Dreamland

Chapter the 279th, here come the men in black, lanky 3D renders.

Plot:
The Doctor arrives in Nevada in 1958 and meets Cassie and Jimmy Stalkingwolf in a diner, where the two of them seem to just be sitting around waiting for a Time Lord so they can become his temporary companions for a few hours. Also in the diner is displayed an alien MacGuffin, supposedly a component that had fallen off a flying saucer that came down in the area many years before. The Doctor's examination of the component causes an alert and various characters - robotic Feds, US soldiers, and Viperox, warlike insectoid creatures - chase the three of them around various locations - desert, the nearby Area 51 base nicknamed Dreamland, a ghost mining town called Solitude - for it. The soldiers capture the Doctor and his new companions and try to wipe their memories with a prototype gas, but our heroes escape. Hidden in the Dreamland base is a Roswell Grey alien, and the local native Americans are harbouring another, the life partner of the first. The MacGuffin turns out to be a genetic superweapon that will wipe out all the Viperox, designed by one of the Greys (they do have names, but they're a bit silly, so I'm not going to mention them here). The Doctor uses the weapon, which would be significantly uncharacteristic if it weren't for some tweaks he's already made that mean the Viperox are driven away in pain, but not killed. The two Greys are allowed to leave in a spaceship, and Cassie and Jimmy Stalkingwolf hold hands, as if they've just been waiting around to have a short adventure with a Time Lord before they can express their love for one another.

Context:

I watched 'Dreamland: Invasion der Area 51' as it is titled on the German Blu-ray set I have (where it is paired with another animated Tennant story The Infinite Quest) in omnibus format. This was with English audio, as my viewing companions (the children - boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11) and I do not have good enough German to follow it dubbed into that language. There wasn't much of a peep from the little ones, probably because the velocity of the story's action stays at a fairly relentless pace throughout, not leaving much room for comment. The eldest did state at one point that he has the same shoes as animated David Tennant (he loves his Converse does our kid), and the two boys found the traditional 'Grey' look of the alien trapped in Area 51 to be so 'on the nose' as to provoke mirth. Apart from that, though, they were quiet and stuck around to the end.

Milestone watch: This marks the blog covering the final one of the original David Tennant 2009 specials that came after his last full season and led up to his (first) regeneration handing over the role of the Doctor. It also is the last of all the specials from throughout his first tenure (including Christmas specials and animated specials) blogged. Of course, at the time of writing, it's only a few weeks before three new 2023 specials featuring Tennant for the 60th anniversary are added to the 'To Do' pile.

First Time Round:

After four years of full Doctor Who seasons, 2009 was Doctor Who's first 'gap year'. Unlike in later years when the series pulled something similar, where there would only be a festive special, in 2009 an effort was made to offer quite a bit more. As well as four special episodes shown between Easter 2009 and New Year's Day 2010, there was a Tennant-starring serial in that year's series of spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures, and an event series of other spin-off Torchwood stripped across a week in the Summer. And there was Dreamland, an animated story shown episodically from November of that year as a red button extra, then compiled into one story and broadcast on BBC1 in the UK in December 2009. I have no clear memories of my first watch. I know I saw it then, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have waited for the TV broadcast omnibus version - I would instead have watched the episodes as they became available on the BBC's red button service, but I can't remember any reaction to the story or the animation. I could barely remember any details of the plot before this rewatch except that it began with the Doctor visiting a diner in the Nevada desert and it featured the robotic Men in Black characters that also featured (before this or after?) in a Sarah Jane Adventures story.

Reaction:

Dreamland comes from a time of experimentation for Doctor Who as an animated prospect. There'd never been an official animated version of Doctor Who in the first 40 years after the series started in 1963 (so, all the classic series and a major part of the subsequent 'wilderness' years). For the 40th anniversary, the first ever properly animated story was made. This was Scream of the Skalka, and was intended to be the start of something. There might have been many animated adventures for the new Shalka Doctor in subsequent years. Fate, though, dictated this was not to be. Before it was even shown, the announcement was made that Doctor Who was coming back to television in live action in 2005, so an ongoing animated series running in parallel starring a different Doctor would not be possible. The trail having been blazed by Shalka though, there was then the possibility of other animated one-offs in future. A few years afterwards, with the TV series established, there were the next new animations, one each for the classic and the new series. One was a new version of a couple of missing episodes of classic series story The Invasion to complete the story for DVD release, and the other was The Infinite Quest, an animated outing for the current Doctor David Tennant. The former eventually led to ongoing classic series releases for the home video market, first of missing episodes, then of whole missing stories, that still continue to this day. The Infinite Quest only led to Dreamland, and that was that. It makes sense to me. Why would there be a market for current Doctor animations - which no matter how much love and care is put into them are always going to be inferior to live action - when he or she's living and breathing and being heroic in real life footage elsewhere?

Even though it was the last current Doctor animation, Dreamland was also an experiment. The other animated stories before it were 2D, but Dreamland's done in a 3D CG-model style. This technique would be used in animations thereafter, so Dreamland was also blazing a trail. In later years, the style would be used sparingly, though. It's better at rendering vehicles and machines, like the pick-up truck and Roswell spaceship seen here, but for the humanoid characters it doesn't work so well. There's no logical reason for this, it's just one of those 'uncanny valley' type emotional responses: the 2D animations of Tennant and others are just as much abstractions of reality as are the 3D models, but the former seem more acceptable aesthetically. This might just be to do with familiarity, but there's something about how the 3D characters' limbs look and move particularly that makes the figures in Dreamland look like visualisations of puppets of people, rather than of the people directly. There's also something odd about their teeth, they seem too prominent during dialogue (again something I've noticed with some animations over the years). One gets used to it through the running time, but it's no coincidence that - while it's been used in concert with a 2D style since for animating spaceships and vehicles, and many, many Daleks - only one 25-minute episode since (The Web of Fear 3 in 2021) has been wholly animated in a 3D-modelled style, and it didn't prove universally popular by any means.

It would perhaps be less of a problem how the characters look if they were fully rounded, interesting individuals, but Dreamland isn't that sort of story. Intended to be seen like The Infinite Quest in small chunks, writer Phil Ford opts for an extended chase structure in place of the quest of the previous Tennant animation. This similarly allows for a fast pace and the inclusion of different environments and characters, and similarly comes at the cost of depth and meaning. In a way, it's a shame that Tennant is not accompanied by a regular companion, as it would mean that there would be two characters rather than one in whom we are already invested. There isn't time to provide backstory for the two companions of the week, Cassie and Jimmy, so despite good vocal performances - by Georgia Moffett and Time Howar respectively - they are ciphers. Great vocalisations but thin characters covers everyone: not even the mighty David Warner can make much of the Viperox commander. Does he really need to, though? This is a high-speed, knockabout adventure story where the Doctor gets to visit Area 51 and save a captured alien. It doesn't need to have pretensions beyond that, perhaps. Writing this less than a week after watching Dreamland, though, I know for example that there was a big reveal that Warner's Viperox commander was in league with the US base commander, but 've already forgotten why. The internet tells me that this was the big part one cliffhanger when watching episodically, so supposedly had some significance. It didn't leave much of an impression on the overall story or on my mind, though.

Connectivity:

Dreamland and Genesis of the Daleks both feature a genetic scientist that has created something that could wipe out other forms of life.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Art of Leaving Gaps. When Patrick Troughton appeared in The Five Doctors (fresh in my mind as I'm currently watching the Season 20 boxset that has no less than three different versions of the 1983 anniversary reunion special) a narrative hand wave was required to explain why Pat's Doctor was travelling alone. At no time during his tenure as the Doctor did this ever take place; he's always accompanied by companions, and can't control his TARDIS to take any of them to, or retrieve them from, a specific place. Additionally, various details of dialogue, narrative or costuming dictate that each Troughton story links into the next. Tennant's solo adventures in 2009 conversely allow many gaps in which can be slotted extended universe adventures to be made in future. The Day of the Doctor later used one of those gaps to tie up some continuity mentions from a couple of stories about the Doctor and Queen Elizabeth the First, which was fun for the long term fans who'd been paying attention. This happened in between The Waters of Mars and The End of Time. Dreamland itself could also sit in that gap - i.e. exactly the same place in the Doctor's personal chronology as it takes up in the order of broadcast stories, even though The Waters of Mars ends on a cliffhanger, or it could fit anywhere in 2009. Could the specials just possibly have been designed deliberately to open up options for future producers, or owners of tie-in franchises like Big Finish audio to fill these gaps? Once and future showrunner Russell T. Davies is very aware of the importance of those extended universe stories; did he - knowing David Tennant would definitely be up for returning to the role, but being less sure of Billie, Freema or Catherine, perhaps - create the opportunity for that to be easily explained. Almost certainly not, but it's a nice thought nonetheless.

Highway to Mel 

Some other points in Doctor Who's history are similarly fertile territory, with gaps for planting new stories. The introduction of Mel (fresh in my mind as the character is featured prominently in,  including on the cover of, Doctor Who Magazine issue 595) is one example. Mel is the only companion featured in the series after its start whose introductory story was never seen; she is first shown when already travelling with the Doctor, meaning that the events of their meeting can be speculated on in other media, including a Big Finish audio called The Wrong Doctors and a Virgin book called Business Unusual. I've not caught up with either of them, and wonder if either closes what to me is the biggest gap about that particular character. Never mind how exactly the end of Trial of a Timelord fits with Mel's timeline (clearly the Doctor, who at that point earlier in his timestream has not yet met Mel on Earth, drops her off somewhere where she can rejoin his later self); no, the big mystery is - where does Mel earn a living as a computer programmer? She lives in Pease Pottage, which is a village of about ten buildings plus a Services off the M23. Nowhere in Pease Pottage in the late 1980s needed computer programming skills, and it's too early to imagine that Mel was telecommuting. So, it has to be somewhere in commuting distance of Pease Pottage, which includes Crawley and London, but to me feels more likely to be Haywards Heath or Brighton or even Worthing on the south coast. Presumably, producer John Nathan-Turner picked the village as he'd seen the prominent sign mentioning its name on the road as he did his own commute from his home down South to the capital where Who was made.

Services on the Highway to Mel

Mel could have worked in some innovative small software company, of course, but I can't think of any that were based around there at that time. Besides, the title of computer programmer feels more big business corporate somehow; so, I imagine her coding in COBOL at Amex's HQ in Brighton, more than coding games in BASIC for Sinclair or Acorn (the latter was based in Cambridge in the 1980s, which seems like a punishing daily commute - Mel would have no time on weekdays to tend her beloved garden complete with its compost heap). It's very easy to randomly pluck 'Computer Programmer' and 'Pease Pottage' from thin air when putting together a character biog that nobody's ever likely to read (despite all the details of characterisation, the document may as well have read "Bonnie Langford" for all the thought that went into the character underneath the quirks of characterisation). It's interesting, though, that such a small gap can get wider and wider to allow question after question to be crammed in, the more one thinks of it. There are many such aspects of the companions of Doctor Who that similarly open up such gaps. The audience never finds out Polly's surname for example, but do the other characters in the TARDIS ever know it? I can't imagine how the conversation would start. I don't think I've ever had call to ask someone what their surname is; I've either become aware of it somehow, or maybe they've ventured it. It depends on context, though. The other TARDIS travellers never need to send her a letter or look up her number in a telephone directory, and it's sufficient to yell "Polly!" rather than "Polly Wright!" if she's in danger of being grabbed by a Macra or whatever. (Yes, after much fandom research, it was discovered that the producers intended her to be called Wright, same as Barbara - again, someone could have fun writing something where they turn out to be related.)

We never find out Vicki's surname either, though fandom was much less bothered about that for some reason. She's just a normal human from the UK in the 25th century (unlike, say, Nyssa who comes from a different culture) but maybe we dispense with surnames by then, who knows? What else? Why exactly couldn't the Doctor go back and save Adric, since nobody (character or audience) has been given conclusive proof he was still on the spaceship when it hit the Earth? What would possibly tempt Liz Shaw to go back to research in Cambridge when she has the most exciting possible job defeating alien invasions every week? What is Leela doing during the events of Arc of Infinity and The Five Doctors? Sticking with that latter story, and going back to the first thought that prompted all this speculation, and might just give a reason why it's important: a continuity error in Pat Troughton's dialogue in The Five Doctors suggests that he is aware of the events of his own trial, always assumed before that to have been immediately before his regeneration into Jon Pertwee. Over the years, the 'season 6b' theory grew up to explain this. Troughton's sentence of regeneration and exile had not been served as it appeared to be at the end of The War Games. Instead, it was deferred, and the Doctor was freed to allow him to go on missions for the Time Lords, including the mission he's on in later story The Two Doctors. Extended universe stories have subsequently been written in a gap that didn't even really exist, except in the imagination of fans that broke through what looked to be solid continuity. Creativity can't be contained, it shines like light through the gaps and cracks, and let it ever remain so.

In Summary:

A diverting enough experiment, but after watching it's almost like one's received a dose of prototype memory wipe gas - nothing much sticks in one's mind.