The Night of the Doctor

Chapter the 303rd, covers some Doctor Who, but probably not the Doctor Who you were expecting.

Plot:
During the Time War, the Paul McGann version of the Doctor materialises on a stricken space-gunship. When its sole occupant Cass finds out that he is a Time Lord, a people she holds in contempt because of their contribution to the carnage, she refuses to escape with him in the TARDIS. He is still trying to persuade her when the ship crashes onto the planet Karn. Both Cass and the Doctor are killed, but the Sisterhood of Karn restore the Doctor to life for a short period. They believe he is the one hope of ending the war, and offer him a controlled regeneration using mixtures of their elixir. The Doctor has so far refused to fight in the war, and is in no mood to change now, but they persuade him. He chooses to become a warrior, sends the Sisterhood away, salutes his companions of old, and drinks the mixture. He regenerates into a young John Hurt, and dons Cass's bandolier - ready for battle at last.

Context:

Is this cheating? My calculations tell me that at my current rate of blogging I have enough TV stories left to see out 2024 and no further, but there's a whole new Ncuti Gatwa season in post-production that is unlikely to be shown before spring 2025. I don't want to end up having to blog that in broadcast order; I'm also sentimentally inclined to attempt reaching the blog's 10th anniversary in May 2025. For that reason - and also because I think it might be interesting - I am going to throw in (randomly, natch) a few more of the odds and sods of dubious canonical status. I've already covered Scream of the Shalka and even An Adventure in Space and Time; if they're fair game, then the only reason not to cover The Night of the Doctor would be its short duration (see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more on that). Even though it's only a few minutes long, The Night of the Doctor depicts significant events in the mythology of the show, and that swayed me. I watched it on my own a couple of times from the iplayer taking notes, in mid-June 2024.

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 significant milestone of the completion of a Doctor's televisual era; the eighth Doctor becoming the first one completed for the blog. I kind-of sort-of already completed Paul McGann with a single post in the very first year of blogging, depending on your views of what counts or doesn't. With this 2013 special short and McGann's recent cameo in The Power of the Doctor additionally written up, though, there can be no doubt - at the time of writing, that's every visual appearance by his Doctor covered.

First Time Round:

It's hard to be 100% sure after more than a decade, but I'm pretty sure that The Night of the Doctor was the first newly made Doctor Who I ever watched on a smartphone screen. I was at the office in South Quay, London for my day job on Thursday 14th November 2013, and saw online messages that something had become available to stream as a taster for the big 50th anniversary special due in nine more days' time. I didn't want to wait to watch it, but also didn't want to watch it on a big monitor in the middle of a working day in the office. So, I used my phone (actually one provided by work as I recall, which had relatively recently become an iOS device, swapped in after years of them providing a Blackberry that I doubt would have been useable for watching video easily). When I came home after work, I undoubtedly would have watched it again on a bigger screen (I seem to remember it was available on TV using the red button service) with anyone from the family dragged in if they were interested (I don't recall who was and who wasn't). That weekend I left for a working trip to Paris for the next week, coming home on the following Friday. The next day after that, of course, was The Day of the Doctor.

Reaction:

Paul McGann, with typical humour and self-deprecation, has described himself as the George Lazenby of Doctor Who, having only - before The Night of Doctor at least - played the role once on TV. Like James Bond, the Doctor is a role an actor is forever associated with after playing it, even if it was only the once. The comparison to Bond's 'one hit wonder' actor doesn't hold up, though. For a start, the period McGann wasn't playing the role was only a relative blip. After the TV movie was broadcast in May 1996, McGann started recording audio stories for Big Finish, the first being released early in 2001 after he'd had less than five years away from the part; he's continued making them ever since. In parallel with this, he was the face of the Doctor in other media (the ongoing comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine, the original novels published by BBC Books) from immediately after the TV movie's broadcast right up to the point that Christopher Eccleston appeared on TV in 2005. Were many members of the James Bond fandom during the Roger Moore years clamouring for Lazenby to come back or to have his own rival series of movies? Maybe some of them were, but how long did they keep it up? Despite his ubiquity in tie-in media, McGann has still been felt not to have been given a fair crack of the whip, and some fans are still - almost thirty years on - asking for his return. When Russell T Davies first hinted that he had ambitions for a Marvel-style stable of spin-off shows, a pitch that came from many corners of fandom was a McGann-starring Tales of the Time War, or similar. Watching The Night of the Doctor, one can instantly see why.

McGann has aged well, growing into the part, and looks perfect; there's a magnificent new costume that is much better than the slightly fake outfit worn in 1996 (in the story of the TV movie, it was explicitly stated to be a fancy dress costume, not something a hardy adventurer would keep for long). Even considering the American TV money that the first outing had, production values have improved between 1996 and 2013, so this brief return is pretty glossy. Mainly, though, it's all about the performance. McGann's a great actor, with a great controlled take on the role, honed over the years to remove any small amounts of hesitancy that can be seen in the TV movie. To a certain extent, he has to be great, as he only has a very limited amount of onscreen action to make a mark. Not including the 30-second pre-credits sequence where he makes a dramatic entrance right at the end with a killer line, there's a scene on the spaceship with Cass that lasts a minute and a half, and - after the Sisterhood have witnessed the ship crash - a four minute scene of the Doctor in conversation with Ohila, leading to his regeneration. It's two scenes and just over five minutes, and McGann burns through the screen throughout. To give him his due, writer Steven Moffat stuffs those minutes with so much good material. The spaceship scene with Cass is something that was unique at the time: the Doctor, all his initial chumminess and quips dying away, has desperately to try to save someone who rejects him, and refuses to be saved. It's interesting that there is now a very similar scene where Ncuti Gatwa faces the same challenge (I won't specify exactly where and why to avoid spoilers in this streaming age). In both instances, it is a gift to the performer.

The scene with the sisterhood allows McGann to run the gamut: humorous cynicism at first, as he refuses to accept Ohila's attempt to pressure him into a decision, dawning resolution that he must suppress the more peaceful parts of his nature, a commanding anger as he sends everyone out of the room. If there's one mild criticism I have, it's that he's persuaded a bit too easily, but they only had a handful of minutes, so what could they do? At this point, as someone who wasn't familiar with the details of his Big Finish adventures, his litany of companion names took me out of the action momentarily (and presumably the list has subsequently dated as he's continued doing audios for over a decade and counting after Night of the Doctor); it's a nice tribute, though, to the makers and the audience of the dramas that kept the character performance alive. With a great final line - "Physician heal thyself" - he regenerates and is woven in to the wider fabric of the series. The character has an onscreen start and end now; even if there's never anything televisual ever made or shown of his adventures in between, and even for someone who has no knowledge of the extended media tie-ins that take place there, we can always imagine our own stories - with an indelible image of the hero of those stories - to plug the gap.

Connectivity:

In both Space Babies and The Night of the Doctor, the Doctor arrives on a craft in space that's undergoing mechanical trouble that if left unchecked will eventually mean everyone aboard is killed. At least according to Cass's reaction on discovering he's a Time Lord, both crafts have monsters on board too.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Duration Game. Many moons ago, I expounded in the Deeper Thoughts section of a blog post about the longest Doctor Who stories ever. As I wrote then, long stories are rarer than one might think. Until the 1980s, four or six part stories were standard; in the final years of the classic series, it was four and three parts. In the new series years, and in one experimental season of Colin Baker's tenure, individual episodes were double the length of the classic era, but the stories tended not to be more than two - and very rarely - three parts; as such, they did not breach the established ceiling. In the first seven years of Doctor Who, there were a handful of exceptions that were longer than the established standard durations of the time, and - if you count them as single stories rather than linked separate stories under a banner title - The Trial of a Time Lord and Flux did this more recently too (I count one as a single story, but not the other - I won't get into why just now). But what about stories that were shorter than the norm? In the classic era, two times 25-minute long episode stories came along occasionally, but as they were the equivalent length of a new series one-parter, and because one-parters have formed the vast majority of stories in the last 14 years of the show, one can't exactly call that duration a rarity. Sometimes individual episodes of stories ran short, but collectively the story was still about average. For Doctor Who as broadcast on TV, there was really only one shorter than usual story in 60+ years. This was Mission to the Unknown, a 25-minute single episode teaser for the longer Dalek Master Plan story to come. Some might lump this in with that later story, but it's made difficult by the slightly bizarre decision to broadcast another story in between. I decided to cover the story for the blog on its own (see here).

For a story shorter than 25 minutes, one has to go beyond broadcast TV Who, which unavoidably entails considerations of canon. As I widen the definition of acceptable stories for the blog (see Context section above for more details), I have to ask myself certain questions of anything I want to include. The first would be: does it star the Doctor? You'd think this would be a no-brainer, but I've already broken that rule blogging the K9 and Company pilot (I had a moment of weakness!). Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? I can't blog every Big Finish audio ever made, so I have to next ask: does it have visuals? (An aside: I might make an exception for radio adventure Slipback; I won't for The Paradise of Death as I already covered its novelisation in a Deeper Thoughts section a while back; as for The Ghosts of N-Space - no, just no.) Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Have I not already covered it in passing with another connected story (as I did with the Children in Need shorts Born Again and Time Crash in The Christmas Invasion and Voyage of the Damned posts respectively)? With all those rules considered, there are certainly other future contenders to add to the list, but none under 25 minutes, except for maybe each of the 2006 Tardisodes or other similar short prequel scenes or special trailers made over the years. I can't see myself being able to spin an entire blog post out of any of them though, they don't have sufficient content and aren't self-contained. As such, I suspect that The Night of the Doctor - which I think meets all the criteria above, just about - is going to be the shortest story ever covered for the blog.

In Summary:

For one night only - again! - Paul McGann shines.

Space Babies

Chapter the 302nd, is not the first time a snot monster has appeared on TV.

Plot:
[Warning: this is a story from the current series at the time of writing, and there will be spoilers ahead.] The Doctor takes Ruby on her first trip in the TARDIS. They go to prehistoric times and see dinosaurs, and the Doctor manages to narrowly avoid Ruby changing her timeline by treading on a butterfly. They then go to a space-station in the far future. It houses baby-producing technology to help populate the planet below, but it's been abandoned (under protest recorded by the crew when leaving) because the company that ran it withdrew funding. The law says that the machines can't be switched off, though, and a few years back it ran out of control, accelerating the growth of a group of babies, who now crew the ship. The babies are very happy that someone has come to rescue them; they have been alone apart from Nan-E, seemingly an automated system that talks to them over the ship's PA system. The Doctor is concerned about the babies' safety as there is a build up of pressure on the station, but he can't get them away in the TARDIS as an aggressive and fear-inducing creature is roaming the lower levels. The creature turns out to have been created out of built-up nasal secretion waste by the same machinery malfunction that accelerated the babies' knowledge, keying in to the need for stories with monsters as part of education and growth. Nan-E turns out to be the last remaining member of the crew Jocelyn, hidden elsewhere on the station, talking to the children through a filtered comms system. She tries to eject the creature into space, but the Doctor saves it, as it is a unique lifeform. He releases the pressure build-up (methane from discarded nappies) to propel the station to a planet that accepts refugees, then takes Ruby home so she can see her Mum Carla for Christmas. At one point it snowed inside, like a memory of the moment baby Ruby was abandoned at the church on Ruby Road coming to life.

 

Context:

I watched this from the iplayer in early June accompanied by the eldest child (boy of 17) who had not yet caught up with the story, and was taking a break from revising for his A-level exams. His brother and sister had been a bit cool on this story, though not outright hating it, so he went in with low expectations only to find it wasn't nearly as bad as he had been anticipating. He mentioned that he thought Gatwa's Doctor was "very Tennant", which is as expected when both Doctors were written and exec-produced by the same showrunner, Russell T Davies. He also commented - like many a long-term fan did too, I'm sure - on the repetition of story moments from the beginning of Davies's last tenure; both the scene of Ruby and the Doctor opening a screen out onto a vista of space and the one of Ruby's phone call across thousands of years and light years to her Mum are direct swipes from The End of the World.

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 second of the recent - and still ongoing at the time of writing - Gatwa season episodes to be blogged, leaving five stories remaining (the last being a two-parter). Beyond that, 26 out of the total of 40 seasons to date have been completed, classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13.

First Time Round:

The nature of the end stage of my randomly ordered journey through TV Doctor Who, as the available pool of unblogged stories gets smaller, means a wide disparity of gaps between first watch and current watch for the blog. I first watched the previous story covered, The Monster of Peladon, nearly 30 years before writing about it. For Space Babies, it wasn't much more than 30 days. I first saw this story on the 11th May 2024, a few minutes after midnight when it dropped on the BBC's iplayer (as it did simultaneously on Disney+ for the rest of the world outside the UK). I remained awake to watch the second episode in the double bill that day. It was a novelty to watch the stories in such a way then, and I've come to appreciate it more as the season has gone on - it's a nice way to finish a working week, staying up and tuning in to watch an exciting and highly anticipated episode of Doctor Who, before turning in for the night. Tuning in then turning in has been my process these last few weeks, and I look forward to the same in the future, presuming that this pattern remains for next season.

Reaction:

Assuming that the big finale of the season (see Deeper Thoughts section for more anticipation of that) doesn't disappoint, Space Babies will turn out to be the least strong story of the 2024 run, in my humble opinion. I still love it, though. With every other story, perhaps because of the more abbreviated run compared to previous years, the scripts are doing something radically different with Doctor Who's format. The show is supposed to be ever flexible and expandable, but it has always tended periodically after any shake-up to settle into a formulaic format. In Ncuti's first season, there's not been any big contemporary Earth invasions yet, nor any established monsters or villains from the show's past returning (though there is speculation about both these things happening in the two-part finale, see Deeper Thoughts again). Perhaps Davies took it as a challenge that the previous showrunner, his friend Chris Chibnall, produced an opening season for Jodie Whittaker without any returning elements from Who's back catalogue, and is replicating this to keep the series seeming fresh. Whittaker's first year lacked a bit of oomph because of this approach, mind; Davies looks to be avoiding that trap by making every story high-concept (i.e. based on a premise with an attention-grabbing hook that can be summed up in a simple sentence). Putting in a narrative reason to bring in more purely supernatural stories was also a good move to help with this. A story like 73 Yards, say, is pushing at the boundaries not just in terms of subject matter but narrative structure too; but, it's just the most obvious in going about it: many of the others - though they might seem superficially traditional - are doing the same, leaving Space Babies to be the most straightforward as the 'set-up' episode.

There's a slightly leisurely beginning where the Doctor gives Ruby all, and I mean all, the information she (and newly joining Disney+ viewers) will need to keep up. This is radically different to the last time Davies ran the show. In his last 'jumping-on point' story Rose in 2005, there isn't even any time travel bar a brief mention at the end; concepts that the Doctor tosses off in Space Babies were teased out slowly over the many stories and seasons that followed Rose. That was a different time, though; Davies has fewer episodes per year to play with now, and streaming viewers tend to be more enthusiastic about lore than perhaps were the sceptical UK Saturday night audience 19 years previously. The section isn't just dry exposition anyway. I fear that Space Babies is a story whose jokes are going to be sneered at in years to come, with the default unthinking consensus being the story is not much cop. But Ruby stepping on the butterfly and transforming herself into Rubathon Blue of the 57th Hemisphere Hatchlings is funny, just as depicting a Star Trek-style crew in Doctor Who except that they're all babies is funny; the boogeyman being made of bogies is funny, the nanny filter auto-correcting Jocelyn's swearing is funny, the solution to the space-station's propulsion towards its safe haven being a release of methane (i.e. a big ol' space fart) is funny. It's supposed to be - for the most part - funny. It's not all unsophisticated humour either. The line in there that satirises a certain attitude to abortion law ("So, the planet down below will refuse to stop the babies being born, but once they're born, they don't look after them?" / "It's a very strange planet" / "It's not that strange") is killer.

It also helps that Ncuti Gatwa is charismatic and energetic, and can take any decent line of Davies dialogue and make it even better, such that some of the dialogue here becomes iconic. Lines such as "There's no such things as monsters, just creatures you haven't met yet", "I'm not saying things are connected, but things connect" or "Most of the universe is knackered, babes" deserve to act as slogans for this new new Doctor Who for years to come. The main story is slight, but affecting. Beyond the humour, there is a lot of emotion here. The babies - like many a child in the real world, alas - have never been hugged, and think they have grown up wrong. The scene where the Doctor talks to Captain Poppy about a person's uniqueness being their superpower -  linking it back to his own status as an abandoned child as set up in Chibnall's Timeless Child backstory, which Davies has found an interesting way to build upon - is one of the first big Doctor moments for Gatwa. It all took a lot of effort to get to screen too (the clever casting of the youngsters, all the effects work and the multiple takes to get so much footage of talking babies means it would be ghastly and inaccurate to call anything about this story lazy). The climax, intercut with flashbacks to the Poppy scene, where the Doctor saves the Boogeyman from the shellshocked Jocelyn's knee-jerk action to jettison it from the ship to protect the children ("It is one of the children, Jocelyn!") is truly marvellous: exciting, but also - in its small way - political.

It's not perfect: it's a bit of a stretch to imagine that the scenario the Doctor and Ruby arrive into could have been caused by one malfunctioning machine; the running joke where the Doctor corrects himself every time he says babies and makes it "Space Babies!" gets a bit wearisome; there's an unfortunate bit of editing / framing where Ruby responds to writing on a screen being in English, but it looks like she's reacting to the name of the planet that the Doctor's just read out from the screen and saying that's English; as the name of the planet is Pacifico Del Rio, that jars a bit and makes her character briefly look a bit silly. This is fairly insignificant stuff, though. Ultimately, in its own way, the story does go beyond the simply straightforward - there's no monster, and no villain (apart from the off-screen company), for example. Even if one doesn't like any of the babies - Space Babies! - stuff, there's still all the intriguing hints at the arc of the series to come. Another great moment is the Doctor dictating the terms and conditions to Ruby, that he can never take her back to that Christmas where she was abandoned to find out her mother's identity (all the while we're watching this, we of course know something like that is almost certainly going to happen). That Ruby neatly counters this, and explains that she will get to meet her Mum at Christmas (meaning her adoptive mother Carla in 2024) is the final nice moment in a story replete with them. I fear that everyone will just remember snot and fart gags, but that's on them.

Connectivity:

In both Space Babies and The Monster of Peladon, the Doctor is accompanied by a single female companion and visits a planet he's been to before. In both, there is an appearance of a somewhat mythological monster (the Boogeyman and the 'heat ray' Aggedor) in an area below where the majority of the characters usually operate, and these manifestations turn out to both have been created by machinery.

Deeper Thoughts:

There's always a Twist, There's always a Twist... [Warning: this involves speculation about the un-broadcast - at the time of writing - end of the current series, and though it'll probably turn out to be clownishly incorrect speculation it nonetheless might be considered spoilerific.] There is one story of Ncuti Gatwa's first season, which started with Space Babies, to go; this is a two part finale that it's fair to say has been pretty hyped up. The final episode will be getting a midnight screening in cinemas across the UK. Writer and showrunner Russell T Davies has been quoted saying that it would be "the biggest finale ever" "devastating" and that " you will be screaming". He has also hinted that there will be major revelations involved, and as such has advised fans to watch it as soon as possible to avoid spoilers: "If ever you're going to stay up until midnight with a bottle of cider or a box of chocolates and sit there and watch Doctor Who, I would recommend it for that one". The previous most recent series of Doctor Who with Davies as showrunner was in 2008, and culminated in the recently blogged and massive two-part finale The Stolen Earth / Journey's End, so - you know - he's got form in this area. In between he produced specials, both in 2009/10 and 2023, and they culminated in big finales in both instances, but when Davies delivers a series, he does things in a slightly different way. There are emotional arcs, of course: can the Doctor keep Rose safe? Will he ever notice Martha's unrequited love? What will be the culmination of Donna's growth as a person? As well as that, though, and sometimes interlinked, is an observation game being played with the audience.

Susan Twist as Mrs. Merridew

Probably the most successful of these was in the first year of the returning Doctor Who; in most of the episodes, there was a visual or audio reference to two words, "Bad Wolf", and the explanation for this came explosively in the two-part finale. Davies is replicating this in a slightly different way in the 2024 run for all the adherents of the repeated meme watching at home. Cast without any in-story explanation in a different small role in each episode is actor Susan Twist: a face reappearing, haunting the Doctor and Ruby in different places and times. Her first appearance was in Wild Blue Yonder, back when David Tennant was still playing the fourteenth Doctor. Twist played Mrs. Merridew who exchanged a couple of lines with Isaac Newton in the pre-credits scene before the Doctor and Donna arrived. Looking back, this should have stood out more - the scene adds nothing and the episode could quite happily start with Newton already under the tree and save the money of hiring another actor. It didn't in fact go completely unnoticed at the time. As relayed in the blog post for WBY,  the story had little given away in advance publicity because of its minimalist nature. This meant some wild speculation grew that old Doctors or old companions might be appearing. The name "Susan Twist" being released in the cast list in advance of broadcast became part of that wild speculation. Was it a pseudonym, and was Carole Ann Ford, who played the very first companion in 1963, the Doctor's granddaughter Susan, going to appear? A cursory glance at imdb.com could undermine this theory, as Susan Twist has been acting since 1980. Could Davies deliberately have cast someone with a name that would initiate intrigue? It seemed unlikely, but not impossible.

Twist's appearance in Space Babies

When Twist didn't turn out to be Susan in Wild Blue Yonder that theory seemed to die. But from The Church on Ruby Road in December 2023 onwards, Twist kept showing up. In that Christmas story, she's a heckler in the audience watching Ruby's band. In Space Babies, she is one of the space-station crew on a screen expressing their objections to the order to abandon the babies. In The Devil's Chord, she appears for the first time in a shot interacting with the Doctor and Ruby, playing a tea lady in EMI's studios, though neither of the show's stars look directly at her. The biggest appearance to date was throughout third story Boom when Twist played the friendly face of the homicidal Villengard ambulance AI. When she appears in the following three stories (a hiker in 73 Yards, Lindy's Mum in Dot and Bubble, and a portrait of the "Duke's late mother" in Rogue) Ruby or the Doctor recognise her and comment. From the look of the trailer at the end of Rogue, The Legend of Ruby Sunday is going to address this fully. Twist plays a character called Susan Triad, and snatches of dialogue offer some surrounding explanation: the Doctor is heard to say "Everywhere I land, a woman appears", Twist's character says, apparently in agony, "In every dream I'm there" and finally the Doctor adds, seemingly referring to Twist's character, that she "doesn't know why, but she remembered them". So what does it all mean? There are two main theories. One points out that 'S. Triad' is an anagram of 'Tardis'. Twist started appearing only after Donna spilt a cup of coffee onto the time machine's newly reconfigured console, so maybe she is a manifestation of some time disturbance, or even the ship herself. Triad technology has been seeded in too (mentioned in dialogue in The Giggle, advertised on a bus in The Church of Ruby Road) so may be part of the long-term gameplan.

S. Triad

The other main theory is the original theory again. The character in the finale is Susan Triad, after all, and the Doctor made a glaring reference to his granddaughter in The Devil's Chord; was that just fan-pleasing background info or is it leading to a major revelation? Fanning the flames is a mysterious new edition of Tales of the TARDIS scheduled for broadcast on BBC4 and iplayer on the 20th June, shortly before the second part of the finale, Empire of Death, lands. There was a series of six of these spin-offs available in the UK in November 2023, newly made framing sequences starring a pair of Doctor Who cast (for the 20th June one, it's Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson) that wrap around edited omnibus versions of classic series stories. It could be a coincidence, but the timing suggests a tie-in to the events depicted in the series finale. Will it be a story featuring Susan or a TARDIS-centric story (or maybe The Edge of Destruction, which works as both)? Is it unconnected to the mystery of Twist, meaning some other old character is returning? Is it not going to feature old material at all and just be a recap of the season so far (if so, it's odd that it's on the 'heritage' channel of BBC4)? We should know soon enough, but there will likely still be questions left unanswered. Are we going to uncover all the mysteries of Ruby? Who was the cowled figure seen leaving her at the church when she was a newborn baby? Why does she have the Carol of the Bells playing in her soul somehow, and why does it snow indoors when she's sad? Who's the "one who waits"? Who's the Meep's boss, and is it the same new boss that Rogue mentioned he is now working for? Is the universe ever going to be righted such that the word 'mavity' is pronounced 'gravity' once again? Who is the mysterious Mrs. Flood, Ruby's neighbour? It feels like Doctor Who will need to run for at least ten more years to answer all that lot; bring it on, says I.

In Summary:

Space Babies!

The Monster of Peladon

Chapter the 301st, wherein the Miners are revolting!

Plot:
The Doctor makes a return visit to the planet of Peladon with Sarah Jane Smith, 50 years after he was last there. King Peladon's daughter Queen Thalira rules, but she is young and her advisor Chancellor Ortron holds sway. The federation is mining a valuable mineral on the planet to help in the war effort against another galaxy, but the local miners aren't happy. They're even less happy when an apparition of sacred beast Aggedor keeps appearing and killing some of their number. They down tools. The Doctor suspects someone is trying to sabotage the mining, but he is distrusted by Ortron, despite federation ambassador Alpha Centauri vouching for him. When some of the miners go on the attack, the federation's engineer onsite Eckersley persuades Centauri to call in federation troops. Some Ice Warriors appear on the planet, but there's evidence to suggest that they haven't just arrived and were previously in hiding. They are a rogue breakaway group and, along with Eckersley, were engineering the Aggedor attacks in order to take control of the planet; they plan to sell the minerals once mined to the enemies of the federation. The Doctor defeats them using their own combined matter projector / heat ray in the shape of Aggedor. Ortron is killed, and the Doctor recommends that the miners' leader Gebek is made the new chancellor.

Context:

I watched this story as nature (or at least Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks) intended, one episode a week during April and May 2024. I viewed the episodes from the DVD, rather than the iplayer; I don't know why really - habit, perhaps - as it makes no difference in terms of quality. I mean visual quality, of course, not story quality. Story quality is where this tale is generally felt to be lacking: it's six episodes long, and is not known for containing too many engaging moments of narrative or visuals, hence why I avoided watching it in one big lump or even slightly fast-tracked from the weekly frequency for which it was built. When I tried this experiment before, it improved my experience of watching the story (as it did this time) and even left me eager to see the next episode (it didn't quite get to that level for Monster of Peladon, alas).

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 completion of another season, the 26th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, these are classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I first saw this story after it came out of VHS in 1995. It came out a couple of days after Christmas that year, and I would have picked it up at Volume One in Worthing sometime around then. It was rare for a Doctor Who video to have a late December release, for the obvious reason that it could get lost in the post-Yuletide period. The previous time it had taken place (for a couple of tapes at the end of 1993), I remember vividly the excitement of finding something I wasn't expecting in a shop. I don't remember the same thing for The Monster of Peladon VHS, so I might have only got it in the new year. The one thing I can remember is that it came with a free postcard of the tape box's cover art, which had been happening for all the releases for the last few months of 1995. The box set released in November 1995 of The Five Doctors Special Edition paired with the King's Demons, which I received as a Christmas present that year, came with a little album to keep them all in (see First Time Round section of the Five Doctors post). I would have slotted the Monster of Peladon postcard directly into the plastic sheath within the album, and left it there forever after. I'm sure I still have the album, so presumably it's remained there to this day - let me have a look...

Album + postcard (taken out for the first time since 1995)

Reaction:

This story is a sequel to The Curse of Peladon, shown a couple of years earlier; as well as featuring a return to the planet Peladon, plus the Ice Warriors and lovable walking nob Alpha Centauri, they both have in common the hook of referencing contemporary political events from the UK as a gag / imaginative jumping-off point. Curse was a Doctor Who alien planet take on the UK's joining the European Economic Community; Monster does the same for the miners' strikes of the early 1970s. In my blog post on The Curse of Peladon from 2017, I put forward my view that that story isn't really political at all. It isn't doing a thoroughly worked out allegory, nor even light satire. It just throws in a reference to a vaguely topical area, then goes its own way with the story. The Monster of Peladon is a bit more political in one way in that it picks a side. It was surprising to me how pro-miner the Doctor was shown to be, expressing with regularity that the striking Peladons have legitimate grievances and should be given a fair hearing. Whether or not this represented writer Brian Hayles's views about the UK's National Union of Miners in real life, he certainly puts the Doctor on the side of the striking worker. Though there is internal squabbling in the ranks of the Peladon miners, they are presented in the story as the good guys against the antagonists - the unfeeling aristocratic class of Peladons in the early part of the narrative, and the scheming off-worlders exploiting Peladon's resources in the latter. They even - unlike in real life in the UK as it eventually turned out - get a happy ending, with their leader Gebek elevated to a position of power where he can make a positive difference for his comrades.

Of all the classic series, the Jon Pertwee era is probably the most aligned with the current series in terms of political outlook; the raison d'etre for the villainy in Monster of Peladon - rampant capitalism cashing-in on a war - would definitely be on brand for a story in Ncuti Gatwa's first season. This villainy is personified in the character of Eckersley, a performance of smooth amorality from Donald Gee, who plays the character as slightly amused by everything happening around him throughout. Eckersley consistently expresses detachment from the events early on, not wanting to get involved in "local politics", so isn't exactly depicted as a saint even then; towards the end, though, it is revealed that he's been manipulating events all along. It's a nice enough reversal, but does relegate the Ice Warriors to henchmen rather than the main antagonists. As a sequel, the story was inevitably going to repeat a lot of the story beats of The Curse of Peladon. In that earlier story, the Ice Warriors are good guys suspected for a long period of being bad. One might expect that to be reversed here, with a period of time where the Martians are trusted but then turn against everyone, but that's not how it plays out. As that villain reveal twist is instead being done with Eckersley, the Ice Warriors are shown to be baddies pretty much as soon as they appear, which feels like an opportunity missed. It might have proved a useful additional subplot to have the Doctor (who mistrusted them the last time he was on Peladon) trusting them at first, and gradually coming to the conclusion that they are up to something. The Warriors also are not looking their best, with make-up not as convincing as in their previous appearances, and some of the costumes not fitting the actors as well. This may be down to general budgetary issues as the furry version of Aggedor here is a lot more fake-looking than the one in Curse too.

The key difference between The Curse of Peladon and its sequel is that the later story is two episodes longer. With mostly the same story beats playing out, that means quite a bit of padding. The recaps at the start of episodes are suspiciously lengthy, and there are some repetitive sequences and some longueurs. Interminable early sections are spent of capture, escape, recapture as the Doctor and his companion are chased by the Peladon guards; this, despite a high-ranking diplomat known to the court confirming his identity and bona fides. It's not that there aren't nice moments in there, though. There's some decent fights and action moments. Aggedor looks much better as a statue zooming towards people than in his fuzzy felt form. Ysanne Churchman's vocal performance as Alpha Centauri, delivering quite a few humorous lines - "Thank you Eckersley, but you are still a traitor" - some of them wonderfully bitchy, is fun. Nina Thomas as Queen Thalira does a good job at showing a young ruler trying hard to exert their authority. The romance subplot between Jo Grant and King Peladon from the first story is replaced by Sarah teaching Thalira about female empowerment, which includes the nice line "There's nothing only about being a girl". This theme is undermined by the Doctor being a little bit chauvinistic in places: maybe I'm overreacting or getting oversensitive as I get older, but I feel he crosses a line with the supposedly jokey roughhousing at the end: he pulls Sarah into the TARDIS by her ear.

Connectivity:

The Monster of Peladon, like The Stolen Earth / Journey's End, features the Doctor teaming up with allies from previous adventures in his era (including Sarah Jane Smith) to defeat a famous recurring Doctor Who monster race who aim to exploit a planet for power.  

Deeper Thoughts:

And on that bombshell... part 2. A quick reprise then, as we return to my treatise on cliffhangers: story structure dictates there will be at least a couple of significant moments in a story the length of your average Doctor Who tale, where the protagonist or the action goes through a fundamental change. These act breaks (for want of a better name) will rarely line up exactly with the point where the credits are required to roll at the end of that particular chunk of episodic drama, though. So, writers of such drama have to use different types of tricks to make any ending engaging enough for the audience to want to return. If everything lines up, you might have a game-changer cliffhanger; if not, then you might have the much more common bisected action sequence style cliffhanger (from which the name is derived): the Doctor is in a predicament - like hanging off a cliff - that it looks impossible to get out of, and we viewers are left for a while to wonder what cleverness they are going to employ to extricate themselves. Sometimes, though, a cliffhanger begs not so much the question "How will they get out of that?" but more "Oooh, what does that mean?". The third type of cliffhanger is the enigmatic cliffhanger. It's a more distant echo of the game-changer cliffhanger - something has happened, maybe not so significant as to fundamentally change anyone's life, but it nonetheless propels us into the next phase of the action. This is another that's often used in Doctor Who. One particularly prevalent version of this is the monster reveal. For all of part one of any story (or perhaps even later) we've caught glimpses or hints of the threat, but it is finally revealed in full.

There are good and bad end of episode monster reveals; for example, it became a tradition that the Daleks would not appear in a Terry Nation story until the first cliffhanger. When this is at the end of an episode titled "World's End" then the appearance of a Dalek (rising up out of the Thames) has more impact than it does in, say, "Planet of the Daleks episode one", where it's obviously going to be less of a surprise. In that story, the Doctor already knows that he's facing the Daleks as they appeared at the end of previous story Frontier in Space, and he's gone to the planet deliberately to find the Skaro pepperpots. Yet, he still acts surprised to see one - he's obviously very committed to this cliffhanger strategy. With monsters that keep coming back (usually with a blaze of advance publicity) there will be diminishing returns in the monster reveal. Leaving it for a while since the last appearance and avoiding any publicity can help (see the end of Earthshock part one). For a new foe, it can also work very well. The Curse of Fenric has a nice reveal of the monstrous Haemovores at the end of part two, but tops it for the next cliffhanger with the reveal of the villain Fenric. A character is possessed by the spirit of Fenric, and rises up saying "We play the contest again, Time Lord". Oooh, now what can that mean?! It's better when the reveal is something even more intriguing that just a villain's identity. The end of City of Death part one has a nice enough monster reveal cliffhanger, though it's a bit nonsensical (why does Scaroth remove his mask and look in the mirror - vanity?). But the end of the second part is much more intriguing: he, or someone very like him, seems to be able to exist in different time zones. What can that mean?!

The earliest Doctor Who stories in the Hartnell era blazed trails, doing for the first time almost anything you could think of, so there's many an enigmatic cliffhanger, like the end of the first ever episode An Unearthly Child, where the shadow of an approaching figure falls over the incongruous police box exterior of the TARDIS transplanted to a barren landscape: the intrigue about what this might mean propels the audience into a 60+ year journey. Topping even that, though, and my personal favourite, is the end of A Battle of Wits, part three of The Time Meddler, where the Doctor's companions discover that the Monk has a TARDIS of his own. One thing that this era didn't ever really do - and it never really happened in any era of Who - was the fourth type of cliffhanger, the high-stakes choice. In the "Now Get Out of That" style cliffhanger, the Doctor or his friends might have to choose between the rock or the hard place, the lesser of two evils; but, that's more about the danger than the choice. A good example of a high stakes choice cliffhanger is the end of the third season of US Sitcom Friends. The character Ross has to choose between two loves, represented by the doors of two rooms before him as he stands deciding. He goes into one of the rooms, but the audience does not see which and has to wait until the next season's start to find out which he chose. The reason why this doesn't happen that often in Doctor Who is similar to why the game-changer cliffhanger is rare. Doctor Who's format is such that the adventures have to continue on and on, so fundamental choices - like fundamental changes - would undermine that. The nearest Who got to the high stakes choice is the "Do I have the right?" moment in Genesis of the Daleks: by touching two wires, the Doctor can change history and destroy the Daleks before they have become established; but, if he does, will he have lost sight of his own values?

Terry Walsh not Jon Pertwee

The Doctor pauses a moment, the two wires in front of him, almost touching; he doesn't know the right path to take. If the credits rolled then, it would be a great cliffhanger, but it comes a few minutes into the sixth and final episode; the actual cliffhanger at the end of episode five is just a bisected action sequence with a Kaled mutant trying to strangle the Doctor. This is an example of the first of two unfortunate cliffhanger types unique to Doctor Who: the mistimed cliffhanger. An episode has run short or run long, and no amount of editing can put the intended episode ending in the right place, so the programme makers end up with something sub-optimal and arbitrary. The most infamous of these is another Terry Nation story, Death to the Daleks - the story before The Monster of Peladon. At the end of part three of the story, the Doctor stops short of stepping on a mosaic floor. That's it! The music starts to play and we're into the credits. It's a bisected action sequence without any action. The second unfortunate cliffhanger is the one that brings undue attention to a production fail... twice. The audience gets to see the error during the exciting end to an episode, and then again in the reprise the following week. The co-pilot splits his trousers as he falls to the ground at the end of part two - and again at the start of part three - of The Horns of Nimon. The model tank looks pathetic at the end of part three, and the start of part four, of Robot. The Monster of Peladon has a great example of this type, at the fourth episode end. There's a fight between Ettis and the Doctor where the latter is mostly played by a stuntman. The wig is unconvincing, the voice is badly dubbed over the action, and in one shot the audience gets a face-on mid-shot view of someone who's clearly Terry Walsh doing Venusian Aikido, not Jon Pertwee. If by some miracle you missed all that, don't worry, it will be repeated in full the following week at the start of part five.

I've mistimed my own cliffhanger. I've run out of space without an interesting way to wrap up my discussion. All I can do is slap on a Next Time Trailer: in the next blog post's Deeper Thoughts section, there's always a Twist, there's always a Twist, there's always a Twist...

In Summary:

Like The Curse of Peladon but longer!