Demons of the Punjab

Chapter the 257th, sees a nation and a family divided, and the Doctor and friends can only watch.

Synopsis:

Yaz's Nani gives her a broken watch as a memento; it's something to do with her wedding - she claims to have been the first woman married in Pakistan. Yaz is curious, and persuades the cautious Doctor to take her back in time to see her Nani (Umbreen) when she was young. Connecting the watch to the TARDIS telepathic circuits brings them, accompanied as ever by Ryan and Graham, to near what will imminently be the India Pakistan border; it is the eve of the 1947 Partition. They bump into Prem, who turns out to be Umbreen's intended, but crucially not Yaz's grandfather. He is a Hindu, while Yaz's family are Muslim; this has caused upset, particularly with Prem's hothead younger brother Manish, but local sadhu Bhakti had agreed to marry them. Unfortunately, Bhakti is found dead with two aliens near his corpse. The Doctor identifies these as Thijarians, infamous intergalactic assassins. Prem has seen these "demons" once before, on a battlefield when he was fighting in the second world war; he found his older brother dead, and glimpsed them.

Manish has early warning of the exact partition lines and proudly shows the others: Umbreen's mother Hasna's house is now in Pakistan, so she will have no choice where to live. Tensions mount as Manish tries to persuade his brother not to marry. The Doctor helps protect the others from the Thijarians, but then she discovers that they are no longer the ruthless creatures they once were. Turning over a new leaf, they have now decided to honour the dead, travelling through time to be there when someone would otherwise die alone. Who then killed the sadhu? It was Manish. He has also called in a group of Hindu nationalists to stop the wedding. Umbreen chooses to get married holding hands with Prem across both sides of the border. The watch is Prem's, given to Umbreen as a symbolic gift, and accidentally broken. The Doctor officiates the ceremony. Immediately after they are married, Prem goes to confront the mob, while Umbreen and Hasna escape into what has become Pakistan. Prem is killed. Back in the present day, Yaz talks to her grandmother, finding out that Umbreen has no regrets at how her life turned out.

 

Context:

The children have got into a pattern of humouring their old man by occasionally watching with him a Doctor Who that's come up for the blog, usually on a Sunday afternoon. I'd run the random number search in advance and Demons of the Punjab was the next one to watch. I'd also run the search for the next few titles after that. When it came time to watch, on a Sunday in late February 2023, I decided that the Jodie Whittaker story (based on a distant memory of the last time I'd seen it a few years before) was a bit dull for the children. Instead we watched the first half of a classic series story that has a reputation for being comically terrible, and so I thought it would be more fun. I may have miscalculated (it'll be blogged next after this, and you'll see the full ordeal that I put my poor kids through). The classic story was bad in a weary way; Demons of the Punjab (which I watched alone midweek from the Blu-ray) had a lot more energy.

First Time Round:

Watched on its debut BBC1 broadcast on Sunday 11th November 2018 with the whole family except the youngest (a girl of 6 years old at the time) as she'd taken against the show at that point for being too scary. Just under a week later, I was at the BFI for a screening of Earthshock to tie in with the Blu-ray box-set release of Peter Davison's first season (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details). I was accompanied by fan friend David, who commented at one point about the connection between what we were watching on the big screen and the most recently broadcast Doctor Who story, as both did something different with their end credit music to hammer home the emotion of the story's denouement (Earthshock plays the credits in silence, Demons reimagines the Doctor Who theme as something of a lament). I didn't know what he was talking about as I'd already forgotten all about the new Doctor Who episode I'd seen six days before. It clearly hadn't left that much of an impression on me.

Reaction:

Who's the protagonist of a Doctor Who story? Is it the Doctor, or the companion, or a new guest character who only appears in that story? The answer is that it can be all three, but the chances diminish as you progress through the three parts of the question. It's generally expected that the Doctor will be active and make a difference in the story because they are the title character. Less often, but regularly, a companion has the vehicle role, being the audience's proxy witnessing wonders, and maybe like us at our best saving the day now and then. If one is tuning in and seeing a story driven by some new character one's never seen in the series before, though, the obvious question is why do the Doctor and their friends need to be there at all? So, a story like Demons of the Punjab, where the protagonist is Prem, a character we know for less than 50 minutes of screen time, is an exception. But exceptions can be still be, well, exceptional. The central story of two brothers falling out over partition, with the younger one radicalised and wanting to block the elder's inter-faith marriage is emotionally resonant, and meets the very earliest educational remit of Doctor Who, illuminating a point in history new to many in the audience. It's not too polemical either; the rushed nature of the British plans for India's independence and the immediate consequences this had country-wide are there in the background if you want them, but the focus is on the foreground tale of familial responsibility and love.

Like most stories of this period, it looks amazing - the sun-kissed Spanish locations standing in for the Punjab are colourful, and the verious departments contributing to the production design create time and place effectively. Writer Vinay Patel in his first script for the programme produces something wonderful in the main plot. The characters are well defined in an economical fashion, and the guest cast ably translate what's on the page. Shane Zaza as Prem is effective in the lead (for this week only), but he is matched by Amita Suman as Umbreen, who appropriately as one of the star-crossed central couple earns her place in the spotlight next to him. The script is careful to give her character agency, rather than just be a complicating factor emblematic of a religious or political divide - she's a vivid, dynamic character in her own right. Hamsa Jeetooa plays Manish sensitively, one is not blocked from empathising, if not fully sympathising, with his radical point of view; his murderous and treacherous actions don't come from nowhere, and make one sad rather than angry as he is almost as much of a victim of circumstance as anyone else. Smaller guest roles are also handled with aplomb, with special mention to Leena Dhingra playing the older version of Yaz's indomitable Nani.

Mandip Gill as Yaz finally gets a bit more to do. With four regular characters in this period, stories are crowded, and at least one companion is usually superfluous to the plot. It's tended to be Yaz in the previous five stories since the character's introduction, so it's a nice change for a story to be built around her family. Most of what she has to do is just react wordlessly to events, but Gill does it well, with emotion but restraint. In fact, everyone in the regular cast can only react to events. It's built in to the story. Like in Rosa earlier in the year, the history being presented is too important and too recent for alien intervention. Imagine if the younger brother Manish was radicalised not by the people and the circumstances around him, but by some alien ray; it would be crass. So, what are the aliens and the Doctor to do? Patel decides to tuck them away in a harmless subplot: the Doctor misunderstands their nature at first, but then her investigations prove that they are benign. It's a bit of a sideshow, and could almost lift out completely without impacting the rest of the story, though it does set up a nice reversal (that it is Manish not them that has killed the holy man in an attempt to prevent his brother's wedding). The Doctor then gets to officiate the wedding herself, which is cute.

A flaw with the alien subplot, though, is that the Thijarians are set up as having worked all through time and space on their mission to honour the fallen; this being so, it seems like an almighty coincidence that they manage to get themselves spotted twice, and both times by the same human. It's teased at first as of possible significance when there's still a mystery about the aliens, but once the truth is revealed it turns out to definitely to be only an almighty coincidence. One could retcon it that Prem's destined for death, so the Thijarians don't mind allowing him a peek, but it isn't played like that in the moment. It also wouldn't explain how the Doctor sees the aliens at the site of the sadhu's demise. One doesn't want to pull on this thread too much as things might unravel: for people who were supposedly dying alone, they sure seem to have a lot of people around. I think all of this can be forgiven, though, when at the end Prem is left on his own to die and the Thijarians come to him, then his holographic face joins the thousands of others in their ship representing the previously unrecognised dead. A big emotional surge ties everything together at least at the 'feels' level. It's not something the show could get away with every week, but as a one-off it works.

Connectivity:

Both Demons of the Punjab and The Woman Who Lived are adventures in Earth history that involve a tragedy impacting a woman known to the Doctor and/or their companion.

Deeper Thoughts:

The History of Historicals. As most people know, Doctor Who's very earliest stories tended to oscillate between those exploring Earth's past and those set in the future with strange, strange creatures. (There was also the occasional 'sideways' story exploring a strange concept that didn't quite align to either of the 'back' or 'forward' types, but they were rare enough to forget about for today.) What people don't necessarily remember - even possibly some people who later made the show - is that this format didn't really work, and certainly didn't last. There is ample evidence from the start that audiences didn't care for the historical stories nearly as much as anything that featured alien monsters. The recent Blu-ray box set of the second season of the programme, containing the stories that aired from October 1964 to July 1965, is a reminder if one were needed that the production team started to tweak the formula as early as one year in. The historicals of the first season (adventures with cavemen, Marco Polo, Aztecs, and spies during the period following the French revolution) are a full 50% of the season, and all played it pretty straight. The following year, though, it is four stories in before there's a historical setting, and it is definitely not played straight. The Romans is experimental for the treatment of material in a comedic fashion, and also it features the first ever scene of an extra-temporal influence creating history as we know it, with the Doctor inadvertently planting the idea of setting Rome ablaze.

The next historical story, The Crusade, is the only other 'pure' historical of the year (I'll get onto the concept of purity in this context in a moment). The final two stories of the season would revolutionise the use of history in the programme. The Chase was the first to show that other alien creatures than Gallifreyans can time travel to Earth's past (though it was restricted to just the Daleks initially). This story - a peripatetic adventure that takes in many locations, most futuristic and/or alien - sees the Doctor and Daleks briefly make a stop on the Marie Celeste in the 1800s, causing the crew to abandon ship. This was another 'explanation for historical event is time travelling aliens' story beat as seen in The Romans, and this would become a regular trope of this kind of story in subsequent years. Following directly on after The Chase, The Time Meddler is the first full story using a setting of Earth's past as a backdrop for the Doctor tussling with an out of this world problem (in this case, a meddling time traveller of his own race with their own TARDIS). With this quick one-two at the end of its second season, Who gained the 'pseudo-historical' story type, as it came to be known by fans later. This is as opposed to a pure historical that contains no elements unknown to history, except for the Doctor and friends.

Like many mini-genres created in the Hartnell period, when Doctor Who was trying out new story structures every week, the pseudo-historical was used sparingly at first. The Daleks and the Monk from The Time Meddler would appear together in an ancient Egypt section of the Dalek Master Plan story in season three. Mostly, though, the past-set stories were still pure; a good few used humour like The Chase, and then there was a short run where they were not trying to recreate history for its own sake but sampling classic adventure book texts (like Treasure Island in The Smugglers, or Kidnapped in The Highlanders). After that, from early on in the fourth season, that was your lot. There would be a rare pseudo historical (Daleks in the Victorian era in the last story of that season The Evil of the Daleks, for example) throughout the rest of the 1960s and 70s, nowhere near the every other story frequency of the very earliest period of Doctor Who. And the idea of having a story that just depicted history without any monsters or sci-fi was gone for ever. Well, very nearly. Obviously none of these fan terms is officially defined anywhere, but some online wags have interpreted a pure historical very literally as "no aliens except the Doctor" meaning they can claim stories like Thin Ice and Legend of the Sea Devils (where the monstrous creatures are confirmed as or likely to be indigenous) as fitting the bill. I'm assuming this is just a bit of fun, and nobody really believes there were giant fish creatures in the Thames during the London frost fairs, nor reptile pirates in the 19th century.

From the 1980s to the present day, the frequency of historical stories has increased for certain periods, maybe, as mentioned above, because someone in a production role had a vague idea that regular historical stop-overs were expected. In Peter Davison's first year, which has markedly more trips into history than the seasons surrounding it (to the beginning of the universe, the 1600s, the 1920s, and Earth circa the Jurassic period), there was even one pure historical, the first and last (to date) after the mid-60s. This was Black Orchid, but an examination of that story will show that it uses the visual grammar of a Doctor Who monster story to tease the audience and keep them interested. Plus, it's only two episodes long, very brief in classic Doctor Who terms: consciously or subconsciously, those making that story didn't want to risk challenging the audience's expectations for long. Some fans still hanker for a similar experiment again. Probably, the nearest the show will ever come was in the first Jodie Whittaker series of which Demons of the Punjab was part. It's not quite alternating frequency, but three out of ten of the season were set in the past and the stories were unabashedly exploring that history, mostly without too many sci-fi trappings getting in the way. In Demons of the Punjab, the monsters are a red herring and a distraction; in Rosa, the villain is just a racist white bloke from the future - he's more emblem than antagonist. The reason I don't think the show will go further is what was touched upon elsewhere in the blog post above: without monsters to fight, and with history respected and unchangeable, there's nothing left for the Doctor and companions to do but be tourists.

 

In Summary:

An interesting and important story, but it's not really a Doctor Who story as the Doctor doesn't (can't) have anything to do except experience a historical in the sun: a holiday in someone else's misery.

The Woman Who Lived

Chapter the 256th, where the dandy highwayman grabbing your attention is old enough to qualify for this year's old age pension.

Plot:

The Doctor is searching for a powerful alien MacGuffin, which leads him to England in 1651. He bumps into Ashildr, who he'd saved from death but made immortal hundreds of years earlier. She is occupying a large house and styling herself as aristo Lady Me, but is secretly also posing as a highwayman called the Knightmare to aid her in her search for the same MacGuffin. The Doctor finds out all about the ups and downs of Lady Me's long life. She wants to escape the planet, and was expecting the Doctor to help her with this, but he's not keen (something about two long-lived beings not having the necessary perspective without a pet mortal with them, or something). He continues to scan for the MacGuffin, and Lady Me helps him find it. She is secretly in league with a lion creature from space called Leandro who says he needs it to open a portal to leave Earth, and has promised to take her with him. Unfortunately, the MacGuffin requires the death of a human to power it. Lady Me betrays the Doctor, and goes to the public execution of her rival highwayman Sam Swift to use his death to power the opening of the portal. When it opens, though, Leandro's people attack: he really wanted to open up a route for an invasion force. Lady Me rediscovers her lost humanity and uses a different MacGuffin that the Doctor had previously given her to save Sam and close the portal. As it closes, Leandro's people assassinate him for his failure. Lady Me tells the Doctor that she will use her time on Earth to look after the people the Doctor leaves behind.

Context:

I decided to watch this one on my own, from a disc in Complete Eighth Series box set. The disappointment of the reveal of a returning character, and how long they had been away (see First Time Round section for more details) resonated for the time I watched the story: it was the week that UK politician and former Prime Minister of the country Liz Truss staged a comeback after people had barely missed her. I briefly made a joke in the synopsis of the Asylum of the Daleks blog post last year about the leadership election that would appoint the new prime minister, comparing both the two remaining candidates to Daleks (apologies to all Daleks out there). That was published on the 12th August 2022. In the Deeper Thoughts section of the post on Castrovalva I mentioned that Liz Truss had taken on the role, and talked about how the cycles of politics and news were accelerating (I didn't know the half of it). That was the 13th September. By the time I blogged about Orphan 55 on the 25th October, she was gone and her predecessor had attempted his own brief comeback. It's now early February 2023, and Liz Truss's attempt at public rehabilitation after her disastrous tenure is already fading from memory. By the time you read this, it'll be completely forgotten and she'll no doubt be planning her third coming. Hollywood remakes seem to be on a similar accelerating curve (Tobey Maguire's Spiderman films still feel recent to me), as does Doctor Who. The Master used to have the decency to be offscreen for a good few years before returning with a new face, now new Masters seem to be popping up every couple. I'm not a young man anymore, and I'm not sure I can keep up at this speed.

First Time Round:

This is another time where I remember some online discussion in advance of a story more than I remember first watching the story itself. A teaser trailer was released mid-July 2015, a couple of months before the season was due to start. (I'd just started a new Doctor Who blog at the time, the one you're currently reading, which is surprisingly still going strong almost eight years later.) At the end of the trailer, post the BBC One logo and start date, was a clip from The Woman Who Lived, where Maisie Williams as Lady Me removes her mask in a close-up; the Doctor responds "You?!" in astonishment, and she replies "What took you so long, old man?". This led to weeks of fervent speculation from fans that the character was a new incarnation of Susan or Romana or the Rani (no woman can be cast in Doctor Who, it seems, without someone thinking that they will be a new incarnation of Susan or Romana or the Rani). At some point before the broadcast of The Woman Who Lived on the 24th October - which I watched on that evening with the Better Half, then again with my three children (aged between three and nine years old then) the following Sunday morning -  showrunner Steven Moffat went on record to say that Williams was playing a brand new character. Anyone who missed that, or just didn't believe it, was presumably very disappointed.

Reaction:

The DC comic The Sandman, written in the late 1980s / early 1990s by the later bestselling author and two-time Doctor Who writer Neil Gaiman, features a character called Hob Gadling. Hob cannot die, and lives through many centuries fighting in wars, losing people he loves, and enduring changing fortunes. In other words, he shares exactly the same situation as Lady Me / Ashildr in The Woman Who Lived. There's a reversal in that Sandman story that's almost a metatextual one, as Hob reacts to his predicament in a way that confounds obvious expectations: he stays positive about life and always wants to keep living. This avoidance of the usual cliché of the curse of longevity is not just surprising but life-affirming; Hob never gives up, and can always see the value in carrying on. Compare Hob to Lady Me, and the Doctor Who story unfortunately seems the poorer: it leans in to the cliché, and shows that 800 years of life has left Ashildr / Me jaded and petulant. I don't think this is a good or even realistic message: centuries of life have not given her an expansive perspective, she's instead moaning about how long it takes to get anywhere, desperate for a lift off planet. It makes it hard to side with her, and makes her distrust of the Doctor and his treatment of people seem disproportionate and hypocritical. At the end, she decides she's going to look after the people he leaves behind; but does he really treat people that badly? And wasn't Lady Me prepared to kill an innocent person just to power her transport only a few moments before?

The character conflict seems artificial and inflated. It also doesn't feel integrated enough into the main plot. The highway robbery and house breaking to find the magic amulet has to screech to a halt for long info-dump sequences where the Doctor learns about Lady Me's backstory. Now, it's probably the case that all involved in the production intended that the scenes with the Doctor and Lady Me about her last 800 years were the main plot, and the highwayman / amulet parts the distraction. If so, it's just not dynamic enough a narrative - it's just talk, talk, talk. The scenes of carriages and people being held up are at least well shot; the machinations of Leandro may be simplistic (it's a double-cross that can be seen coming a mile off) but allow a little bit of sci-fi spectacle where the portal is opened and the Earth is attacked, though it is done on the cheap. The make-up and prosthetics to create the leonine beast are a little bit panto too: is the issue throughout a lack of budget? I have a feeling that it might just be very difficult to make any creature that looks realistically like a lion be threatening rather than cuddly. The best part of the highwayman plot is Rufus Hound as Sam Swift, but he's barely in it. The most enjoyable sequence is the one where he effectively does stand-up comedy on the gallows, entertaining the crowd to put off the moment of his execution. It's life-affirming in a similar way to the Hob Gadling plot, and Hound provides the same wide-boy, ducking and diving energy as the comic book character.

I am conscious of my potential patriarchal bias here, by the way. Maybe Sam Swift and Hob were able to be happy-go-lucky because they were men, and Lady Me doesn't have the same luxury. She is shown, though, to have achieved mastery and power in a world run by men. Why couldn't she achieve resilience as well, without losing her zest for life? She loses her children, this is true, but such tragedies sadly happen to women with normal life spans, and those people still can and do learn to live with the pain, and move on. To make a big point of this being the event that made her shut herself off from her humanity, even though she has eternity to heal, maybe makes the opposite point than the writer Catherine Tregenna intended. It's very hard to be persuaded from the evidence here that the Doctor did anything except give her the most enormous gift, for which she is ungrateful. In general, and not just in this story, it's hard to root for the Lady Me character. I get the feeling that this could be different if I'd seen the previous work of Maisie Williams, the actor portraying her. I think perhaps there was a feeling that with that work "in the bank" as it were that there would be a short cut to audience empathy. Unfortunately (as I go into within the Deeper Thoughts section below) I hadn't seen that work. So, I was left feeling Williams was miscast, without the necessary gravitas for the character. And that's before the story's awkward tonal shifts into broad comedy detract further from any underlying sadness. Overall, the story stands as a brave attempt to tackle an interesting theme, but the final product is a mixed-bag, and ultimately - and sadly - not much of a success.

Connectivity:

In The Woman Who Lived, just like The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, a character performs before an audience and will stay alive only as long as he can keep that audience entertained; in both stories there is a search for a powerful artefact connected to opening up a gateway to another time and place. Plus, highway-people and hippy circus folk alike favour noms de guerre such as The Knightmare, Flowerchild, and so forth.

Deeper Thoughts:

I've never listened to I've Never Watched Star Wars. Perhaps I'd rate Maisie Williams more if I'd seen her performances as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones; I haven't ever, though, seen more than one frame of Game of Thrones (that being the one of Emilia Clarke doing a face that people often post as a meme). This has surprised a few people of my acquaintance over the years since that series debuted in 2011, as people assume it's the sort of thing I would watch religiously. I've picked up enough from references or jokes in other shows or online to know roughly what the show is like and about (including, after a few years of seeing it, that the meme of the blonde-haired woman was Emilia Clarke playing a character from GoT). I don't have any particular antipathy towards the series, but neither am I in any big hurry to see it. I think this is something that has become increasingly common as the availability of content has grown, and the means for engaging with such content diversified: significant and highly popular examples of media can be missed or ignored by individuals. Nothing will be so big that it can't slip below the radar. I've never seen Titanic or either of the two Avatar movies, for example, and they are three of the biggest selling movies of all time. The BBC made a radio programme about this phenomenon called I've Never Watched Star Wars, which took a celebrity and gave them the opportunity to close their personal gaps. Perhaps appropriately, I've never listened to a single edition of it; I probably never will, either, as like GoT it ended a few years back.

What about equivalent gaps within the world of Doctor Who? I've been a fan of the show for over four decades now, and watched every broadcast episode of the show and all the TV spin-offs. One would think I'd covered everything, and would have no surprising confessions. But there are a few things I need to get off my chest, don't judge me too harshly. First, I have never collected action figures; in fact, I've never purchased a single one. When I was first a fan, there wasn't anything to collect. I'd arrived too late for the Denys Fisher toys of the late 70s (dollies of the Tom Baker Doctor, Leela, K9 and a few others). A few years later, a company called Dapol started to release figures about the same size as the Star Wars figures that were ubiquitous in the 1980s, but I only ever saw them in adverts in Doctor Who Magazine and never in the shops (not that I had the money for them anyway). When the show came back, there was an explosion of merchandise available, including hundreds of action figures, but I still wasn't tempted. Perhaps more surprisingly, as someone who was a writer for a while, I've never written a piece of fan fiction, Not a single sentence. When I was writing semi-professionally, I wasn't ever writing prose, and I was serious enough about it to know that nobody was going to produce a Doctor Who screenplay written by an unknown, so I concentrated my efforts elsewhere. Before that, when Doctor Who was off air in the 1990s, Virgin Publishing would accept unsolicited manuscripts from new writers for their range of original Who novels. I did think about sending in something, but I could never think of an even half decent idea. Maybe it was because I didn't have any action figures to act my stories out.

I've never been to the Fitzroy Tavern, a London boozer where fans congregate monthly. I've never cosplayed (i.e. dressed up as the Doctor or another character from the programme). Like with Game of Thrones, I don't have any particular antipathy towards other people enjoying this pastime, but I'm not in any hurry to join them. I've never asked a Doctor Who star for their autograph (though I have got a couple of books with signatures in them because they came with the book or event where I purchased the book anyway). I'm struggling to think of anything else significant that I've never done. I've been to one proper Doctor Who convention in my life, but I have gone to at least one. I've listened to four whole Big Finish Doctor Who stories, a tiny fraction of their output over the years, but it's something. It shows what a broad set of potential activities are concealed within the summary "being a Doctor Who fan". This is probably why I bristle a bit at the cruder characterisations of Doctor Who fans in other media (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the last blog post for more details) as there is no single, simplified type of Doctor Who fan. And I haven't even got onto the more niche fan activities like making fan films / videos (never done it), or recording a podcast (no), or doing a blog where you review every Doctor Who story one by one (okay, guilty as charged). Am I in any hurry to close my Who gaps? No, but it might be fun in Doctor Who's 60th anniversary year to try something new. I can't see myself cosplaying, but never say never!

In Summary:

Stands (as a brave attempt to tackle an interesting theme) but doesn't really deliver. 

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

Chapter the 255th, where we discover much evidence of coulrophobia and lycanthropy, and the Doctor displays his legerdemain.

Plot:

The Doctor and Ace receive an aggressive junk mail bot in the TARDIS advertising a talent show run by the Psychic Circus on the planet Segonax. Despite her fear of clowns, Ace agrees to go with the Doctor. On the planet, they meet colourful characters all bound for the circus tent to take part in the talent show: aggressive biker Nord, insufferably pompous adventurer Captain Cook and his mysterious young companion Mags, and Whizz Kid, the number one fan of the Psychic Circus. The place is a bit run down now, and only appears to have one family (a Dad, Mum, and child) in the audience; plus, the Chief Clown, Ringmaster and fortune-teller Morgana seem to be in thrall of some force. This is perhaps connected with the mysterious stones in the circus ring area - the tent has been put up around the ruins of a temple to an ancient power. The Captain plays other people against each other, getting them to be the next ones to perform in the ring, and Nord and Whizz Kid are killed there when they can no longer entertain.

Escaping, the Doctor and Ace separately and together piece together the backstory. In the past, Kingpin, the then leader of the Circus, believed he could harness the powers on Segonax and used a special medallion to do this. Unfortunately, the power was too strong and seemed to burn out Kingpin's mind, though he can be restored if the medallion is ever made whole again. The jewelled eye from the centre of the medallion was hidden, and the remaining members served the ancient power, the Gods of Ragnarok (who appear in the Circus's time-space in the form of the family of three). Some of the Circus folk tried to escape and find the eye, but were killed. With no acts left to go in the ring, the Captain, Doctor and Mags appear together. With a moon-shaped lighting effect, the Captain instigates Mags's transformation into a werewolf; he plans to take control of the Circus's power himself. The Doctor manages to entreat Mag's inner self, and she turns instead on the Captain and kills him, then returns to normal. The Doctor faces off against the Gods of Ragnarok, who have by now killed almost everyone else, while Ace, Mags and Kingpin find the jewelled eye and bring the Doctor the full medallion. With its power, he destroys the Gods of Ragnarok and the Circus.

Context:

This story completes another full season blogged, making season 25 the eighth one completed (following seasons 3, 8, 14, 17, 23, and new series 6 and 13); it was watched across two weekends in January and February 2023, two episodes a week, from the DVD (this is - at the time of writing - the most recently broadcast Doctor Who television story not yet available on Blu-ray, and I wondered when watching it how it might scrub up when released on that medium in future). I was accompanied both times by all three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10). It didn't quite hold everyone's attention to the very end, though the youngest was very impressed by the conjuring tricks the Doctor does in episode four. Everyone was critical - excessively, to my mind - of the effects sequence of the juggling club falling into the mysterious well. I find this interesting in regards to different levels of suspension of disbelief: they didn't doubt the depiction of a cosmic, chasmic well with an eye looking up from bottom, just an object falling a bit awkwardly into it. 

First Time Round:

Season 25 was scheduled to start only after the completion of the BBC's coverage of the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, so its finale The Greatest Show in the Galaxy aired later in the year than usual. Doctor Who's seasons at the time were usually done and dusted early in December, but this one snuck into the Yuletide schedules, with two episodes in the run up to the big day and two within the 12 days of Christmas. This meant that I saw The Talons of Weng-Chiang for the first time slap-bang in the middle of the story (having received the video as a Christmas present on the 25th December 1988 - see the First Time Round section of this blog post for more details). The final episode did not air until 1989, on January 4th. For the previous one on 28th December, my Mum dragged my sister and me, both of us somewhat unwilling, to her friend's house down the road, as we'd been invited for a meal during the festive season. Trying to get out of going, I'd said that I really wanted to watch that evening's episode of Doctor Who as it went out live; that was no problem, I was told, as the friend's kids wanted to watch it anyway. So it came to pass that the 16-year old me crammed himself onto the sofa with a seven- and a five-year old to watch Sylvester McCoy battle against robot clowns. I was already slightly embarrassed, but it got worse when every adult in attendance guffawed their way through the sequence at the end of the episode where Mags transforms into a werewolf. They laughed and laughed, thinking it hilarious. I tried to disappear into the sofa, but that isn't easy when you're going crimson and radiating heat. In those days, when every episode clashed with the much more popular Coronation Street, viewing Doctor Who was almost always a solitary activity; I only appreciated the advantages of that once I'd watched Greatest Show part three with other people.

Reaction:

The end of that third episode of the story is excellently realised, whatever some of the people I first watched it with (see First Time Round section) thought. Even better is the continuation of the sequence in the final part. It starts in the dark comic vein of previous characters' appearances in the ring, turns to well handled family-friendly Doctor Who horror as Mags transforms into an 80s post-punk werewolf, then moves into a full-on choreographed action sequence where the Captain cracks a whip, lion tamer style, using Mags as a weapon against the Doctor who's desperately trying to escape. Within this energetic sequence, the plot still moves forward - the Captain monologues his plan to take over the power of the Circus, the alien nature of the spectating family of three is revealed - and there's some nice moments like the cutaways to the family raising their scorecards, each giving the spectacle before them a 9, or to the lamp in the lighting rig spinning madly as Mags turns on and savages the Captain. It works for me, but I can see how it might not for another viewer because, well, it has an 80s post-punk werewolf and a bloke in a pith helmet cracking a whip, surrounded by circus performers. A key strength of the story is the incongruity of the imagery, with playful but eerie juxtapositions like a silent hearse driven through a barren landscape by a clown in an undertaker's outfit. The characters are all larger than life and their looks emblematic rather than realistic (there's no Martin Smith from Croydon here, it's all Nord The Vandal and Whizz Kid and the like).

As a teenager watching the opening of part one, I felt a bit of trepidation. The story was called "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy" rather than something more traditional, and the opening scene is Ricco Ross's Ringmaster doing a rap. In 1988, a UK show featuring anyone rapping was generally to be avoided as a near-certain embarrassment. (It turned out alright though; Mark Ayres' music underpinning all the Ringmaster's raps is rather good, as is his work throughout the serial, and Ross's close-up look to camera at the end nicely sinister.) If even a long-term fan like me needed a bit of time to acclimatise to this story world, perhaps it wasn't a surprise that non-fans coming into it cold at episode three might struggle with the overload of seemingly silly visual elements. This was perhaps the start of a different style of Doctor Who for a video-recording audience, where there's significantly more service given to those watching every episode than those just casually dropping in here and there (this approach would be furthered in 1989's season 26). Countering that theory, though, is the surprising fact that episode four got the biggest audience of Sylvester's three years as the Doctor, with almost a million more people than usual tuning in, forgoing Coronation Street on the other side. It wasn't to do with Christmas scheduling either - the third part had one of the lowest ratings for story and season, lost in the festive noise. But the final episode, appearing at the start of a new year, proved to be a draw.

Those tuning in that week would have seen perhaps the best sequence of this era, and a defining moment for Sylvester as the Doctor: his stroll out of the chaos of the collapsing circus that then explodes behind him, walking away without reacting or breaking stride. It's just one of a number of great character moments for the regulars. Sophie Aldred as Ace is perhaps a little less well served by the script than Sylv - it errs a little too much on telling us that she doesn't like clowns rather than showing us - but it's a minor quibble. The script is giving the companion material with more emotion and depth than had been done for a while before this story, something again that would be developed in future. The two lead characters look to be at the height of their powers here, though again it just kept getting better the following year. It's hard to believe this is only their third story together (it was produced second in the run but shown fourth). The guest cast are uniformly good too. Jessica Martin as Mags is a good would-be companion, Dee Sadler makes a big impression as the doomed Flowerchild even though her character is gone early on in episode one, Christopher Guard plays Bellboy with sensitivity, and gets one of this era's greatest death scenes, committing suicide by turning his own robot creations on himself. Best of all is Ian Reddington as the Chief Clown. There's not much to the character on the page, but he perfects every little gesture, expression and changes in tone of voice to make a memorable and effective villain.

Stories in Sylvester McCoy's tenure tend to love ensembles, but - even with a great group of actors as there is here - a cast is only as good as the material they are given. Greatest Show has fun adventure, an intriguing mystery, and engaging world building. What lifts it up to an even higher level of quality is its underlying theme. There is an interesting subtext about the decline and death of western counter-cultural movements from their emergence in the 1960s (as represented by the nomadic and commune-like existence of the Psychic Circus before arriving on Segonax) to the point in the late 1980s when the story was made and when everyone seemed to be selling out to unfettered capitalism (as represented by settling on Segonax and keeping the demanding audience of the Gods of Ragnarok entertained). It's an original theme for Doctor Who, and an interesting slant on subject matter the show at this time came back to again and again, critiquing the heartlessness of the Thatcherite era in the UK. The only issue is that no money ever changes hands in the Psychic Circus (the enterprising stallholder and Segonax native played by Peggy Mount, of whom Margaret Thatcher would no doubt have been proud, is the only person seen to expect payment). Even the closest reading is likely therefore to connote that its the consumers that are the problem, not the capitalists, that the antagonism is coming from an insatiable audience, rather than an evil commissioning director or studio bigwig trying to make a buck. Though any writer would empathise with the story's author Stephen Wyatt if he despaired at having to continually feed the hungry story consumption machine, I think this is inadvertent. It's just a shame that a story that found an audience also seemed to be taking pot shots at it.

Connectivity:

Both this story and the last one blogged feature posters (the wartime Dalek 'Victory' poster in Victory of the Daleks, and the many examples advertising the tours of the Psychic Circus in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy); they each also feature antagonists made of metal, one of a pair of lovers coming to a tragic end leaving the other one sad, and a reference to someone with the rank of Captain.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Fan in Fiction. The character of Whizz Kid in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy caused some eyebrows to be raised in the audience, as he was clearly a fictional representation of a science fiction fan of the sort that might obsess over Doctor Who. He was there as an in-jokey dig at those watching who might take the programme a bit too seriously. Even though I saw myself being sent up, I still found this fun; others, though, were probably more annoyed. What all of us probably missed was that the character was notable in another way: I've wracked my brains and I can't think of an earlier depiction of such a fan on UK television. It might well be a first. Beatlemania and Dalekmania both exploded in the UK in the mid 1960s, and England won the men's football world cup in 1966. In the period from then through the 1970s and into the 1980s, characters who were pop music fans and football fans were not uncommon in comedies or dramas, but sci-fi or telefantasy enthusiasts, not at all. Part of this may be that stories have to attempt to be interesting, and screen stories attempt to express this interest visually. Pop music and football fans get out of the house and go places to indulge their fandom; there's not much for a writer to mine from someone just happily watching TV.  For fans to be fictionalised, there needed to be Fandom (with a capital 'F'), and this was slow getting going. The first Star Trek convention, getting fans out of the house and away from their television sets, was early in the 1970s (1972, to be exact), but the first for Doctor Who was much nearer the end of the decade (1977). After that, it would take another decade for this subcultural activity to be known and acknowledged enough for writer and audience in order for a fictional Doctor Who fan to appear on screen.

Early in the 1980s, Gian Sammarco portrayed Adrian Mole on UK television, in an adaptation of Sue Townsend's books. His casting as Whizz Kid was a meta-textual hint at the similarities of the characters; Mole, though, is much more the embodiment of an older tradition of lovelorn teenager and wannabe poet. This same character type was satirised by Rik Mayall around the same time as the 'People's Poet' in The Young Ones, and is still going strong today with Matthew Baynton as Thomas in Ghosts representing. For a character who is perhaps less interested in girls and poetry but who definitely knows Yeoman Rand's cabin number, the first significant depiction I can find is the infamous 'Get a Life' sketch from US TV's Saturday Night Live in 1986. William Shatner guest stars delivering some home truths to a group of nerds at a Star Trek convention. It's more about the cult TV star than the fans though; the latter are very crudely drawn and act as a mass of antagonism demanding detailed answers from the Shat about an acting job he did two decades earlier. It's not very nice to or for anyone involved (I've always thought Shatner's line to the assembled fans of "Look at the way you're dressed" was a bit rich seeing as he appears to be wearing an outfit made of a fake polyester bear rug in the skit). The Whizz Kid's treatment is affectionate by comparison. A UK TV descendent of the sketch is 2003's Cruise of the Gods, a TV movie written by Tim Firth starring Rob Brydon. He plays the former lead of a fictional Sci-Fi TV show, The Children of Castor, again beset by crudely drawn fans wanting something from him that he can't give.

The fans in such stories are not characters in their own right, but devices, stereotypes. Possibly too, they are not even realistic ones. Glimpses of The Children of Castor shown in Cruise of the Gods demonstrate - for the purposes of exaggerated comedy - that it's not a show anyone would want to watch, let alone remember. This damages the reality of its story world a bit. It's therefore preferable to feature a real show if you can, so any adoration, even if potentially misplaced, can at least seem credible. (Aside: would selected clips from The Greatest Show in the Galaxy taken out of context look as naff as the bits of Castor seen in Cruise of the Gods? Let's not dwell on that.)  As the 1990s progressed, fictional fans of real programmes and films became more and more common. A prestigious series like Alan Bleasdale's GBH contained scenes where a character is surrounded by the chaos of a Doctor Who convention, attended by many cosplayers, happening in the hotel in which he's staying. In Queer as Folk, Russell T Davies combines the lovelorn archetype with a Doctor Who fan in the character of Vince, drawing on his own detailed fan knowledge for specifics to add verisimilitude. Then there was Spaced, The IT Crowd, The Big Bang Theory, Community (which used a fictionalised version of what was obviously Doctor Who in its show within a show, Inspector Spacetime), and Galaxy Quest on the big screen (which used a fictionalised version of what was obviously Star Trek, presumably so they didn't get sued).

The other thing that's required to make a story interesting, of course, is conflict. What's heartening is that after a few decades, the conflict in the lives of sci-fi fan characters is rarely between them and their favourite show: it's not a barrier to them engaging with and enjoying other parts of life (don't get me wrong, the characters usually do have barriers stopping them from enjoying other parts of life, but the fact that they like shows featuring aliens is incidental). What is intriguing about Whizz Kid is that there's only one place from where conflict arises. He's a generally very happy and positive person, admits a tiny misgiving "Although I never got to see the early days, I know it's not as good as it used to be but I'm still terribly interested" (which is a dig against Doctor Who fans that relied too much on received wisdom, but shows the character to be relatively thoughtful and open). Then, the show that he likes and the people involved in its production destroy him. Morgana, working the circus's front of house, tries to dissuade others from going in, knowing their eventual fate. After a few minutes in Whizz Kid's company, though, she ushers him in gladly. I can't find anything on record about whose idea the character was; I suspect Stephen Wyatt might have been prompted to include him by either script editor Andrew Cartmel or producer John Nathan-Turner, who both had more experience of organised Doctor Who fandom. Even if I'm wrong, both those gentlemen would have signed off on the final scripts. Did they think about what this was saying? In a story that already had a subtext hinting that the mass viewership were monsters that had to be constantly fed, there's also a giant middle finger given to the minority fan audience: the makers hate them and wish they were dead. Justice for Whizz Kid!

In Summary:

An enjoyable, well-made and successful Doctor Who story whose subtext is (inadvertently?) telling its audience to get stuffed.