Marco Polo

Chapter the 275th, where the Doctor goes on a long journey, a very long journey.

Plot:
The Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara land in the Himalayas in 1289. The TARDIS is damaged, needing lengthy repairs, and they are without water or heat. Luckily, they meet a party including Marco Polo. He is en route to see Kublai Khan, and takes them with him, also bringing the TARDIS. Polo won't let the Doctor access the TARDIS and keeps the key, as he wants to give this magic flying caravan, as he sees it, to Kublai Khan and finally buy his freedom to return to his home in Venice after many years in the Khan's service. A Mongol warlord, Tegana, who is part of the caravan, is supposed to be a peace emissary, but is secretly plotting to kill Polo and the Khan. Another member of the party is a young girl Ping-Cho, who wants to get out of the arranged marriage to a septuagenarian that awaits her in Peking. There follows an epic journey where Polo and the TARDIS team face conflict with the elements (including sandstorms and the threat of dehydration in the Gobi desert) and with Tegana's plotting. The Doctor secretly accesses and fixes the TARDIS. Both the Doctor and friends, and later Ping Cho, make attempts to leave but are caught. Everyone ends up eventually at the Khan's palace in Peking. He and the Doctor bond over the aches and pains of old age and a liking for backgammon. The Doctor gambles on getting the TARDIS back but loses. Polo saves the Khan from an assassination attempt by Tegana. Tegana chooses death over dishonour at his own hand. Polo gives the Doctor the key and the time travellers escape; Khan forgives Polo this upon seeing the magic of the TARDIS dematerialising.

Context:

It was mid-August 2023, and the family was going on holiday. As long term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know, this is often my opportunity to link the Doctor Who story being watched to the trip. This year, we were going to the Greek island of Kos. No Doctor Who story is set on Kos, or Greece, and the only contenders that are even tenuously related (The Time Monster, The Underwater Menace, The Horns of Nimon) have already been blogged long ago. The random number generator then chose Marco Polo to be next, and I stuck with it; it's vaguely apt as it does see the very first TARDIS team travelling for a lengthy period with the titular character and his caravan. My laziness knows no bounds: rather that struggle with an old laptop that has itunes on and a hard-drive full of all my ripped CDs, but is very slow, I just used one of my Audible credits to download Marco Polo afresh. I think it's probably been remastered since I got the audio version of the story on CD twenty years ago (see First Time Round section below), so that's something. The one credit got me a bundle which included many other William Hartnell stories along with Marco Polo too. Before the trip, I watched the condensed reconstructed version on DVD (again, see First Time Round below); it was a nice job by Derek Handley as always but it can't fully represent the story's expanses. Then I periodically listened to episodes of the story on audio while I was away.

First Time Round:

This is one of those Doctor Who stories that has something of a mystique, and I'm sure I'd heard of it and seen some of the on-set photographs before I ever knew anything about the story. It's the first proper historical story of the series, the first time a real figure from history appears. It forms part of the opening salvo from the series that captured the public imagination: the lavish sets and costumes and educational content appealing to viewers, with large audience figures and reasonable appreciation scores. It sold widely internationally too. It was mentioned subsequently by some of the regular cast as their favourite story, and was considered prestigious enough to be the topic of the series' first ever Radio Times cover. Plus, it's missing without a trace - the earliest Doctor Who story for which no moving images have yet been recovered. I first encountered it in novelisation form sometime in the 1980s. I then bought and listened to the audio version with narration by William Russell when it was released in November 2003 (the audio existing because of enthusiastic fan home-tapers). Finally, a few years later in January 2006, I bought The Beginning DVD box set, which collected the first three stories, and had as an extra the aforementioned 30-minute compilation representing the fourth story Marco Polo using photographs, off-screen stills and sections of the audio.

Reaction:

Unless Russell T Davies takes things in a very unexpected direction, this is the last 7 x 25-minute episode story I will cover for the blog. Doctor Who did stories longer than seven episodes rarely for special occasions or at times of desperation, but the majority of stories were either four or six episodes long. At the beginning, though, and periodically thereafter for the first few years, it kept coming back to seven episode tales. As I touched on in the recent blog post for The Ambassadors of Death, this is an odd length of story, with a single focussed narrative usually unable to sustain such a running time, necessitating the inclusion of a strong subplot. Here, though, a different approach is taken: it's all subplots, with the loosest 'journey' narrative framing them. This is risky, as the eventual piece could seem too unconnected and bitty. To help prevent this, the people and the places seen on the journey need to be interesting. It's unfortunate when judging it that the story has another significance in relation to this blog: it's the final missing adventure I'm going to cover. There remain left to blog only complete stories, or ones with an episode or two missing that has been replaced with animation. If ever a story needed its visuals for a proper assessment, it's this one. Luckily, we have the audio and a lot of photographs, and from that evidence, it seems like it was a lavish production. The evocative stops on the epic route - way stations, Lop, the Gobi desert, the Wall, the Yellow River, the White City, and palaces at Shang-tu and Peking - were no doubt created with utmost skill and ingenuity from the creative production team.

Writer John Lucarotti has also been clever in his scripts to allow for a story with epic sweep to be constructed within the confines of Lime Grove D. The device of having Marco narrate the journey by reading from his journal makes the action seem much more broad and spacious than any television studio. It also tends to make Marco the main character of this particular tale. He's already got the title (and was part of the Radio Times cover, unlike any of the regulars save Hartnell). The regulars' subplot is about getting access to the TARDIS so they can leave, which is not really as interesting, and certainly not as picturesque, as Marco's journey to the Khan, hoping to buy his freedom. In order to achieve their aim, the time travellers have to get Marco on side, which also makes him the embodiment of authority, Othello to Tegana's Iago, as the warlord persuades him that he cannot trust these strangers. The regulars don't feel sidelined exactly as they mostly have enough good material here and there to keep them on screen to remind the audience whose show it's supposed to be; but, it's telling that the Doctor's role in the second episode was drastically reduced (as Hartnell was ill for the rehearsals) and it doesn't impact the story at all. This is a lot to do with this being only the fourth ever story, with the rules and structures still plastic. One can see things develop in real time, with the early episodes having overtly educational material (water boiling at different temperatures, the origins of the word 'assassin') and Susan speaking in an uncharacteristic hip groovy idiom; all this disappears partway through the story.

The most interesting guest characters, with the best performances, are those in Marco's caravan that become de facto regulars for the seven weeks of screen time. On route, there are some comedy grotesques - unctuous attendants and villainous henchmen, even the doddery Khan himself - but the depth comes from Mark Eden's Polo, Derren Nesbitt's Tegana, and Zienia Merton's Ping Cho, and the interactions between them and the time travellers: the trust triangle between Ian, Polo, and Tegana, at one memorable point symbolised in a chess game, the sweet friendship that develops between Susan and Ping Cho, the Doctor's frustration that he's been bested by his intellectual inferior. The story is unique (again, this comes down to it being early on when approaches are still being tried out) in allowing so much story time to elapse for these relationships to develop. The character stuff never dominates over incident, though, and there are some great set piece scenes (sandstorms, repelled bandit attacks, the teased false ending of episode 5 when the regulars almost escape but are caught at the last minute) along the way. If there are flaws, they are minor ones; such time elapses, that it does feel Polo is sometimes being an idiot in stubbornly mistrusting the people who are continually helping him, and failing to suspect the person who always seems to go missing whenever they get into trouble. Sometimes the pacing might just be a smidge too laid back - it feels like a whole episode is taken up with the telling of one story. There's never a moment, though, when the story is less than charming. I just wish that I could see it.

Connectivity:

An extended period of time elapses in both Marco Polo and The Time of the Doctor compared to the majority of Doctor Who stories that more closely follow the Aristotelian advice on temporal unity.

Deeper Thoughts:

Travels without a TARDIS. The peripatetic nature of the story of Marco Polo is an excuse for me to indulge in a bit of travelogue and cover some episodic but unconnected Doctor Who activities and thoughts from this summer. The story starts with me at home down on the south coast of the UK. The group of Doctor Who enthusiast friends that I often meet up with (as recounted occasionally in these pages) were looking for an opportunity to get together as it had been a while. In previous years, there had been more Doctor Who events at the BFI Southbank, which we'd use as a reason to meet; but, with no stories having been released as animations for a while, and a slower rate of release for the Collection Blu-ray box sets, the BFI events had become few and far between. We decided to try something different, the Doctor Who escape room on Oxford Street. This is Escape Hunt's The Dalek Awakens. On a Saturday towards the end of July, I travelled up to meet the rest of the party in London. It was only as the train pulled out from Brighton that I heard someone behind me talking about their limited travel options because of the RMT strike, and I realised I might face limited travel options because of an RMT strike. In the end that meant that Scott couldn't make it at all, the rest (David, Trevor, Chris) were staying in or close to London and so were fine. I just had to go home earlier than I would have normally. The escape room only takes up to an hour, so the limited number of trains to get home didn't impinge on that activity, but we would potentially have gone to see the Barbie movie in the evening had I been around longer (I saw it with my daughter instead - great movie, not enough Ncuti!).

The first rule of The Dalek Awakens escape room is you don't talk about The Dalek Awakens escape room, the better for it to be a fun surprise for anyone doing it in future. As such, I won't mention anything here except that it had good production values (Jodie Whittaker provides extensive voiceover as the Doctor, as does Nicholas Briggs as the Dalek), and some challenging but not impossible puzzles. You don't need to know anything about Doctor Who to participate. For a few more details, but no spoilers, there is a Radio Times review online here. Unlike the group mentioned in that review, the four of us managed to complete it with a few minutes to spare. Our same group, with Scott and others mentioned many times before on this blog such as Tim and Dave, didn't have to wait too long after that for a new possible opportunity to meet up, as a BFI Southbank event was announced to tie in with the forthcoming Season 20 Blu-ray box set, showing a(nother) new version of The Five Doctors. Unfortunately, like the last two of these events the date clashed with a pre-existing engagement for me. I hope to get to the next one, whenever that is. The positive way to look at my clashing engagement is that I'm leaving someone else the opportunity to get a seat. Perhaps because there are fewer events of this kind of late, competition was fierce. Only David and Trevor managed to get tickets (which are limited to two per person). Everyone else tried and couldn't select tickets and get them into the basket on the website fast enough as The Five Doctors screening sold out in less than 5 minutes, the quickest I've ever seen for a BFI Doctor Who event.

A number of disappointed people online afterwards directed their ire at the BFI for not providing more - and perhaps more regional - opportunities for fans to access these events. This isn't fair. They have two venues only, both in London, one of which is an IMAX cinema totally unsuitable for watching old telly or guest panels. Also, their job isn't Doctor Who, it's programming a wide range of films, festivals and special events of which Doctor Who is just an infinitesimal fraction. BBC Studios could potentially branch out to find more exhibition partners across the country, but presumably they don't have much of a budget for any of their staff to find and progress such new relationships. The investment would only be worth it if the events were a sure thing, but the last BFI event I made it to, for The Abominable Snowmen animation showcase last year, wasn't sold out, and I couldn't give my spare tickets away. It's a shame, but I can't see us getting any more than we're getting, with everyone having to travel to London. Just before we were due to fly out to Kos, an announcement was made that The Underwater Menace was going to get a full animation release on DVD and Blu-ray in November 2023; assuming this will get a tie-in screening, there will be another opportunity for everyone to get stressed and frustrated with the BFI's website later in the year. There was an online story on the Mirror's website early in 2023 that stated Underwater Menace was being animated, so it was at least half right. The other one they mentioned was The Smugglers, so maybe we'll see that one soon too.

An attractive ruin in Kos town

Going back to the topic of disappointments caused by the popularity of Doctor Who stuff, I'd hoped that Pull to Open, Ten Acre Films book by Paul Hayes giving the inside story of how Doctor Who was brought to air in 1962 and 1963, would be my holiday reading. It's a companion piece to Hayes's book The Long Game that told a similar story about the new series before its launch in 2005, which I read and reviewed in the Deeper Thoughts section of the blog post of Midnight back in March. I was very much looking forward to reading it, and it would have been thematically linked to Marco Polo, one of the first script commissions from that early period. It wasn't to be, but it was for a good reason. The weight of demand for pre-orders necessitated an extended print run, which delayed the book, and I didn't receive my pre-ordered copy before we flew. It was waiting for me on the doormat when I got back home, and I'll share my thoughts in a future post. That left me with only Marco Polo as my Doctor Who fix in Kos. As I listened in the sunny surroundings, I struggled to find resonances (trying to eke out the bottles of sun cream we'd brought to last the week of our holiday wasn't exactly on a par with the Doctor and friends trying to make their limited water last for their trek across the Gobi desert). It was only on the penultimate day when we caught a bus into Kos old town that something occurred to me. As I wandered round the remains of many ancient buildings, surrounded by many other tourists, I realised Marco Polo is Doctor Who's attractive ruin: it's from long ago, it unfortunately doesn't all exist as it did when it was first made, but it's still a big draw for interested parties. Until it's restored by animation, or even the recovery of the original footage, let it always remain so.

In Summary:

Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo!

The Time of the Doctor

Chapter the 274th, where the Doctor makes a house call and stays for simply ages (it tends to happen as one gets older).

Plot:
A coded message is being signalled out from a planet, and this attracts spaceships from every alien species (you know, like in the Pandorica one). The Doctor investigates, but Clara distracts him for a bit getting him to pose as her boyfriend making an appearance at Christmas dinner on contemporary Earth (where Clara's relatives see him naked - don't ask). Soon, Clara is helping him uncover the mystery of the message. It turns out to be from the Time Lords, and the planet turns out to be Trenzalore, the place where the Doctor is destined to die. Tasha Lem, a great friend of the Doctor that he's never mentioned before and never will again, is leader of a religious order based on one of the ships in orbit. She helps to get the Doctor and Clara down to the planet; they land in the town of Christmas, where no one can lie. In a tower in the town, the Doctor discovers the crack in space and time that he first saw in Amy Pond's bedroom. Through it, the Time Lords are broadcasting the signal from another universe in which they are hiding; once decoded it is heard to be the question "Doctor Who?" If the Doctor answers with his name, they will know it is him because of the truth field they are also creating, and will know it's safe to come through. This, though, will start the Time War again. All those in the ships surrounding the planet will attack to prevent the Doctor answering the question (in other words, to ensure 'silence will fall').

The Doctor tricks Clara into travelling home in the TARDIS, and stays to defend the town and the planet. Lots of different aliens attack, but he sees them off. Clara, annoyed at being sent home, comes back with the TARDIS. By the time she gets to Trenzalore, the Doctor has been there many years, and is looking much older. The Doctor persuades her to travel home in the TARDIS again, and stays to defend the town some more. Lots of different aliens attack, but he sees them off. Clara, still not happy at being sent home, is picked up by Tasha Lem in the TARDIS, and comes back. By the time she gets to Trenzalore, the Doctor's been there many more years, and is looking very old. The Daleks come in for a final big attack. The Doctor knows he's going to die, as he has no regenerations left, and has seen the future of his tomb on the empty battlefields of Trenzalore. Clara doesn't want to accept this, though, and persuades the Time Lords, talking through the crack to them, to grant the Doctor more regenerations. He uses this gifted regeneration energy to zap the Dalek ships, then goes back to the TARDIS, sees a vision of Amy Pond, and changes into Peter Capaldi. He then talks about his kidneys for a bit.

Context:

It's been a while since the randomiser has chosen an unseasonable festive special to watch in the middle of Summer. As if to compensate for this, the UK weather at the start of August 2023 when we watched this turned chillier and wetter. At least it didn't snow. I watched this on a Sunday afternoon with all three children (boys of 17 and 13, girl of 11) from the disc in the 50th Anniversary Collector's edition Blu-ray box set, which brought together the specials shown in 2013. All the children did me proud one way or the other. The eldest, when watching the (first) scene where the Doctor fools Clara into leaving in the TARDIS because the situation is too dangerous, said "Isn't this just a rip-off of The Parting of the Ways?" He's so right. After the story had finished, the middle child went into a very Doctor Who fan rant about how the Timeless Child arc from Jodie Whittaker's time had retrospectively ruined the drama of The Time of the Doctor. He's a chip off the old block. The youngest really enjoyed all the jokes about the Doctor and Clara being naked. (You hear that Moffat? The humour is at just the right level for 11-year olds!) She was also excited to see Amy again at the end, though she'd forgotten all about the significance of fish fingers and custard.

First Time Round:

Christmas day 2013. After the in-laws had gone home in the early evening and the kids were abed, the Better Half and I would have had a friendly and harmonious discussion about which we would watch first that evening, the Doctor Who or the Downton Abbey special episode. My memory is that Julian Fellowes's posho potboiler was on an hour later than Who, around the time we were both finally alone, so we could watch it as it went out live. So, we did. When Downton finished it was 10.30pm; after a long day of eating and drinking and being merry, I feel sure that the BH went to bed at that point, leaving me alone to watch the recording of The Time of the Doctor. She then caught up when I watched it again the following day. Some of the later Capaldi festive ones I left until I was a little fresher on Boxing Day, but at this point it was still important to me to watch the special on the big day. Reminiscing years later, when I wrote the blog post for the The Doctor, The Widow, His Wife and Her Lover or whatever it's called, I satirised the tired, tipsy conversations the BH and I would exchange when trying to work out the continuity of the show that was the other person's favourite, thus: "Why is he in old guy make-up now?" "Why is the crack in the wall back?" "Have we ever met this footman before?" "What relation is the American guy from Sideways to the Granthams again?". I feel, though,  that this is probably verbatim what was said on December 25th and 26th 2013 chez Perry.

Reaction:

Responding to change can be better than following a plan. There's so much evidence that Steven Moffat, writer of this story and showrunner since Matt Smith took over as the Doctor, had planned for this finale throughout his time in charge; so many detailed set-ups are paid off here. I wonder, though, whether he anticipated that he would have to set the story that represented the culmination of all that work at Christmas, and almost immediately after a big, showy anniversary episode, and whether he had sufficient time to respond to that. I think not, as the narrative structure of The Time of the Doctor is all over the place. It's particularly striking just how wrong the structure is, because this is an area where Moffat is usually very strong. Three years worth of plot comes to an end in this story: where Gallifrey has disappeared off to, what was the final significance of the crack in space/time that appeared in Amy's bedroom wall, what the true meaning was of the oldest question, hidden in plain sight, why silence had to fall, what was destined to happen on Trenzalore, who exactly were the Silence that the Doctor encountered in 1969 and why they wanted to kill him, what the Doctor's greatest fear was that he saw in The God Complex. All these are explained in a coherent sweep: it's all about stopping the time war from starting up again (and so links ever further back to the very earliest episode of the relaunched series, Rose). I don't know how much Moffat worked out opportunistically as he was going along, but a lot of past material must have been produced knowing exactly where things would end. But, in The Time of the Doctor, all that explanation is done in the first 20 minutes out of 60; there's still two thirds of the running time to go.

Why in the name of all that's sacred did Moffat blow all that story material so early on? It's even worse than it seems, as that first 20 minutes is also shared with some misfiring comedy about nudity, domestic scenes of Clara's Christmas (the scantest lip service being paid to the festive season), and lots of set piece sequences with Doctor Who monsters like the Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels. The culmination of the plotting of three years of episodes is spaffed away in something like 10 minutes. This would be okay if there was a lot of incident left to happen in the remaining running time, but there's barely anything. A clear indication that something's gone wrong is that, in the last two-thirds of The Time of the Doctor, Clara is tricked by our favourite Time Lord into getting in the TARDIS, is sent back home to safety, refuses to accept that and returns to find the Doctor has aged in the meantime... TWICE. The same damn story beats - too similar, as my son pointed out (see above), to what happens to Rose in another regeneration story - play out again in the same way. It's first draft stuff; any cursory review of a screenplay would clearly show this, and the two sets of repetitive beats would have to be combined to form one stronger sequence. For a start, the first time round, the TARDIS stays with Clara, which is a terrible mistake that the second time round rectifies. It can't be a heroic sacrifice by the Doctor to defend Trenzalore if he's trapped there anyway and has no choice. Was this a first draft? Did Moffat put all his energy into preceding 50th anniversary story The Day of the Doctor and have no time to do any rewrites on the subsequent script?

Aside from Clara yo-yoing back and forth between contemporary Earth and Trenzalore, all that's left is a Western-style stand off, with the Doctor as the Sheriff protecting the small town from bandits, or rather another succession of set piece sequences with Doctor Who monsters (Sontarans and Silence included as well this time). It's not that there aren't nice moments (Dan Starkey being funny as identical Sontarans, a wooden cyberman being outwitted, the Silence fighting alongside the Doctor) but each lasts for a few seconds at a time. The rest of the final two-thirds of the story is just a lot of droning on about mortality (to get my own back, I am going to drone on a bit in the Deeper Thoughts section below about my own mortality - you can judge how entertaining or not it is). Even if a viewer has been living under a rock and missed that Peter Capaldi is taking over (and that was showcased in its own live broadcast entertainment extravaganza), they still know the Doctor's not going to die, so the ageing of the Doctor and the long, drawn out sequences dwelling on it seem dull at best, over-sentimental and manipulative at worst. To make it in any way work, Smith has to persuade us that at least the Doctor really thinks he's going to die, but he struggles to do that from deep within a mound of latex. There is no make-up job that can convince that the youngest ever Doctor is an old man. Maybe he could do this with his performance, and Moffat was quoted as saying that he thinks that it's Smith's best performance in the role, but I don't agree. His best performance was when he was the Doctor, young and early on. This is tacitly confirmed by returning him to look like that before the regeneration happens properly.

The significant character of Tasha Lem is so similar to River Song that it makes one wonder whether Alex Kingston just wasn't available and it was a hasty recasting. Tasha Lem doesn't age (presumably to avoid a guest artist having to also endure a restrictive make-up job), but that doesn't make sense (it's covered by a quippy line of dialogue). Two fine actors - Rob Jarvis and Tessa-Peake-Jones - are wasted in tiny cameos as passers-by in the town of Christmas; this isn't the first time such a thing would happen in the Moffat era, but it's a problem here as it would be good to have more feeling for the people whom the Doctor is protecting. The scene in the TARDIS for the regeneration with the appearance from Karen Gillan as Amy is fine, but Capaldi's first line being about his kidneys doesn't really work, and displays a desperation towards wackiness. Less is more. Here's how I think it should have played: first, lose the nudity gags. Expand out the investigation and solving the mystery to 35 to 40 minutes; there is definitely enough there to keep things pacy at that duration. At that point, send Clara home (just the once) and return the TARDIS immediately to Trenzalore, so the Doctor is choosing to stay. If you can't get Alex Kingston to play a Library hologram version of River (who wouldn't age), then have a succession of different cameo appearances as different leaders of the religious order over the years or write out the role altogether, and instead build up the roles of one or two people who are with the Doctor on Trenzalore. At around the 50-minute mark, get Clara back to find out the Doctor's aged (but maybe just have Smith play him older rather than overdo the latex), Clara then works out how to save him, and there's Daleks and energy bolts just as it plays now. When Smith turns into Capaldi have the Doctor and Clara look at each other for a moment or two, then he says "Just one question: do you happen to know how to fly this thing?!". Crash to credits, and we're out.

Connectivity:

The Time of the Doctor and The Ambassadors of Death both feature a grey-haired Doctor stuck on a planet helping the locals against alien invasion. Both stories see the Doctor go into battle on the same side as some scary-seeming but ultimately nice aliens (space-suited ambassadors in the Pertwee story, the Silence in Matt Smith's swansong).

Deeper Thoughts:

What do you want to be when you grow up? It's a question, even after half a century of ageing, that I keep asking myself. I'm not looking yet as old as Matt Smith in either stage of his old man make-up from The Time of the Doctor (but then, I doubt anyone has ever looked like that, it's well over the top!). Recent readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I have found a box of old diaries when cleaning out the garage. Reading these and getting a glimpse of the old me at different and more youthful stages of my life, I do find myself dwelling upon my mortality and my place in the world, very much in the manner of the Doctor in a Steven Moffat screenplay that was maybe written in a hurry. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to share a section of a diary entry from 1995 here, as I think it's illuminating, and I think that the 22-year old me who wrote it pretty much nails it. Is there ever anyone who dwells upon their own mortality more than a 22-year old bloke does? Except maybe characters in a Steven Moffat screenplay that was maybe written in a hurry, perhaps? Anyway, to set the scene, it is early 1995; I had finished at university the year before, and hadn't shined academically; without a clue what to do next, I had come back to my home town of Worthing, and started working in a temp job to pay off my student overdraft, while I waited for inspiration to hit me. At university (in St. Aidan's College, Durham) I'd vaguely known a chap that was a student union rep, and wrote for the university magazine, Palatinate. On February 21st of 1995, with a long wait for a bus to take me home after work, I popped into the W.H. Smiths near the bus stop and flicked through the latest Doctor Who Magazine (issue 223, out since the 16th February, fact fans!). With surprise, I found that that chap I vaguely know from university, Gary Gillatt - for it was he - has become the editor of said magazine.

 

This immediately made me, a wannabe writer who received the same class of degree as Gary after three years, incredibly uninspired, and very envious. The following day, I explode the following screed upon the pages of my journal: "First off, you're young and the world of the telly and the world of you and your mates are entirely separate. It stays that way (unless you're at stage school, or happened to be young like I was when that 10-year old from Musical bloody Youth was always on the TV) for many years. Then, at about sixteen or seventeen years of age, you realise that the teenage daughter in the sitcom is the same age as you, and you fancy her and she's probably doing coke at Stringfellows every night. Then, you get a little older (and maybe wiser) and you're still on the same course or the same pay. You're flicking through the Mirror lifestyle pages when you find out that Andi Peters / Dani Behr / some page 3 model are one year, two years, three years younger than you. Then, the first of your baby sister's friends has an abortion. A year later, you're maybe hanging around the student union, when someone tells you that the woman you were sure was looking at you in the bar used to have a promising career in modelling. A friend gets engaged. Someone from another class at middle school dies on the flyover. Then, you get to the present, and you're flicking through Doctor Who Magazine when you realise that it's being edited by someone you knew vaguely at university. The world of the media and the world of you and your mates are almost overlapping. The next stage will be for someone that you're good friends with to become famous. And it better be me!"

I never did become famous. Nor did any of my friends. I know a couple of radio presenters, and some people who have written Doctor Who extended universe media, or other books or films. That's about it. I only ever wanted to write, and I suppose I am doing that. In fact, I'm doing it right now. Piecing things together, I look at the dates of all the diaries collected in that box from the garage. In fits and starts, I keep a journal from youth in the mid-1980s through to starting university. Then, in all my time studying for a degree, I don't keep a diary. I'm instead writing lots and lots of poems (which occasionally are taken seriously by other parties and get performed and shared in a small way). As soon as I've finished studying, I start a diary again, and again in fits and starts keep that going through the rest of the 1990s.  From 2000, I give up writing poems and work seriously on screenplays for about a decade. During this time, I never keep a journal, though I do have a blog. When I stop screenwriting, I start a diary again. I give that up, and within a few months I start this Doctor Who blog, with enough material to keep me going for a decade. Writing is less a vocation and more an affliction; one can't stop doing it, it'll escape out, one way or the other. This makes me feel better - if I had become famous or not, it would have been the same, I'd have still been writing. An author too can be any age when first successful, so I can always live in hope. It makes me more disposed to be nicer to Steven Moffat, a habitual writer if ever there was one, for his sometimes less than perfect efforts. I can also take some small comfort - now that I can look such things up easily on the web - in my being slightly younger than both Andi Peters and Dani Behr.

In Summary:

Some good stuff is buried in there, but the screenplay desperately needed another rewrite.

The Ambassadors of Death

Chapter the 273rd, the Chapter - twang! - OF DEATH.

Plot:
The UK has a space programme that is running manned missions to Mars, the ground control centre of which is based near UNIT HQ, which is convenient as the Brig is helping out with a recovery mission there. When they lose contact with the astronaut sent out to find the two astronauts they lost contact with months earlier, the Doctor and Liz come to lend a hand. Persons unknown (who are probably military) have sent a signal to space, and when the Mars Recovery Probe spacecraft comes back down to Earth, it's taken before the Brig and his men can reach it. The Doctor intercepts a lorry carrying it. The driver and his accomplice get away, but the Doctor gets the craft back to the centre. When they open it, they find it is empty, the astronauts already having been taken out and hidden away somewhere. With clues mounting to an obvious conspiracy, head of the space programme Sir James Quinlan comes clean that he and a General Carrington were involved in a secret operation to isolate the astronauts, as they have become affected with a form of contagious radiation. They take the Doctor and the Brig to see the astronauts, only to find that they have been taken again (by a criminal Reegan). Reegan is working for Carrington, though, and the spacesuits contain not three astronauts but three aliens. Liz is kidnapped and made to assist another scientist working for Reegan in looking after his charges. 

Previous instructions from the aliens allow the construction of a control device that gets the aliens to do simple tasks. With this, on Carrington's orders, Reegan gets the aliens to cover things up (including by killing Quinlan) and provoke fear. Despite delays and sabotage caused by the conspirators, the centre prepares another recovery module and the Doctor goes up in it. He is intercepted by the alien mothership, and finds the three astronauts still alive; the leader of the aliens confronts him asking when his three ambassadors will be returned. The Doctor returns to Earth, and Reegan kidnaps him while he's in quarantine, bringing him back to the hideout with the aliens. Reegan wants to go solo, using the aliens to rob banks, and instructs the Doctor to build him a more sophisticated control device. The Doctor pretends to do this, but really he's built a signalling device to alert UNIT. Carrington takes one of the aliens, and plans to do an unmasking on a worldwide TV broadcast to start an attack on the alien's spaceship. UNIT arrive in answer to the Doctor's signalling, arrest Reegan and free the Doctor and Liz. Using the remaining astronauts, they stop Carrington just in time. The space centre start their work to rescue the three astronauts and return the ambassadors.

Context:

It'll happen more and more as I write up the final three dozen Doctor Who stories left to blog from 1963 to 2022, but this marks another season completed, adding season seven to the current haul (seasons 3, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 6 and 13) to make it 12 done out of the the 39 broadcast so far. I watched this from the DVD an episode at a time every evening or so in the second half of July 2023, accompanied by the Better Half throughout, as we had stumbled across a rarity, a classic series story that she hadn't yet seen. Her insights were interesting to record: she, like doubtless everyone seeing the story for the first time, thought the beginning credits - that are interrupted by a mid-credits teaser before the title zooms towards the viewer, with the final two words 'OF DEATH' held back so they crash in last - were "bizarre". She wondered how technology had advanced so far that there were manned missions to Mars, but "they haven't invented mobile phones". On first seeing General Carrington, who's wearing civvies in his first scene, she assumed he must be "the Labour Party candidate" - he's got a red carnation in his buttonhole that's so large it looks like a rosette. She thought the seats in the Mars probe were "hairdresser chairs" (which they may be for all I know). When one scene played accompanied by a particularly jazzy riff by incidental music composer Dudley Simpson, she wondered why they were playing "sex music". Also on a musical theme, she was confused by the cue sampling A Whiter Shade of Pale that accompanied the model scenes of craft docking in space. I thought perhaps I'd read that it was done for verisimilitude, as the BBC had maybe used that music in their Apollo coverage on TV, but I can find nothing online to back that up, so I maybe dreamed it.   

First Time Round:

I first saw the story when it came out on VHS, towards the end of the range in May 2002. They were almost certainly holding off until the end to see if there was any way to fully restore colour to the episodes. The approach used a decade earlier on other stories like The Daemons and Terror of the Autons had been tried on this story then too, but was only successful in patches. The version that was brought out in 2002 went in and out of colour, switching between chromatically restored sections and those that were still black and white. It wasn't as distracting as it sounds, and I enjoyed the story on that first watch without it detracting too much. Just over a decade later, other techniques including some manual colourisation were used to present the whole story in colour for the first time since the BBC's colour master copies were junked. That was in October 2012, and I no doubt would have pre-ordered the disc, received it on the day of release, and watched it straight away, marvelling at all that chroma.

Reaction:

The Better Half's amusing running commentary stopped after about an episode. She'd hate to admit it, I'm sure, but after that she was hooked and found the story compelling... until close to the end. This is because the story is compelling... until close to the end. This is the first time that the series has done (and pretty much the earliest it could do) a contemporary conspiracy thriller, so the story is something new, something that thereafter would be used a lot (it won't be the last time that UNIT officers are disarmed and arrested by a group of regular army soldiers who are being commanded by a misguided person out for their own ends). The Apollo inspired background for the story of a UK space programme trying to solve the mystery of missing astronauts provides great visual and narrative interest: the impressive space control set with a working lift and prototype touchscreens, and lots of supporting artists helping Ronald Allen's Ralph Cornish (Allen seems to be following the same school of minimalism in his acting that Keith Barron would later in Enlightenment). Space-suited aliens would also be something the series came back to in future; it's a great visual, particularly when director Michael Ferguson frames them in his signature shot from a low angle with the sun behind. Dudley Simpson provides a momerably eerie cue to underscore the sequences of the ambassadors bringing death too.

There are lots of very effective moments in the story: the recording of voices from the Module repeating over and over, the tense scenes as command supervise link-ups in space, the callous killings of various henchmen with radiation, the three astronauts on the mothership hypnotised to think they are already back home. A compelling story with great moments featuring distinct and intriguing monsters against an interesting backdrop - what could go wrong? Well, it is seven episodes long. For this season only, the episode allocation was structured so that there were three stories of this length in a row. The other two (Doctor Who and The Silurians before and Inferno after) introduce a strong subplot partway through, essentially another story within the story, to keep up interest and engagement (for the Silurian story, it's a plague, for Inferno, a parallel universe). The Ambassadors of Death instead just has one complicated story with lots of ins and outs. I think if one were watching it all in one go then the crosses and double-crosses would get a bit repetitive, but that's not how it was meant to be seen. Even with a day rather than a week's gap between its episodes, I found the story flowed nicely and kept my interest.

The plot does run out of steam a little in the second half of the final episode. The script includes a ticking clock to General Carrington's worldwide television address, but that's an intangible threat compared to, say, a bomb going off. The idea is that a reveal on TV will turn everyone against the aliens meaning an attack that starts a war that will destroy the Earth. It's not immediate enough, and it probably wouldn't have worked anyway. Won't people watching just think it's a hoax, and the alien is a bloke in make-up? (After all, it is a bloke in make-up.) When the Doctor saves the day, it's anyway not clear how much if any of the broadcast has been seen by viewers at home. One good thing about this, though, is the presence of Michael Wisher as the TV presenter at the start and end of the story, adding a layer of reality to the space command centre scenes (again, this is a trick the show will use in future stories). As well as Wisher and Allen, there are many other fine actors assembled in the guest cast. John Abineri is great as Carrington, bringing humanity and pathos to a villain. William Dysart represents the more career criminal end of the villainy spectrum (the story combines Reegan's Euston Films activity with Carrington's espionage, plus a few action skirmishes with soldiers and hardware orchestrated by the Havoc stunt team). Cyril Shaps plays to type, but does it very well, as the nervy scientist Lennox, who falls into being Liz Shaw's companion for a lot of the running time. Caroline John as Liz has good material, as do all the regulars including John Levene, returning to the series as Sergeant Benton.

As well as all of them, there's Max Faulkner milking all the tragedy he can playing identical twins who've both been accepted to be UNIT soldiers, but one has to go to work in place of the other as if nothing's happened when his brother is killed at the hands of the alien ambassadors. Okay, I'm joshing a bit: there is an infamous continuity error in the story where the same soldier appears again after having been killed in an earlier episode. It's never explicitly stated that the touch of an ambassador has to always kill one necessarily, so perhaps it's just the one squaddie and he got lucky. The ambassadors' powers are an area for the one unexplainable plot hole in the piece for me. A big fuss is made that the device Reegan uses can only send a limited set of simple instructions, but somehow he's still able to instruct the aliens by remote control to achieve some very complex activities like breaking into a safe and threatening people in a room into which Reegan can't see. A number of reviews have suggested more plot holes in Ambassadors than just that one, but I can't see them. The story had a difficult gestation, with credited writer David Whittaker's original scripts rejected by the production team and multiple rewrites done by Trevor Ray and Malcolm Hulke. Considering this, I think what made it to screen is pretty solid.

There's a conspiracy led by Sir James Quinlan and General Carrington to kidnap three alien ambassadors they'd arranged to be sent to Earth (Carrington having learned about how to communicate with the aliens and negotiated the visit since his own Mars mission previously). Quinlan just wants the glory of first contact with aliens, but Carrington wants to provoke a war as he is convinced because of his rampant xenophobia that the aliens are a threat. When the Doctor's investigations get too close, they give him a prepared cover story about contagion. Fearing that Quinlan might divulge the aliens' location, Carrington arranges with Reegan to have them moved, and starts using the aliens to stage events meant to whip up fear. He uses them to kill Quinlan to tie up that loose end. Reegan sees the more criminal advantage to these space-suited superweapons, and plans to go solo. As Carrington plans to reveal one of the aliens to a watching world, UNIT capture Reegan and then use the other aliens to capture Carrington. As a villainous plan in Doctor Who it's definitely on the coherent side compared to many in the show's history. In fact, it might have been better for it to get a bit wilder at the end, with Carrington instead getting the aliens to try blowing up a reactor or something. In the end, it's probably Carrington's moderation that means that the story ends on a less than exciting note.

Connectivity:

Both The Ambassadors of Death and In the Forest of the Night are somewhat experimental stories from the first year of a grey-haired older Doctor's first season, both in the position of penultimate story before the finale for the year. The set-up of the regulars is superficially similar too - the Doctor teams up with a man and a woman based on Earth that help him with his adventures (Liz and the Brig in the 70s story, Clara and Danny in the new series story). There's soldiers in both as well (at the very least an ex-soldier in Danny, but the people in hazmat suits trying to burn down the trees in central London are presumably army too).

Deeper Thoughts:

Unlucky (Mars Recovery Probe) 7 and lucky (Apollo) 13? In one of the biggest coincidences between events playing out weekly in TV's Doctor Who and contemporaneous events in the so-called 'real' world, the broadcast of episodes of a Doctor Who story about three astronauts bound for Mars missing in space and needing rescue happened at the same time as three astronauts bound for the moon were out in space in need of rescue. The Apollo 13 mission started on Saturday 11th April 1970, the same day as the broadcast of episode four of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor was in peril, with one of the space-suited ambassadors' deadly hands poised above his head, at the end of that week's instalment. It would be a couple of days later that the Apollo astronauts Lovell, Swigert and Haise found themselves in danger. Like the fictional astronauts in the Doctor Who story, they needed a lot of help from the ground, but with that help they famously resolved their own cliffhanger and all three safely splashed down to Earth on the day before Ambassadors episode five was shown. It's testament to NASA's record that already by 1970 a trip to the moon was seen as so boringly mundane that Doctor Who had to show a - somewhat unlikely, but there's no shame in being ambitious - UK mission to Mars. Real life proved to be more thrilling than fiction, and the third attempt to put men on the moon was not nearly as easy as the first two (or the subsequent four). I wondered about any other examples of such synchronicity with current events in Doctor Who's classic series era on television (it's still a bit early to know what is truly historic from the new series years).

Though there's no story or even thematic link, the most famous example from early in the series is that a big day that will be remembered by every Doctor Who fan forever more is a mere day later than a date that will be remembered by pretty much everyone forever more, i.e. 22nd November 1963 and John F. Kennedy's assassination. (It strikes me writing this, as it often does, that - assuming that he did act alone - Lee Harvey Oswald only needed to take a fraction more time between the shots he fired at the motorcade, then there'd possibly have been no conspiracy about it at all - oh well!) I couldn't think of any other examples off the top of my head, though, apart from those two. It made me curious enough to have a quick check into when other big events took place relative to the Doctor Who episode guide. (Apologies in advance, but the sort of historic events that came to mind prove the TV news axiom that "if it bleeds, it leads", so it's all a little grisly - I promise I'm not in any way equating these moments, just seeing if there's any points of resonance.) Sticking with tragic assassinations, MLK was killed in April 1968, during the broadcast of Patrick Troughton story Fury from the Deep, but that's famous as one of the very few episodes of Doctor Who in which nobody dies, so it isn't exactly apt. Robert Kennedy was shot a few weeks later after the end of The Wheel in Space but before the repeat showing of The Evil of the Daleks started; I'm struggling to see any link to either story. John Lennon bought it outside the Dakota between the broadcast of the third and final part of State of Decay, a late stage Tom Baker. There's no connection at all to a story of vampires living in an old spaceship.

Going back to the space race: the Apollo 11 mission, and the first man on the moon, was in July 1969, when Doctor Who was off air. The take off and landing of the first ever Space Shuttle took place in April 1981 when Doctor Who was off air. The Challenger shuttle disaster in January 1986 was when Doctor Who was off air. The Columbia shuttle disaster was early 2003 when Doctor Who had been off the air for simply ages. What about natural or man-made disasters? Chernobyl? April 1986, Doctor Who was off air. Bloomin' 'eck! US troops first entering the Vietnam war? March 1965. Doctor Who was on almost all year round back then, so there must be something... The Web Planet was showing: a story about ants and butterflies. Sigh. I've not had much luck with the events of 1986, but then Doctor Who was on its famous 18-month hiatus then, so what about a year later - what about the great storm in the UK in October 1987? It happened between episodes two and three of Paradise Towers, a story restricted to one building with no weather or trees. Ok, what about probably the biggest event that's happened during my lifetime, the fall of the Berlin Wall? The 9th November 1989 was during the broadcast of Sylvester McCoy story The Curse of Fenric. Ooh, now there's something of a connection there: Fenric has a subplot about the start of what would become cold war hostilities, and it includes many soviet characters. It only took until nearly the end of the series to find something. So, the classic series begins with JFK's death and ends with the fall of the Berlin wall. There's probably an academic paper waiting to be written right there. I promise, though, that I won't be the one to inflict that upon the world.

In Summary:

It's really spoiling us (for the first six and a half episodes at least).