Father's Day

Chapter the 248th, where the past is another country, but 2005's just the Isle of Wight.

Plot: 

In 1987, Rose's Dad Pete Tyler was hit by a car on the day of a family friend's wedding. He died alone, and the grown-up Rose wants to be there with him. The Doctor, somewhat reluctantly, takes her to the Powell Estate on 7th November of that year (two days before the broadcast of Delta and the Bannermen episode two in another reality). She bottles it, running away after Pete gets knocked down, and asks the Doctor for another try. They go back again, hiding round the corner from themselves, the plan being for Rose to wait until her earlier self runs away and then slide in and comfort her Dad in his last moments. Instead, she rushes out past the earlier Doctor and Rose, and shoves her Dad out of the path of the oncoming car, doubly transgressing the laws of time. This makes the Doctor very annoyed indeed, and also makes time and space a bit screwy. Anachronistic songs play on the radio, all the phones have Alexander Graham Bell's first ever phone call playing on a loop, and winged creatures (Reapers) are flying around devouring everyone in sight.

The whole area of space/time has been isolated - a wound in time, which the Reapers are sterilising. The Doctor finds Rose at the wedding with her Dad and a young Jackie Tyler. He gets everyone - including a young Mickey and Rose as a baby - into the church, and shuts the doors. He sets something up to link out of their time bubble to the TARDIS and help everyone to safety, but Rose accidentally comes into contact with her younger self. This creates a paradox, which lets in a Reaper that swallows the Doctor and breaks any link with the TARDIS and the outside universe. Pete pieces together that Rose is his daughter grown up, and that he's supposed to be dead. He looks out of a church window to see that the car that was meant to hit him is still circling as if in a time loop, and knows what he has to do. Saying an emotional goodbye to his grown-up daughter, he runs out of the church and into the path of the car. As he's knocked down, the reapers disappear and everything is brought back including the Doctor. Rose gets to be with her Dad in his final moments, and time is put back (almost) as it was.

Context:

Watched from BBC iplayer (still haven't fixed the Blu-ray remote) accompanied by all three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10). The boys have re-found their enthusiasm for Doctor Who of late, and have even watched episodes - or at least youtube videos about episodes - on their own. The youngest was not quite so keen, mainly because of the particular Doctor; "I like him, but I kind-of don't like him" was how she put it. All of them watched and enjoyed the episode from start to finish.

First Time Round:

I watched this on its first BBC1 broadcast in May 2005 at my sister's old flat in Worthing, with my sis, her partner (now husband) James, and the Better Half. The BH and I had been married less than a year and didn't have kids yet, so we were able to travel around, meet up and stay with people, fancy free, and not just be exhausted piles of detritus trying to gather themselves together every weekend as we are now. During that exciting and impressive first year of renewed and returned Doctor Who in 2005, we were away (and usually watching the episode with the group of people we visited, as everybody seemed to be watching Doctor Who that year) half a dozen times. After Father's Day had finished, I remember the other three all leaving the room promptly, and me shouting to them that the trailer for the next episode with its WW2 planes and barrage balloons looked amazing.

Reaction: 

The gap between the historical setting of Father's Day (November 1987) and its broadcast in May 2005 is 17 years and a few months. The gap between my writing this in November 2022 and that original broadcast is 17 years and a few months - there's only a few weeks in it. The first series of 21st century Doctor Who is now a historical artefact as old as the brick-sized mobile phones, shoulder pads and big hair that were gently mocked in writer Paul Cornell's script. It's customary when viewing old Doctor Who stories, particularly when looking at the classic series period, to either comment on or - depending on the particular fan's sensibility - to reframe and ignore the parts where those stories are outmoded in terms of production sophistication or pacing. When the series came back a lot of commentators thought the stories were too breakneck, with no time for reflection, but Father's Day is evidence to refute that. It's remarkable watching it back how deliberately slow the scenes in the story are, one after another: the Doctor talking to the bride and groom about how they met, Rose talking to her Dad who's realised who she is, the Doctor asking Rose for an apology. There's very little in the way of action scenes, just a couple of moments where Reapers attack someone. At first, their activity is presented as tinted POV shots as they stalk their prey, very old school but nonetheless effective. The climax of the story is just the simple act of a man standing in the path of an oncoming car. The story is half horror-inflected build up and half small, emotional beats including lots of talk. This is not a bad thing.

In terms of production sophistication, the CGI of the Reapers still looks good to my eyes, maybe not quite as seamless as more modern work, but perfectly fine. Murray Gold's incidental music is played on synths rather than by an orchestra as it would be in later years, so it's not as expansive a sound accompanying Father's Day; the score is nonetheless evocative and emotional. Costuming, hair and make-up are relatively restrained; as someone who went to family weddings as a kid in the 1980s, it looks like how the decade actually was rather than too much of a comic exaggeration. The script is good with some nice lines of dialogue for all the characters. There's a central problem that it has to address, though. Why is it not okay for the Doctor and Rose to interfere with events and save someone in 1987 when they do this all the time in other stories, in the past and in the future? The solution to this is for the Doctor and Rose to visit the same time-space event twice, which is interesting as it's not something the series had ever done before in the classic era. The two sets of time travellers being in the same place weakens time and gives a reasonable enough reason why Reaper creatures didn't appear when the Doctor and Rose made changes to history in The Unquiet Dead earlier in the season, and wouldn't in the very next story in wartime London. What's wonderful about this solution to the plotting problem is it acts very effectively to ramp up the tension leading up to Rose's inevitable act in saving her Dad. There's a real feeling of dread building up to that moment.

For such a story with an emotional arc, the performances are most important. Casting Shaun Dingwall as Pete Tyler was a great choice. He embodies the optimistic 80s wide boy perfectly, and slots right in to the established Tyler family dynamic. The scene of the grown-up Rose aghast at her bickering parents, because of the romanticised version of their relationship that the widowed Jackie chose to remember and impart, is particularly good. It is, incidentally, exactly how my parents interacted, both before and after their divorce, so for me there was both a shock of recognition and the warmth of a universality of experience. The scenes of Piper and Dingwall as he gradually pieces together what's happened are all perfectly played by the two actors; particularly fine is Pete's moment of self-awareness after hearing Rose telling him how devoted and reliable a father he was, lying to prevent him realising the turth of his non-existence in the future, where he replies with a simple: "That's not me". Eight episodes in, there can be a bit more conflict within the TARDIS team's ranks than before too: Eccleston is great in glowering form, angry at Rose for using time travel for personal benefit, but the script has her give as good as she gets. Props to director Joe Ahearne for getting these powerhouse performances out of the cast (every small guest character is beautifully portrayed, my favourite being the East End Dad talking the groom out of getting married in haste) and for framing them so well - lots of lovely close-ups of emotional faces.

Everything works - the novelty of a personal time travel story based in a relatively close period, the fun of the chaotic time slips (hearing The Streets 'Don't Mug Yourself' coming out of Pete's car stereo is a nice moment), the Doctor finding the TARDIS has been reduced to the shell of a police box, the sheer chutzpah of creating an entirely false subplot of the Doctor's escape plan that comes to nothing, because ultimately Pete can't cheat time and death. It's one of the best stories in one of the best seasons of Doctor Who.

Connectivity: 

Both Father's Day and The Vampires of Venice feature the death of a parent, and a group of people trapped in an old building. In both, the monster is not named on screen (in the Vampire story, the creatures' planet is named but not their species, and the word 'Reapers' does not appear in Father's Day dialogue). 

Deeper Thoughts:

For my Dad (TW: Indulgent Personal Story Incoming). The first time I watched Father's Day my father was alive, the second time, he had died. It was a very sad time, but slightly unusual circumstances made it a family story too. I've never told the story in writing, but thought I would finally write a little about it here, as Doctor Who features in a small but significant way. The barnstorming 2005 season starring Christopher Eccleston came to an end on the 18th June 2005. A couple of weeks before that I'd had Sunday lunch with Dad for his birthday, and he'd told me he was watching and enjoying the series. He wasn't particularly a Doctor Who fan in the 20th century, but - as I said above - it did feel like everyone was watching the show that year. Immediately after the series ended, Saturday nights went back to being dull again (the following week the BBC went almost as far back into their archives as the Doctor and Rose had gone back in time, and put on an Only Fools and Horses special from 1989 in the Doctor Who slot); world events, though, were still interesting. The next weekend saw Live 8 concerts around the globe, and a few days after that London - the city in which I was based for the day job at the time - was awarded the Summer Olympics for 2012. I was watching the announcement with many other colleagues on a big TV in the staff canteen at the top of an office building in Royal Mint Court, and a few minutes later, we saw out of the windows the Red Arrows fly by trailing red and blue smoke. The following day, I was at work early, but before long was seeing messages from people who couldn't get in because of what were then thought to be either electrical problems or fires on the underground system. In fact, it was the terrorist activity of '7/7' where various bombings took place in London. There was a very London flavour of stoic resolve displayed by people that I talked to on that particular Thursday. They would not be cowed, they averred. They would not let the terrorists win by letting this action in anyway change how they would go about their lives... but, if all this meant they could have Friday off, they weren't going to argue.

I was supposed not to come in that Friday, but the telephone communication process wasn't properly followed and so nobody told a group of us. After a couple of hours, we were sent home, and - having travelled out of the capital back home to Gillingham, a place I thought no self-respecting terrorist could possibly want to blow up - I was able to relax and enjoy a slightly long weekend. That was until the early afternoon of Sunday the 10th July, when I got a phone call from my Dad's sister. He had been on a European river cruise with a bunch of oldies, and just as they were about to get on the transfer bus back to the airport, he'd collapsed. He was being taken to a hospital in Brussels, and someone needed to go over there immediately. I was given some details including a contact number for an insurance company (who after a number of calls back and forth to me the next day found that my Dad wasn't covered for this somehow, so stopped bothering me). I looked up a nearby hotel online as it was already getting late and I would not be coming back that day. After packing a few things in a bag, I then rushed via Waterloo (where the Eurostar departed from in those days) by train to Brussels Zuid. I was in my early 30s, so that part, zooming off to another country on a mercy dash, on a train that goes under the water, was of course exciting. If you know the film version of About a Boy, where Hugh Grant as Will thinks "It was terrible... but driving really fast behind the ambulance was fantastic" then yeah - that; that was the mood. Of course, seven tenths of that mood was denial. When I arrived in Belgium it was dark; I didn't know where I was going, but managed to get a cab, and somehow got to the right room in the quiet and still hospital despite not being able to communicate properly with any of the staff there (the hospital was in a primarily Flemish speaking area, so my soupçon of classroom French wasn't much help).

My Dad was hooked up to a ventilator and myriad other machines. It was late by the time I saw him, but the evening staff, talented healthcare professions doing their best, let me know the situation in a second language. There was still hope. They left me alone in my Dad's room, and I spoke to him, and I cried. I spent my next few days like this, talking occasionally to doctors and nurses, talking to my Dad, and - every time it happened - being shocked by his making a periodic gasp / groan (which was an involuntary spasm, and did not mean anything related to his physical or mental recovery, but sounded like him waking up). I was isolated and unable to communicate in a strange land. As a metaphor for grief, and particularly for the frozen grief of this situation where a loved one is suspended between living and dying, a writer would probably strike it through as being too heavy-handed. My sister and her partner James would arrive later and stay for an evening and a day, but most of the week I was on my own. An effort is required, including by me, to mentally recreate that time. The differences might not be as pronounced as those fictionally depicted between 1987 and 2005, but they were there. For example, my phone was a Nokia 3100 (pictured below). It could let one play a blocky-graphics game of snake, but it was not going to be any help in translating medical terms like 'sepsis'. Somehow, though, I was made aware that my Dad's body was suffering from this. I don't know to this day whether if the conversation had been happening in English I would have caught more nuance and seen any subtext. At the end of the week, the hospital staff encouraged me to go home as nothing was going to happen soon. I anyway needed more clothes if I was going to stay much longer as I'd packed in a hurry. I travelled back to the UK on Saturday 16th July (I can remember seeing launch displays in shops of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, which was published on that day).

The idea was that the hospital in Brussels would contact me for any change, but I'd remain at home until they did. On the Monday, I went into the day job to show willing (I'd been out for a week's unplanned leave suddenly, which put pressure on my colleagues, and I was going to need more leave as soon as things changed). I'd not been there many hours, though, when I took a call from the hospital calling me back over there. I couldn't find the shared language to ever find out from the hospital exactly what happened, but things had taken a turn for the worse. I flew over the following day with my sister. I don't know if my father had ever been aware of my presence in his room the previous week, nor of any of the words I said to him. The room had undergone a change since I was last in it: all the many different machines whose rhythms of bleeps and lights had accompanied those words were gone. My father was only connected now to one machine, and this was switched off once his two children were there to witness. His date of death was Tuesday 19th July. If he could understand anything said to him in the previous week, he knew before he died that my sister was pregnant (she's only just found out herself), but he never got to meet my niece, and he never knew about any of my children, the first of whom wasn't conceived until a couple of months after he died. He was never to be called Grandad. All these thoughts and more come to one later. It's a commonly expressed thought, but true, that immediately after the death the work that the grieving have to do pushes those other thoughts temporarily away. We had to now arrange a cremation and a return flight home with the ashes, all in a foreign language (which involved ringing a dozen places from the local directory and asking in haltingly bad French "Qu'es qu'il ... un person ... parlez anglais ... d'ici?"; only to get the response "Non" from each and have the line to go dead).

Waiting around for the date finally arranged with undertakers and the crematorium, we were joined by my sister's partner and the Better Half for moral support. We had a bit more time to relax and celebrate my Dad's life then. There's many more anecdotes about this period, as the situation remained strange; we were half wanting to feel like it was a holiday, half feeling that we couldn't smile too much, but we had nothing much to do except be tourists. One of the days we were in that situation was the 21st July, which is Belgium's national day, so things got even stranger with parades of armoured vehicles rolling down the streets. To get away from the crowds, we ducked down a side street and into a café where they were showing on a wall mounted television a live broadcast of the parade happening only a few yards away. These broadcasts were briefly interrupted by a news item about another attempted terrorist attack in London, two weeks after the last one, so we had to make some frantic phone calls to friends in the UK's capital to check they were okay (and thankfully they were). The second week has a few happy memories. That first week was quite bleak, though; I was mostly on my own in the evenings in the Hotel Frederiksborg, worrying about my Dad but powerless to do anything for him. It will I know sound ridiculous, but one thing that got me through it was something I'd packed in my haste: the Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition issue "Season 1 companion" that had been published a few day's before I was first called out to Brussels. This was a set of extensive features, one each for every Christopher Eccleston story of the year, including Father's Day, detailing how they were made including scripting, pre-production, shooting and post-production. The writer Andrew Pixley and the editor Clayton Hickman provided me a bit of nerdy escapism every lonely, sad evening.  When I re-watched my taped copy of the Father's Day broadcast much later, that helped by reflecting my grief too; like Pete Tyler, my Dad was no saint, but he occasionally had this good moments. Doctor Who is far from perfect either, but - like anything one might love - it can sometimes bring comfort during dark times nonetheless.

 

In Summary:

Doctor Who's The Daddy?

The Vampires of Venice

Chapter the 247th, where there's something fishy about a Venetian artistocratic family

Plot: 

The Doctor crashes Rory's stag party to confess that Amy kissed him after their last adventure, then takes them both on a trip as a date so they can discuss and make-up. They arrive in Venice in 1580 to rapidly find a mystery involving aliens (it's only to be expected). The Calvierri family has persuaded the Venetians to cut themselves off from the rest of the world because of a non-existent plague, and have set up an exclusive school for girls. Venetians are sending their daughters to this school, never to be able to interact with them again, despite everyone involved in this educational establishment making it clear that they're turning the girls into vampires. Some investigations by the TARDIS team discover that they aren't vampires but instead Saturnyns, carnivorous fish creatures using perception filters to disguise themselves. The mother of the shoal, posing as Rosanna Calvierri, was the only female who survived when they fled their homes from something called the Silence (which isn't explained but which presumably will be covered in Doctor Who seasons to come, probably somewhat unsatisfactorily).

Aside from her son, also posing as Venetian aristocracy, the other males are swimming around in the canals of Venice. She is converting the school's pupils into Saturnyne females by draining their blood and replacing it with her own, Dracula style. With help from Guido, the father of one of the pupils who's desperate to get her back, the TARDIS team attempt to infiltrate by enrolling Amy in the school. They manage to get her out after only one small neck bite, but they fail to free Guido's still unconverted daughter Isabella. Isabella is killed by being thrown into the waters of Venice where the male Saturnyns eat her. The female converted Saturnyns attack Guido's house; the others escape, and Guido blows up some barrels of gunpowder he's been collecting to attack the Calvierris. Not knowing her breeding stock is gone, Rosanna starts up a weather control gizmo that starts storms in order to flood Venice and make it a watery wonderland, perfect for fish people. The Doctor climbs a Venetian tower and does some techno jiggery-pokery to an aerial to stop that. With her plans foiled, Rosanna commits suicide by jumping into the water, her perception filter device jammed on to human mode meaning the males will eat her. The TARDIS team travel off to new adventures as a trio.

Context:

Watched from the BBC iplayer (the Blu-ray remote is broken again) on my lonesome one evening.

First Time Round:

As usual, I can't remember my first encounter with a Matt Smith story. Almost certainly I would have watched The Vampires of Venice on the day of its UK broadcast, probably slightly time-shifted as the Better Half and I had at the time a young baby and a toddler whom we would have been putting to bed at around the time the story went out. In these circumstances in previous blog posts, I have produced an anecdote about the Doctor Who 'wilderness years' (the period from the end of 1989 when the classic series ended to its return as an ongoing new series in 2005). This one is not so much an anecdote as a description of how it felt for a few years of that period, specifically the period from 2000 to 2003. The 1990s, although they form the larger part of that so-called wilderness period, were pretty good for Doctor Who fans. Most would not have seen all the older stories that were being newly released on VHS, there were new original novels being published, and later in the decade Big Finish started to make new stories on audio; there was no shortage of tales to buy and enjoy. There were many repeats of old stories on terrestrial TV in the UK in the first half of the decade, a lot of hoopla around the 30th anniversary in 1993 with a big new documentary and a charity skit featuring new performances from actors that played Doctors and companions through Who's history; then, there was a brand new feature length story starring Paul McGann in 1996. It wasn't a barren wilderness

The decade ended with an entire night (23 years ago to the day as I write this) given over to Doctor Who related programming on BBC2, followed by the launch of an ambitious series of repeats. Starting with the first colour story, Jon Pertwee's Spearhead from Space, the intention was to continue with all the serials from the 1970s in order. Doctor Who would potentially be on British TV screens all year round. It was early in 2000 that things faltered. The repeats didn't get good ratings, so they tried leaping ahead to a Tom Baker story, but things did not improve. The repeats were cancelled, and thereafter no classic series episode would be repeated on the major BBC channels 1 or 2 ever again. Four years after its showing, there was no hope left that Paul McGann's one night stand was ever going to become a series, and the VHS releases were drying up (with less frequent releases of the dwindling number of unreleased stories in the back catalogue, none of which were that popular). DVD came along instead, but the range started slowly with only a handful of releases in the early years of the 2000s. For approximately three years, it was the leanest of times, and the wilderness did finally feel a bit barren. Then one day in September of 2003, everything changed, the sun shone and the land became green and bountiful again. A press release went out saying that Russell T Davies was producing a new series of Doctor Who. After that, all was anticipation, and excitement. Eighteen years later almost to the day, another press release went out saying that Russell T Davies was again producing a new series of Doctor Who. Now that Jodie Whittaker has bowed out, we are in the same kind of period of anticipation and excitement: over a year to go, little bits of filming being spotted, the unveiling of a new logo. If it's anything like the first time round, it'll be worth the wait.

Reaction: 

I can remember every story title from Doctor Who's start in 1963 to the present day, and can recite them to order, except... I never know if it's Vampires of Venice or Vampires in Venice. I have to look it up, every darn time. I had to look it up to title this blog, and as I type this I've already forgotten which it is and have had to take a glance upwards at that title to double check again. It's odd that my mind has this one silly blank spot where it has perfect recall elsewhere (believe me, I've tried to forget some of this stuff). It's not just the title, either; the story's not exactly forgettable, but it is rather superficial. For a plot that hinges on the projection of false images that disguise the villains, it coincidentally ends up all about the surface and not what lies beneath. It's a hell of a good looking surface though. A case in point is a stunning image from early on: beneath a grand staircase, the late and much missed Helen McCrory playing Rosanna Calvierri - whose work throughout the story is powerful, precise and excellent - kneels before a factotum, head back. He is serving her what looks like wine in a bejewelled gold goblet, but the hint is that it's blood. Her big skirts are fanned out flat on the ground behind her. It looks like a Renaissance canvas. Nobody could complain about the story's production design, and the sumptuous look created on screen: the use of the Croatian town Trogir with CGI enhancement to double for Venice, the costume and make-up, and a good number of background extras all add up to an effective and beautiful realisation of time and place. There are many other shots in the story as striking as the McCrory 'hydrating' scene too. But who in the story laid her skirts all flat like that, and why? How long did it take? Why make such a spectacle out of doing something which ought to be covert, and who exactly is the intended audience for this spectacle? There's a figleaf in the script suggesting that the aliens are so arrogant and superior as to be overt about their villainy, but this doesn't seem adequate to me.

This is not to say that the story is 100% superficial. There is some very neat material providing a scientific rationale for many parts of vampire mythology. They are really alien fish creatures using low-level mind control to appear human, but the human brain's survival instincts kick in when it sees the teeth, so they are not disguised. The same technology confuses your brain when seeing the reflection in a mirror, so the creature does not appear; and, as they usually live in a subaquatic darkness, they are sensitive to light. Rory is a nice addition to the regular travelling team, and Arthur Darvill's performance complements - completes - the others. This also allows a little bit of interesting interpersonal conflict between Rory and the Doctor as the former accuses the latter of making people put themselves into danger as he encourages them to want to impress him. The relationship between Calvierri mother and son is nicely sketched in. Matt Smith and McCrory have a couple of good confrontation scenes, where the villain challenges the Doctor's morality related to the fate of his own people (very similar to the scenes that writer Toby Whithouse had between Anthony Head and David Tennant in his story School Reunion, but none the worse for that). Smith does a good line in righteous anger "This ends today - I will tear down the House of Calvierri, stone by stone ... And you know why? You didn't know Isabella's name - you didn't know Isabella's name." There's some nice playful moments too, like Guido appearing in Rory's stag night T-shirt as they've had to swap clothes for Rory to pretend to be a Venetian. Listed out, it sounds like a lot, but it adds up to very little running time, and the rest is stuff that looks good but doesn't always make sense.

Why, for example, if the Saturnyns are just mildly sensitive to light does Amy's reflecting the sun onto one with a mirror make it instantly combust into a cloud of ashes? It's just for spectacle and to bring an end to a fight scene the writer had no other way of tying up, but it doesn't make any sense. There's a lot of other material that doesn't work too: there's the somewhat flaccid opening where the Doctor appears jumping out of a pretend cake at Rory's stag do; it's supposed to be comic, but it isn't because it's not real (has anyone's real stag night in the real world ever involved an exotic dancer jumping out of a cardboard cake, or is it just a TV-land only situation?), and the rhythm of the comedy is all over the place - there's not much of a punchline, and it's not cut so the credits come in quickly enough, leaving the scene to limp on for too long. The resolution is a bit too easy, with the Doctor effectively pressing a switch to turn off the plot (albeit the switch has been placed in a high spot to make it a tiny bit more difficult for him); by that point, the evil plan has effectively been foiled anyway, as Guido has blown up all the young female Saturnyns in a plot development that's heinously telegraphed by the presence of Chekov's gunpowder barrels in act one. There's a major loose end in that the carnivorous males are still swimming around in Venice's waters at the end of the story; how long they'll live to terrorise swimmers is not something that's covered.

Another puzzling aspect of the story, though it's not a fault of this script so much as it is the wider arc narrative of the Matt Smith years, is the references to the Silence. Clearly there was some planning ahead in the arc plotting of this period, and the Silence teased here would be introduced properly the following year. It maybe hadn't been thought out sufficiently to be so bold about it so early, though. The creatures that form the order of the Silence (Silents?) don't make things go very quiet, as suggested at the end of Vampires, it's just a name. Additionally and crucially, it's rapidly established when they finally appear that nobody can remember the Silence after an encounter, so how can Rosanna know that it was the Silence that attacked her home world? And why would the Silence attack her home world at all? They will either be the relatively peaceful religious order that want to prevent the return of the Time Lords to the universe, or a more violent breakaway group that want to kill the Doctor as they believe that will prevent the Time Lords returning. Neither group would have anything to gain by attacking the Saturnyns. I know this is nit-picking, but it's just another example of the story going for an effect without any underlying logic. It all looks very good though.

Connectivity: 

Both The Vampires of Venice and The Edge of Destruction feature William Hartnell (he appears on the library card that Matt Smith flashes at one point, thinking it's the psychic paper).

Deeper Thoughts:

For the Dads? For a long time after this story was broadcast, there were Doctor Who musical events - one-off proms, touring music showcases, etc. - which used the same pattern as had been established early on after Doctor Who's return with the very first charity concerts of Murray Gold's incidental music. There would be many pieces stirringly played, accompanied by clips on a screen and / or creature performers wandering round the audience scaring and thrilling kids. The creature costumes that would most often appear would be the ones you'd expect: Cybermen, Judoon, Ood... and, of course, the fish creatures from Venice in their nightie-wearing girl disguises. Erm? Why that last one again? They appeared in one story, never returned, did not make that much of an impact, and they barely look like monsters at all. Maybe the reason for their inclusion was so some female artistes could appear as part of proceedings (I assume that the big, heavy costumes of the other creatures were mainly worn by blokes, but I may be wrong), maybe it was to still provide some spectacle but take the pressure off backstage for a period as the vampire girls were easier to dress. Maybe. Hmm. I could be being cynical, but I suspect that at least part of it was that they were there "for the dads" as goes the phrase long associated with Doctor Who. Could they have been added to appeal to the fathers dragged along by the kids, who weren't particularly interested in science-fiction or adventure narratives? Though not exactly at the slutty Halloween costume level, the vampire girl outfits and performers in The Vampires Of Venice are clearly intended to have sex appeal for the heterosexual males watching. The script even has the Doctor describe them as "buxom", which I have to say stuck out as a line and put my teeth on edge when I watched the story this time round. Perhaps uncharitably, I am convinced it was a line added by showrunner Steven Moffat, no stranger to including a saucy gag or two in his writing.

Doctor Who has a long history, particularly in the 20th century, of introducing questionable sexist outfits as a way to attract a certain audience demographic that those making the programme thought might not otherwise be interested. Successive (male) producers presented the female companion characters in shorter and shorter skirts in the 1960s and 70s. Tom Baker's companion Leela played by Louise Jameson wore a skimpy savage girl leotard made out of chamois leather; in the 1980s. Janet Fielding as Tegan was hardly ever allowed a hem line below her knee (she finally got to help choose her character's outfit for her appearance in The Power of the Doctor, and wore trousers); in the same decade, Nicola Bryant perhaps got it worst of all, forced into day-glo bikini-top and cut-off shorts combos for her first couple of seasons. It seems to me a ridiculous notion that this would have any impact on Doctor Who's viewing figures, as households would have to be watching anyway for the Dad in this hypothetical situation to get a glimpse of leg - it wasn't the sort of selling point they covered ahead of time in the Radio Times plot synopsis. Is the scenario being envisaged that the Dad would keep tuning in the following weeks, whether his kids were still interested or not? Were the 1960s and 70s so devoid of titillation that these - if we're honest, profoundly unerotic - outfits in Doctor Who were a draw for perverts? If so, is this really an audience that the show wants? If any middle-aged man can't get through a music concert accompanying their kids without the potential for a glimpse of cleavage, they probably need a bromide prescription. Jodie Whittaker, in an early interview with Vulture after debuting as the Doctor, mentioned "the male gaze", and some of these decisions were clearly objectifying and - based on a lot of testimony since - were aimed at heterosexual males (they may have appealed to lesbian and bisexual women's gaze as well, I suppose, but this was not the intention).

As one of those heterosexual males, and being a long-term fan, I was apprehensive when watching Whittaker playing the Doctor for the first time. With all apologies upfront for my shallowness (I'm just being honest): I had seen her act in many other things and thought she was attractive. Was I going to end up fancying the Doctor? The way she played the role of the Doctor, though, was completely childlike and un-sexual (unlike, say, David Tennant's handsome swagger necessary for him to become a love interest for Rose and Martha, as the script dictated). It was a wonderful approach to the part; a bit like how Matt Smith mostly played the role (when he wasn't given lines noticing how buxom or not people were). Context is everything, and Doctor Who should not be the context for providing anyone those kind of thrills. It wasn't anyway Whittaker's meaning when she talked about the male gaze; the quote is about "stories being told through the white male gaze" (emphasis mine) not for the white (or otherwise) male gaze. Indeed, although he was a white cishet middle-aged man, Chris Chibnall in his time as showrunner did create the greatest plurality of authorial voices that had ever written for Doctor Who before, and did try in his own scripts to cover a range of subject matter that featured minority characters, situations and viewpoints. Incoming and returning showrunner Russell T Davies will continue this, or course. Won't he? Based on a recent social media reaction against some comments he's made, Davies has upset some of those hoping for a diverse and inclusive Doctor Who, and it also happened to be about a character wearing clothes that are just a little too small for them. (Note: spoilers for The Power of the Doctor follow, although I imagine you've seen it by now). At the end of Whittaker's swan song, the regeneration scene was different in that the Doctor's clothes changed also. The only time previously that this has happened was way back when Hartnell turned into Troughton, so it's not unprecedented, but Tennant plays the moment with surprise looking at his new outfit, and there are hints in the trailer for next year that it's going to link into a future plot point somehow.

Whether Davies's decision not to have Tennant appear in Whittaker's costume preceded or developed from the plotting of the 2023 stories is unknown, but a deliberate decision it was. In Doctor Who Magazine issue 584, the showrunner is interviewed and mentions it. He explains that he felt that the "culture and the dignity" of drag needed to be treated delicately. Because of the size difference between the two actors, he thought it would look like "taking the mickey" if Tennant appeared in Whittaker's outfit. He also believed that there would only then be interest in those images of Tennant in "what [the press] considered to be women's clothes" and it would become "weaponised" to mock feminine traits and drag culture. This upset some people, as Whittaker's outfit had been carefully designed to be gender neutral (some might not have the seen the comments about the press and their capacity to ignore that, though - a screenshot of the interview circulated online that only covered the first part of his comments as they continued over a page). Some others felt it was an attack on any male that had ever cosplayed as Thirteen, though it seems uncharitable to assume that Davies's talk of dignity did not extend to cosplayers. Why wouldn't it? A more valid criticism was that Davies shouldn't self-censor because of possible reactions from the reactionary press. I can sympathise with both sides: in a way, his decision is writing Doctor Who for the white male gaze (as dominates the tabloid press) yet again. Davies, though, wants no distractions from his series relaunch, particularly ones that might be hurtful to a group of people about whom he cares. The social media spat has probably fizzled out by the time you read this, and was mostly just an excuse for fans of one showrunner period to criticise another: this is just another rite of passage for any new era, just like revealing a new logo. It's nice to know that however Doctor Who develops, some things are constant, but also some things can change (the era of putting companion actors into revealing costumes is gone, I think, and I hope gone forever).

 

In Summary:

Looks good, but - on reflection - there's not a lot to it. 

The Edge of Destruction

Chapter The 246th, where the very first TARDIS team are inside the spaceship, go beyond the sun, and find themselves on the edge of destruction and the brink of disaster.

Plot:

The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan are in the TARDIS when there is an explosion knocking them out. When they wake up, they suffer from unexplained pains and memory losses. The doors to the ship open and close of their own accord. Susan is paranoid that something might have got into the ship that is inhabiting one of the others, and threatens Ian and Barbara with a pair of scissors. The TARDIS scanner shows seemingly random images. All the clocks and watches in the ship melt. The Doctor accuses Ian and Barbara of sabotage, a way to blackmail him into taking them home to their own time. (This doesn't really make sense, but nobody's behaving very rationally.) The Doctor deliberately sedates everyone so he can investigate alone, but a suspicious Ian hasn't drunk the drink given to him. Eventually, everyone's awake again and collectively they piece together what is happening. The TARDIS fault locator starts honking and flashing every fifteen seconds, which clues them in that the ship is trying to count down time. One of the controls, the fast return switch, has become jammed, and they were all travelling back in time, into the beginning of the formation of a solar system, where the TARDIS would have been destroyed. The Doctor fixes the switch and all returns to normal. He apologises to Barbara, who was hurt by his earlier comments.

Context:

I have a broken TV/Blu-ray player remote control again (see The War Machines post for the last time this happened, with hilarious consequences). With no way to watch the DVD of this story, I had to resort to Britbox. The Britbox app that I can use on the family TV, via a Fire stick, is a bit buggy; with perseverance, though, I was able to get both episodes to play. I watched them one a night on two consecutive nights midweek in the final full week of October. Before this, while looking around the classic Doctor Who offerings on the streaming service, I noticed that there's a photo reconstruction of missing episodes of Patrick Troughton story The Wheel in Space that, unless I missed it, has never been made commercially available on any shiny disc release. I viewed a bit of it, and it was rather good. I was almost tempted to override the random generator and watch that story instead, but rules are rules. I sucked it up and watched the - probably more dull, even than a slide-show - Hartnell two-parter.

First Time Round:

Does everyone remember the different houses they've lived in, and when exactly they moved in to each? And every change of job, and every birth, marriage or death, to pinpoint date/time accuracy without having to glance at a calendar? I'm half a century old, but I can recall this information for my entire life, only because of Doctor Who. My extreme fandom means that I know which Doctor Who videos, DVDs or broadcasts I was watching in which homes, and then I can date them (usually from memory, but even if I forget once in a while, a large section of the internet is devoted to remembering Doctor Who dates also). I don't know if this is an affliction or a superpower. Most of the 1990s I spent living in Worthing on the Sussex coast (except for being in Durham in term time for my three years at university there). I moved to Brighton in 1999, at first in a house share, and then in a flat on my own from November of that year. The Edge of Destruction came out on VHS (accompanied by the pilot episode) six months later in April 2000 when I was nicely settled in there. I was still working in Worthing, taking the train there every day. In a few weeks' time, I would start a job commuting into London daily, whereupon my usual suppliers of Doctor Who stuff would change to be more capital-centric, as I wouldn't get home until later. On the day The Edge of Destruction came out, I would have had time after getting home on the train from Worthing to walk down Queen's Road and purchase it in the Brighton MVC shop, as they were still open (though I'd still have had to trot down from the station at a reasonable pace to get in before they shut). I'd then have walked back up the hill to the Seven Dials area where I lived, get in, and put the video on straight away. My memory is that it was a thrill seeing a William Hartnell story that was new to me (there weren't many of those left to release that were so by 2000), and it didn't bother me that the story was short, and unhinged. 

Reaction:

The Edge of Destruction, the third ever Doctor Who story, was something of an afterthought. The original commitment made by the BBC to the production team when the show was starting up in 1963 was for 13 episodes; 11 of these had been used creating the superlative two opening stories, four episodes for An Unearthly Child and seven episodes for The Daleks. Further full length stories were being prepped, somewhat at risk as there hadn't been a formal commitment to more at that point. Just in case they didn't get re-commissioned, they needed a space-filler - two episodes to slot in to complete the first batch, with the hope that more would follow if the decision went their way (as it eventually did). Writer (and script editor of the series at the time) David Whittaker had a tight brief, with limited resources he could use. If I remember rightly, even when it first came out for home video purchase in the year 2000 (as remembered above) the first impulse was again for it to be an afterthought. There was a plan to bring out a VHS box set of the first three William Hartnell stories; remastered versions of the first two that were already out on VHS, with the two episodes of The Edge of Destruction along for the ride. There was resistance to the idea that fans would have to pay for an expensive box set just to get two episodes of previously unreleased material, and the idea was shelved. That initial intention though would have reduced the two-part story to a glorified extra, with insufficient draw to stand on its own. In the end it had to, though. It may have been that, for a lot of fans, paying exclusively for two episodes of slightly inept psychodrama might have chafed more than if the cost had been subsumed into the experience of getting a pretty box and maybe a TARDIS-shaped keyring. Is it perhaps better for this story to remain an afterthought and not have too much focus upon it?

It's tough for me, though, as it's come up for the blog and I've watched it, so I have to write something. There's just not that much to say, as there's not much to The Edge of Destruction. It's only two episodes long and at the slow pace of the black-and-white stories of the time, but then so was The Rescue, and that had a somewhat engaging plot. Even the single episode story Mission to the Unknown, which doesn't include any of the regular cast, contains a reasonable amount of incident. There's something to be said for featuring other places, times, or people in a story. Within the severe restrictions he was faced with of not being able to do any of that, Whittaker still falls upon one very clever idea, the false suspicion that some formless creature has entered into the TARDIS and possessed one of the four, only for this to turn out just to be paranoia. If the script just developed this plot, I think it would succeed, or at the very least be better, but it doesn't. Each scene acts like an unconnected sketch or tableau on the loose theme of 'people going a bit loopy' without any real sense of progression. The four characters - five, if one counts the TARDIS itself - act strangely in their own little orbits, but rarely intersect with one another. Carole Ann Ford plays it all fear and rage, Hartnell is accusatory and aggressive, Barbara floats through proceedings like a zombie, and William Russell plays many scenes like a giggling drunk. Occasionally this works (Carole Ann Ford poised, still, arm raised with the scissors ready to strike is a wonderful image), but it seems more by accident than design.

The eventual explanation that the TARDIS has been deliberately dropping cryptic hints is ludicrous, obviously (it melted all the clocks to tell its crew that their time was running out, but it can't override the fault locator to register an issue in a jammed component because it is technically still functioning correctly); but it's also inadequate. Did the TARDIS somehow cause injuries to the backs of a couple of characters' necks? If so, why? If not, it's a bit of a coincidence that two different people got injuries in the same way. Did the TARDIS make Susan repeatedly stab a pair of scissors into a space-age chaise-longue? If not, what did make her do this? Big actions with insufficient motivation, alas, equals melodrama. That, plus limited options for visual interest, equals stagey melodrama. Nonetheless, there are a few moments that work - Hartnell's monologue about the mysteries of the universe when he witnesses the formation of a solar system is okay, although he delivers it when he knows they're short of time and in incredible danger. Have a sense of urgency as well as a sense of wonder, please, Bill! The story also works better in context than in isolation: a couple of episodes of breather in between longer stories, and something a bit different. In its third story, the programme demonstrates that it can go anywhere, even deep into some very strange story ideas indeed, and then - at the end - it moves on, and the four travellers find themselves at the 'roof of the world' just about to meet Marco Polo. The series would, of course, use this structure of continuing adventure, changing tone and genre and locale frequently, and - yes - occasionally trying something odd or something that didn't quite work, to power through another 13 episodes, and then another, and then another... for nigh on 60 years now, and counting.

Connectivity: 

The Edge of Destruction and Orphan 55 both feature a four person TARDIS team and the Doctor doing a monologue towards the end. That's pretty much it.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Ship in a Bottle Episode. The Edge of Destruction is Doctor Who's first ever bottle episode, in the truest sense of the term. If you're not familiar with bottle episodes, it is a phenomenon, and the resultant terminology to refer to that phenomenon, emerging from US TV. When you have to produce 26 episodes a year of a comedy or drama series, year in year out (which is rare in the UK, but commonplace in the US), there will be times when you need to economise. Just like the clip show, a bottle episode is a way to make the budget stretch a bit further. Unlike a clip show, which would allow a production team to make an episode out of recycled material with a small amount of newly filmed content as a framing device, a bottle episode is a full programme of new material. To keep it cheap, though, the cast and sets are kept restricted. Just as in Edge of Destruction, the most bottliest bottle episode features only the regular cast and standing sets. Often, plot has to be minimal because of this, and so stories tend to be at the inter-personal level, with characters exchanging dialogue to paint word pictures in lieu of globe-trotting, and subtext in lieu of action. Examples would be the Breaking Bad episode Fly (just the two main regulars in the lab set) or the One Where No One's Ready episode of Friends (just the six regulars in the large apartment set). Interestingly, the clip show did gain some traction in the UK around the time that Doctor Who started; Gerry Anderson's rival tele-fantasy series like Stingray and Thunderbirds often used the clip show approach. British TV didn't do the bottle episode, though, or at least not in the same way. To take an example: an entire series of a comedy like Steptoe and Son might rarely feature any scenes not in the standing sets of the house and the totter's yard: every episode was to a certain extent a bottle episode. UK television took longer to grow out of its roots as filmed theatre than the offerings from across the pond, and budgets tended to be lower, and expectations lower, from the get go.

Though a UK show might feature limited sets, it would then have a bit of budget for actors, a girlfriend for Steptoe Junior or a dodgy dealer come to sell him and Steptoe Senior some scrap metal, and so on. Doctor Who could only have done such a purist bottle episode as The Edge of Destruction early on, as later it had something of the opposite challenge. It was only in the early years of Doctor Who where spending significant story time in the TARDIS between jaunts was common, and there were sets built to accommodate this. Later, the console room set was the only standing set for the series, and it was too small to comfortably house an entire episode without the available camera angles becoming very boring very quickly. Doctor Who being a series of serials, each one in a new locale, meant that it had to create a new set of sets every few weeks, and therefore might not have had so much money for actors. This gave rise to a format later in the series where a large standing set was created to last the four to six weeks of the serial (the tomb in The Tomb of the Cybermen, the moon base in The Moonbase), and the cast was limited. The 'base under siege' format, as it became known later, gets some artistic genre value out of the restriction, and for a few years in the Patrick Troughton era Doctor Who focusses on horror plots where monsters infiltrate lonely outposts and pick off members of the limited cast one by one. There are echoes of this throughout Doctor Who long after it shrugged off that house style, in such stories as Tom Baker's The Ark in Space (which features only the regular cast in its first episode as they explore the impressive new sets) and something like Midnight (regular cast and limited guest cast trapped in a small newly built set) in the new series. These not quite pure bottle episodes are in good company; famous examples of similar episodes of other shows would be Seinfeld's The Chinese Restaurant (regular cast on a single new set) and Brooklyn 99's The Box (a couple of the regular cast on a standing set, but they've splurged on a big name guest actor in Sterling K. Brown).

Though Doctor Who would never be a stranger to budgetary constraints, it didn't often have to do anything as extreme as The Edge of Destruction again. The closest it came was having to work up from nothing an additional episode to be added to the front of Patrick Troughton story The Mind Robber to plug a gap. As well as the regulars and the TARDIS sets it featured a blank cyclorama to represent a white void, some non-speaking characters in robot outfits from stock, and a nifty bit of filmed effects work where the TARDIS blows up. It's arguably better than the four following episodes that had a more generous budget. Since it came back, the new series has had more budget and commitment from BBC executives than anyone could have dreamed of in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. There have still been challenges, though. In the first ten or so years after the 2005 return, the show was making 12 or 13 episodes a season, but also had to create a Christmas special. To make the schedule stretch, double-banking was often employed - splitting the regular cast between episodes so that two could be shot simultaneously. Often, this used similar techniques to the bottle episode. For example, in both Flatline and The Girl Who Waited the Doctor is stuck in the TARDIS, allowing the lead actor to do a short period of filming on the standing set that can then be intercut with the rest of the action, giving the character more screen time and interaction with the other characters than otherwise. In later years, with fewer episodes being made per year, double banking hasn't been necessary, and there's been no bottle episodes either. On the contrary, the show has travelled far and wide both in the real world (filming in many locations around the globe) and the fictional one (the many planets and times featured in Flux, despite the restrictions imposed by Covid-19 on filming). If a bottle - or bottle-ish - episode were to happen in future, it would most likely be for artistic rather than budgetary reasons. 

In Summary:

Bitty, brief and bizarre.