The Church on Ruby Road

Chapter the 288th, in which some goblins try to eat a baby, and they don't half make a song and dance about it.

Plot:
[It's an up to the minute episode, so beware spoilers ahead.] Ruby Sunday is a foundling, left by a church on her birthday, Christmas Eve 2004. Nineteen years later, all attempts to trace her birth parents, including going on to TV programme Long Lost Family with Davina McCall, have led to nothing. Ruby lives with her adopted mother Carla and grandmother Cherry in a London flat. Lately, she's been having a run of bad luck caused by inter-dimensional Goblins, who are secretly engineering accidents, all part of their scientific language of coincidence and luck. In the run-up to Christmas, she meets a mysterious man called the Doctor. On Christmas Eve, Carla is looking after a newborn. The Goblins snatch this baby from an upper-story bedroom, but Ruby gives chase across the rooftops, following the Goblins onto a rope ladder that leads up to their floating ship. The Doctor is also up there and joins her on the ladder. They climb up to the Goblin ship. The Goblins sing a song as they present the baby to their enormous Goblin King to eat, but the Doctor and Ruby (also joining in with the singing) escape with the baby. Back in the Sundays' flat, the Doctor realises lots of coincidences (like Ruby and himself both being foundlings) and this powers the Goblins to go back in time nineteen years and snatch Ruby as a baby, changing the present. The Doctor follows them, and manages to put things back to how they were. The Goblin ship falls onto the church, with the steeple skewering the Goblin King, killing him. The ship disappears back into the either, and the Doctor returns to the present day. Ruby joins the Doctor in his TARDIS travels.

Context:

I viewed this for the second time on my own during the Chrimbo Limbo between Christmas and New Year's, the Merrineum. I watched on the BBC iplayer: we discovered something was wrong with our aerial just before Christmas, too late to get it fixed, so this was my first Yuletide ever without traditional, multi-channel terrestrial TV, and my first since 1984 where I didn't have a method of recording the programmes to watch later (the trusty PVR is still functioning perfectly, but was not connected to any signal). Of course, I didn't need such a method, as everything I was interested in seeing I could either watch live or catch up with later using an online streaming service. I was seeing a theme emerging of the ascendence of streaming compared to programmed TV channels like BBC1, or purchased media. None of the trailers I saw for The Church on Ruby Road - before or after it was shown - mentioned that it was being broadcast on BBC1 or when, they all just told me to head to iplayer. More on this theme is in the Deeper Thoughts section below.

First Time Round:

We sat down to watch this as a family from the iplayer, a little after its broadcast on BBC1 on Christmas Day 2023. The In-laws didn't visit until Boxing Day this year, so it was just the five of us (Me, the Better Half, and three kids, two boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11) and everyone was in the living room to watch. Alas, I was the only one of five who enjoyed it on this first watch; I thought it was a little slight but fun (and I always give something of a pass for a slight story at Christmas if it also manages to be fun); the others though presented a range of reactions from slightly to greatly negative. The Better Half thought it was too cheesy, and announced that she was going back to her boycott of new episodes of Doctor Who (which started two-thirds of the way through Jodie Whittaker's era, and only ceased for the three David Tennant specials, which she liked). Eldest child liked the Doctor but thought the Ruby character was a "blank... just like Yaz" and as for the story, he couldn't believe that Russell T Davies had written it, "If Chris Chibnall had written it, it wouldn't be so surprising". Middle child thought the Doctor was "too cheerful for a Doctor travelling on his own"; youngest said that "the companion's too modern" and really hated the new sonic screwdriver "It's not a screwdriver anymore, it's a disc". Looking online afterwards, and checking in with other fan friends via Whatsapp, I found a similarly diverse range of reactions. Some hated the song but liked everything else, some vice versa.

Reaction:

I'll admit that for my first watch of The Church on Ruby Road I'd had a few festive glasses of wine; so, I was interested on this second watch whether without that buoyancy aid the story would fall flat. I watched and waited, and made it to the end of the hour feeling exactly as positive about the story as I did on first watch, but this time I was stone-cold sober. It starts well with a sequence that instantly establishes atmosphere: a silent, snowy, night, and a mysterious cowled figure carrying the baby Ruby to the doors of a church, all accompanied by Ncuti's voiceover narration and a sinister-sounding Carol of the Bells. This sets up the mystery of Ruby's parentage that I'm sure will run through the next season. I'd only be a little surprised if that cowled figure turned out to be Millie Gibson's older Ruby herself, and that scintilla of surprise would only be because I would doubt that they'd go there as Red Dwarf has famously done such a plotline already. There was also a mystery at the end that one assumes will be paid off at some point too, where Ruby's neighbour Mrs. Flood played by Anita Dobson knows what a TARDIS is; again, time will tell as to whether this is part of next year's Bad Wolf style arc plot. Another presumably recurring element is Ruby's family, Michelle Greenidge as Carla and Angela Wynter as Cherry. Both characters were well performed and - as one would expect from the story's writer Russell T Davies - well drawn (both Cherry grumbling as she waits and nobody makes her a cup of tea, and Ruby sarcastically noting that at Christmas the shops are closed for all of one whole day, resonated with me based on similar exchanges that happen in our family).

Greenidge's moment where history has been changed and she's become harder and more mercenary in an alternate life without her daughter was the best and most emotional moment of the story ("Why are you crying?" "I don't know; why are you?"). The climax of the story being the Doctor going back nineteen years to fix Clara and Ruby's personal history might seem a bit timey-wimey for a Christmas special, but it worked for me because it was reminiscent of Yuletide perennials like A Christmas Carol and It's a Wonderful life. It means that the second half of the narrative is quite different from the first (conflict on an internal emotional level after the more knock-about, almost slapstick action of the scenes of Goblins causing mayhem in the first half). The transition between the two styles is smoothed by the intriguing concept of the Goblin's science of chance. There's an effective sequence where the sky darkens as the Doctor realises more and more coincidences between Ruby's backstory and his own (building on the Timeless Child plotline from Jodie Whittaker's stories) that then powers the Goblins to travel back and snatch Ruby. The only issue, and it's probably the only significant flaw in the story structure for me, is it takes a bit too long to get from the song and dance battle and rescue of the baby to the cracks appearing and time being changed, and a lot of that is spent on exposition to feed into the moment of realisation of the coincidences. The conflict gets less and less taut, and is in danger of becoming flaccid for a while there; if that section was half as long it would work better, That could be achieved by having the Doctor find out a bit more about Ruby when he is tailing her in the earlier sections.

Those earlier sections are fun, giving lots of opportunities to show the Doctor in different contexts as an introduction to this new version of the character: dancing in a club, observing moodily from doorways, joking about being a gin and tonic inspector, being brave and saving people from a collapsing giant snowman, encouraging someone to go ahead with proposing to their fiancee. All of these moments are pitched perfectly by Ncuti Gatwa who is instantly perfect as the Doctor, an engaging and charismatic presence. His look is striking throughout too, with a few costume changes but still within a coherent visual theme for the character. Millie Gibson is good as Ruby, though she doesn't get quite such a range of material to get her teeth into: we've seen she can do plucky and funny, and I've no doubt she'll run the gamut of other emotional states in stories to come. The running gag in the early sections of Davina McCall continually being injured is nice too, and McCall is very natural performing these for a non-actor. It's interesting to see Davies sample real world media not for global scope as he has tended to do in the past, but here for character depth in establishing Ruby's search for her birth parents. There's some fun jokes, nice set pieces, and good character design - the Goblin King's a bit static, but he looks great. The song and dance number is something a bit different or the show; musically it's strong, but the lyrics were a little less good. I like that they're keeping going the gag from the 60th anniversary specials that gravity is called mavity in the current Who universe. Will this turn into a plot point later on, with the divergence between the old and new universes righted in a finale? We'll see. Overall, this story set up such intriguing ongoing questions in my mind while also delivering a silly, funny Goblin story with a little bit of seriousness in there too. What more could one want at Christmastime?

Connectivity:

Both The Church on Ruby Road and The Snowmen are Christmas specials set in London that feature the Doctor meeting a new female companion whom he invites to join him in his TARDIS travels, following a sequence where that companion has climbed up a ladder to an unseen craft high above in the sky. For the third blogged story in a row the new companion is seen working in a pub or club, and in two out of those last three that work has been as a musician.

Deeper Thoughts:

Will Wham be Christmas number one every year now? In the words of Homer Simson, I'm just a big kid and I love Christmas so much. I like the rituals, and the return of the ritual of watching a Doctor Who special on the big day was very much appreciated. Another ritual coming back after a few years away was wondering what the UK Christmas number one would be. I've been interested in the UK Christmas number one since 1987 when my favourite band of the time, Pet Shop Boys, landed the festive top spot with Always on my Mind. In those days, and for most of the history of the UK chart, the honour would be earned by a good pop record (and Always on my Mind is a good pop record), or a Christmas-themed hit, or a novelty song of the moment. Sometimes, the winning song could be a mixture of the three. For the previous five Yuletides before 2023, though, it wasn't any source of mystery and certainly not wonder. Youtuber Ladbaby cornered the market between 2018 and 2022, exactly the period that Doctor Who's specials were missing from Christmas Day coincidentally, with versions of songs with the lyrics changed to talk about sausage rolls (yes, really) released for charity in the immediate run up to Christmas. It was very successful, and the top spot was achieved each of the five times attempted. As well as being successful, it was also tiresome - variety is the spice of life and all that. There was no fun in guessing as the answer was always the same.

There had been periods of ubiquity before; the Beatles in the 1960s, the Spice Girls in the 1990s, but they are hardly comparable as they were at least offering original songs. The only similar period of frustration was probably just over a decade earlier than Ladbaby, when each year's winner of the UK TV programme X Factor, a singing competition televised in the autumn, would tend to grab the festive top spot. This pissed off some people that weren't watching that programme, or who didn't appreciate the - very samey - style of record created each year, so much that an online campaign was successful in getting Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name (with its forceful refrain about not doing what one's told to do) to Christmas number one in 2009. Like Ladbaby, X Factor had been using its built-in audience to put power behind a song climbing the charts, which some felt was gaming the system. The online campaign of 2009 showed though that something more grassroots could be effective, but nothing like that has really been successful at Christmas since despite a few attempts over the years. This year there was something of an online push for Fairytale of New York by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl to get to number one, as a tribute to Pogues singer and cowriter of the song Shane MacGowan who had died at the end of November 2023. It is a well-loved song, and many people feel it was unfairly robbed of the festive top spot when first released in 1987 by being kept at number two by the hi-NRG frippery of a couple of arch Northerners with synthesisers (see above). But it only made it to number six in 2023.

For Christmas 2023, another TV show was pushing its own song, with proceeds going to charity too, and that was Doctor Who. The Goblin Song from The Church on Ruby Road was available to stream and download in December 2023. It got to a reasonably high position in the top 40 sales chart in the UK, but didn't break the UK top 40. What's that you're saying? You weren't aware that the UK sales chart and the UK top 40 are different things? Me neither until I found out, like I would guess many a Doctor Who fan did, when there was a brief social media kerfuffle about it. A Doctor Who Magazine journalist replied to the singer of the Goblin Song Christina Rotondo, without knowing it was her or he might have been more polite, pissing on her parade in an 'Actually, I think you'll find' manner, She'd been celebrating the song reaching number 12 in the UK top 40 for the week before Christmas. He pointed out that it was at that position in a UK top 40, but not the UK top 40 (the definitive article you might say). So much for Christmas cheer and goodwill. It begs the question, though, that if the official chart is not charting sales, then what's the use of it? What dominates it is streaming. Television, as noted above in the Context section above, is more and more about streaming, and that journey happened for music even earlier. Unfortunately, this means the chart it is no longer fit for purpose as a test of what current song people are excited by in the Christmas period. The majority of the songs in the official UK top 40 in Christmas week of 2023 were all the songs - from any era - that tend to get streamed at Christmas every year, from Slade to Bing Crosby to Mariah Carey to Ariana Grande to Wham, who made it to the Christmas 2023 number one spot with their 1984 record, Last Christmas.

Ladbaby had opted out of the race in 2023, but he may not have managed to get a sixth consecutive number one anyway. The sales chart (where The Goblin Song was hanging in there at 52 in its second week) was very different to the UK top 40, and had more new recordings. This makes sense: if someone is going to pay to download something it's more likely to be something new (and it's more likely that if a song is for charity that it will be paid for rather than streamed); if a song's an old one that someone wants to have on in the background as they make mince pies, it's more likely to be streamed. As honourable as is the charitable aim, and as catchy a ditty as is the Goblin King song, it is not - like Ladbaby's efforts - going to form part of anyone's festive playlists in years to come. This cannot be said for Wham's Last Christmas, a song played so much at Yuletide that people have made a challenge out of avoiding it before the big day. It's charted every December since 2007, reached the top ten every year since 2016, and has made the top spot twice before, but not quite for Christmas week, in 2020 and 2022. With no Ladbaby in its way, it finally did it, but what will now stop it doing the same every year from now on? I can't foresee a new Ladbaby phenomenon arising that would dent its dominance. Even with the boost of people wanting to pay tribute to MacGowan, Fairytale of New York (a song that gets streamed lots anyway) couldn't make the top five. Mariah Carey's All I Want For Christmas Is You could challenge it, I suppose. But whether it's Wham every year, or Wham alternating with Mariah, either way it's not going to be very interesting. If the worst happens and the Christmas number one becomes a one or two horse race, finally ending that ritual of wonder, at least we will have a Doctor Who special annually to make up for it. Happy New Year!

In Summary:

The Church on Ruby Road seems to have split audiences as much as the church on Ruby Road split the Goblin King; I liked it a lot. 

The Snowmen

Chapter the 287th, where it's Snow Joke for the Doctor and Clara at Christmas...

Plot:
London, England 1892. Disillusioned after losing the Ponds to the Weeping Angels (though they did get to die of old age, so that's alright then!), the Doctor is hiding out in the TARDIS on top of a cloud reached by an invisible spiral staircase (yes, really). Vastra, Jenny and Strax are trying to engage him in helping people again, but he's resisting futilely. He meets a governess and sometime barmaid Clara Oswald, while investigating telepathic alien snow that can form itself into killer snowmen. The head of the G.I. institute Doctor Simeon has had a telepathic link with the snow since he was a child, and now is aiming to make the intelligence corporeal. To achieve this, he needs the icy body print of a human that exists at Clara's employer Captain Latimer's house, as the previous governess a year earlier drowned in a pond that then froze over. Snowmen surround the house, and the ice governess comes to life, but Clara protects her charges (a young girl and boy). The Doctor, and then Vastra, Jenny and Strax arrive to help out.

The Doctor and Clara lead the ice governess to the top of the house, then both escape up the invisible staircase to the TARDIS, where the Doctor believes the governess will not be able to follow. Just as he's inviting Clara to travel with him in the TARDIS, the governess arrives, and pulls at Clara and they both fall down to Earth. The governess is smashed to smithereens, and Clara is mortally wounded. The Doctor brings her in to the Latimer house where the others try to save her, while he goes to confront Simeon. With a nice little bit of the old Doctor flim-flam, he manages to wipe Simeon's memory, but instead of removing the link to the snow, it allows the snow to animate the blank Simeon. Suddenly, though, it starts to rain, the snow melts, and Simeon collapses. The telepathic signal caused by the Latimer children crying has created rain, and they are crying because Clara has died. In the aftermath, the Doctor realises that the G.I. in the institute's name stands for Great Intelligence, so maybe the disembodied force behind the snowmen might have survived. He also realises Clara is someone he's now met twice and both times she has died, He goes off into time and space to investigate that mystery.

Context:

Watched on a Sunday afternoon in the lead up to Christmas 2023, accompanied by the eldest and youngest child (boy of 17, girl of 11). The Better Half and middle child (boy of 14) were elsewhere in the house rewatching Good Omens season one, the David Tennant-loving genre traitors! I watched from the BBC iplayer, rather than bothering to get the Blu-ray set down from the shelf.  

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. The Snowmen is the final (at time of writing) new series Christmas Day special to be covered. There was a good run of these from The Christmas Invasion in 2005 to Twice Upon a Time in 2017. After that, the Who festive specials moved to January 1st and didn't look like they were ever going to come back to December 25th. Missing them, I decided then to hold back a few of the older ones, exempting them from selection during the rest of the year, to blog about annually - but in a random order, natch - just before the big day. Luckily, now that I've run the old ones out, Doctor Who is back on Christmas Day again from 2023 onwards. Exciting!

First Time Round:

I can't remember much about Christmas 2012. My In-Laws were round during the day, and the youngest's first Christmas was a bit rubbish as she was ill with an ear infection, poor thing. I definitely watched The Snowmen on the day, probably time-shifted a little into the evening as its 5:15pm broadcast time would still have been a bit busy in the house.  The only clear memory in my head from around this time is reading the Christmas Radio Times listings magazine, which introduced Jenna Coleman as the new companion Clara. I'm struggling to remember whether it had leaked that she wasn't the real Clara, and that this was to a certain extent misdirection with the Victorian Clara dying during the special. (Like in many a show since it was done - spoiler alert for old telly - by Spooks in the UK, writer Steven Moffat is pulling the trick of introducing someone who appears to be a regular and therefore plot-armoured, but then killing them off as a surprise.) I don't think I had heard anything about this, so when reading about Clara I would have thought that she was to be a Victorian in the TARDIS, and I probably thought that wasn't the greatest idea.

Reaction:

When The Church on Ruby Road is shown on the 25th December 2023, it will make it fourteen specials in total for the new Doctor Who broadcast on BBC1 on the big day. It's rare for something that isn't a light entertainment show, soap or monarch's message to rack up such numbers. Fourteen specials is equal with Only Fools and Horses's total (the popular sit-com being something of a benchmark for festive ubiquity). As OFAH's writer John Sullivan found earlier (the most popular Only Fools Christmas special is set around August Bank Holiday weekend), it's hard to keep coming up with ideas that feature significant festive trimmings. The Snowmen marks the point that Moffat pretty much gives up, and - with the exception of the cracked / genius / both idea to include Santa Claus in a Doctor Who story a couple of years later - all of his Christmas specials from this one onwards barely feature any festivities, and could be set at any time of the year. That's fair enough, as it is a hard ask of anyone, and there would have been diminishing returns in sticking with killer tinsel monsters, or whatever, year on year. The Snowmen is at least wintery, and the central idea of semi-sentient carnivorous snow telepathically connected to a formless intelligence is an interesting one. The visuals pop, whether it's deep and crisp and even backdrops to dialogue scenes, or the moments where razor-toothed snowmen form instantly, or of Simeon using a machine to create an artificial blizzard in the Latimer house.

The title makes it seem like this is the third and final one of a series of Moffat Christmas specials loosely based on literary texts associated with the season, following the use of A Christmas Carol and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe the previous two years. Was The Snowmen in any way alluding to Raymond Briggs's The Snowman singular, the animated short film of which has been a festive fixture on UK channel 4 for decades. There is a sequence where the Doctor and Clara are literally walking in the air (the refrain of the famous song featured in The Snowman) so it's possible. It could, though, just be a coincidence. My money's on the latter, as Moffat seems to be much more interested in riffing on texts that are closer to home, creating an origin story for a classic monster from the early days of the show - the Great Intelligence. As would be expected of the writer, it's very clever: in one short programme with a few other things going on, the Doctor accidentally gives freedom and agency to the floating snow intelligence, as well as giving it the ideas for its first two battles with him in his Patrick Troughton persona (The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear). This is summed up in some slightly glib but funny (for a long-term fan) dialogue shared between Vastra, Jenny and the Doctor towards the end - a wink to the audience. Of course, this means that the defeat the alien invasion plot is not resolved during the special. The Great Intelligence will turn out to be the Big Bad of the episodes broadcast in Spring the following year.

One might think, and I agree, that the defeat the alien invasion plot is not the main point of The Snowmen. The real story is about the introduction of Clara. Jenna Coleman is perfect in her first appearance (well, sort-of, she had an unexpected teaser appearance earlier in 2012, but this is the first time she's properly interacted with the Doctor). She's sassy, assertive, cheeky, brave, clever; the character clearly passes the audition, for Doctor and for audience alike. But it's all misdirection: this Clara dies, and the Doctor then realises it's the same person as he talked to in the Dalek asylum. There's a mystery to solve and - perhaps - a prime Clara to find somewhere in the universe. So, again, the plot is unresolved and leads in to the episodes the following Spring. With The Snowmen being all so much set-up, how does it manage to engage the perhaps more flighty Christmas day audience? Maybe a lot of people watching don't care about the resolution of plot arcs - they'll either be watching in 2013 anyway, in which case they'll find out how things pan out, or they won't, so they won't care. They are rewarded during their hour's worth of Yuletide attention with comedy at least, and that might well be enough to get them through it. This is one of those Doctor Who stories blessed with more than its fair share of funny lines, and a lot of them are thanks to Dan Starkey's performance as Strax. The combination of his delivery and the material Moffat provides him is a winning combination (that the show would regularly milk over the next couple of years). The memory worm scene alone justifies the entire episode. In fact, even if the other 59 minutes and 50 seconds were fuzz and white noise, it would be worth it just for the line "Do not discuss my reproductive cycle in front of enemy girls."

  

Starkey is not the only one delivering; everybody's giving it their all. Richard E. Grant is as good as you'd expect as a restrained baddie, Neve Mackintosh as Vastra and Catrin Stewart as Jenny are not going to let the Sontaran have all the fun ("I'm a lizard woman from the dawn of time, and this is my wife"), Tom Ward and Liz White are memorably great too, without a huge amount of screen time. Murray Gold's music is sublime, there are some great set piece sequences like the interrogation scene where Vastra makes Clara form her answers as a single word only. There's a nice new beginning title sequence with Matt Smith's face appearing (for old times sake as the 50th anniversary approached); there's a wonderful new TARDIS control room set (possibly the best ever since 2005). As every parent knows, some years you can't find one big, perfect present for a child, and you have to instead give them lots of little things. The Snowmen is like that, a stocking full of individual, small pleasures rather than one solid plot. Sometimes, that's enough. If you stuff every gift you can think of into a stocking,  inevitably not everything will be liked. I didn't like Clara forcing a kiss on the Doctor without consent, and I didn't like the Doctor's borderline bullying of Strax, making many disparaging comments about his appearance. I don't think those moments would be handled in the same way if this story was made today.

Connectivity:

Both The Snowmen and The Ultimate Adventure feature the Doctor meeting a new female companion who works in an establishment that serves drinks. Both stories also see the Doctor with a cute alien sidekick (Zog, Strax).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Year of the Whoniverse. In the approach to Christmas Day, it's appropriate to look back on the year just gone. The biggest part of Doctor Who in 2023 will be forgotten, maybe already is forgotten, and that was a long wait. The longest period ever between new episodes on television since the programme returned in 2005 elapsed between the Power of the Doctor in October 2022 and The Star Beast in November 2023. The stretch of time was a miniature version of the so-called wilderness years between the classic and the new series, and like those years it didn't exactly live up to the name, not being particularly barren. For a start, there was excitingly new Doctor Who being made. There were frequent press releases throughout the year announcing new guest stars, or featuring photographs of the new main stars of the show Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson in different outfits (the wardrobe budget certainly seems to have been expanded with the influx of Disney+ money). I don't think there's ever before in its 60 year history been a period when Doctor Who has had so much in the can ahead of broadcast. All of Gatwa's first season has completed production and is into post before a single story of his has been shown. At the time of writing in December 2023, his 2024 Christmas special is being shot before his 2023 Christmas special has aired. After having two years on the trot with only a few specials, an effort's clearly being made to ensure in future there will be a regular season and special broadcast annually, without gap years.

There's also lots of delicious rumours of spin-offs that might well be entertaining us between seasons. A little taste of that was the Tales of the TARDIS series of shorts that landed on the BBC iplayer at the start of November 2023, but I'd be surprised if there weren't plans for bigger things in 2024. Those Tales of the TARDIS were the start of a flood of new stuff from the start of November that helped fans forget being patient for the first ten months of the year. There was an exclusive new scene for Children in Need for the first time in simply ages, and there was a colourised and re-edited version of classic story The Daleks. Again, it's been confirmed that another such programme will be coming in the next year. The main event for the anniversary, though, was a trio of specials featuring David Tennant and Catherine Tate. For me, these were perfect, and I don't think I'm alone in that view. The only sane negatives I've seen were more to do with people's expectations than the stories themselves. For most viewers, getting David Tennant and Catherine Tate back was nostalgia and celebration enough, but some fans were expecting many more returning elements from the show's history. Secrecy about the nature of middle story Wild Blue Yonder, as by its minimalist nature it didn't have much to use for pre-publicity that wasn't a spoiler, led to wild theories online about appearances from Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi and such. Instead, what we got were more leftfield choices exploring the nooks and crannies of Who history, which were ultimately more celebratory.

One might think the past of the programme had been mined to exhaustion, but adapting a plot from the early years of Doctor Who Magazine, or bringing back a well-remembered one-off foe from decades before, proved that to be false. The Meep and Neil Patrick Harris's Toymaker left me wanting more, as did Tennant and Tate themselves (on particularly good form with the material they got to play in Wild Blue Yonder). I'd love to see any or all of them back, but - as Ncuti's appearance at the end of The Giggle underlined - it's all about the future now. The tantalising glimpses seen so far of Ncuti's first stories haven't included any hints of returning monsters as yet, so it may be a clean slate, Who knows. Another way of experiencing the past of Doctor Who, and another thing keeping fans entertained for the first 10 months of the year, were the releases on Blu-ray and DVD. There were another two seasons of 20th century stories released on Collection Blu-ray boxsets, season 9 (Jon Pertwee's third run) in March and season 20 (Peter Davison's second, including no less than three different versions of 20th anniversary tale The Five Doctors) in September. The most surprising release was an animated The Underwater Menace in November, when last year the animation range had seemed like it was dead. It was an enjoyable version, but was probably overshadowed by everything else going on in November. I look forward to seeing the next one (confirmed during the BFI panel for the release as being lined up - see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Tenth Planet post for more details).

The year for the blog has seen 35 stories written up. I will endeavour to get The Church on Ruby Road blogged by New Year's Eve '23 too, which will mean 36 in total, three a month, which is generally the rate I maintain every year. Of these, there was a slight weighting in favour of new series stories. For the classic series Doctors, I watched three William Hartnell stories (one wholly intact, one wholly missing, and one mix of episodes and animation to plug gaps), two Patrick Troughtons (one wholly intact, one wholly missing), three each for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, one each for Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy (though I also snuck in a post about a stage play recording also starring Colin). For the new series, one story only for Christopher Eccleston, four for Matt Smith (though he did additionally feature briefly in a spin-off that I blogged this year too), four for Peter Capaldi, and three for Jodie Whittaker. Winning out over everyone - it really was his year - was David Tennant with seven stories. Four of these were standard stories from his original TV run from 2005 to 2010, two were animated stories shown in that same period, and one was a 2023 60th anniversary special where he returned as the 14th Doctor. No other Doctor before (or between) Tennant is adding to their total anymore; with dwindling supplies of stories to cover, I will likely run out by the end of next year, even taking into consideration the nine stories starring Ncuti Gatwa to be broadcast that year. I may well branch out and look at some more spin-offs. If you find me blogging The Airzone Solution in 2024, you'll know why (and, needless to say, apologies in advance). All that's to come in the new year, so for now all there is to say is Merry Christmas!  

In Summary:

Incidentally, a Happy and Snowy Christmas to all of you at home.

The Ultimate Adventure

Chapter the 286th, it's December, so we're entering into Panto season...

Plot:
Sometime in the 1980s. The Doctor is travelling with a French aristo whom he saved from the guillotine, Jason, when he's called to Earth by UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She wants his help to ensure the smooth running of an imminent peace conference in London. Security services have gathered intelligence that the American envoy is going to be kidnapped by extraterrestrial forces, but have foolishly let him go to a nightclub. The Doctor arrives just too late; Cybermen and mercenaries - who are working with the Daleks - have kidnapped the envoy after a shoot-out. The club's singer Crystal joins the Doctor and Jason as they try to track the envoy down. They travel to Altair 4, then the Bar Galactica where there are shambolic scuffles with baddies and the occasional song. A cute furry critter called Zog joins the TARDIS crew. They go to some other places, including revolutionary France where Jason nearly loses his head, and an asteroid field in space that they have to fly the TARDIS through death-defyingly. Eventually, they find the envoy, and manage to free him. The Doctor secretly records the Emperor Dalek talking of betraying the Cybermen and the mercenaries; they all turn on each other leading to another shambolic scuffle. The Doctor returns the envoy to the peace conference, but is concerned that it was too easy to escape the Daleks. He realises the envoy is under their control and is going to blow up the conference, but manages to decondition him and defuse the bomb. Crystal and Jason fall in love, and Crystal decides to join the TARDIS crew for further time and space travels.

Context:

Earlier in 2023, youtuber and Doctor Who fan Josh Snares put up a restored version of this play, which he had put together from the best bits of multiple video and audio sources. These were all fan made, as no professional recording was ever created either for commercial exploitation or posterity. When I saw that it was available, I thought that it would be something interesting to cover for the blog, but I waited until early December as it somehow felt a more fitting watch for the pre-Christmas period. I watched it on my own on the big screen TV through a youtube application rather than on a laptop screen, so I could get the best possible look at the story. I tried my hardest not to be influenced by any dips in audio and video quality and just rate the story as if I'd seen it live; Snares has anyway done an excellent job with what he had to work with - it's at this link, if you want to check it out.

Milestone watch: I started this blog in 2015 to cover all of the new and the classic series of Doctor Who in a randomly shuffled order, and I'm now closing in on the point where I catch up with the serial broadcasts of new episodes. I've so far completed 18 of the 39 seasons made to date, and have only one or two stories from each remaining season left. The occasional opportunity to blog something that falls outside the TV canon is usually embraced, as it puts off that point for a little longer. It's also great to be able to cover another Colin Baker story, even an only semi-official one; otherwise, I have only one of his left to go.

First Time Round:

The Ultimate Adventure toured UK theatres in spring and summer 1989 - first starring Jon Pertwee before Colin Baker took over later in the run - but I wasn't aware that it was happening. That period fell during my least engaged spell of fandom since becoming hooked on the series in 1981. My grandfather used to pay for the local newsagent to deliver a copy of Doctor Who Magazine every month, but when there was a cover price hike sometime in 1987 he stopped doing this. From that point, I disengaged a little, though I would still watch stories that went out on TV, and buy those few coming out on VHS. I didn't have much access to any information on the show during that time (those early videos were surprise discoveries rather than things I knew about in advance). I may have disengaged a little anyway even if my Gramps hadn't prompted it, as I was at that sort of age (15 years old). Three years later, in the spring of 1990, I flicked through the latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine in a shop and realised that the copy had improved in terms of detail and depth. I started collecting it again, and then got a lot of the back issues I'd missed from a mail order place run by John Fitton (well remembered by Doctor Who fans of the time). It would have been when reading one of those that I found out about the play, much too late to go and see it. I heard bits and pieces here and there about it after that, but this youtube watch was my first time seeing it.

Reaction:

The strangest thing about The Ultimate Adventure is that it was written by Terrance Dicks, someone who knew every aspect of Doctor Who in detail and had a long and vast experience in writing the show. If I didn't know that, I'd be convinced the author was someone who'd vaguely heard about the programme but never seen an episode. Each aspect of the play is presented as textbook Doctor Who, but a textbook that has been hastily skim read. The Doctor has companions and flies around in a TARDIS, he visits weird planets and meets weird aliens with names like Zog, he travels back into history, he saves the world from Daleks and Cybermen. He doesn't usually do all of these in the one story, though. Even a big jamboree like Terrance's The Five Doctors had most of its action taking place in one place and one time, the better to contain all the other disparate elements. The Ultimate Adventure is attempting to do something more akin to the space opera with a cast of thousands of the last story covered for the blog - script-edited by Terrance, of course - Frontier in Space (although even that story didn't try to include a stopover in revolutionary France). The action of the play, lest we forget, had to be staged in a series of different regional theatres in the UK. It was ambitious to say the least, and seems baffling to me because Doctor Who comes with a ready-made style of story that would be relatively easy to put on as a touring production. It's the polar opposite of The Ultimate Adventure's approach, though. For example, another Terrance Dicks story Horror of Fang Rock would be a great template: a few characters in a spooky isolated location requiring only a few sets, with tension arising from character interactions, and simple effects.

Instead of such a chamber piece, The Ultimate Adventure goes for spectacle. This was clearly the brief from the money men and Terrance is writing to it, pro that he is. So, we have laser projections and smoke, actors on wires, swordfights and zap-gun battles on stage, and even a conjuring trick (Crystal at one point gets into a crate that is hoist above the stage, the crate is exterminated by Daleks and in a puff of smoke she disappears and emerges stage left. For one bizarre scene, our heroes play a game of Asteroids on stage on a big screen. There's also, infamously, songs. It isn't a full-on musical, there are only three numbers, none of which is particularly memorable but neither are they that bad. It's all part of the attempt to throw everything at the audience to keep them interested, but without ever engaging their emotions or even building up any intrigue. Each scene feels short, and most descend into stage fights that look a bit shambolic (at least from the angles that fans were recording the action). There's no sense that the plot is building in any way to a climax, as every five minutes the characters go back to the TARDIS and move on to another location (every other scene being a TARDIS scene is a big signal that something's wrong with a Doctor Who plot). I don't suppose any audience member over the age of four years old ever felt concern at any point that the Doctor and his friends were in danger, nor cared to wonder at any point how things would turn out. There is a cliffhanger in the middle of the play (the textbook says Doctor Who has cliffhangers), which I assume led to an intermission though the play isn't really long enough to warrant it. It's not the greatest cliffhanger: the Daleks are going to exterminate the Doctor, and the resolution is that the Daleks don't exterminate the Doctor.

Other inclusions leave one scratching one's head. There's a Vervoid (walking vegetable lifeform from The Trial of a Time Lord) in a song and dance number. There's a bit where the Doctor impersonates Winston Churchill. There's a long sequence where the character Delilah comes on strong to the Doctor. There's a cringe moment with a martial arts display on stage. I don't know what in time and space is happening on Altair 4 (it's like a fever dream, with kids in bat costumes doing flips on wires). Plus, warning: it contains scenes featuring Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was never not divisive, but was particularly so in 1989 towards the end of her tenure as UK Prime Minister. Dicks's line that he gives the Doctor "That woman terrifies me" is clever, in that it can be interpreted in a negative or positive light by the different sides, but I still don't like the Doctor saying it. There's a romance subplot between Crystal and Jason that is so perfunctory it makes Leela and Andred from The Invasion of Time (who get together at the end despite having barely looked at one another beforehand) look like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The production had wanted Kyle Minogue and Jason Donovan (who were explosively popular in 1989 - as mentioned before, The Ultimate Adventure is nothing if not ambitious) to play Crystal and Jason. Just by being themselves, and bringing the recent history of their onscreen relationship in TV soap Neighbours, they probably would have made it work. The play's overkill 'throw everything and see what sticks' approach mostly misses the mark, but if there's one positive that comes out of it, it's Colin Baker; he's consistently great. This was the first time he got to play the Doctor without being laden down with the aggressive persona that was written for him on television. It must have been worth the ticket price for fans at the time just to see him play the Doctor again.

 

Connectivity:

Both stories feature a plan by the Daleks than involves them allying themselves with other alien creatures, and both involve a lot of travelling from place to place.

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who: The Live Experience. I recently summarised a lot of the TV offerings to celebrate the 60th anniversary (see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Star Beast post for more details); there were obviously other things happening too away from the small screen, tie-in publications, extended universe media, and so on. What there weren't this time were any official in-person celebratory events. The only exception was a quite bijou concert in Cardiff earlier in the year that most people would have experienced on the radio or TV anyway; there was nothing like the three day celebration at the ExCel London attended by thousands of fans that took place a decade before for the 50th anniversary. This was a deliberate choice; current showrunner Russell T Davies mentioned in an interview that the production team were concentrating on things that everyone could access (plus, that production team was working on the 60th specials simultaneously with stories for 2024 and 2025, so likely didn't have time to be part of organising anything anyway). Nonetheless, Doctor Who has a rich history of such events, and they don't always have to be linked to anniversaries. Putting aside personal appearances and tours, which I think are a slightly different proposition (the year after the 50th anniversary, the stars and showrunner of Doctor Who did a global publicity tour, they were high on their own supply back then), there are two main types of live Who experience: theatrical shows and conventions.

There have been relatively few official Who stage plays over the years; before The Ultimate Adventure, there were short runs of a Dalek play The Curse of the Daleks in the 1960s, and another Dalek-featuring show Seven Keys to Doomsday in the 1970s, starring an alternate version of the Doctor played by Trevor Martin. There were a few unofficial offerings made by fans or even actors that appeared in TV Who over the years, but only those three official productions - one a decade - in the 20th century. There were lots of chances to sit in an auditorium and watch live official Doctor Who entertainment in the 21st century, but they were much more focussed on music; there were charity concerts, proms, and a touring "Symphonic Spectacular". All of these featured performances by actors in monster costumes, some also had brief filmed or live appearances by the current Doctor, but nothing else in the way of narrative. In 2010, there was an arena show "Doctor Who Live! The Monsters are Coming" which was still mainly about the music, but built an overarching story around the tunes. That was it, though; any full-on official 21st century stage play is still awaited. With conventions, the BBC rarely get involved in the organising, with lots of different events being run by fan groups, but official events few and far between. The 20th anniversary event in Longleat (Doctor Who's version of Woodstock), the aforementioned 50th event at the ExCel, and another similar one a couple of years later are all that come to mind.

In the same year as that first ExCel event, there was a series of anniversary screenings at the BFI Southbank of selected stories from half a century of Doctor Who. A few years later, a showcase of the animation of The Power of the Daleks restarted such events and they've continued ever since. For people lucky enough to be able to travel to London to attend them, they have provided an affordable way (tickets are very cheap for a few hours of entertainment compared to much else on offer in the UK capital) to get the best of both worlds. There's an opportunity to watch a story with an audience, usually a special edition version from a Blu-ray boxset or an animated version of a lost story, but there are also onstage interviews, panels, signings and the opportunity to see fan friends and acquaintances. They are also at least semi-official too, with BBC Studios providing the material to screen and other giveaways. The most recent of these events was for the newly animated version of The Underwater Menace, which I attended (a write up of that event can be found in the Deeper Thoughts section of a recent blog post for The Tenth Planet.) Alas, that was the final such event in 2023; there wasn't anything specifically connected to the anniversary happening at the BFI. These events tend to tie in to product releases, and - presumably because Doctor Who was on TV and all attention was required there - there wasn't any Blu-ray or animated product being released in November 2023.

Fiddy (L) and Thornton (R)

There was one small thing, though, a bit of an oddity that took place in early November. It wasn't one of the usual screenings, but instead formed a part of a season called Destination Time Travel programmed by Dick Fiddy, one of the usual hosts of Doctor Who events at the BFI. It was an illustrated discussion about the TARDIS, "The Most Famous Time Machine in the Universe". Slightly shorter than the usual screenings, its tickets cost half as much, so a couple of fan friends and I used it as an excuse to meet up one more time before the end of the year. The usual screenings are watching a Doctor Who story with an audience; this one was like watching a Doctor Who DVD extra with an audience. Fiddy kicked things off with a compilation of stills of the time machine put together by Doctor Who Magazine, accompanied by the new version of the theme tune as played at the 60th anniversary concert. In between interviews on stage, there was a series of clips compiled by DVD and Blu-ray Value Added Material producer Ed Stradling. These showcased various control room interiors from An Unearthly Child through to Spyfall. Before the first (classic era) half of this clip reel, designer Malcolm Thornton was interviewed. He created the TARDIS console seen from The Five Doctors onwards, and also the cloister rooms for Logopolis. Thornton talked about this, and about his other work for the BBC, including Star Cops.

Fiddy (L) and Ayres (R)

Mark Ayres was up next, this time in his role as Radiophonic Workshop archivist. Ayres had come armed with a laptop and a hard drive full of different sound files from the programme's history. These included the cloister bell sound, the source of which was the noise of an old immersion heater in the Workshop's Maida Vale studios being banged like a kettle drum. "Thumping the immersion heater sounds like a euphemism," added Fiddy. After the second (new series) half of the clip reel, the final guest on stage was Steve Nallon, voice artist and writer. He talked about his childhood being a fan of the Doctor. The inspiration for this entire season is a book that Nallon and Fiddy have written together, also called Destination Time Travel. Sweetly, it is priced £19.63, as a tribute to the year in which Doctor Who started (Fiddy managed to persuade Nallon that this was more appropriate than £19.85 as a Back to the Future reference). I got a signed copy in the BFI shop afterwards, but my membership discount rendered the pricing in-joke meaningless anyway. The book is a genre guide to time travel in film, TV and books, and is an interesting read. After Nallon, there was another brief clip of the late great Michael Pickwoad, new series production designer, talking about the creation of the TARDIS control room set and console that was used from The Snowmen through to Twice Upon a Time. After that, Ayres was invited briefly back on stage to play one more audio clip of a Doctor Who sound effect. With a wheezing, groaning sound, he "dematerialised us all to the bar". A slightly strange live experience, then, but - as can be seen with The Ultimate Adventure - Doctor Who has a long history of such things.

In Summary:

It seems silly to have a go at what is essentially a Panto, but this one really is Pants.

Frontier in Space

Chapter the 285th, here be Dragons...

Plot:
The TARDIS materialises aboard a cargo spaceship. It's the 26th century and there is a frontier (in space) between the Draconian and Earth empires. Relations are strained as both sides have apparently been attacking each others ships. The Doctor and Jo see Ogrons board, but the crew - thanks to a hypnotic signal - see them as Draconians. By the time rescue arrives, the Ogrons have gone, taking the TARDIS with them. The Doctor and Jo are arrested as spies in league with the Draconians, and nobody will believe them when they say a third-party is stirring up both sides to create a war. The third-party turns out to be the Master who arrives posing as an official from a colony planet with forged warrants for the Doctor and Jo's arrest. The Doctor has already been taken to a prison on the moon where political prisoners are held. During an attempted escape that goes wrong, the Master rescues the Doctor and takes him and Jo off in a stolen Earth ship. Later, the Draconians board them, and the Master signals the Ogrons to rescue him. On Draconia, the Doctor is meeting the Emperor when the Ogrons attack. They escape with the Master, but leave one of their party behind. When the hypnotic signal wears off the Draconians see him change from a hallucinated Earthman to an Ogron, and are convinced. There's more back and forth space shenanigans: Jo is captured by the Master and taken to the Ogrons' planet, where the TARDIS is; the Doctor and a Draconian prince persuade General Williams on Earth to help, and they all go there too. The Master reveals for whom he's been plotting - the Daleks. They want a war to destabilise things so they can invade. Williams and the Draconian prince leave to warn their respective empires. There's a tussle where the Doctor is hurt (somehow), and the Master escapes (presumably).

Context:

I was a little bit Who-ed out towards the end of November 2023. There was such a lot of different programmes old and new being made available (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post for more details) and I'm still working my way through the episodes on recent Blu-ray purchases (The animated Underwater Menace and the Season 20 Collection box-set) too. As such, I set myself a one episode per day limit to avoid Time Lord Appreciation Fatigue. I have enough, with everything that's being shown, or that I plan to watch from newly bought disc, or cover for the blog, to get me to Christmas Day and Ncuti's debut. I watched Frontier in Space therefore stripped across six consecutive days in late November and early December 2023. The family have current Doctor Who back on TV with David Tennant and Meeps to keep them amused now, so they didn't join me.

Milestone watch: I started this blog in 2015 to cover all of the new and the classic series of Doctor Who in a randomly shuffled order. I am keeping closer track now that I'm nearing the point of catching up with the serial broadcasts of new episodes. This story marks another season of Doctor Who completed, the 10th season, Jon Pertwee's fourth run from 1972/73. This is the 18th season done out of the total of 39 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 10, 11 and 13).

First Time Round:

This is a rarity, a story where I saw the final episode first, long before the rest. The reason for this was a VHS release in early 1992 called The Pertwee Years. The Years tapes were the brainchild of former Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner when he worked as a consultant to the VHS range in its early days. The Hartnell and Troughton Years tapes had come out the year before, and provided a home for some of the orphaned episodes, where the rest of the story was missing. Jon Pertwee's tape was made at the same time, and there was a plan to complete the series for all seven of the actors who'd by then starred as the Doctor, but Nathan-Turner parted company with BBC Video before all of them were completed. The later tapes that did get made (for Bakers Tom and Colin) involved clips rather than full episodes as everything of theirs was present and correct in the archives. But this was true of Pertwee too. Perhaps the episodes were Pertwee's favourites, or perhaps Nathan-Turner selected them; however it came to be, the three that ended up on the tape were the final episodes of Inferno, The Daemons, and Frontier in Space. To put it another way, the Pertwee Years tape celebrated his tenure as the Doctor by ruining the ending of three of his stories. I had already seen Inferno and The Daemons on fan-exchanged nth generation tapes by 1992, so it was only Frontier in Space that had me scratching my head working out what might have happened in the first five-sixths of the story. I finally found that out when it was released in full on VHS in August 1995.

Reaction:

Frontiers, politics, different space-faring races, neutral zones being entered at the risk of war: this story is bloody Star Trek more than Doctor Who, isn't it? This kind of space opera underpinned by relatable politics is much more commonly done by my favourite show's US rival. Gene Roddenberry's famous creation might not have been a direct inspiration; writer of Frontier in Space Malcolm Hulke tended to imbue his tales with political parallels, and the creature races in his stories tended to have more depth (except for the Ogrons, perhaps, but they were inherited from an earlier story - more on them in the Deeper Thoughts section below). Who had anyway blazed the trail of peripatetic space opera in its early days with stories like The Daleks' Master Plan, and that was before Star Trek even existed. There's no reason why the flexible format of Who shouldn't try something like this, but the one thing Frontier in Space doesn't have is warp drive. There's mention of hyperspace and hyperdrive, but they don't seem to make things swift enough: travels through space and to planets in this story take up a lengthy amount of story time, which can get a little boring. Such sequences are interspersed with capture-escape-recapture moments which are less boring at first but get quite repetitive as things progress. You could lose almost all of episode four, for example, and the narrative would barely be impacted. The Master extricates the Doctor from the prison on the moon, they travel to his base but are boarded by Draconians, then the Master secretly signals the Ogrons to rescue him. That's all that happens in 25 minutes: two minutes of plot - less than the recap for some of the story's episodes.

 

What you would lose by jettisoning that episode is character moments; the three regulars - Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Katy Manning as Jo and Roger Delgado as the Master - are on fine form, particularly Delgado, who is at his most snarky in this story. There is a sequence where Jo (or maybe Katy?) has to improvise long monologues moaning about the lot of working for UNIT and being the Doctor's companion. Such material sometimes veers too far into silliness (the Doctor talking about a purple horse with yellow spots) or gets uncomfortably close to sending up the tropes of the series, but it's mostly fun. It's not quite enough, though, to make the dull, repetitive scenes of going from place to place fully worthwhile. One problem is that there's lots of other repetition going on in the story. The entire second episode is a succession of scenes of the Doctor and Jo telling different sets of disbelieving people that they are being manipulated towards an intergalactic war, over and over again. The only intermissions are zap-gunfights shot amidst the Brutalist architecture of the South Bank area. (I'm very familiar with this area from many visits to watch Doctor Who at the BFI, so I was trying to work out exactly which overhead walkway and staircase was being used in which shot). The repetition is the point, of course, highlighting the difficulty of convincing the obdurate authorities, but it unfortunately doesn't get paid off. The ending sidesteps everything that's come before.

General Williams, the embodiment of the aggressive warmongers of Earth, is ultimately persuaded far too easily that he's been in the wrong, with a revelation from the Draconian prince about a past misjudgement he made in battle. It doesn't, though, prove anything about the third-party manipulation theory. Okay, he's only persuaded to mount a mission to fetch evidence, but crucially he isn't actually seen to ever gather such evidence. He and the Draconian Prince go to the planet, see that the Daleks are behind everything, and then the Doctor tells them to "Get the truth back to your respective governments". But that's what people have been trying to do without success for five and a half episodes: why should it be any more successful now? It's as if, once the Daleks have been revealed, the production team wants to switch off the Draconian plot so they can get the Dalek story going (perhaps anticipating how their audience might be feeling too). If we give the benefit of the doubt and imagine that Williams's ship's sensors have recorded details of the Ogrons and the Daleks somehow, then at least we can assume that there isn't a terrible Earth-Draconia war, even if we aren't shown that to be definitively the case. If the status quo is re-established, though, that still means that political opposition is being ruthlessly quashed, with its leaders locked up for life in a corrupt prison on the moon. The President (played expertly by Vera Fusek, one of many instances of more diverse casting choices than usual) is presented as a goodie, but this has all been happening on her watch.

Maybe leaving the lunar subplot unresolved is a deliberate statement about the darker side of centrist politics, but to me it comes over more as a rather lax Terry Nation style 'Episode three was weeks ago, haven't you forgotten about all that by now?' approach to serial drama. Hulke is normally better than that. Even if we imagine that it's resolved too somehow, the defeat of the Master at the end is heinously bungled. I don't know what happened in the production - I don't know how it's possible to have such insufficient coverage when you're shooting multi-camera - but something must have gone wrong, or they ran out of time. There's a melee when the Doctor uses the Master's hypnotic device to scare the Ogrons, then a series of abrupt jump-cuts: the Master in close-up, a reaction shot from Jo, an explosion near the Master, the Doctor tussling with Ogrons, another reaction shot from Jo, the Doctor on the floor clutching his head, the Ogrons running away. Then, we cut to a longer scene of the Doctor and Jo alone, with her helping him up and into the TARDIS. It's not clear how the Doctor got injured or when and how the Master got away. It's especially sad, though nobody knew this at the time of course, that this would turn out to be Delgado's final work on the series - his last appearance is a disappearance, one second he's there and the next he's not.

There is a lot of merit in the earlier material leading up to this moment, don't get me wrong. Including lots of spaceships, locations and characters might have tested the resources of the Beeb, but they were not found wanting: the model work and design is pretty good throughout, particularly the Draconian masks, costumes and make-up. The filmed scenes of wire-work to show space walks are pretty effective. But, if you recall (see First Time Round section above), I saw the final episode with all its clumsy non-resolutions before I saw the rest of the story. It's possible that viewing it in that order may have sullied my enjoyment of the majority. The story also can be seen as just the first part of a two-story arc continuing with Planet of the Daleks: that second story doesn't in any way tie up the Frontier in Space plot either, but maybe it gave viewers of the time another six weeks to forget about it. 

Connectivity:

Both Frontier in Space and The Star Beast feature conflict involving spaceship fights and gun battles between different alien races. They also both have a significant lead-in at the end to the next story.

Deeper Thoughts:

Nobody wants to bring the Ogrons back. Because they're racist? It's probably because they're racist, I think. It doesn't matter whether the many Ogrons seen on screen in the 1970s were played by black actors or by actors blacking up, neither way makes it better. Doctor Who throughout its long life has taken inspiration from the animal kingdom of Earth for creature designs, but visualising a race of ape-men came with unfortunate connotations. The manner of the Ogrons' comportment and speech too taps into a hoary old trope of the savage native (from Great White Hunter / Explorer films, or the depictions of native Americans seen in older Westerns). The insensitive nature of this was almost certainly inadvertent on the parts of the makers of the two stories in which the Ogrons feature, Frontier in Space and Day of the Daleks, but does that count for much to a viewer in the 21st century? Did it count for much to a viewer back in the 1970s? These sort of things might have been accepted, but maybe weren't or shouldn't have ever been acceptable. On screen, the Ogrons are a striking visual, of course, but that probably makes things worse rather than better. Visuals are powerful. One could argue or rationalise that they are just alien baddies and any similarities to anyone's skin pigmentation is coincidental and isn't supposed to suggest any aligned savageness, but the eye receives information before the brain. The new series has never brought the Ogrons back, but if for some reason a writer or showrunner wanted to do so in future, there would have to be a radical rethink in terms of how they are presented.

So, to recap: characters with a striking look originating in 1970s Who are likely to be problematic to a modern audience because of a negative connotation related to a minority group. There may not have been an intention to be insensitive on behalf of the people who created and designed these characters, and there was no specific plot point or line of dialogue that linked their bad actions to how they are or how they look, but they tap into old tropes that it's probably best to break away from when making television in the 21st century. As such, if they ever were to return, they'd have to be treated very differently to how they were in the past. Is this sounding familiar? This is similar to current showrunner Russell T Davies's expressed position about the character of Davros, which caused a bit of a storm of online opinion for a week in November 2023. After the Children in Need special scene on 17th November, there was a taster mini-episode of new behind-the-scenes show Unleashed, and Davies was interviewed. I'd watched the short, where the Dalek creator is seen without his usual wizened appearance or Dalek-like bottom half, and just assumed that it was set before whatever had happened to change him into the Davros I knew. Davies explained that there was more to it than that: "Time and society and culture and taste has moved on, and there's a problem with the Davros of old in that he's a wheelchair user who is evil ... A lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil, and trust me there's a very long tradition of this." Thus: "We made the choice to bring back Davros without the facial scarring and without the wheelchair ... This is how we see Davros now."

Davros, as seen in Destination: Skaro

That was fair enough, wasn't it? It veered a bit towards virtue signalling, I suppose, but he was talking about a contribution to an evening long telethon for a children's charity. If there was ever a moment for virtue signalling, it was then. A lot of Doctor Who fans online, though, did not like what they heard. Some accused him of seeing negative intent from past creators of Doctor Who that wasn't there, but in the same interview he had said "I'm not blaming people in the past at all, but the world changes and when the world changes Doctor Who has to change as well". Some accused him of ableism for seeing all disabled people as having one monolithic viewpoint, assuming they'd all be offended, but he did no such thing. He didn't talk for anyone but himself and fellow members of the production team. These are the people whose job it is to decide what is broadcast under the Doctor Who banner, and - as long as they stay within appropriate broadcasting regulations - they can make Doctor Who be anything they want it to be. That's why they're being paid. At the root of all this is probably the inflexibility of a certain Doctor Who fan towards the continuity of the lore. Many fans have interpreted Davies's comment to mean that if Davros were to come back in future, even if it was in a scene set later in his personal timeline, he'd still have the use of his legs and his good skin. He might just mean that they'll only revisit Davros in his past. Even if they do change the later Davros, there will be many narrative possibilities offered by a show featuring time travel and alternate universes to explain it.

No fan seems to have any problem in terms of narrative plausibility with the decision of successive production teams not to bring back the Ogrons. They have appeared twice, as allies of big-hitting A-list Doctor Who villains the Daleks and the Master. So, why has the Doctor never come across them again, when he bumps into old enemies and allies on a very regular basis? It seems to me that that's equally as explainable as some disturbance in the timelines creating an alt-Davros. I'm not immune to some of these fan feelings, of course. My first thought upon watching the interview with Davies was that it was a shame, as I like the character note that Davros created the Daleks in his own image. That's really only of relevance in Genesis of the Daleks, though, and that story isn't going to be remade or censored. On the contrary, it's more available to people than ever, and the same of course is true for the stories featuring the Ogrons. (In fact, the sole existing Doctor Who serial from the 60-year catalogue that is more difficult to view than the others is not being supressed for 'woke' reasons; much the opposite, it seems - but that's another story.) If Davies's decision means that in future even just one fewer wheelchair user gets called 'Davros' by some nob that thinks they're funny, then it will definitely be worth it. 

In Summary:

There's lots of good stuff in these six episodes, but the action is drawn out, and the end is abrupt and unresolved.