The Girl Who Died

Chapter the 293rd, which is Rio Bravo meets Eric the Viking, plus angst and immortality.

Plot:
The Doctor and Clara escape from their last adventure in a big space battle, and arrive in the past on Earth where they are captured by vikings and taken back to a village as prisoners. The Doctor pretends to be Odin to try to escape, but someone else has had the same idea: a giant face appears in the sky claiming to be Odin and invites the warriors of the village to join him in Valhalla. This is really the leader of the Mire, one of the deadliest warrior races in entire galaxy. All the warriors are transported up to the Mire spaceship and harvested for adrenaline and testosterone, which the Mire consume. Clara and a village girl Ashildr are accidentally scooped up too, but they get away; unfortunately, Ashildr in the heat of the moment declares war on the Mire. Both Clara and Ashildr are returned to the village, but the next day the Mire will arrive to challenge everyone to combat. The Doctor has only until the next day to whip the remaining villagers into fighting shape. Luckily he discovers the vikings keep some electric eels, which gives him a plan. Harnessing the power of the eels they capture the helmet of a Mire battle suit, and plug Ashildr into it. Her imagination makes the Mire think they are being attacked by monsters, and the Doctor and Clara persuade them to leave or they'll release footage of this, which will destroy the Mire's reputation. They then discover Ashildr's mental exertions have proved fatal. The Doctor, remembering saving the Dad of a family in Pompeii whose face he now shares, uses Mire technology to resurrect her, but makes her immortal in the process.

 

Context:

The best laid plans of Mire and men gang aft agley and all that: towards the end of February 2024, I had to be in central Cardiff for a couple of days for the day job. It's a long train journey from the homestead down South, so I went up and stayed over the night before the event. This gave me a few hours potentially to explore the area. The last time I went to Cardiff for work, it was too whistle-stop a visit to do much in the way of sightseeing (see this blog post for more details). I left my hotel room with a plan to travel over to Cardiff Bay and see where exteriors for many Doctor Who and Torchwood stories were filmed, take a selfie at Ianto's Shrine, see Roath Lock Studios, that sort of thing. As I entered the lift in the hotel, though, a senior director from the day job was in there and invited me to go to the restaurant with a group of colleagues who were also in town that evening. I couldn't really say no, and it was obviously a nicer prospect than dining alone (even if I might have been at a table for one in an establishment where Christopher Eccleston and Annette Badland had once been). I hope to be back to the capital and its bay area before too long, when either business or leisure takes me in that direction. I'd downloaded onto my phone the next randomly-selected story The Girl Who Died, which was filmed at Roath Lock, so watched it on the BBC iplayer app in the hotel room when I got back after the meal.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the 21st season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

It was not long after I started this blog that Peter Capaldi's second season, new series 9, was shown on BBC1. I have many times before wondered why I didn't start a viewing diary then and there to help with these entries in years to come, but I alas did not. Based on what little I can remember, the Better Half and I would have watched this on the Saturday night. On the following Sunday morning, I and probably the BH too would then watch again with the children if deemed suitably kid-friendly (as this one was).

 

Reaction:

On my first watch of this story, which I can't remember in much detail (see above), I must have had certain expectations based on its co-writer, Jamie Mathieson, who this time shared the writing credit with showrunner Steven Moffat. The previous year, he delivered two of the best stories of the season, Flatline and Mummy on the Orient Express. There was a certain anticipation at what he would bring this time, particularly in collaboration with the showrunner. Unfortunately, the story fell a bit flat by any measure, and compared to those lofty heights of anticipation it fell so flat it broke the ground beneath it and all its limbs. A story where some aliens and some vikings have a battle is a decent idea, as is the Doctor being forced into the role of whipping a ragbag band of misfits into shape so they can defend their village against attack. Vikings haven't been done that often in Doctor Who, so the setting is distinctive too. David Schofield, playing the leader of the Mire, is on fine form doing his best Tim Curry OTT villain impression. The monsters are a reasonably good design. Why didn't all that add up to something? Well, there's not much of any of that in the running time; instead from the - somewhat lengthy - introduction with the Doctor and Clara in the midst of a different adventure, and onwards, a theme is heavy-handedly highlighted: who can and can't the Doctor save, and what impact does that have on him? At first glance, this doesn't seem as fun as vikings versus spacemen, but let's give it the benefit of the doubt and go with it. Clara chides the Doctor when he's given up hope and is aiming only to give the villagers a chance to die in battle. That's not like him, we know that - we watch the show. We know he'll think of a plan, and he does.

Because of all the soul searching, there's not much time for the plan nor even the battle, so the defeat seems too easy. The vikings have a tank of electric eels, which is - if one is very generous - just about plausible: some historically unknown raiding party must have brought them back from somewhere in South America. There's no evidence for such a thing, but nobody can prove it didn't happen, just as nobody can prove vikings didn't ever have horned helmets as they do in this story. Many Doctor Who stories, of course, particularly those set in Earth's history, have been built on shakier foundations of accuracy. And the defeat of the Mire -  using trickery, theatre and ridicule instead of violence - is fun in a light-hearted way. It's all instantly undercut, though, by the revelation that Ashildr is dead. Cue: more soul searching. It's a little bit sad, yes, but people die during the Doctor's adventures, and there's nothing to make this one particularly stand out compared to the deaths in the underwater vessel in previous story Under the Lake / Before The Flood or in the Zygon invasion 2-parter to come, or any other story. The script gives no reason for the Doctor to overreact, but he nonetheless does. It's momentarily exciting, because there's a flashback montage to the Fires of Pompeii story which featured Peter Capaldi in a guest role, and to scenes in his first ever story Deep Breath where he wonders why he's picked this particular face. It's startling because it's unexpected, but was it necessary to provide such an explanation?  Anyway, it galvanises the Doctor into an uncharacteristic - and as it turns out hasty - action.

The reason given for his choosing his face is to remind him that he must save people (as the Doctor saved the character played by Capaldi and his family in Pompeii). But when exactly was he supposed to have forgotten that, such that he needs a permanent reminder? Just before acquiring this face, he spent centuries defending a bloody village from bloody aliens exactly as he does in The Girl Who Died. He saves people every week; he also loses people every week, however hard he tries. None of this is news, and there is no particular motivation for him to save Ashildr above anyone else. She's not that special. She's loved by the village, and is a storyteller, okay. But what else? If she'd perhaps been the mother of the baby that is referenced every so often throughout it might make more sense (the Doctor, who speaks baby, gets crucial clues from listening to the baby crying). Or if there was anything else in the script to make this death atypical in any way, but there's nothing, The only thing that's special about Ashildr is that she's played by a guest actor who's a bit of a draw because she appeared in another fantasy genre show (Game of Thrones). The story is damaged by insufficient motivation for the Doctor to save her at all, let alone do so in such a way as to make her immortal, which is something consistently shown in Doctor Who to be an issue (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details). The mini-cliff at the end hints at this, in a very well realised circling shot of Ashildr, who stays still while the days pass time-lapsed around her, and her expression changes, her stare becoming hard and cold. But I just didn't buy it. Unfortunately, the remainder of the season will develop Ashildr's story in an arc-plot, so I couldn't buy that either. 

 

Connectivity:

Both The Girl Who Died and Wild Blue Yonder have a pre-credits scene that's unconnected to the main action, and both see the Doctor, and his one female travelling companion, separated from the TARDIS early on. The Mire's combat suits have a certain look in common with Jimbo the robot from the later story - rusted industrial chic, with big head / helmet.

Deeper Thoughts:

What - live forever, never die? That is what the word means... As I discussed in the blog post for the linked story that followed this one The Woman Who Lived, it isn't mandatory for a story about someone becoming immortal (or losing "the ability to die" as the Doctor puts it) to portray this as a miserable fate, but Doctor Who rarely strays from such an approach. Striving for immortality is definitely something risky in the Whoniverse. It's no picnic if you've always been immortal either. Beings like the Eternals or the Toymaker aren't shown to be miserable exactly, but they are both extremely bored with eternity and have to find often dubious pursuits to entertain themselves. The Time Lords too originally came into the same category. In The War Games, the story that first properly introduced the Doctor's people and some of their backstory, they were said to "live forever, barring accidents" (a piece of dialogue used again to describe Ashildr in The Girl Who Died) but they "hardly ever use [their] great powers". The Doctor grew bored of this and rebelled. Later, when Tom Baker had taken over the role, the introduction of a limit to regenerations side-stepped (at least for a while, anyway) any potential implications for the show's leading character. Elsewhere, immortality and immortals were generally shown in a negative light, so it was probably best not to dwell on the fact that our hero was one of their number. Likely it was not entirely deliberately, but The Brain of Morbius sets out the slightly amended approach comprehensively: "Death," says the Doctor in that story, "Is the price we pay for progress". He claims there's a big difference between Time Lords' regeneration and the longevity of the Sisterhood of Karn in that story, who use an elixir of life that leaves them unchanged, and so nothing on Karn ever changes.

It's probably no coincidence that the Sisterhood were brought back for the second Capaldi season of which The Girl Who Died was part, where immortality was going to be interrogated somewhat; but, it's anyway a topic that keeps coming up in all periods of the show's history. It's often used as a motivation of a character to clue us in that they're a wrong 'un (like Joshua Naismith in The End of Time attempting to use Vinvocci tech to help his daughter live forever, or Queen Xanxia in The Pirate Planet leaving a trail of devastated planets in her wake, trying to extend her life indefinitely), or it is gained as the result of foolhardy ventures and proves to be a prison and a torment (Mawdryn and his fellow scientists in Mawdryn Undead, Borusa in The Five Doctors). I struggle to think of any positive aspects of immortality expressed in the classic series (all 26 years of it). The new series was mostly a misery-fest too, but intriguingly it has used immortality in a not entirely negative way when writing companion characters out of the show. At first, this was only related to one character, Captain Jack Harkness. At the end of the first season of the revived show, he is resurrected by Bad Wolf Rose after being killed by the Daleks, and thereafter he cannot die. In his later appearances in the main show, he seems to have made his peace with this situation. That is mainly, of course, because he had his own spin-off show aimed at an older audience to be broody and tormented in. The final (to date) series of Torchwood had an arc-plot that explored the terrible ramifications of everyone in the world gaining Jack's ability, so it wasn't by any means a wholly positive take.

A few years after Jack's resurrection, there's some echoes of what happened to him in River Song's final fate. Just like Jack, she appears to die bravely, but then is brought back to life, a life that will last forever, without any say in the matter. In Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead that eternal life is as a consciousness plugged into a computer-controlled dreamscape, which could be a fate worse than death if one thinks for any length of time about it. The character was at that point only intended as a one-off not a regular, though, and that's possibly why there were no qualms about presenting this as if it is a wholly happy ending. The writer of that story, Steven Moffat, then pulls the same trick later on for companion Clara and then again for Bill. The pattern is similar again: a regular character is killed, which the audience watching - presuming they're invested - does not like to see, so they're forgiving when an episode or two later, it turns out they haven't quite died at all, and in fact exist in their last extended second of life, or as a free-floating consciousness. Again, these were presented as happy endings, and again it wouldn't take much to see them as the opposite. Indeed, it didn't take long for the series to see a little negative there. In The Giggle, the Doctor is confronted by the consequences of his actions, and there's strong hints that he has some residual guilt about how Bill and Clara are now "living" "happily" ever after. Showrunner Chris Chibnall put a stop to endings where the Doctor's friends become immortal. Everyone who travelled with Jodie Whittaker's Doctor came home in one piece, and got to continue living a normal life-span. Who knows what fate is in store for Ruby Sunday, though? Only a couple of months to go before we start finding out...

In Summary:

Disappointing, probably because of a poorly motivated action that lies at its heart.

Wild Blue Yonder

Chapter the 292nd, wherein the Doctor and Donna get all bent out of shape even though there's Not-Thing to worry about.

Plot:
The TARDIS is out of control after Donna split coffee on the console. After a brief stop in an apple tree and a hello to Isaac Newton, the time travellers arrive in a vast and empty spaceship at the edge of the universe. The Doctor sets his time and space machine to mend itself, and he and Donne explore; almost instantly, though, the TARDIS dematerialises without them. The Doctor realises that they have landed in a hostile environment, and the ship will not return until they have neutralised these hostilities. They find many mysteries aboard. Why does the ship reconfigure itself every so often after strange words are spoken over the ship's PA? Why is a rusty old robot moving very slowly down a corridor? And why was the airlock opened three years ago? Before they can find answers, the Doctor and Donna meet copies of themselves; these are predatory entities, the Not-Things, that can mimic people. Luckily, they find it difficult to get the shapes exactly right, allowing the real Doctor and Donna to know who's Who, but the Not-Things are quick learners. The real versions of our heroes get chased around by the fakes, and slowly piece together what is happening. The captain of the ship ejected herself into the vacuum three years ago to stop the Not-Things copying her, preventing their piloting the ship back to civilisation. She then set a slow trap - the ship is gradually instigating its self-destruct process, with the robot moving into place to press the final button; the strange words were a countdown. The Doctor speeds up the countdown; as it nears completion, the TARDIS returns. The real Doctor and Donna just manage to escape and the Not-Things are blown up. Back in London, Wilf has been waiting for the TARDIS to come back; the world around him is in chaos, with everyone having seemingly gone mad...

Context:

It feels like this one's only just been on TV; it was not long after my initial watch and even less time since rewatching it on the Blu-Ray which I got as a Christmas present from the fam. For this blog post, though, I got to experience it afresh in a different medium, as I was reading the novelisation (see Deeper Thoughts below). I read the book in a few days in February 2024, then had another look at the TV episode to make sure I remembered the visuals clearly enough for its write-up. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. I have completed 20 out of the total of 39 seasons to date (at the time of writing). There are also specials in between those seasons (mostly in the new series years post 2005), and I've completed most of those too. With this one done, I only have two other specials to date to cover: The Giggle, last of the trilogy that saw Tennant and Tate returning, and Jodie Whittaker's swansong The Power of the Doctor.

First Time Round:

This story was watched on its debut broadcast in the UK on Saturday 2nd December 2023 live from the BBC iplayer by the whole family (Better Half and all three children, boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11). We'd put up the Christmas decorations during the hours before broadcast and I was feeling festive, so I poured myself a large cocktail to accompany my viewing. I probably made it too strong and/or I'd not eaten enough that day and/or I'd not had enough sleep the night before, but this drink went straight to my head. I could barely stay awake through the broadcast, and turned in for the night immediately after the story finished. Even through that fug, it was clear to me that I'd watched something remarkable. My early night alas led to sitting up wide-awake at 4.30am the next day. Unable to sleep, I crept downstairs to the living room and killed time until everyone else was up by watching something akin to a Doctor Who panto, then watching Wild Blue Yonder again.

Reaction:

At the time it was first shown, the immediate reaction from some fans was disappointment about what Wild Blue Yonder didn't feature, rather than what it did. In a cruel irony, the minimalism of the story meant it was marketed with more secrecy than the other two 60th anniversary specials around it (having little that could be shared without being a spoiler), and that left a gap into which overheated imaginings flooded. Before one could say 'Clown-face emoji', people were speculating that this secrecy was because Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi and all the other Doctors, companions, villains and monsters would be appearing. It's interesting that the nature of the Not-Thing creatures could have allowed some scope for cameos: the script says that the creatures can copy but they aren't as aware of shapes as us, and that they have access to the full memory of the Time Lord: they could have copied wrong and briefly ended up with some old faces of the Doctor. But the nature of the tale was minimalism not the maximalism of some fans' expectations. The production team had what they considered to be - and it's a feeling shared by a lot of us, to be fair - the dream team of David Tennant and Catherine Tate back, and they were going to make full use of them. I can see if you're more of a fan of Eleven and Amy, or Twelve and Clara, or whoever, it would be disappointing in an anniversary year to concentrate on just one team, but tiny cameos by those characters likely wouldn't have satisfied anyway (and this is assuming they'd have all been willing and available to appear). Creating a decent narrative with many returning characters is hard, and often leads to messy results. Wild Blue Yonder has a clean and elegant story that any additions would have muddled.

Because the simplicity of the arrangement of elements in the piece is its key strength, I'd almost be tempted to lose the pre-credits sequence where the Doctor and Donna meet Isaac Newton. It's fun though, and sets up a running gag in this story and those shown after it that the Doctor and Donna have inadvertently changed history so that gravity is instead dubbed 'mavity' by its discoverer. Is this just a piece of ongoing silliness, or will it pay-off as some clue to future traversing of the multiverse? Time will tell. The other aspect of the pre-credits sequence that had an impact was the colourblind casting of Nathaniel Curtis as Newton. He was great, and it was fantastic to see him in Doctor Who; it also annoyed some inflexibly-minded people on the internet (whether you see this as another plus is entirely up to your own judgement!). These few, mild controversies aside, the story was the sort of straightforward narrative that it must be incredibly complicated to write and to direct. The later duty fell to Tom Kingsley, and on the basis of his work here, it would be great to see him return to the show. The story relied on two very different types of scenes: quiet and emotional interactions between the Doctor and Donna (or their doubles in different combos - some of the most heartstring-tugging moments turned out to be when one character was baring their soul to an imposter), and big effects scenes with contorted fairground-mirror versions of our heroes attacking. Kingsley and crew handled both with aplomb. There was some magnificent production design on display here, with use of elegant bubbling hydraulics or organic goo as set dressing in various of the spaceship's chambers, courtesy of designer Phil Sims, all of which were lit beautifully.

Then, there were the sets that weren't even really there. Will we one day look back on the effects work used here to put the Doctor and Donna into vast metallic spaces, and think it looks dated? Will green-screen technology improve in future such that this work looks rudimentary by comparison? I can't see how myself, as I could not see any join. Every detail seemed to have been considered from the design of the alien captain floating outside the ship to the alien numerals on the control panels, from a cute rusty robot to the majestic vista of the ship floating alone in the inky blackness. It all looked amazing, but the material had the depth to mean it wasn't all just shiny surface. Even the smallest moments, like Donna and the Doctor stopping themselves from bickering when things start to go wrong, or the haunted moment where the Doctor talks with not-Donna about his newly discovered Timeless Child status - it all resonated. The early scenes of the two characters just hanging out are a joy, finding the name Mrs. Bean unfeasibly funny. If all that wasn't enough for you, then at the end it played the last magnificent card of its hand, and we got a scene with Bernard Cribbins as Wilf. The actor's final scene in any production, so we were so blessed to get it. Wilf's joy at seeing the Tennant Doctor, despite the chaos going on around them, could melt the frostiest of hearts. Maybe none of the concepts in the story are exactly revolutionary: Doctor Who has done the regulars alone on an abandoned spaceship many times, and the mimicking Not-Things are like a rerun of the creature from Midnight. The story is much more optimistic than Midnight, though, and that's because in that story the Doctor and Donna were separated; the joy of Wild Blue Yonder is seeing them together.

Connectivity:

Both Wild Blue Yonder and Full Circle feature crafts situated outside of the area of space in which the Doctor normally travels (the edge of the universe in the Tennant special, a different universe in the Baker serial). In both ships, activity is happening at a somewhat slow pace, the original crews are long gone, and the ships are instead inhabited by interloper creatures who are adept at developing to suit their new environment. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Target Acquired: Further Novelisation Collection. The original Target imprint, owned by a number of publishers over the years, was the home of novelisations of almost all the Doctor Who television stories. Starting in the 1970s, it kept going until the early 1990s, when the available pool of stories to turn into books ran out. For a number of years before 2024, a relaunched Target range has been running. It published all the stories that hadn't been available for whatever reason first time round, closing the gaps, published alternate versions of previously novelised stories, and it started on converting the new series stories from 2005 onwards too. In fits and starts, batches of books have come out for readers and collectors to enjoy. This latest batch of three are a bit different, though. Even in the old days, television production and book publishing timelines rarely aligned; the Target novelisations were on their own schedule, often covering a story many years after it had been shown on the TV. Now, because the production schedule of the 60th anniversary specials and Ncuti Gatwa's stories is substantially ahead of transmission, it is possible to have synchronised tie-ins. The three book versions of the 2023 anniversary specials starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate were available in audio form immediately after broadcast, with the paperback versions coming out in January 2024, only a few weeks after the television showings. The authors picked to write the books all seem aptly chosen. Gary Russell takes on the most traditional script, The Star Beast, Mark Morris covers the horror-inflected Wild Blue Yonder, and James Goss the fast-paced and camp finale of the trio, The Giggle.

The first few pages of The Star Beast are loaded with continuity in-jokes and references (calling back to the original comic strips, the classic series, and the new series) and it got a bit overwhelming for this fan. One starts to fret that every detail must link to something from Doctor Who's past, and if that happens to be a Virgin New Adventure novel one hasn't read, or a Big Finish audio to which one hasn't listened, then one's missing out. It settles down after a while, though, and it wouldn't be intrusive to someone less steeped in lore. The book is structured into seven longer chapters, separated by fun epistolary interludes. From experience of the novelisations of recent stories, an hour long special usually provides enough material for an 150-page paperback without the need for the author to create too much extra. There's even a couple of omissions, probably because the action didn't work in book form; the reporter at the steelworks is missing, as is the intercut flashback late on of Rose chanting "Non-binary" over and over. The small amount of action added (an early scene where Rose sees the Doctor use his sonic screwdriver, more scenes featuring the character of Fudge) is almost certainly material cut from the TV version before broadcast. Beyond this, Russell uses the tried and trusted technique of adding a POV character that provides a perspective of certain scenes as they play out (something Malcolm Hulke often did in early titles in the Target range). This character Stew Ferguson is one who had fleetingly appeared many years before in TV Doctor Who, but you'd never guess where in a million years. All told, this is an entertaining version of the story, satisfyingly getting into the characters' heads (you'll come out with a fuller understanding of Sylvia Noble for a start).

Morris's prose in his adaptation of Wild Blue Yonder is more unobtrusive and economical, in keeping with the story's minimalist feel. The tale is told briskly without any significant changes, capturing the characters' emotional reactions without lengthy paragraphs about their inner life. No in-jokes here (or at least none that I noticed), no new material (I half expected a prologue featuring the original captain of the craft ejecting herself into space, but this is left as backstory) and no new characters. The cast list is so small that Morris has no choice but to get inside the Doctor's head occasionally, which could be a risky endeavour - the character still has to retain some mystery. When it's done, it's done well: there's a wonderful moment of the Doctor summoning up new resolve after a moment of vulnerability (when he pummels the walls in frustration, as seen on TV).  Given the visual nature of the setting and the monstrousness encountered there, the success of the book lies in how well the descriptions capture the images; again Morris keeps things simple and effective with the occasional comparison to a slug or a scorpion, but nothing overblown. Good chosen nouns and verbs, not too many modifiers. The only gesture at ornamentation is making the chapter headings the alien words for the numbers in the countdown in descending order, Fenshaw, Coliss, Brate, etc. The overall approach might be too functional for some readers, but it is in line with the material it is adapting, and allows the strength of the story to come through.

Goss's The Giggle is at the other end of the spectrum, rainbow-hued, sugar-rich and quirky, again as befits the tone of the original TV version. The chapters (listed as a set of moves as in one of the Toymaker's games) are told from an omniscient viewpoint, the narrator of which turns out to be the Toymaker himself. There are hints of this early on, but it's revealed in full about a third of the way through. Steven Moffat did something similar with a different narrator in the novelisation of The Day of the Doctor a few years back, and I found it too mannered and distracting for that story. Here, it works because it fits the character and plot of endless game-playing. It allows the action to occasionally be punctuated by parodies of games and puzzles, or bits of concrete poetry illustrating the action. The book even takes on the structure of a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' book when Donna is exploring the corridors behind the Toymaker's shop. Elsewhere there is meta humour, where the Toymaker breaks the fourth-wall (if books indeed have four walls). I think the only time these alienation devices get in the way is during the more emotional moments. At the end of the story where the Doctor is born anew but still exists in his old version too, getting to do his therapy out of order, the narration returns to the normal style; all the time I was reading it I was therefore distracted by wondering who was narrating this if not the Toymaker, and if it was him, why he was suddenly being so respectful. It's the most interesting of the three books, and probably my favourite overall; but all three are worth reading. I hope to see more from the Target range soon. These are definitely not the last tie-in books being released close to the time of broadcast, as next story on The Church on Ruby Road has already come out in hardback. I expect a paperback edition will come out sooner rather than later.

In Summary:

If you think about it, it was a multi-Doctor story with familiar monsters and multiple returning companions. I don't know what people are moaning about!

Full Circle

Chapter the 291st, where the Doctor artfully dodges having to return Romana to Gallifrey.

Plot:
The Doctor, Romana and K9 are in the TARDIS en route to Gallifrey, but things go wibbly when they pass through a highly-scientific (magic) portal that leads to another universe, e-space. Instead of Gallifrey, they land on Alzarius. This is seemingly a temperate paradise where people harvest fruits and swim in rivers and the like. Then, Mistfall comes - an environmental change every five decades or so caused by the planet's orbit in space. This is a time where the people must shelter inside the Starliner, a ship that crashed on the planet years before bringing castaways from another world, Terradon. The people are told the atmosphere becomes poisonous during Mistfall, but it's merely a time when homicidal creatures emerge and roam around. The authorities of the people on the Starliner, a three-person committee called the Deciders, are cagey about sharing any details of these Marshmen with the people. Why could that be? A few young rebels, the Outlers, are stuck outside the ship when it is closed up, and meet with the Doctor and Romana. Two of these Outlers are Varsh and his brother Adric. The Marshmen knock K9's head off, and a marsh spider bites Romana which puts her under the Marshmen's control. The Doctor meanwhile enters the Starliner. The Outlers are separated from Romana in the TARDIS, and accidentally materialise it inside the Starliner. Romana helps the Marshmen break into the Starliner.

The Doctor confronts the Deciders and discovers some truths: the ongoing Starliner maintenance work that the people are engaged in is pointless busy work: the ship has been ready to take off for centuries, but nobody knows how to fly it - the records that survived were all about maintaining the ship, but nothing survived about operating it. The other revelation is that the people on the Starliner did not come from Terradon, they are instead descendants of Marshmen who invaded the ship many generations before. As someone had gnomically pointed out early on, they've come "Full Circle". Although, if they'd come full circle, wouldn't they be evolving into Marshmen again? I'm not getting how they've come full circle. This is like people getting a 180 mistaken for a 360; the people of the Starliner have only come "Semi-Circle", if you ask me. Anyway, Varsh is killed fighting to hold back the invading Marshmen, The Doctor manages to cure Romana, repel the Marshmen, and to get the Starliner in the air to take the evolved Starliner dwellers off into the stars. When he, Romana and K9 leave, Adric stows away on board the TARDIS.

Context:

I watched this from the Blu-ray across two weekends in January and February 2024, two episodes at a time with a week between them. The younger two of my kids (boy of 14, girl of 11) were in attendance for some periods, but it didn't hold their attention throughout. The youngest was particularly enamoured of K9 and his adventuring around Alzarius accompanied by Paddy Kingsland's jaunty motif. She was very unhappy when he was beheaded and took no further active part in the story, as she thinks - quote unquote - that "K9 is the best!". I wonder that a lot of children watching thought the same when this was first shown; the production team appreciated the metallic mutt much less than the audience, and continually - and often brutally - wrote him out of stories, before finally getting rid of him altogether a couple of stories after Full Circle.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with current stories being broadcast serially. This story marks another season of Doctor Who completed, classic series 18, Tom Baker's seventh and final run from 1980/81. This is the 20th season completed out of the total of 39 to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 10, 11 and 13).

First Time Round:

One of my earliest glimpses of Doctor Who ever was from this story, when I was changing channels on the TV. This was before I became a fan and regular viewer, but exactly how long before I cannot tell as I'm not certain whether this glimpse was during the original broadcast in the autumn of 1980 or the terrestrial repeat in Summer 1981. It was a moment with Romana under the influence of a Marsh Spider bite with tendril lines over her face, which seared itself onto young me's memory. I watched the complete story from a reasonably good tape-to-tape copy from fan friend David (mentioned many times before on the blog) in 1992; then, in the years thereafter, I collected it in incrementally better fidelity on sell-though VHS when it came out in 1997, then DVD in 2009, and finally Blu-Ray in 2019.

Reaction:

Famously, Full Circle was written by a teenage fan. Andrew Smith was 17 years old when it was made, 18 when it was shown, but he'd been pitching ideas to the production office for many years before this one was finally developed and produced. Smith is undoubtedly therefore responsible for making all teenage fans for the next ten years wrongly believe they could be in with a shot of getting their Doctor Who story made (and yes, I was one of them); more positively, a few of those young scribblers ended up creating Who stories for books and audio during the wilderness years when Doctor Who was not on TV, and this was one of the things that kept interest in the show alive such that it could eventually return. If Full Circle hadn't been made, maybe Doctor Who would not still be a going concern now, showing as it did that the writing of Doctor Who didn't have to be an old man's game? What's curious though, is that it's not exactly an idea bursting with youthful vigour. If you didn't know, you'd probably guess it was written by a middle-aged man, with its themes of indecision, impotence and fear of getting replaced by another incoming generation. This may be because Smith was a preternaturally mature talent (and he was), but it might also be connected to the script editor Christopher H. Bidmead. In every one of the three stories in the loose e-space trilogy that kicked off with Full Circle - for all of which Bidmead was screenplay midwife as he was for all the stories during the year - there's a spacecraft that can't take off, usually crewed by ineffectual men (often with beards). This is one of the more energetic of this type of story in season 18 - often the visuals during this season are aiming for operatic grandeur (The Leisure Hive, Warrior's Gate) rather than thrills and spills.

The vitality in the story, and the excitement in the visuals, comes mainly from the director Peter Grimwade's approach to the material. Grimwade had worked on Doctor Who in various capacities before, but this was his first director gig, and he would make his mark with Full Circle and a number of other stories over the next couple of years as either director or writer. The script gifts him one great sequence, where the marshmen arise from the depths and advance, and a couple of juicy story reversals. Grimwade gets the most out of these. The first of these reversals is that the Starliner has been ready to take off for centuries, but nobody knows how to fly it; the second, that the inhabitants of the Starliner are not the descendants of the original crew and passengers that crashed generations ago, but are instead descended from the hyper-adaptive Marshmen that broke in many years before. Again, this is satisfying as presented, but the lifecycle gets more confusing if one gives it any thought after watching. The main issue I think is the inclusion of the marsh spiders. If the idea is that they evolve into Marshmen, then why are both presented as existing in the same environment at the same time? Is the spiders' power to control people whom they bite significant to the evolution? Or is it, as I suspect, just to add another monster and create some frightening moments? To be fair, a lot of those moments work (one was so effective it stuck in my mind for many a few years - see First Time Round above), and it's good to give Lalla Ward the chance to do some possessed acting, which she almost never got to do (other companions would be hypnotised left, right and centre).

In general, Grimwade is better at getting effective sequences on location film than he is in the multi-camera studio (he'd get better at creating dynamism in the latter environment in subsequent stories he helmed). A few of the scuffles on the Starliner are a little messy. The performances Grimwade gets out of his cast are generally of high quality. George Baker, James Bree and Alan Rowe (the last of whom had previously been in many Doctor Who stories including Horror of Fang Rock - see Deeper Thoughts section for more on that story) as the Deciders do solid work; Tom Baker gets to do some nice righteous anger scenes confronting them. The younger members of the cast playing the Outlers all comport themselves well, even Matthew Waterhouse as incoming regular Adric, who was inexperienced with TV work. The character he's saddled with doesn't do a new young actor any favours. Initially conceived by the production team as a kind-of Artful Dodger in space, the scripts subsequently produced for him just don't present the character as anything like that. He's instead a precocious member of the elite, with intellectual skills, but no street smarts, who - one assumes from the scenes in Full Circle - will gradually learn during his travels with the Doctor (in other words, exactly the same arc as Romana when she was introduced). Adric isn't eventually developed that way either, and ends up as a character without a raison d'etre.

Adric is, though, the first new regular character of a new regime, and they would get a bit better at creating such characters anon. With these first signs of changes to the regular cast, bringing in younger actors, Full Circle feels like the first proper John Nathan-Turner story. The scripts for the previous two stories (The Leisure Hive and Meglos) would not have been out of place in seasons run by the previous producer, indeed the first was a script from the go-to writer of that previous era given a 1980s paint job. Full Circle, with a new young writer, a new young director and a new young regular was the point where things really started to change.

Connectivity:

Both Full Circle and The Caves of Androzani are four-part 1980s stories produced by John Nathan-Turner. In both, there is a plot point about the orbit of the planet on which the story is set periodically causing environmental changes (Mistfall on Alzarius, mudbusrts on Androzani Minor).

 

Deeper Thoughts:

From Alzarius to Ruta 3: Season 15 screenings at the BFI Southbank, 4th February 2024. Some milestones one passes without noticing. In July 2023, with the blog post for The Power of Kroll, and without any fanfare, I finally covered the entire Doctor Who oeuvre of producer Graham Williams. This write-up of a Williams-related BFI day has therefore to be attached to a Tom Baker story from after his time, albeit only the third story to be broadcast after Williams had left and the producer job had been taken on by John Nathan-Turner. The next story broadcast after Full Circle was a reworking of a Terrance Dicks script that Williams had commissioned to be his first produced story (eventually being replaced by Horror of Fang Rock). Despite some differences of look and feel where Nathan-Turner wanted to distance his stories from the previous era, 1980s Who generally builds on what Williams achieved. The three seasons where Williams was in charge, from 1977 to 1980, saw a widening out of the styles and tones of tales that could be told compared to Tom Baker's early stories, including more literary and lyrical styles. Chris Chapman, director of a new feature-length documentary Darkness and Light - The Life of Graham Williams made this point in his introduction to the doco, praising Williams's "intergalactic imagination". The screenings at the BFI were to tie-in to the latest Collection Blu-Ray box set, season 15, on which Darkness and Light was to be a special feature. But the day - and in particular the doco - also served as a long overdue tribute to everything that Williams achieved with Doctor Who.

Chris Chapman

It was almost a full audience in NFT1 hearing Chapman speak despite it being a 9.30am start on a cold Sunday. He explained that the project could only go ahead with the blessing of the Williams family; happily, when he approached them and explained his intentions they agreed to go ahead. The narrative of the documentary is propelled only by the interviewees and the lion's share of material comes from the family, Graham's window and three children, each with a subtly distinct perspective on a man who's been absent from their lives, but not their hearts, for over three decades now. Before the screening started, Chapman entreated us to avoid sharing too many details on social media, to better allow people to find out any new information provided within the context of the documentary itself. It was the right advice, which makes it difficult to share much more. I will just note two things: one is that Williams died in Summer 1990, which happened to be a point where I was re-embracing my fandom after a few years of more casual enthusiasm for the show. The tragedy coincided with my joining the Doctor Who Appreciation Society and re-subscribing to Doctor Who Magazine, so I saw a lot of detailed career retrospectives and other tributes to him then. Despite all that, I learned a lot from this documentary. Second, after it had ended - just like with Chapman's JNT documentary Showman (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details) - I needed a moment or two to process it. Be prepared for it to provoke some emotion. As it was, there was a full 45 minutes before the next screening, a showing of a new version of Horror of Fang Rock with new effects, made for the Blu-ray box set.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres 

The hosts for this event were as usual Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. They brought all the usual trappings of these events, including many a double entendre: talking about a recent podcast they did together that had done good numbers, Johnson said "Dick does always boost the ratings". They invited Mark Ayres up for a brief chat about the 5.1 mix we were about to hear (which was very effective). Then, Johnson read out some of the twitter activity connected to the screening. Someone was moaning that their train was delayed because of a trespasser at Slough, "Don't they know I have Louise Jameson to see". Someone else was wondering if "any cute boys" might be in attendance. "You're not going to find them in this audience" said Johnson, eliciting a chorus of Panto boos from the assembled. The quiz followed, with answers to trivia questions getting the person that could shout "Dick" first and loudest some swag. After that there was an impromptu chat with fan and comedian Frank Skinner, who is sometimes in the audience for these events and is cajoled onto the stage to give a fan's view, or to make the audience laugh, both of which he did on this day. He talked mainly about Terrance Dicks, his onetime neighbour, about whom was made the magnificent documentary Terrance and Me that Skinner fronted ("Though not one deemed good enough to be shown at the BFI" he added in mock hurt, though the Blu-ray set that the documentary was on never got a BFI screening as it came out in the middle of Covid restrictions). He also shared an anecdote about spending a night in what he thought was a disused lighthouse with his partner, that turned out not to be disused at all. This culminated in the punchline "Those glow in the dark condoms were a waste of money."

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Skinner

The first two episodes of Fang Rock were then shown. My blog post on the story, form early on in the blog's life, can be found here. The new effects for the crash of the ship at the end of episode one are much better, but they still run as long as the original (which infamously holds on the model-work far too long). I'd have been tempted to trim it down, but that's probably impossible given the way the new effects are presented on the discs (as branching versions of the episodes rather than as a separate versions on their own). The main thing that stood out on this watch, though, was just how good the story is, with whatever effects. A slightly duff model shot notwithstanding, Horror of Fang Rock is top drawer Who, one of the best. It might get forgotten that it's quite so good, as it's never been in the top ten of polls, up there with Talons or Genesis or Caves; but, watching it again I realise, as the youth might say, that it slaps (more on slaps in a moment). Invited on stage in between the two halves of the story was the person responsible for the new effects Chris Thompson. Chris has worked on many of Pete McTighe's short films that act as trailers for the box sets (including the one for season 15 that was shown later on that day in the BFI). He had to view lots of footage of boats crashing into one another for research, which was "weirdly therapeutic". Apart from the boats, the first two episodes had a lot of subtle improvements of rotoscoping in the lamp room scenes, but the major contribution to the story had not yet been seen by the audience, as it featured only in episodes three and four: a new version of the Rutan creature. Thompson had successfully pitched to do the creature as a practical effect using puppetry, which I think was a great decision: the texture of the skin and the tendrils would never have been as easily achievable on a budget if it had been done CG.

Thompson (L) shows Johnson the Rutan puppet

The final two episodes were then shown, and the new Rutan looked great; it was also accompanied in the new sound mix by some farty, squelchy noises that amused a lot of the BFI audience. The only other major audience reactions were related to the (deliberately) irritating character of Adelaide - there was a round of applause when Leela slaps her during a hysterical outburst, and another when she died. The episodes being done, Thompson came back on the stage to display the model Rutan in all its green glory. Next up was a selection of clips from the Blu-ray box set's Value Added Material. We were shown excerpts from the new Making Of for Fang Rock, from Darkness and Light (for those that hadn't been around earlier), some funny moments from Behind the Sofa, and the short film / trailer depicting Leela on Gallifrey fighting Daleks during the Time War. This last one was then discussed by Pete McTighe and Louise Jameson, who both came up, one after the other, onto the stage. McTighe had wanted to right the historical wrong of Leela's (and Louise's) half-hearted exist from the series, and also take the opportunity to have Leela meet the Daleks (something she never did in her time in the TARDIS on TV). Asked about a spin-off featuring the older Leela, Jameson told the audience to "Ask Russell" as in T. Davies, and added that she'd be back "in a nanosecond" if she was asked. McTighe, when asked about the budget for this latest short film, which - from what was on screen - looked to be larger than usual, said it was "20 quid and a ham sandwich". He also attempted some expectation management, suggesting that people couldn't expect big productions every time, and that he might have to produce a more traditional clips-based trailer occasionally in future. This was over-excitedly reported online later with headlines suggesting the trailers were being "rested", but that wasn't what he was saying.

Johnson (L) and McTighe (R)

McTighe left the stage, and a couple of the guest cast of Horror of Fang Rock joined Jameson: John Abbott (Vince) and Annette Woollett (Adelaide). Jameson touched on some subjects she's covered many times before. Her difficult relationship with Tom Baker when making Doctor Who, which has come semi-circle since then to the point that they're now good friends (Johnson mentioned that in 2013, when they had BFI screenings for the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, Baker only agreed to attend if Jameson was coming too), and her hasty exit from the programme. Graham Williams was hoping to persuade her to stay until the very last moment, so she didn't get the kind of ending for the Leela that she'd have desired, dying heroically saving the Doctor's life. Woollett confirmed that on her insistence Jameson gave her a full-on slap rather than use any stage fakery. She also thanked everybody for the work they'd done on the new version, which made it in her opinion a "completely different show". Abbott gave a shout out to the late Colin Douglas for his significant contribution to the story as Rueben and as the Rutan mimicking him, and for giving him acting advice during its making: "Always be doing something before they shout action". Woollett revealed that she'd played the sister of Abbott's character on Emmerdale Farm, many years after working on Doctor Who, but Abbott had no memory of this. Tom Baker seemed to have been challenging to work with for both these guest actors: he did lots of improvisations with Abbott in rehearsal, then suddenly threw them all out when it came to recording. He stood on the hem of Woollett's dress as she was entering a scene, as he thought it was funny.

(L to R) Johnson, Jameson, Abbott, Woollett

A discussion about Leela being one of the first Doctor Who characters to have an action figure (in the Denys Fisher range of the 1970s - Jameson's mother put it atop their Christmas tree) led to Jameson sharing a joke that a collector should say at her funeral, as the coffin comes in, that she's "worth more in the box". During audience questions, Woollett explained that she thought Adelaide was just as much of a pain as the audience did; Abbott thought that "Vince was lovely" and didn't deserve his fate. Nobody could remember a row documented in the story's production file between the actor playing Lord Palmerdale, Sean Caffrey, and director Paddy Russell - all remembered her as exacting, but sympathetic and open to ideas from the cast. Jameson was asked about any advice - or warning - she gave to Mary Tamm, who followed her in the companion role playing Romana mark one. Jameson and Tamm had both been in the same year at RADA. The first question Tamm asked her was "How much were you being paid?". Jameson didn't warn her off, and in the end Tamm got on very well with Tom, which Jameson put down to Tamm being more well-read than herself. She broke all our hearts when she said, with a crack in her voice, "I miss Mary". That goes for all of us too, I'm sure. Once the panel left the stage, the last treat was a brand-new clips trailer for the set, then it was off to the BFI cocktail bar for a drink with the fan friends that attended alongside me (the aforementioned David, plus Chris and Scott). I haven't been to a Blu-Ray event at the BFI for some time (I had clashes for the one at the end of 2022 and both of those that took place in 2023), and this refreshed my memory about how enjoyable they are. I look forward to trying to get tickets to the next one, whenever that may be.

In Summary:

Efficient, and a little bit showy; the first real salvo of the John Nathan-Turner era. Should be called "Semi-Circle", though.