The Infinite Quest

Chapter the 267th, which may not even count.

Plot:

The far future. The Doctor and Martha defeat a space pirate called Baltazar and his robotic parrot, Caw, but the pirate gets away. Martha insists that the Doctor free Caw, who they meet again a couple of years in the future. He gives Martha a present of a bird-shaped brooch in exchange for saving his life, and warns the Doctor that Baltazar is searching for four data-chips that will lead him to the Infinite, a mythologised artefact that once found will reputedly grant one one's heart's desire. Caw gives them the first data-chip, but warns them that Baltazar has a copy. Caw is still in the thrall of his old owner, though, and this is just a ruse to get the Doctor to locate the Infinite for Baltazar. The quest leads to three different people on three different planets, each possessing the next data-chip: Captain Kaliko on the desert planet Boukon (where the Doctor and Martha deal with piracy), Mergrass on the swamp planet Myarr (where they deal with a war between humans and giant bugs), and Gurney on the ice planet Volag-Noc (where they deal with a prisoner rebellion).

At the end of each mini-adventure, they find each of the three people mysteriously killed, so they can collect the chip from their cold, dead hands and move on. Once they have all four, Baltazar appears - he's the one that's been killing everyone - and takes Martha hostage. Caw dies protecting Martha, and the brooch turns out to be another robot parrot, Caw's son Squawk. Having got the Doctor to programme the TARDIS coordinates for the location of the Infinite, Baltazar goes off in the time ship with Martha leaving the Doctor in the cold. The TARDIS arrives at a wrecked spaceship on an asteroid. Martha finds the Doctor, but it's a mirage - she's seeing a vision of her heart's desire. The real Doctor arrives having got a lift from Squawk, and explains that the vision is because of some last vestige of whatever power used to exist on the ship. Baltazar sees myriad riches, and won't be talked into believing that they are not real. The Doctor uses his sonic to vibrate the ship and asteroid, destroying it. They get to the safety of the TARDIS, and Baltazar is scooped up by Squawk and taken to the prison on Volag-Noc.

Context:

I had started wondering about branching out and covering episodes of spin-offs and the like for the blog (see Deeper Thoughts below for more details on this, and where and how one can draw the line). It was then that it occurred to me that there were at least two stories I'd forgotten about which had at least some call to be included. They weren't spin-offs, they were real Doctor Who with the theme tune and credits and starring the Doctor of the time and everything; they were the two animated David Tennant stories The Infinite Quest and Dreamland. I went online and purchased a Blu-ray containing both stories; a German disc being the only such option. With all the children (boys of 17 and 13, girl of 11) I watched the earlier of the stories - Auf Der Suche Nach Der Unendlichkeit as it is titled in German, translating to In Search of Infinity - on a Sunday afternoon during half-term at the end of May 2023. I thought they'd find it an interesting curio, and they did for the most part, though the youngest - closest to the CBBC demographic the story was originally aimed at - bailed before the end. The eldest, a big Peep Show fan, recognised the voice of Paul Clayton (Sophie's Dad in that sit-com) playing Mergrass. The middle child pointed out something that helped me understand a slight uneasiness I was feeling watching the story, so I'll save that and share it with you in the Reaction section below.

First Time Round:

At this period, a couple of years in to the relaunched new series, the Doctor Who brand seemed to be everywhere. From day one, the show had its own companion documentary series Doctor Who Confidential on BBC3 showing the making of each new episode. Then in 2006, two new spin-offs started. Torchwood was there for an older audience (having just finished its first run on the first day of 2007), and the younger audience were served by a CBBC children's magazine show Totally Doctor Who, a Doctor Who version of the similar long-running UK show Blue Peter; so, 'Who Peter', if you will. Like the Confidential show, it ran every week when the main show was broadcasting. It had some fun strands, but what wasn't there in its first year was any scripted drama aimed at the CBBC audience. That was rectified in the 2007 series by including a three-minute segment in each Totally Doctor Who of the animated serial The Infinite Quest. I watched these and found them fun, but crucially - unlike the main show - I didn't record them for future, didn't have any urge to buy them on disc at the time, and never watched them again until now. It was fun, but it was disposable fun. There was no Totally Doctor Who from 2008 onwards, and the Doctor Who CBBC drama itch was scratched instead by another spin-off whose pilot had aired at the beginning of 2007, and would have a full series later in the year, The Sarah Jane Adventures. It is amazing that in one year there were broadcast 13 episodes of the main show, and no fewer than four spin-offs, one including its own sub-spin-off mini animated series. I wonder, with all the Disney+ money reportedly coming in, whether we'll see anything like that in the show's future.

Reaction:

What my middle child said after watching was that this story wasn't true Doctor Who as the Doctor wouldn't be so callous as to just abandon the dead bodies of the executed owners of the data-chips where they lay. "I mean, it was a bit too, you know, heartless - he would have buried them at least". He was inclined to disallow the story because of its content not its medium. Of course it was the medium that dictated that specific content decision, at least partially: animating the Doctor and Martha digging a grave would have been too difficult (would still be too difficult now, 16 years on). Even just cutting to a scene where the poor souls were buried was clearly thought to be too time-consuming. The writer Alan Barnes was challenged to construct a narrative in three minute bursts. The Infinite Quest was spread over thirteen episodes each of roughly that short duration. Some thought must have been given to how they would come together as a whole (in toto, they make up roughly the usual duration of a regular episode of this period with credits at beginning and end). If every three minutes there's got to be some distinctive danger, it doesn't leave much room to do anything but rush from one element to another, and the quest plot became therefore a good choice to make this cohere into a satisfying whole. But when everything is stitched together, what's lost is a bit of heart. The Doctor just has to rush on and never dwell.

Does he have to be in such a rush though? The Doctor believes he's in a race against time to get to the data-chips before Baltazar, but isn't he a bit of a schmuck for believing this? There's no evidence that Baltazar is around at all - they don't bump into him until the end - except for the deaths of the people in ownership of a data-chip. Crucially, though, they are found with the chips still on their dead bodies. The only explanation is that Baltazar is using the Doctor to lead him to the Infinite, and this should have been screamingly obvious to the Doctor, at least once the second body was found. Plus, the Doctor has a time machine, and Baltazar doesn't, so surely there's no need to rush, even if the Doctor hasn't worked out that it would be only by such equipment that these old artefacts could be decoded (Baltazar knows this, but the Doctor's oblivious - the latter clearly having an off day). If the script had more time to breathe, this could potentially have been made more plausible. The other plot point that didn't really ring true for me was that all three data-chip owners were in the same prison at the same time with Baltazar. It seems like a hell of a coincidence, and undermines the quest plot a bit to know that in the recent past all the chips were in the same place. It doesn't add much (just that Baltazar is driven by revenge on those who wouldn't team up with him as well as by greed) so they should have just snipped it out: Baltazar just found out about the Infinite on Volag-Noc and maybe murderously obtained the first data-chip, but the location of the others were a mystery, hence his need for the Doctor.

The vocal work is good throughout, with the regulars maintaining their on-screen chemistry using just their voices. The dialogue is of a good standard. Most of the gags land: I'm not sure about little moments like the Doctor listing Madame Cholet as one of the great chefs of Planet Earth, it would have probably have worked better in live action with Tennant's facial expression to sell it; describing the disguised brooch (really another of Baltazar's hench-birds) as an "accessory to murder", on the other hand, 'chef's kiss'. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but did Barnes spend a long time setting up the mechanical birds, who consume gold to power fusion engines in their bellies, just so he could crowbar in a Month Python's Life of Brian in-joke, when the dying Caw says he was blackmailed into helping Baltazar by promises of "all the gold I could eat"?! The various vistas created by the artists are all interesting, and the steampunk-inflected design approach works. Scenes of the AT-AT like oil tanker vehicles scuttling over the surface of a desert world would never be possible to achieve in any other medium. Something like the "skeleton crew" of animated bones in spacesuits would be done in an live action story a couple of years after The Infinite Quest, but those suited skeletons couldn't afford to wield light-sabres as their animated cousins do. All told, it's a good story if you're not looking for anything too deep (but then that wasn't the brief). If you've never seen it, and you're still waiting in anticipation for November 2023 and some new Tennant episodes, it's worth a watch to keep you going. 

Connectivity:

The Infinite Quest is possibly an inadvertent sequel / subconscious homage to Enlightenment, featuring as it does pirates with spaceships and many characters seeking a gnomically single-word named MacGuffin that grants one's every desire.

Deeper Thoughts:

But does it count? The concept of Head Canon. Where does Doctor Who begin and end? This is a question that I've been mulling over with regards to the blog. I'm close to catching up with Doctor Who currently being broadcast, as I continue on my mission to watch all of TV Doctor Who in a random order. Before watching this latest story, there were 39 of my original list of stories left to watch and blog. Adding the two Tennant animations puts that up to 41. Based on my blogging frequency, that's just over a year's worth. Plus there are three specials being shown this year for the 60th anniversary, another special to be shown in the festive period of 2023 (whenever that may mean), and an eight episode Ncuti Gatwa season in 2024. The problem is that there's no way to know when that 2024 run, currently being filmed, is going to be shown. A good guess would be a spring start at around Easter, but if it's any later than that, the risk is that I'll have run out of any other stories and will be forced to blog those stories boringly in order as there won't be anything else left. Alternatively, I could quit the whole endeavour completely, but it seems a shame to do that before at least some of Ncuti's episodes are included for the blog. I want to put off having to make such a decision as long as possible, so was casting around for possible additional bits and bobs I could watch to bump up the total. This meant I was going to again have to grapple with the tricky question of what is canon. As any fan knows, this is an infinite quest in and of itself; there are no answers to these questions that everyone would agree upon.

Some limits seem to naturally occur, but that might be just the tyranny of the majority. If one googles 'doctor who episode guide' what will be returned is almost certainly a list that doesn't include The Infinite Quest. But why? It was shown on TV on the BBC with the Doctor Who theme tune and beginning credits attached. It's arguably got more reason to appear in such a list than Shada (which was intended to be broadcast, but not finished, so has never been shown). Wikipedia's main Doctor Who episode guide pages list Shada, but not The Infinite Quest. Is there any defining logic there? In this blog, I can make up my own rules as I go along. I didn't intend to do blog posts for Shada or K9 & Company when I started out, but for the former a new and definitive semi-animated version was produced, and for the latter, the story was included in an official Doctor Who season box set. I can continue to do whatever I like, but it feels like there should be some guiding principles. If I am accepting animated stories, what about Scream of the Shalka, an animated online story for an alternate ninth Doctor? Once alternate ninth Doctors are fair game, what about The Curse of Fatal Death, a lengthy skit for Comic Relief? If an online-only airing is okay, what about Death Comes to Time, an audio story with illustrations released on the official Doctor Who website when there was a dearth of new material available? If audio only stories are allowed, what about Slipback, a radio programme starring Colin Baker? Or every Big Finish audio ever made? Clearly, there have got to be some boundaries, but maybe they can move with time.

I dived into the thorny area of canon once before in the Deeper Thoughts section of the blog post for Listen. I mentioned that the ultimate definition of canon was probably the stuff you can't wish away, even if you'd like to try. That was back in 2018, before the name for that concept, head canon, had as much traction. Now I see it used by fans everywhere. It's usually about the smaller details; to take a Doctor Who example, if a fan believes that Ben and Polly got married after their time with the Doctor and nothing is explicitly said to contradict that in the show thereafter, that fan can accept that as part of their 'head canon'. If an EU text (Expanded or sometimes Extended Universe) like a book or short story  suggests a different fate for them, then the fan either has to adjust their head canon or reject that text. This obviously becomes more difficult to do if the official-seeming TV series - with its official seeming wikipedia episode guide - kills off Ben or Polly, or marries them off to other people. Difficult, but not impossible. It's a time travel show, and it sometimes visits parallel universes, and there's lots of details that are still secret or that could be overturned in future. The imaginative leaps might need to be bigger, but one could go beyond the details to bigger things. If you don't like the whole timeless child mythology introduced during Jodie Whittaker's tenure meaning that William Hartnell isn't the first Doctor anymore, it wouldn't take much to rewrite it in your head. The Division somehow implanted false memories in the Doctor's mind, say, and brought the Jo Martin Doctor from a parallel universe to pose as an earlier version, to destabilise the Doctor so she would be less effective against fighting their Flux plan. That could work.

With such an approach, assimilating Scream of the Shalka, say, featuring a Doctor from a slightly different timeline, is a piece of cake. Heck, I could make a case that An Adventure in Space and Time the 50th anniversary docudrama about the early 1960s creation of Who, is an in-universe slice of Doctor Who proper where the Matt Smith Doctor briefly breaks into a parallel dimension where Doctor Who is a TV series made by people who all look slightly different to their counterpoints in our reality, and cheers up a sad old actor. When the blog looks like it's going to run out of material, I can transfer its mental energy and consciousness to some other head canon where Lenny Henry played the Doctor (twice) or where some of the planets visited looked very much like Crackerjack sketches. The blog need never die! Gosh, what a thought.

 

In Summary:

Disposable, but somewhat fun.