The Invasion of Time

Chapter the 264th, David Agnew's first script for Doctor Who (his next one would be better).

Plot:

The Doctor is behaving erratically and keeping secrets from Leela. He has a mysterious meeting on a spaceship with persons unknown, then materialises on Gallifrey claiming the title of president (which he got on a technicality during his last visit home). He's erratic and rude to everybody, particularly his old tutor Borusa, and seems to be working for some baddies called the Vardans whom he helps invade. The Vardans appear to be made of light bouncing off sheets of aluminium foil. As part of his investiture, the Doctor is connected up to the Matrix (famous Time Lord MacGuffin / computer) which gives him some knowledge, but he also needs the Great Key (famous Time Lord MacGuffin / key). His erratic and rude behaviour was a tactic for blocking the Vardans from reading his thoughts, and he plans to get them to fully materialise and then trap them in a time loop. Borusa hands over the Great Key, and the Doctor opens a small gap in the forcefield around Gallifrey. The Vardans materialise and in person they are much less interesting than aluminum foil. Leela, who has been banished outside the Time Lord Citadel, allies herself with some Time Lord drop-outs; they attack and the Doctor is successful in his plan to get rid of the Vardans. As everyone's celebrating, some Sontarans appear on Gallifrey, having used the Vardans to get the forcefield gap opened, then snuck in while everyone was distracted. The Sontarans run around after the Doctor and friends for a bit, first in the Citadel and then within the TARDIS. The Doctor builds a powerful weapon, the Demat gun, and uses it against the Sontarans. Leela and K9 Mark 1 decide to stay on Gallifrey. The Doctor leaves, and starts building K9 mark 2.

Context:

This completes another season of Doctor Who, covered peripatetically over the years for this randomly ordered blog. Season 15 (Tom Baker's fourth, middle year as the titular Time Lord) is not the most popular with fandom, but it certainly has its moments. Although the middle stories were muddled up, I did start the journey to completing this set with the opening story Horror of Fang Rock back in May 2016, and have ended here with the season finale. As The Invasion of Time is six episodes long, and isn't that well thought of, I didn't even ask the children or Better Half to watch with me, but caught up with an episode every other evening or so (from the DVD, without the optional new CGI effects) across the course of a couple of weeks in late April and early May 2023. I tried to have an alcoholic tipple to accompany each episode (if you've ever seen the story, you'll know why). I realised after watching it that this also completes another set of stories more personal to me (see First Time Round section below for details).

First Time Round:

The first time I saw The Invasion of Time was exciting. Not because of the story, of course, but because of the medium. It was the 20th July 1997, and I'd just paid for cable to be connected in the flat where I was living in Worthing. This was the first time I'd ever received anything beyond terrestrial channels (of which, if I remember rightly, there were only four available to me - Channel 5 had started earlier in the year, but couldn't yet be picked up in my area by a normal aerial). I didn't want sports or movie channels, I just wanted and got a channel package that included UK Gold, who showed repeats of Doctor Who stories some of which were not yet out to buy. I paid for the channel for three months; weekly on a Sunday morning during that time, a full story would be shown as an omnibus edition, with advert breaks to separate the episodes rather than full beginning and end credits. The first weekend I was connected up, I got to watch (and tape to watch again and again), this Gallifrey and Sontaran epic in all its shabby-chic glory.

I'd timed things badly, as there then followed eight weeks of stories I already had on official BBC VHS. (An aside: the planned showing of The Armageddon Factor on the 31st August was pulled because of the breaking news a few hours earlier of Princess Diana's death - it features a princess in jeopardy - and replaced by Planet of the Spiders, which I also had on official BBC VHS.) I then watched and taped the three remaining stories I needed from season 16, and then Meglos, before I cancelled the package. I think they put the prices up, I don't think it was just because every Who story they happened to be showing at that time was sub-par. I finally got to see the full story including all those interstitial sets of credits three years later when it came out on official BBC VHS. I bought the tape, even though I had the UK Gold copy already, just for those sets of credits and a nice box, because of course I did. With this post, I have finally blogged every one of the set of five stories I taped off cable TV channel in 1997. What a milestone!  

Reaction:

Just when you think The Invasion of Time's story is going to run out of steam, it does. A bit later it throws a lovely narrative curveball by introducing the Sontarans at the episode four cliffhanger, and changes the focus of its last two episodes. There's not, though, anywhere near enough story to sustain the first four episodes, or the last two either. Given the circumstances, one has to forgive this to a certain extent. The script for this story was a rush job after another one fell through. Like for the later story in producer Graham Williams's tenure when this happened, Williams and his script editor worked together to assemble a screenplay at speed, crediting the resulting story to the in-house pseudonym David Agnew. That latter story was City of Death. As part of a 60th anniversary poll, the latest Doctor Who Magazine at time of writing contains a full scored rundown of the Tom Baker stories. City of Death is at the number one position, the most popular; as the accompanying commentary to the poll says, sometimes it's possible to spin gold out of straw. Sometimes, though, you just get slightly tangled straw, as in the case of The Invasion of Time which languishes at position 36 of 41. It's not entirely a fair comparison: when Douglas Adams and Williams created City of Death they already had a plot that David Fisher had constructed. If anything, their job was more to pare away material (and add lots of jokes and good lines too). Williams and Anthony Read, the script editor when The Invasion of Time was required to plug a gap, started from an empty page. They get some jokes and good lines in there, but the plot can't help but look like what it is, something constructed in a hurry.

It starts with an intriguing idea: could the Doctor have gone rogue? Tom Baker's particular take on the main character is well suited to create some moral ambiguity, and he's always been at odds with his own people. It could work, but isn't sustainable for long; unfortunately, like everything in the story, it nonetheless has to go on for a long time, stretched out to fill a lot of pages. If you don't buy it, every scene where the Doctor is being unpleasant with people is difficult to watch as you know it's not real and there's going to be a plot switcheroo at some point; if you do buy it, it's just unpleasant to watch one's hero behave in this way. It also doesn't make much sense. Before the events of this story, the Doctor somehow bumps into the Vardans and realises that they can travel along any wavelength including thought, and he does a deal with them to let them in to Gallifrey. This is part of a plan to defeat them, but why bother doing the deal and letting them in to Gallifrey if that's what they want? Why not just leave them where they are? What threat are they if the Doctor just goes about his business and never travels back to his home planet? Any explanations given are muddled. They don't travel to Gallifrey in the Doctor's head as thoughts, as if they did, the Doctor wouldn't need to drop the transduction barrier to let them in. What is a transduction barrier, anyway? It can't be a forcefield, because in later episodes, the Doctor needs to drop the forcefield too, to let the Vardans in, erm, again (but more so). The script is rife with these repetitious beats, with just one more meaningless MacGuffin - the Matrix, the rod and sash of Rassilon, the Great Key, the Demat gun, the primary refraction tube of the fail safe controls - to be collected and used before this threadbare plot can finally be switched off.

With this intrinsic confusion, I don't think the Vardans would work as villains with even the most big budget style of visual realisation. Needless to say, they don't get this. Like everything in this story where the money looks like it's run out, they are rubbish. In their early form, they are light reflected onto some kind of foil on one camera, mixed into the picture of another; in their final form, they're just some dudes in dull uniforms. The mask of lead Sontaran Stor is okay, but the hands are very fake and plasticky. Both lead villains are essentially hidden from view, so needed very good vocal performances; unfortunately the people cast in the roles are just not strong enough vocally. It might not matter, anyway, as villains are only as good as what they do, and neither the Vardans or Sontarans do anything in the narrative. Whole episodes are taken up with characters just walking around. Maybe all the budget went on shoe leather? It's hard to call these chase scenes, as moving too fast would mean they would be over too quickly, and that can't happen in The Invasion of Marking Time. Balanced against this, the model work is particularly fine. The reused Gallifrey sets are good, but they have been embellished with tacky-looking plastic chairs and cushions, or very tatty looking desks and computer units. Controversially for fans, the final two episodes set in the TARDIS were filmed in a location rather than using specially made sets, meaning some rather drab brick walls. There's the odd interesting idea (the TARDIS power room being disguised as an art gallery) but again it all goes on far too long, and with the déjà vu gag of characters walking the same corridor and staircase over and over, is horribly repetitive too.

What bright points there are come from some of the performances. Baker has some good moments, but it's not his finest hour. Oh, how I wish this story only lasted an hour. As it is, there's plenty of time for lapses, like various scenes of maniacal laughter, or Baker staring into the camera and breaking the fourth wall with a "Not even the sonic screwdriver can get me out of this one!". John Arnatt as Borusa gives a solid performance despite some inconsistencies in his character's behaviour from scene to scene. Milton Johns is on fine, oleaginous form as the comic relief Castellan Kelner, who - as a running gag - adapts to offer his utmost loyalty to whichever n'er-do-well is in charge of Gallifrey for that episode. Apart from this, though, he doesn't really contribute anything to the plot, and he's not the only one. All the drop-out ex-Time Lords living in the wilds of outer Gallifrey meet up with Leela when she's been cast out by the Doctor (to keep her safe / stop her from needing to be involved in the slight plot). They then storm the Citadel, achieving not very much that Leela couldn't have done on her own. In the final two episodes, they pretty much disappear altogether. If Leela had to fall in love with someone to leave the show, surely it should be one of these people who are slightly wild hunters just like her, rather than an effete guard with whom she barely shares any scenes. Properly scripting the outer Gallifrey scenes as part of a romantic subplot would have made them much more worthwhile an inclusion.

As it ends up, Leela's exit is ridiculously abrupt. Reportedly, Graham Williams didn't want Louise Jameson to leave and put off creating a proper ending until it was too late, hoping she could be persuaded to stay. He was right that she was worth the programme holding on to, as she's the best thing in The Invasion of Time. Watching these episodes was the most uncomfortable I've ever been at how she is objectified by the skimpy outfit. There's a scene where Leela swims that doesn't serve any plot function; yes, it was undoubtedly included like everything else in the story in a desperate attempt to fill time rather than for titillation, but it still strikes one as odd that it's in there. Various times that Leela is running round in her chamois underoos, I was very anxious that there was going to be a wardrobe malfunction. The only good thing about Jameson leaving the show was putting an end to that nonsense. Her performance rises above it, though, and it's a shame to see her leave. The character of Rodan, a prototype Romana, is paired with the Doctor often throughout, as a sign of things to come.

Connectivity:

Like Boom Town, The Invasion of Time features someone being held in the TARDIS (this time for their own protection), and a device being connected to the ship that threatens breaking it apart. Both stories also feature the companion character going on a date. Well, alright The Invasion of Time doesn't, but Leela's date must happen off camera between scenes, or else her falling in love with Andred after having barely looked at him previously doesn't make any sense.

Deeper Thoughts:

The High Street - My Part in its Downfall. There's not much more to say about The Invasion of Time, is there?! I already discussed its accidental forming of a subgenre of Doctor Who stories set on Gallifrey in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post about Logopolis. A couple of reminiscences recently for the blog perhaps suggested another topic of interest. Well, interest to me, at least. Be warned: this is probably the most trivial subject for investigative journalism imaginable. Above I demonstrated clear recall about my first experience of The Invasion of Time on TV and on VHS. What about on DVD? The story came out in that medium in May 2008, the final one of the four classic series Sontaran stories to come out on DVD. As well as appearing as a single disc release, it was also collected with those other three stories in the 'Bred for War' box set; this was a rare example of the DVD range tying in to something broadcast in the new series, as revamped Sontarans had just appeared on TV in the one with the killer Sat Navs. I know this because I was often online on the old Restoration Team forum (part of the website of the team who worked on the Doctor Who releases), where these things were discussed. As the 1990s turned into the 2000s, and the new millennium wore on, talking about Doctor Who with like-minded fans online gradually and then rapidly became mainstream. It had been feasible to do this throughout the 1990s, but those old newsgroups were analogous to a niche telecommunications hobby like ham radio. As things became more commoditised, another new activity then became available - buying Doctor Who stories online.

Long term readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I had preferred suppliers of Doctor Who on VHS and then DVD, and these were bricks and mortar shops. This may have been a UK thing, but I don't remember any bespoke sell-through VHS stores, neither chains nor smaller independent businesses. My favourite place to buy Doctor Who and other cult TV videos was a section within a local bookshop in Worthing called Volume One; lots of other big chains that sold books and/or music would also stock them. VHS had started as a medium for rental, and lots of rental places existed - Blockbuster for example having first arrived on our shores in 1989 - but no dedicated stores that just sold tapes. This changed in the early 2000s, with DVD seen as more of a sell-through medium than VHS. Chains adopted DVD alongside VHS to buy, but smaller shops sprouted up too. They were mainly focussed on film, and usually more expensive than places like MVC where I would regularly buy Doctor Who DVD titles in those early days, but it was nice that they were there for the rarer and less mainstream films that I was also collecting at the time. Sadly, such enterprise already had a finite life expectancy because of something else that was taking hold, that at the time I would have called e-commerce. It wouldn't be too long before the e- became superfluous; for a vast array of products that up to then would have been purchased in person, online sites became the default place and way to do commerce.

Physical media for music, TV and films were obvious early options for online purchasing as they were easy to distribute by post, and didn't require a customer's detailed, in-person scrutiny before the decision to buy. I was a relatively early adopter, making my first online purchases in 2000. Availability was a main driver rather than cost; shopping with clicks would supplement shopping in stores made of bricks for a book or a record you couldn't easily find, or an imported region 1 DVD of a film not yet released in the UK. What is lost to my memory is when I first bought a Doctor Who DVD online. Availability for the discs wasn't a problem in those days. I know that I was still purchasing Who traditionally in 2003 (bought the final ever Doctor Who VHS box set in the London Bridge MVC) and 2004 (I remember reading the inlay of the Ghost Light DVD on a commute back to Gillingham, the first new Doctor Who DVD I'd bought to watch in my newly-wed pad with the Better Half). By autumn 2007, I was 100% pre-ordering online for delivery on the day of release (it was a big deal cancelling my pre-order of The Key to Time DVD box set to save some pennies, only to find that I couldn't buy it thereafter because of its limited edition nature). So, I've narrowed it down to sometime in 2005 or 2006 that I made the change. The trouble with investigating this is that none of the companies I was buying from is still trading, so I can't just check my order history on a website.

A good summary of the 'etailers' around in these years can be found on the marvellous Film Stories by the marvellous Simon Brew, link here. I purchased for a while from Sendit.com (and had got non-Who product from there when they were called Blackstar). Later I used play.com (and again had purchased non-Who product from them when they were called play247. What prompted the full move to online I'm not 100% sure on, but I think it probably was the loss of that convenient MVC on London Bridge. My day job office moved out of the City of London to the nearby Royal Mint Court in 2005, meaning it was out of my way to walk across London Bridge. That didn't matter for that long though, as the shop closed anyway shortly after and MVC went into administration. They wouldn't be the last traditional retailer to suffer this fate, and it would happen to etailers too. Sendit.com no longer exists. Play.com were taken over by Japanese company Rakuten in 2011, and stopped selling direct (becoming instead a marketplace for smaller vendors) two years later. I moved on to the online BBC Shop and was still purchasing DVDs from them when this blog started, though by then I was wondering how long Doctor Who on physical media would stick around (see Deeper Thoughts of The Underwater Menace post for more details). The BBC Shop then itself closed in early 2016. Non-physical sell-through was obviously becoming a bigger and bigger thing at that point, which influenced the BBC decision with them trying out a short lived download-to-own model with the BBC Store instead. The smaller etailers closing probably had more to do with their not being able to compete with the Amazon behemoth.

I have somewhat begrudgingly used Amazon for Doctor Who Blu-rays since 2016 as the only reliable option for getting titles on the day of release (but never earlier - one of my small joys in the pre-Amazon days had been the rare early arrival on a Doctor Who story on the Saturday before the release date, giving me a weekend to start on it). Amazon has a comprehensive order history for me, so I can see that the first story I purchased from there was the Blu-ray of The Power of the Daleks animation late in 2016. Purchases are less frequent now than back in the day, of course, with only the box sets of new series, and classic ones as part of the Blu-ray Collection, plus a smattering of animated stories here and there. Armed with this investigation into my personal history, I can answer the question about The Invasion of Time: I would have pre-ordered it from play.com, and received it on release day in the post. I can't tell for sure what my first story purchased online was, though. It would probably have been sometime in the Summer of 2005, so could have been one of the four single-disc volumes of the new Eccleston episodes, or a classic story that was released around then such as Revelation of the Daleks or The Web Planet. Whichever it was, it marked my first blow against the High Street, which would take many blows from many others from then on. It may well be having a bit of a renaissance of late, though. As I was writing this, I saw the good news announced that the big Oxford Street HMV store, that had been closed and replaced by one of those American candy stores / possible money-laundering fronts, is coming back. Whether it'll tempt me enough to even visit there again, let alone to buy any Doctor Who product there, remains to be seen.

 

In Summary:

It deserves some leeway because of the circumstances of its creation, but nonetheless is around one episode's worth of story (including a couple of nice moments and lines) stretched over six.

The Invisible Enemy

Chapter The 225th, where a character arrives that really goes viral.

Plot:

The solar system in the year 5000: a shuttle craft progressing through space on a journey to Titan flies through a cloud of gunk in space and the crew get taken over by a sentient virus. Meanwhile in the nearby TARDIS, the Doctor is also infected; he's been selected by the Nucleus of the Swarm to be its host. For some reason, Leela is immune. The shuttle arrives on Titan, and the infected crew kills the base crew, except for the supervisor, Lowe. The TARDIS materialises there too. The Nucleus telepathically instructs the infected to kill the reject Leela, but the Doctor resists control and doesn't hurt his friend. Lowe is infected by one of the shuttle crew, but pretends not to be and suggests Leela and the Doctor go to a nearby medical station on an asteroid, the Bi-Al foundation, where the Doctor hopes he can be cured, and the Nucleus believes its host will be best protected. The three of them travel to the foundation in the TARDIS - presumably Leela pilots the TARDIS after having been given the coordinates by the stricken Doctor, and Lowe doesn't take any opportunity to kill her, and he must have had several; but, this all happens off-screen. (I think there's ample opportunity for someone to write a story of that journey, much more intriguing that the rest of The Invisible Enemy, if you ask me; maybe Big Finish have already done it, or maybe Terrance Dicks smoothed it out in the novelisation).

One of the shuttle crew remains on Titan guarding an incubation chamber for lots of virus blob eggs getting ready to hatch. (Is this really how viri work? Oh well, never mind.) At the foundation, the Doctor is examined by Professor Marius and his robot computer in the shape of a dog, K9. Lowe goes on the attack, infecting people, but Leela and K9 hold him off. The Nucleus attacks another shuttle craft making it crash into the foundation. Meanwhile cloned forms of the Doctor and Leela are miniaturised using the TARDIS dimensional stabiliser and injected into the Doctor's brain. Lowe breaks in, infects Marius, and a mini-clone of Lowe is sent into the brain after them. The clone Doctor confronts the Nucleus but does not get rid of it before his and Leela's clones are absorbed into his blood stream, the Doctor getting Leela's immunity because of this. The Nucleus follows the Doctor's original plan to escape via a tear duct, and is then expanded to human-size. Helped by Leela and K9, the Doctor escapes the Nucleus, and works to create antibodies extracted from Leela's blood, which he uses to cure Marius. Marius and his staff cultivate more, which the Doctor, accompanied by Leela and K9, takes to Titan to kill the virus. Lowe tackles him and the antibodies are destroyed, so he blows up the incubation chamber instead (it was Leela's idea). Everything returned to normal, Marius gives the Doctor K9 to look after, and the metal mutt joins our favourite Time Lord on his adventures.

Context:

One evening when the rest of the household were off in their own rooms doing their own things, I poured equal parts of gin, sweet vermouth and Campari over ice into a tumbler and stirred, then added a slice of orange. I settled down with the resultant Negroni on the living room sofa, turned on the TV and resolutely failed to watch The Invisible Enemy. The DVD was in the player and everything was cued up, but the effort of just pressing the Play button on a remote didn't seem worth it; visions in my head of a tatty prawn man, and silly scaly make-up put me off. Whether it was a good idea or not, I was stone cold sober the following evening when I did finally watch the story. I was on my ownsome again, as the family were still in the middle of watching the story I last blogged (except for the Better Half who's off Who altogether at the moment - I'm hoping Jodie Whittaker's regeneration story might tempt her back).

First Time Round:

I watched this for the first time with Zahir, childhood fan friend mentioned a few times before on the blog. It was one of a couple of stories that I first saw around the same time with him, on two separate occasions (the other being Underworld). Both had been recorded onto VHS from a broadcast on the Satellite and Cable channel UK Gold by one of Zahir's colleagues at work and lent to him. I went round to visit him and watched it one evening. I've scoured my memory to ascertain when exactly this was. It was definitely after we both finished our degrees (Zahir was one of two other school and college friends whom I knew that went up to Durham University at the same time as me). We were both living and working in Worthing, Zahir in his family home, and - if memory serves - I was by then in the little studio flat I'd moved into with the Better Half. This means it was sometime between 1996 and 1999; my money's on the latter end of that date range. Like all Tom Baker stories, I'd previously seen one clip of The Invisible Enemy on the Tom Baker Years VHS compendium (a two tape set of Tom Baker reacting to clips from each of his stories) that had come out in 1992. The clip used did not show the story at its best, so I was pleasantly surprised by the visuals, even by the Nucleus of the Swarm's cumbersome and impractical prawn outfit. It was a few years later in autumn 2002 when the story finally came out on VHS, and I got to own my own copy.

Reaction:

The clip chosen on that Tom Baker Years tape was the scene of the Doctor's clone in his own brain, talking to the Nucleus of the Swarm, where the antagonist character is depicted as a black-draped lump with a feeble claw poking out. If you've never seen The Invisible Enemy, I'd recommend watching this clip first to emulate my initial watch. It's the story's most threadbare moment, and watching it out of context set very low expectations for the 1990s me still to see the full thing such that I enjoyed the story as a whole when I finally saw it perhaps more than I would have otherwise. The prawn-man version of the Nucleus revealed later may be a little ridiculous, and more than a little immobile, but it looks like a million dollars if you're expecting just a lump and a claw. Had they selected a clip of some of the better model work of spaceships, base stations, asteroids and such, I might have been a lot more disappointed. For every very good effect, costume, set or prop in The Invisible Enemy, there seems to be another waiting - often revealed in the very next scene - that's sub par. It's frustrating; there was clearly a big budget for the model work compared to stories before this in Who's history, but the story as a whole still looks cheap because of the lapses. There's an obvious root cause: the script is utterly, recklessly, hilariously ambitious. The people realising this script are rushing to keep up, and succeeding half the time, but it was beyond the scope of what was feasible with their resources.

There's a moment in episode two for example where the Swarm virus impacts a random shuttle that's not been part of the action before that point, and it collides into the asteroid housing the space hospital where our heroes are adventuring. It provides minimal plot complication, but might provide spectacle if it was delivered to the screen effectively (it isn't); one wonders why the script editor didn't encourage its excision. Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin were known to never let the budget stand in the way of a grand idea, but by this 1977 / 1978 season (Tom Baker's fourth, and the first for new producer Graham Williams) they do seem to have taken things up a notch. They pen two planet-hopping space operas during the run, each crammed with difficult-to-realise action. The latter story Underworld demands a planet be formed in a rush of gravity by cosmic bodies colliding together, staged in Television Centre. That was Baker and Martin reining it in, though, as in this their first story of the year they choose to have an episode set within the Doctor's brain. The resources of Who's production team of the time would have been stretched doing a whole story inside someone's brain, but here it's just one episode of four, a detour to keep episode three interesting, just one of many immense explosions of imagination in the script.

An assumption someone might slip into making, looking back from the present day at rough timings, is that this visual envelope-pushing was prompted by the seismic impact of Star Wars arriving in cinemas in 1977. The inclusion of a small, cute robot sidekick along with all the space opera would seem to confirm so; but, it's all a coincidence. The UK release of Star Wars was far in the future when the story was written and made; the model work was filmed before Star Wars had even premiered in the US. It's another example of Doctor Who getting there first. Baker and Martin put a lot of ideas into Doctor Who, put a lot of ideas just into this one story, but the ideas were often good. None were more so than the one that arrived in this story - K9. This creation tapped into the zeitgeist in a big way, predating R2D2 and C3P0 and the many imitations that followed in lesser sci-fi shows in following years. K9 is like an amalgam of the two robot stars of George Lucas's saga, really, but none of this was intentional, I'm telling you. The design work was a crucial input as well as the clever idea. Robot dog on paper could be handled in many different ways, and Tony Harding's eventual design is iconic and so durable that K9 was still a feature of kids' TV and kids' toy collections 30 years afterwards. If you want an example of how that brief could have been interpreted in a less good way, do a google image search on "Battlestar Galactica Muffit" and thank your lucky star systems that K9 looked as good as he did.

There are other things to commend the story other than just K9 and an expanded amount of model work (most of which is good). It's a refreshing switcheroo that the Doctor, rather than the companion, is the one being taken over by the malevolent force, and the companion, rather than the Doctor, is immune. The cliffhanger scene of Tom Baker's Doctor looking like he's going to shoot Leela is thrilling, and the following struggle, as he temporarily overpowers the virus controlling him, is very effective too. The "Contact has been made" catchphrase parroted by anyone taken over, is nicely done. There are some trippy visuals during the fantastic voyage into the Doctor's brain, and some nice production design elsewhere - the very 2001: A Space Odyssey spacesuits are striking, for example, as are the green PVC fetish outfits of the nursing staff, for perhaps different reasons. Overall, the positives outweigh - just - the sometimes rubbish effects and outsized comedy performances (Frederick Jaeger as Professor Marius, I'm looking at you!). Still, the unevenness is down to ambition. I hate that I've boxed myself in to the position where I'm asking my favourite TV series to be less ambitious, but production values might have been better overall if there were fewer things going on in the narrative. Having said that, though, if Doctor Who's reach does not exceed its grasp, then what's a heaven for?

Connectivity: 

Both The Invisible Enemy and World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls have a significant amount of the action take place in a hospital, and both feature events leading to the Doctor having a companion who's mainly made of metal.

Deeper Thoughts:

Contact Tracing Has Been Unmade. Even as little as a few months ago, a story like The Invisible Enemy, about a virus, would have seemed very fitting, with a viral pandemic ongoing. Watched in late March 2022, though, it felt for me like old news. This isn't because many aren't contracting the Covid-19 virus, and isn't because too many people aren't still dying after doing so. It's just because it is currently being pretty much ignored by those in power where I live (the UK).  All precautions are now up to the individual and nothing is enforced by the state. It leaves me, an overweight, middle-aged man with asthma, exhausted (more than normal, given my overweight middle-aged asthmatic nature) wondering daily exactly how much risk I should be taking. As an example, I have tickets for a Pet Shop Boys concert at the O2 arena in May, their greatest hits Dreamworld tour. My obsession with ver Pets is almost equal to my fanaticism for Doctor Who, so I'd really like to go. The tickets were originally purchased in the autumn of 2019, the original date for the performance was in the first half of 2020, and the gig has been rescheduled - I've lost count now - twice or maybe thrice over the course of Covid lockdowns and restrictions. When all that lifted and it was finally possible to go to such an event again, it should have been a moment of joy and liberation. But a lethal or debilitating (in the case of long Covid) infection still casts a long shadow, and it has turned out to be a time of confusion and doubt.

There are logistic concerns too, of course. The tickets I have are for myself and the Better Half, but the new date is a Sunday, with the following being a working and school day. This reduces our chances of being able to get home from the O2 arena on public transport that evening to zero. Overnight babysitting has to be a family affair, but the only people conveniently able to look after the kids are their grandparents who are old and immunocompromised; I don't want them put at risk by being with kids who are every day going in to schools that still have high Covid rates. The eldest is old enough that he could potentially look after the other two overnight at a push, but because of the rescheduling bumping things along two years, he's now in the middle of his GCSEs - exams disrupted enough by impacts of the virus on his schooling over the last couple of years - so that wouldn't be fair. These sort of headaches are what we all have to face doing certain activities; I don't know how anyone can plan a foreign holiday yet, for example. It seems to be pot luck as to whether an airport will be staffed when one arrives at it, or whether it will be heavily impacted by Covid-related absences. As difficult as it is, I accept, just about, that this is what we have to endure as part of learning to "live with Covid".

Even if all the logistic issues could be overcome for our O2 arena date, though, do the Better Half and I want to be in a "crowded and enclosed space" with thousands of people for an extended period of time, when those people - because of government decisions - will only have to wear masks if they feel like it? Do we want to risk catching Covid because anybody attending can ignore any symptoms they might have and come along without any consequences? Is everyone going to test in advance of coming along, when the government has now made that an expensive activity, rather than a free one? Covid denial was not so long ago restricted to online radicals; now, it is state-sanctioned. This is disappointing; but, disappointment seems to be the best I can expect from my current government. In the days since watching The Invisible Enemy, while I've been turning my viewing notes into this blog post, there have been so many negative stories about the government in the media, that it's hard to keep up. It was proven, for example, that the Covid denialism ran long as well as deep, with fines being issued for parties happening in the corridors of power while everyone else was forbidden to do such things by instruction from the same administration that was organising the parties. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the UK's chief financial minister and as such responsible for raising revenue through taxation, appears to not have even been officially resident in the UK for a good portion of the early Covid period (he held a green card in the US for some of that time), and his wife - whose interests are of public import according to the ministerial code - has not up to now paid UK tax because of her non-domiciled status.

Finally, at least for now, the government want to sell off Channel 4. This broadcaster is state-owned, but not - no matter what any government minister might think or say - public funded, and it is still doing great, innovative work. A public consultation saw a majority were not in favour of privatisation, but they are pressing ahead with it anyway. A fast buck would be made, and a public jewel lost to private ownership, and would no doubt then quickly become tarnished. Would any privately-owned broadcaster have made a series like Russell T Davies's It's a Sin, for example? Clearly ideology is driving this action, but whether it is the ideology that the state should be as small as possible, and own and control as little as possible, or the even less defensible populist regime ideology that media critical of the government should be silenced (Channel 4 News has been very unpopular with this government for highlighting its many failings) is less clear. Again, the delusion that the media in the UK is left-leaning used to be confined to online trolls; to see it become policy is dispiriting. If they come for Channel 4, then the BBC and the licence fee will no doubt be next. A programme like Doctor Who, with a strong history and big fan base, would probably survive, but what else would be destroyed? One can hope for an election to get rid of such a dysfunctional government, but then one sees the news of nasty Hungarian populist Viktor Orbán getting a fourth term in office, and it's tempting to give in to despair. Prime Minister A. Johnson still has his vocal supporters, despite everything that's come to light. Most of these scandals have had exactly zero consequences, despite being out in the open, with no attempts to disguise what's going on. The 'enemy' is all so sadly visible, but that doesn't mean everyone can necessarily see it.

In Summary:

All together now: one man and his dog, went to blow up a giant virus... one man, a savage girl, a comedy scientist and his dog, went to blow up a giant virus...

The Sun Makers

Chapter The 199th, which depicts some taxing times for the Doctor. Taxing, see? Tax? (I couldn't resist it, sorry.)

Plot:

The Doctor, Leela and K9 land on Pluto, finding it mysteriously habitable because of artificial suns in its orbit. The humans living there are controlled by a civil administration, represented in the story by the Gatherer, which works them and taxes them hard on behalf of a company run by aliens, represented by the Collector. The Doctor and Leela persuade low level worker Cordo not to kill himself because of his debts, and join him and some other more unsavoury rebels in overthrowing the regime. The company (from the planet Usurius) found the Earth made uninhabitable by the humans, and did a deal to rehouse them in the solar system using its artificial sun technology to make other planets habitable. Having exhausted the resources of Mars, they moved again to Pluto. As well as by crippling taxes, the populace is also controlled by anxiety-inducing gas pumped into the atmosphere. By a lucky fluke, the Doctor is thrown into contact with a couple of people who know lots of information about this gas, and who help him to shut it off. The newly emboldened humans rebel, and the Doctor does some clever financial tinkering wrecking the company's profits, and making the Collector revert to his true form, a green puddle of liquid. The Gatherer is summarily executed by being thrown off a skyscraper, which seems a bit extreme but there you go. The TARDIS team leave the humans preparing to make a journey back home to Earth.

Context:

Having been forced to watch the last classic Who 4-parter in one go without pausing or rewinding (see the Context section of the post here for more details), and having enjoyed that story seen in such a way, I thought I'd experiment with that approach again for The Sun Makers, even though I have obtained a new functioning remote control for the TV and Blu-ray player now. With the family abed late one Saturday evening, and with a chilled glass of a rather nice white wine to sip, I embarked on The Sun Makers. I managed to the end of the first episode before I stopped things. It no doubt had something to do with the wine and the late hour, but I couldn't watch any more without a break. I watched the next three episodes back to back when feeling fresher on the Sunday morning. I'm not by any means saying that this story is too difficult to follow; the opposite, I think: it's so generic a plotline that my brain, emboldened with a little dutch courage, rebelled at the thought of having to watch more than 25 minutes. After that, I went on holiday for a week to Oxford (no Doctor Who story was ever filmed or set in Oxford, or even had any kind of link to the place, so I didn't pick a Doctor Who story to view and contented myself with watching a couple of Inspector Morses to say "I've been there" whenever a dreaming spire was on screen). Once I was back home, I had the Web of Fear Blu-ray to watch as I wanted to talk about it in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post (and I do - see below). The storyline of The Sun Makers was confirmed as simple enough for me to remember it clearly when writing this a couple of weeks after the fact.

First Time Round:

The Sun Makers has the distinction of being the final Tom Baker Doctor Who story I caught up with during my years of collecting and watching classic Who. I'd missed Tom's tenure altogether when it first aired, as I didn't become a fan and regular viewer until Peter Davison had taken over. As such, the main source of catch-up was the VHS range, and it was very generous with Tom Baker titles from early on. There's a lot of them though, and they form a few discrete phases, some of which are more popular than others. His first three years are well regarded, as is his final shiny season when Doctor Who fully moved into the 1980s; but there's felt by some fans (by no means all, but sufficient to have influenced the release schedule) to be a slump in the middle. The VHS range favoured the bookend years of Baker over two of the three years in between. This was the period produced by Graham Williams, and excepting his second year in charge (the Key to Time season, which came out on video relatively early on in 1995), his stories are rightly or wrongly seen as those where there was a reduction in quality both in scripting and production values; subsequently, most of these stories came out later, in the arse end of the range. Before the VHS range got to these ones, the satellite and cable TV channel UK Gold showed them, cycling through all Baker's stories multiple times over the years. For a brief period in the late 1990s I had the channel as part of my cable package and managed to watch other Tom stories that I hadn't seen before. I'd just missed the Sun Makers, though, and I got rid of UK Gold before they cycled round again. So, it was in 2001 when the VHS was released that I finally got to see this story (and I remember nothing about that first watch). All those other underwhelming stories I'd seen from UK Gold came later in the range, though. So The Sun Makers is either seen as the worst of the good 'uns, or the best of a bad batch.

Reaction:

The possibly apocryphal tale is that writer Robert Holmes received a big tax bill, which prompted his writing of this story. He was at the end of his long period as Doctor Who's script editor, handing over to successor Anthony Read, so I would have thought he'd have only just stopped being a salaried BBC employee on PAYE rather than a freelancer where there might have been any doubt about the amounts in his tax return. I'm not au fait with his contractual status or financial situation, though, so perhaps it is true. Otherwise, he was just reaching for an innovative and interesting hook for another Who story after having written so many in the years since his first contribution to the show in the late 1960s. Tax anyway seemed to be an obsession in the UK in the 1970s, maybe it's an obsession in the UK all the time. The basic percentage rate of income tax was in the mid thirties at the time; it seems high from the vantage point of 2021, but historically, it wasn't particularly outstanding a figure. I am one of those do-gooder lefties that thinks of taxation as a good thing, as long as it's not regressive (which in The Sun Makers, of course, it most definitely is). Perhaps with people like me in mind, Holmes - or the production team around him influencing him to tone his ideas down -  hedges his bets.

The big villain of The Sun Makers is a global (multi-global, in fact) company which has the civil administration in its pocket. So, whatever political wing you are looking on from, you aren't alienated and can find a root cause of the issues that meets your own prejudices. Dictatorships purporting to be democratic governments with disastrous and destructive fiscal policy could emerge from both left and right leaning ideologies. Where, then, is the satirical searchlight of The Sun Makers aimed?  Is the Gatherer the main one to blame? He is an official who leads a civil administration, so he is supposed to represent the people. Instead, he makes an elite strata of the society rich (including presumably the security staff we see keeping people in line) at the expense of all the others, who are kept in place with anxiety-inducing agents in the air, and kept working because of excessively regressive taxation. But the Collector is the Boss Bad of the story, and he confirms that his company is responsible for fiscal policy, so he sets the tax rates. The Collector has the power, and the Gatherer is merely enacting policy that's passed down. Tax is only as bad as the things it pays for, of course. On Pluto, it is paying for the artificial suns that make life possible, as well as the profit margin, and the running costs are high. Without that, everyone will die. So, no matter how badly it is being managed, the taxation is essential. Is the message of the story that major utilities should be nationalised rather than managed by private enterprises, and anyone wanting to make a profit out of such utilities should be treated with suspicion?

Or maybe the people themselves are to blame for making the Earth uninhabitable in the first place, leaving them at the mercy of the company's "commercial imperialism". Environmental concerns and metaphors for colonialism had been mainstay themes of Doctor Who stories throughout the 1970s, so maybe the stuff about tax is just window dressing. The satirical searchlight roams wildly throughout The Sun Makers and doesn't stay too long upon any one element; it's not really making any particular point. The story mechanics show this: at heart, the story has a boilerplate 'rebels overthrow tyrannical regime' plot and it doesn't deviate from it. What the tax and corporate stuff does bring is some spots of wit here and there. Referring to the Collector's personal guard as the "Inner Retinue" is particularly clever. Then there's "Perhaps everyone runs from the taxman", and the Gather's presumably more sci-fi vehicle called a Beamer, and the P45 corridor (another theory about this story is that it's Holmes's barbed farewell to the corporation that he'd been overworked by in his years as script editor, having just received his own P45 on leaving the role). It also allows for a fun ending, where the company - and its boss - literally goes into liquidation.

The other way that Holmes spruces up his plot is more questionable: a gleeful embracing of the dark, nasty and sadistic. Five minutes in and a character's attempting suicide, and the criminal rebels (including Michael Keating effectively auditioning for the part of Vila in Blake's 7 that he was imminently going to fill) are a cut-throat bunch. The acting throughout is good; Tom Baker's having a great time, but not at the expense of the audience, and the addition of John Leeson as K9 in his first regular appearance after his introduction earlier in the season is keeping things fresh. Director Pennant Roberts does less well visually than with performances, though. This is where The Sun Makers could have done with a lift to rise above its plot - wordplay and black humour only getting it so far - and it unfortunately is not served well. The locations - high rooves and long corridors - give it some scale, but they are a bit drab. The set design goes for a somewhat empty aesthetic - defined shapes and large blocks of colour with little maybe Inca-inspired touches of a sun motif here and there - but the money was clearly running out (see the obvious monochrome photo blow-ups of circuit boards pasted on to blocks in lieu of a proper computer bank prop) and it all looks a bit dull ultimately. It's a shame, because there is definitely potential for greatness here, despite the generic plot. 

Connectivity: 

Both stories see the Doctor trapped in a small space in the cliffhanger at the end of the first part (a cubicle in The Sun Makers, the Pandorica in the news series 5 finale). That's about it. The Usurians - one can scarcely believe it - failed to be namechecked as one of the many baddies in the alliance in The Pandorica Opens, but I suppose they could have been in a ship up there somewhere, whirling about above Stonehenge.

Deeper Thoughts:

It has a character called The Collector in it, so... I went into the politics, such as they are, of The Sun Makers as much as they require above. There aren't are other deeper thoughts inspired by the story. So, instead I'm going to use this space for some mini-reviews of some Doctor Who product I've been consuming recently, all of it connected to the second Doctor, Patrick Troughton. I was going to wait until the next Pat story came up to blog, but that's going to be The Evil of The Daleks when I see the imminent animated version. As I've been lucky enough to acquire tickets to the BFI screening of said story, I will want to write up that event, which will not leave room to talk about these other things I've collected. It's a shame, as one of them is the novelisation of The Evil of the Daleks, so it would have fit quite well. I obtained this, and the novelisation of the other David Whittaker scripted Patrick Troughton Dalek story The Power of the Daleks, after swearing I never would. But as a dog returns to his vomit, a fool repeats his folly, so the Bible says. I couldn't bear any longer to have an almost complete collection - every classic series story novelised except these two. I'm not fussy about specific editions or anything, I just want to have and be able to read every story that was on TV. These two came out in 1993, quite late on when a range of original Doctor novels had already started in parallel; they had relatively limited runs, and have never been reprinted. As such, it cost a reasonable sum of money to get them. If you're prepared to do that, though, they aren't that hard to obtain.

The prose by John Peel (not that one) is unfussy and gets on with telling the stories, with just enough character insight added regarding motivations. This is as expected; Peel was the trusted fellow in the late 1980s and early 1990s when it came to novelising Dalek stories, but he wasn't the type to take too many liberties with the text. I think that he occasionally pushes a little too hard on some emotions (for example, Ben's suspicion of the Doctor, and Polly's sometime irritation with Ben) that should have been more subtle, but that's just personal taste. In Power, he clearly feels there needs to be an explanation of why there is discontent in the Vulcan colony, creating the factions amongst the humans that the Daleks exploit. To add more explanation, he does a bit of retroactive continuity, and says that the colony is run by IMC (an immoral mining concern featured in the later TV story Colony in Space). It's neat but, I think unnecessary. It's better, in a way, to leave the reasons behind the humans' disunity unexplained as it almost suggests that the Daleks are so powerful and evil that they could overcome any group of flawed, backbiting humans. These are quibbles, though, and it was a great treat overall to finally read these books. I was very careful flicking through these paperbacks as they were so expensive, but the point was to read and enjoy them rather than just put them on a shelf to look at forever. The only book published as part of the original novelisation range that I don't have now is The Paradise of Death (a prose version of a Jon Pertwee starring radio serial made for Doctor Who's 30th anniversary) that came out around the same time as those two Dalek stories. I wonder how long I'll hold out before I crack and buy that too.

The other item I want to tell you about is a new release on Blu-ray, so it was considerably less expensive. This was the special edition of The Web of Fear. It's a two disc set with lots of extras (the DVD release was a bare bones release without such additional material). I covered the story for the blog before here, so won't go into detail of the story apart from to state that it's still great and looks better than ever on Blu-ray. The story's third episode is still missing from the archives (except for the off-air soundtrack) and that previous version had a photo reconstruction to bridge the gap. This new version has an animated third episode instead, one that uses a new approach. This involves creating the characters as "skins" rather than multiple drawings and applying these skins to moving 3D stick people models that can emulate motion-captured movements by actors, and presumably be directed by computer, or react independently based on AI too (that's what it looks like to my uneducated eye anyway). The result is odd, to say the least, but you do get used to it. My first impression was somewhat unfavourable, it was like I was watching a pastiche of a Thunderbirds-like marionette show. It would be a disservice to the talented people involved in Thunderbirds to compare it directly, this was more like an exaggeration for laughs. I think this is because quite a lot of the movements by the animated Doctor Who characters are too big; where they are smaller, it works much better. I'm putting this down to teething problems with the new technology and am excited to see how they can refine it, and what they do next, though some people (based on online comments I've seen) hated it.

The new approach was deployed, according to the printed notes in the packaging, because a more 3D presentation would better fit in with the episodes either side. What hooey! Lots of stories have previously come out with gaps bridged by 2D animation (or even flatter, still image slide shows) and it didn't cause too many problems. The colour version of the episode can be viewed standalone elsewhere in the set, and it is much less jarring when seen on its own. The truth is more likely to be that this new approach (known as Shapeshifter) is less resource intensive and may open up possibilities to be able to do complicated stories with lots of characters, which may be prohibitively difficult to create with more traditional approaches. This is pretty much confirmed by a representative of Shapeshifter Studios on a featurette talking about the animation on the second disc of the set. If the movement can be made more controlled, the remaining issue will be with likenesses - the 'skin' approach is less likely to always look perfectly like the original actors compared to the more controlled 2D animation illustrations. Some of the animated episodes over the years have had some questionable likeness anyway, though, and if it means that more stories can be animated, I'd be happy with the trade-off.

The animation is the main draw of this release. Other than that, there are making of documentaries and episode commentaries that are at the high level of quality we've come to expect. There's no info text subtitle track, which is a shame; maybe that will be added in future when this story is included in a Patrick Troughton Blu-ray season box-set. I am more and more thinking that a 26 box-set series, covering every season of classic Who on Blu-ray, with missing episodes all animated, is an inevitability, let alone a possibility. I hope that the complaints about the animation of Web of Fear episode 3 don't impact that. What would help, I think, is to have an alternative branched option of a photographic reconstruction for those that don't like the animation style. This emphatically is not the case on the Web of Fear set. The old reconstruction is included, but on the extras disc, separate from the other episodes. One would have to switch between discs partway through to see the recon in situ with the other episodes. Rectify that, and I think any naysayers will be placated, and - you never know - we may get a lovely Shapeshifter-ised version of The Highlanders or Marco Polo, before too long, and thereafter season box sets for the first six black-and-white years of Doctor Who too.

In Summary:

Doesn't achieve greatness despite a fun script, but nonetheless is not too taxing to watch. Taxing, see? Tax? (I couldn't resist it again, sorry.)