The Snowmen

Chapter the 287th, where it's Snow Joke for the Doctor and Clara at Christmas...

Plot:
London, England 1892. Disillusioned after losing the Ponds to the Weeping Angels (though they did get to die of old age, so that's alright then!), the Doctor is hiding out in the TARDIS on top of a cloud reached by an invisible spiral staircase (yes, really). Vastra, Jenny and Strax are trying to engage him in helping people again, but he's resisting futilely. He meets a governess and sometime barmaid Clara Oswald, while investigating telepathic alien snow that can form itself into killer snowmen. The head of the G.I. institute Doctor Simeon has had a telepathic link with the snow since he was a child, and now is aiming to make the intelligence corporeal. To achieve this, he needs the icy body print of a human that exists at Clara's employer Captain Latimer's house, as the previous governess a year earlier drowned in a pond that then froze over. Snowmen surround the house, and the ice governess comes to life, but Clara protects her charges (a young girl and boy). The Doctor, and then Vastra, Jenny and Strax arrive to help out.

The Doctor and Clara lead the ice governess to the top of the house, then both escape up the invisible staircase to the TARDIS, where the Doctor believes the governess will not be able to follow. Just as he's inviting Clara to travel with him in the TARDIS, the governess arrives, and pulls at Clara and they both fall down to Earth. The governess is smashed to smithereens, and Clara is mortally wounded. The Doctor brings her in to the Latimer house where the others try to save her, while he goes to confront Simeon. With a nice little bit of the old Doctor flim-flam, he manages to wipe Simeon's memory, but instead of removing the link to the snow, it allows the snow to animate the blank Simeon. Suddenly, though, it starts to rain, the snow melts, and Simeon collapses. The telepathic signal caused by the Latimer children crying has created rain, and they are crying because Clara has died. In the aftermath, the Doctor realises that the G.I. in the institute's name stands for Great Intelligence, so maybe the disembodied force behind the snowmen might have survived. He also realises Clara is someone he's now met twice and both times she has died, He goes off into time and space to investigate that mystery.

Context:

Watched on a Sunday afternoon in the lead up to Christmas 2023, accompanied by the eldest and youngest child (boy of 17, girl of 11). The Better Half and middle child (boy of 14) were elsewhere in the house rewatching Good Omens season one, the David Tennant-loving genre traitors! I watched from the BBC iplayer, rather than bothering to get the Blu-ray set down from the shelf.  

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. The Snowmen is the final (at time of writing) new series Christmas Day special to be covered. There was a good run of these from The Christmas Invasion in 2005 to Twice Upon a Time in 2017. After that, the Who festive specials moved to January 1st and didn't look like they were ever going to come back to December 25th. Missing them, I decided then to hold back a few of the older ones, exempting them from selection during the rest of the year, to blog about annually - but in a random order, natch - just before the big day. Luckily, now that I've run the old ones out, Doctor Who is back on Christmas Day again from 2023 onwards. Exciting!

First Time Round:

I can't remember much about Christmas 2012. My In-Laws were round during the day, and the youngest's first Christmas was a bit rubbish as she was ill with an ear infection, poor thing. I definitely watched The Snowmen on the day, probably time-shifted a little into the evening as its 5:15pm broadcast time would still have been a bit busy in the house.  The only clear memory in my head from around this time is reading the Christmas Radio Times listings magazine, which introduced Jenna Coleman as the new companion Clara. I'm struggling to remember whether it had leaked that she wasn't the real Clara, and that this was to a certain extent misdirection with the Victorian Clara dying during the special. (Like in many a show since it was done - spoiler alert for old telly - by Spooks in the UK, writer Steven Moffat is pulling the trick of introducing someone who appears to be a regular and therefore plot-armoured, but then killing them off as a surprise.) I don't think I had heard anything about this, so when reading about Clara I would have thought that she was to be a Victorian in the TARDIS, and I probably thought that wasn't the greatest idea.

Reaction:

When The Church on Ruby Road is shown on the 25th December 2023, it will make it fourteen specials in total for the new Doctor Who broadcast on BBC1 on the big day. It's rare for something that isn't a light entertainment show, soap or monarch's message to rack up such numbers. Fourteen specials is equal with Only Fools and Horses's total (the popular sit-com being something of a benchmark for festive ubiquity). As OFAH's writer John Sullivan found earlier (the most popular Only Fools Christmas special is set around August Bank Holiday weekend), it's hard to keep coming up with ideas that feature significant festive trimmings. The Snowmen marks the point that Moffat pretty much gives up, and - with the exception of the cracked / genius / both idea to include Santa Claus in a Doctor Who story a couple of years later - all of his Christmas specials from this one onwards barely feature any festivities, and could be set at any time of the year. That's fair enough, as it is a hard ask of anyone, and there would have been diminishing returns in sticking with killer tinsel monsters, or whatever, year on year. The Snowmen is at least wintery, and the central idea of semi-sentient carnivorous snow telepathically connected to a formless intelligence is an interesting one. The visuals pop, whether it's deep and crisp and even backdrops to dialogue scenes, or the moments where razor-toothed snowmen form instantly, or of Simeon using a machine to create an artificial blizzard in the Latimer house.

The title makes it seem like this is the third and final one of a series of Moffat Christmas specials loosely based on literary texts associated with the season, following the use of A Christmas Carol and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe the previous two years. Was The Snowmen in any way alluding to Raymond Briggs's The Snowman singular, the animated short film of which has been a festive fixture on UK channel 4 for decades. There is a sequence where the Doctor and Clara are literally walking in the air (the refrain of the famous song featured in The Snowman) so it's possible. It could, though, just be a coincidence. My money's on the latter, as Moffat seems to be much more interested in riffing on texts that are closer to home, creating an origin story for a classic monster from the early days of the show - the Great Intelligence. As would be expected of the writer, it's very clever: in one short programme with a few other things going on, the Doctor accidentally gives freedom and agency to the floating snow intelligence, as well as giving it the ideas for its first two battles with him in his Patrick Troughton persona (The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear). This is summed up in some slightly glib but funny (for a long-term fan) dialogue shared between Vastra, Jenny and the Doctor towards the end - a wink to the audience. Of course, this means that the defeat the alien invasion plot is not resolved during the special. The Great Intelligence will turn out to be the Big Bad of the episodes broadcast in Spring the following year.

One might think, and I agree, that the defeat the alien invasion plot is not the main point of The Snowmen. The real story is about the introduction of Clara. Jenna Coleman is perfect in her first appearance (well, sort-of, she had an unexpected teaser appearance earlier in 2012, but this is the first time she's properly interacted with the Doctor). She's sassy, assertive, cheeky, brave, clever; the character clearly passes the audition, for Doctor and for audience alike. But it's all misdirection: this Clara dies, and the Doctor then realises it's the same person as he talked to in the Dalek asylum. There's a mystery to solve and - perhaps - a prime Clara to find somewhere in the universe. So, again, the plot is unresolved and leads in to the episodes the following Spring. With The Snowmen being all so much set-up, how does it manage to engage the perhaps more flighty Christmas day audience? Maybe a lot of people watching don't care about the resolution of plot arcs - they'll either be watching in 2013 anyway, in which case they'll find out how things pan out, or they won't, so they won't care. They are rewarded during their hour's worth of Yuletide attention with comedy at least, and that might well be enough to get them through it. This is one of those Doctor Who stories blessed with more than its fair share of funny lines, and a lot of them are thanks to Dan Starkey's performance as Strax. The combination of his delivery and the material Moffat provides him is a winning combination (that the show would regularly milk over the next couple of years). The memory worm scene alone justifies the entire episode. In fact, even if the other 59 minutes and 50 seconds were fuzz and white noise, it would be worth it just for the line "Do not discuss my reproductive cycle in front of enemy girls."

  

Starkey is not the only one delivering; everybody's giving it their all. Richard E. Grant is as good as you'd expect as a restrained baddie, Neve Mackintosh as Vastra and Catrin Stewart as Jenny are not going to let the Sontaran have all the fun ("I'm a lizard woman from the dawn of time, and this is my wife"), Tom Ward and Liz White are memorably great too, without a huge amount of screen time. Murray Gold's music is sublime, there are some great set piece sequences like the interrogation scene where Vastra makes Clara form her answers as a single word only. There's a nice new beginning title sequence with Matt Smith's face appearing (for old times sake as the 50th anniversary approached); there's a wonderful new TARDIS control room set (possibly the best ever since 2005). As every parent knows, some years you can't find one big, perfect present for a child, and you have to instead give them lots of little things. The Snowmen is like that, a stocking full of individual, small pleasures rather than one solid plot. Sometimes, that's enough. If you stuff every gift you can think of into a stocking,  inevitably not everything will be liked. I didn't like Clara forcing a kiss on the Doctor without consent, and I didn't like the Doctor's borderline bullying of Strax, making many disparaging comments about his appearance. I don't think those moments would be handled in the same way if this story was made today.

Connectivity:

Both The Snowmen and The Ultimate Adventure feature the Doctor meeting a new female companion who works in an establishment that serves drinks. Both stories also see the Doctor with a cute alien sidekick (Zog, Strax).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Year of the Whoniverse. In the approach to Christmas Day, it's appropriate to look back on the year just gone. The biggest part of Doctor Who in 2023 will be forgotten, maybe already is forgotten, and that was a long wait. The longest period ever between new episodes on television since the programme returned in 2005 elapsed between the Power of the Doctor in October 2022 and The Star Beast in November 2023. The stretch of time was a miniature version of the so-called wilderness years between the classic and the new series, and like those years it didn't exactly live up to the name, not being particularly barren. For a start, there was excitingly new Doctor Who being made. There were frequent press releases throughout the year announcing new guest stars, or featuring photographs of the new main stars of the show Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson in different outfits (the wardrobe budget certainly seems to have been expanded with the influx of Disney+ money). I don't think there's ever before in its 60 year history been a period when Doctor Who has had so much in the can ahead of broadcast. All of Gatwa's first season has completed production and is into post before a single story of his has been shown. At the time of writing in December 2023, his 2024 Christmas special is being shot before his 2023 Christmas special has aired. After having two years on the trot with only a few specials, an effort's clearly being made to ensure in future there will be a regular season and special broadcast annually, without gap years.

There's also lots of delicious rumours of spin-offs that might well be entertaining us between seasons. A little taste of that was the Tales of the TARDIS series of shorts that landed on the BBC iplayer at the start of November 2023, but I'd be surprised if there weren't plans for bigger things in 2024. Those Tales of the TARDIS were the start of a flood of new stuff from the start of November that helped fans forget being patient for the first ten months of the year. There was an exclusive new scene for Children in Need for the first time in simply ages, and there was a colourised and re-edited version of classic story The Daleks. Again, it's been confirmed that another such programme will be coming in the next year. The main event for the anniversary, though, was a trio of specials featuring David Tennant and Catherine Tate. For me, these were perfect, and I don't think I'm alone in that view. The only sane negatives I've seen were more to do with people's expectations than the stories themselves. For most viewers, getting David Tennant and Catherine Tate back was nostalgia and celebration enough, but some fans were expecting many more returning elements from the show's history. Secrecy about the nature of middle story Wild Blue Yonder, as by its minimalist nature it didn't have much to use for pre-publicity that wasn't a spoiler, led to wild theories online about appearances from Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi and such. Instead, what we got were more leftfield choices exploring the nooks and crannies of Who history, which were ultimately more celebratory.

One might think the past of the programme had been mined to exhaustion, but adapting a plot from the early years of Doctor Who Magazine, or bringing back a well-remembered one-off foe from decades before, proved that to be false. The Meep and Neil Patrick Harris's Toymaker left me wanting more, as did Tennant and Tate themselves (on particularly good form with the material they got to play in Wild Blue Yonder). I'd love to see any or all of them back, but - as Ncuti's appearance at the end of The Giggle underlined - it's all about the future now. The tantalising glimpses seen so far of Ncuti's first stories haven't included any hints of returning monsters as yet, so it may be a clean slate, Who knows. Another way of experiencing the past of Doctor Who, and another thing keeping fans entertained for the first 10 months of the year, were the releases on Blu-ray and DVD. There were another two seasons of 20th century stories released on Collection Blu-ray boxsets, season 9 (Jon Pertwee's third run) in March and season 20 (Peter Davison's second, including no less than three different versions of 20th anniversary tale The Five Doctors) in September. The most surprising release was an animated The Underwater Menace in November, when last year the animation range had seemed like it was dead. It was an enjoyable version, but was probably overshadowed by everything else going on in November. I look forward to seeing the next one (confirmed during the BFI panel for the release as being lined up - see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Tenth Planet post for more details).

The year for the blog has seen 35 stories written up. I will endeavour to get The Church on Ruby Road blogged by New Year's Eve '23 too, which will mean 36 in total, three a month, which is generally the rate I maintain every year. Of these, there was a slight weighting in favour of new series stories. For the classic series Doctors, I watched three William Hartnell stories (one wholly intact, one wholly missing, and one mix of episodes and animation to plug gaps), two Patrick Troughtons (one wholly intact, one wholly missing), three each for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, one each for Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy (though I also snuck in a post about a stage play recording also starring Colin). For the new series, one story only for Christopher Eccleston, four for Matt Smith (though he did additionally feature briefly in a spin-off that I blogged this year too), four for Peter Capaldi, and three for Jodie Whittaker. Winning out over everyone - it really was his year - was David Tennant with seven stories. Four of these were standard stories from his original TV run from 2005 to 2010, two were animated stories shown in that same period, and one was a 2023 60th anniversary special where he returned as the 14th Doctor. No other Doctor before (or between) Tennant is adding to their total anymore; with dwindling supplies of stories to cover, I will likely run out by the end of next year, even taking into consideration the nine stories starring Ncuti Gatwa to be broadcast that year. I may well branch out and look at some more spin-offs. If you find me blogging The Airzone Solution in 2024, you'll know why (and, needless to say, apologies in advance). All that's to come in the new year, so for now all there is to say is Merry Christmas!  

In Summary:

Incidentally, a Happy and Snowy Christmas to all of you at home.

The Abominable Snowmen

Chapter The 240th, the abominable finally became animatable. 

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in 1930s Tibet, the TARDIS landing on a Himalayan mountainside near the Detsen monastery. The Doctor has been here before many years previously. Four monks have recently been killed, as has the expedition-mate of a Professor Travers, who is trying to discover the elusive yeti creatures believed to live in the area. The yeti are suspected of the killings. The Doctor and his friends, helped by the monks, manage to capture a Yeti and find it is a robot, with a gap in its chest for a control sphere. The spheres can move on their own to fill the gap in the robot Yeti and activate it. The Doctor rigs up a device to track the transmissions controlling the spheres, while Yetis menace people inside and outside the monastery. The master Padmasambhava is behind the Yeti plot; a floating bodiless entity called the Great Intelligence has been communicating mentally with the master for years, keeping him alive; Padmasambhava has built a glass pyramid, which is taken to a cave and starts to change the Intelligence into a physical form there. Travers witnesses all this but goes into shock and can't remember it until it's dramatic to do so later in the story. The master orders that the monks abandon the monastery as the Yeti are too powerful. The Doctor tracks the control signal transmissions to inside the monastery itself. Padmasambhava struggles against the Intelligence's control. The Doctor confronts the Intelligence in a secret room behind the throne in the sanctum, and they battle mentally. During this, Jamie and the others destroy the control equipment including another pyramid. The Yeti are deactivated and the old monk is released from the Intelligence's power and dies. The TARDIS team leave the monastery accompanied by Travers; he spots a real yeti and rushes off to track it.

Context:

Before the BFI screening of the new animation (see Deeper Thoughts section below for full details), I thought about first listening to the audio version, but I decided against. Instead, I watched the surviving episode two on DVD from the Lost In Time box set (on my own one evening, with a glass of wine). The Better Half came in briefly, and watched for a while without making any sarcastic comments (so that's got to be a plus). To me, the episode was as fun and engaging as I found it on first watch (see immediately below). On the day of the 3rd September, I arrived at London Bridge station and then walked along the waterfront to the BFI; the sun was shining, the Southwark Cathedral bells were ringing, people were happy and smiling, buskers were playing nice tunes. I was in a very good mood, and meeting up with friends; what could be better? I met up with David, Trevor and Alan at the BFI. Scott and Chris were intending to attend also, but had to drop out at the last minute. When I enquired at the box office about whether anyone might want these tickets, I was surprised to find that they still had some left themselves. These events are usually sell-outs. That may not have been a reflection on the story. There were two other fan events going on during the weekend (Whooverville and Collectormania) and the panel that accompanied the BFI screening didn't include any stars of the show. Still, the auditorium was pretty full as we all sat down to watch what documentary maker Chris Chapman described in an on-stage interview later as "Doctor Who does Black Narcissus with teddy bears chasing people".

First Time Round:

Only the second of the six episodes of The Abominable Snowmen is present in the archives. The rest are not known to exist, though audio recordings of all the episodes are held because young fans in the 1960s taped them off their tellies. These audio recordings of course allowed for the animation to eventually be made as shown at the BFI, with images matched to those home-made soundtracks. Before animations were feasible, though, releasing these 'orphaned' episodes and mostly pictureless soundtracks presented a challenge. John Nathan-Turner, former producer of the show in the 1980s, worked as a consultant on the BBC Doctor Who ranges in the 1990s, and attempted to tackle these challenges. He was responsible for the first official audio tapes of various story soundtracks with linking narration; from that start a full range on CD (with better source audio and restoration) became a reality later, after his time as a consultant had ended; The Abominable Snowmen came out on CD in 2001. A decade earlier, in June 1991, a time when the Doctor Who VHS range was just getting going, there was a release called The Troughton Years. This was one of an initial brace of 'Years' tapes that provided a way to get the orphaned material released. The presentation style did not catch on as well as narrated audios eventually did. As was probably inevitable based on his style, Nathan-Turner presented the episodes within an inexpensive framing documentary about the lead actor of the show; it was showbiz biography and a little dash of trivia, but little attempt was made to present the wider story either side of the episode shown. With less availability of plot synopses in those days, it was tantalising and somewhat frustrating to get these 25-minute glimpses into stories, but then no more. I defy any Doctor Who fan to watch the surviving episode of The Abominable Snowmen, with its intriguing set-up and fun interactions between the regular cast, and not want to see what happens next. Curiously, when I finally experienced the full story 10 years later as an audio experience, it was not nearly as engaging as a whole.

Reaction:

The Abominable Snowmen doesn't have any music, just special sounds and background atmosphere tracks, which in the exterior scenes is mostly whistling winds and in the interiors, the chanting of monks. This might be why I struggled to engage with the story on audio - deprived as I was of the energy boost of music or much differentiation between the voices - apart from Victoria and the half-ethereal half-raspy performance of Wolfe Morris as Padmasambhava, it's just the sound of a lot of earnest blokes. If you're able to know which of the lamas dies midway through when just listening to voices - is it Rinchen? is it Sapan? - then you've got better ears than me. As such, it's negatively impacted more than other stories by the absence of visuals, and so was a good candidate for what was confirmed at the BFI to be the last animation, at least for a while. A few people who were lucky enough to watch the episodes first go out in the 1960s will know how the story worked with visuals, and how closely the cartoon version captures the feel. It must have gone down well at the time, though, as the writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln were rapidly commissioned for a sequel that was broadcast after only two stories had gone by in the interim. The Yeti were probably the main reason; they clearly struck a chord with the audience, even though they are cuddly and unthreatening. In that sequel, The Web of Fear, the Yeti design is tweaked to make them more monstrous and less teddy bear, and the animation succeeds with a very slightly tweaked design in that direction too.

Another thing that probably appeals to audiences is all the paraphernalia that comes with the creatures - the mini-Yeti that can be moved around a map to remote control the full-size versions, the control spheres with their distinctive beeping, the mysterious pyramids of power. I suspect that there have been some tweaks to how some of these are depicted in the animation, but I haven't seen any offscreen pictures of the original for a while. Despite any changes, and there a more emphatic changes that I'll cover in a moment, these new visuals still feel pretty faithful. The paraphernalia, effective though it all is, does create some implausibility in the story, though. One poor ageing monk working away over centuries has apparently built all this, and several fur-coated robots, and potentially excavated a cave (it's not 100% clear): no wonder he's secretly wishing for death. It would have been a lot more efficient for the Great Intelligence to commune mentally with someone who owned a factory, Nestene-style. Nevertheless, the Tibetan (well, ish) style is original and engaging. With the new visuals those watching are taken more nimbly through a plot that - if one stops to think about for even a few seconds, or if one is just listening to the sparse audio where it's more obvious  - is slight. There's lot of walking back and forth between places to pad out the running time, and suspicion falls on different people pointlessly as the audience have already been clued in to who's behind the plot. On stage later, animation exec and director Gary Russell was a cheerleader for the original story, saying that nothing repetitious happens in The Abominable Snowmen, and that every moment propels the plot along. His comments were definitely heartfelt, but I can't alas agree with him completely.

The plot works - albeit slowly - but the structure of the plot is just to delay the inevitable confrontation between Doctor and master (with a small 'm'), and it is easy to get frustrated when experiencing the story that the obvious final act is put off so long. Russell and all the talented people involved have succeeded in putting off the point where I got restless and annoyed as late as humanly possible, but it did still occur. Maybe somewhere around the time that the Doctor said he needed another bearing when using his gizmo; if the Doctor thought about it for a second, he'd realise that the only reason that Padmasambhava would want to evacuate the monastery is if the control centre was in there somewhere. Anyway, the audience have known since episode two who the bad guy is, and scenes of him hypnotising people left, right and centre are continually being intercut with the actions of the good guys.The writers tweaked the structure for next Yeti story The Web of Fear and held back from revealing who was under the Great Intellignece's influence until the end, and that worked a lot better. When the confrontation happens, it is greatly enhanced by the new visuals. The Scooby Doo look (in a good way) for Padmasambhava is nice for a start. (This is just one of some great character redesigns including the guest cast's ethnicities being updated to be more in keeping with the Tibetan setting; this story - probably because of the visuals mostly being missing - doesn't come in for as much criticism as The Talons of Weng-Chiang for 'yellowing up' white actors, but it really should do.) In the final scenes, the master of the monastery can levitate and his eyes glow, and it's very impressive. All the sanctum scenes, when Padmasambhava is at first hidden behind a gauze curtain, then gradually revealed, are effective too, but they held back some animated spectacle for this final confrontation.

The sequences of Jamie wrecking the machinery in the background also work, and this is itself a minor triumph; this style (and time and budget) of animation finds scenes with rapid movement a challenge. This has been most often obvious when characters have to run in previous animations, but most of the running scenes in The Abominable Snowmen animation work perfectly well. There was one moment of audience mirth when Jamie shouts "Come on!" at Victoria as they escape a Yeti followed by the animated characters moving very slowly out of frame; but, these moments of pacing (as explained by Gary Russell later) are inherited from the soundtrack source material, and the purists in the target market don't like anything to be cut. Action sequences that go beyond running were mostly successful too, well at least for me. The scene where the Yeti is caught in a rope trap and prodded by various warrior monks' spears worked really well, but got a huge laugh from the assembled fans in the BFI, ungrateful so-and-sos. The intended moments of comedy also went down well for the audience, like Troughton's line "I think this is one of those instances where discretion is the better part of valour - Jamie has an idea" and many other moments. The background pictures of all the locales are grand and give the story more scale than could be achieved in a television studio. There's also a nice background Easter egg tying this first ever Yeti story to the new series appearances of the Great Intelligence. Most of my quibbles are with the original material rather than the animation. The script seems to contradict itself as to how long it's been since the Doctor and Padmasambhava last saw each other. It should be three hundred years, but it's sometimes stated to be two hundred. There's a few too many instances where the Yeti just stand in place not doing anything; for instance, the Doctor is allowed to go up to one and remove its control sphere. As they already look cuddly, having them be static does remove any last vestiges of threat. Overall, though, the plusses of the original outweigh the minusses, and this new version makes it even better. 

Connectivity: 

The Doctor finds himself in a place surrounded by mostly men in silly robes in both The Abominable Snowmen and Hell Bent. In both stories, someone gets their memory selectively wiped too.

Deeper Thoughts:

Professor Travers's 1935 Expedition Journal: BFI screening of The Abominable Snowmen, 3rd September 2022. The structure of the day was similar to previous BFI screenings. Our hosts were as ever Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy, Johnson joked early on that Dick had come as the aged Professor Travers from The Web of Fear and that he himself had come as a Yeti. The session kicked off with a quiz and a cheeky round-up of the social media comments of people attending, there followed the first three episodes, then an onstage interview, the final three episodes, another onstage interview and a sneak peak at some of the Value Added Material from the disc release of the animation, then the final panel. Before all that, as has become a tradition, Fiddy paid tribute to one of the Doctor Who family who had sadly left us all recently - Bernard Cribbins. Johnson knew Cribbins from a Bafta committee, and told an anecdote about Elaine Page unexpectedly calling him (she was wanting to sort out BFI membership for a relative), and Cribbins being in the room with her. They were at the time both working on Russell T Davies's BBC version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. "Tell Justin I'm in my pants!" Cribbins shouted in the background. Another scoop (which someone tweeted during the showing of the first episode, which Johnson comically upbraided them for at the intermission) was the reveal that the next BFI screening would be The Time Meddler on the 29th October 2022 as a tie-in for the next Blu-ray boxset release of season two (William Hartnell's second year). The prizes for the quiz were all general - rather than Doctor Who specific - Abominable Snowman tat, so I didn't 'shout for Dick' (Johnson: "Some of you are more used to shouting that than others") despite knowing most of the answers. One social media comment Johnson read out was someone asking if any gay people would be attending - huge laugh from the crowd - Johnson: "Statistically speaking, maybe one or two"; another tweeter didn't know what the BFI was and speculated that it stood for "Best Friends' Institute".

Fiddy (L), Johnson (R)

Throughout the opening, Johnson kept referring to the story as The Abominable Snowman, effectively reducing the threat level by three quarters, and I just thought he was having an off day; but, Alan, who was sitting next to me pointed out to me that it was a typo on the screen-saver behind him, so maybe Johnson was persuaded by this mistake that it was the correct name for the story. In the break between the two halves of the story, the interviewee was Jess Jurkovic. He is a New York based fan and pianist who has an interesting youtube account where he works out, transcribes and then performs Dudley Simpson incidental music from Doctor Who. Simpson was the most prolific composer for the classic years of Doctor Who, but very little of his music survives as isolated tracks or sheet music. Jurkovic looked ecstatic just to be in London, let alone on stage; he talked about how he became a fan in 1982 watching stories on PBS, jokingly teased the Brits in the audience saying that he got The Five Doctors a few days before them across the pond (it's true!), and talked warmly about how the videos he's made have reconnected him to the fan community; he'd attended the Gallifrey One convention in the US recently, thirty years after attending his first convention as a youngster. A grand piano was set up in one corner of NFT1, and we were treated to a brief tinkle of the ivories. This started with a rather funny tribute to the music of The Abominable Snowmen (a story famous for having no music). The "first movement" of this was a snatch of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (which the Doctor plays on his recorder when imprisoned in the monastery in episode two). The second movement was just two notes played over and over, to replicate the sound effect of the control sphere. This was followed by Jurkovic playing a memorable cue from later Troughton story The Seeds of Death. Support his Patreon, people.

Jurkovic at the piano

After the second half of the story had finished, Chris Chapman was welcomed onto the stage. He has been responsible for many documentaries on Doctor Who DVDs and Blu-rays over the years, and has made one called Troughton in Tibet (the title inspired by a Hergé Tintin book) for the disc release of The Abominable Snowmen. This involved taking presenter Toby Hadoke and Jamie actor Frazer Hines to the area of Snowdonia used for the original filming. He did a recce with Doctor Who locations expert and researcher Richard Bignell, and his first impression was that this should be a site of pilgrimage for Doctor Who fans. A shot of the same place is also coincidentally a backdrop used behind the logo on every episode of Countryfile (a series that Chapman works on). This was obvious when the opening shots of the documentary were shown after Chapman left the stage. Fiddy mused that it will probably surprise the Countryfile producers when next week's episode gets a spike in viewers. Chapman detailed that despite there being not many people still alive from the original cast or production, they managed to get eight new interviews and also used five archive interviews from people no longer with us. One of the new interviews was with last surviving Yeti actor from the story John Hogan, who has sadly died since the filming was done last year. Chapman paid him a brief tribute from the stage. The first six minutes of the documentary were then shown, and it looks amazing: some stunning drone shots of the vistas of the mountain and valleys. As in another of Chapman's Who documentaries, they took a TARDIS prop to the location to recreate an image from the original story, and Hines's reaction when first seeing it is lovely to witness.

Fiddy (L), Chapman (R)

The final panel featured three people involved in the animation: Gary Russell (executive producer and director), Rob Ritchie (3D animator) and Ioan Morris (Concept Designer). It's fair to say that it was the first of these three that did most of the talking. The animation has been in production for sixteen months, and Morris's work is all up front doing the first drafts of character designs. He said that when watching the screening his was a surprised reaction of "Oh yeah, I worked on this". Ritchie modestly said that his contribution was merely to send over to Russell "Four renders of a TARDIS". Russell explained that Ritchie works for "the other team". Gary Russell's animated productions are Fury from the Deep, the Web of Fear episode 3, Galaxy 4 and The Abominable Snowmen; the other team led by AnneMarie Walsh created The Macra Terror, The Faceless Ones and The Evil of the Daleks. The two teams do occasionally collaborate; Russell thought it was important for the range as a whole to have consistent elements and not reinvent the wheel, so Ritchie's season five TARDIS and his beginning credits sequence was shared. The decision to change the ethnicities of the monastery inhabitants was a deliberate one, which Russell and Morris worked on early on in the process. Russell talked passionately about this, disagreeing with the usual line that there weren't sufficient actors of the correct ethnicities to play the roles back then, and saying it was his one big bugbear with original director Gerald Blake's work; "We were going to rectify that decision from 1967 because frankly it's bloody insulting".

(L to R) Johnson, Russell, Ritchie, Morris

For the warrior monk costumes, even though no monk in history has ever worn such a design or colour combination, the designs used in the animation stayed faithful. For the lamas' robes, which were a bit dull in the original, they took inspiration from another Doctor Who story featuring Buddhism, Jon Pertwee's swansong Planet of the Spiders: the colour scheme is based on the costume worn by the character Cho-Je in that later story. Script and designs are sent to Digitoonz Media & Entertainment, the animators based in India, and they create the finished product in small chunks (you might get 15 seconds a day if you're lucky according to Russell, although the longest sequence was the 1.5 minute section where Victoria feigns being poisoned to escape from a locked room, and that took ages to download, the file size was phenomenal). There was a brief to everyone working on the animation not to view the surviving episode two for reference. The six episodes of the animation had to all be of a piece and work as a coherent whole; anyway, the approach and techniques of animation are very different to live action. Part of the reason why it took so long to get The Abominable Snowmen finished was that the same team were asked to do Galaxy 4 simultaneously, to which they couldn't really say no. Russell said that it was accomplished at the cost of only one nervous breakdown, which he counted as a win. He was generally quite dismissive of  Galaxy 4 as a choice for an animation because of the quality of the story ("Who would want to make that? Who would want to watch it?!"), but Russell and his team created something more than adequate (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this post for more details).

Note the typo

There was time for only a couple of audience questions. Doctor Who historian Jeremy Bentham asked a question about the new look for Padmasambhava. Russell said his inspiration was EC Comics character the Crypt Keeper, rather than from Scooby Doo as I'd thought. He believed that the actor Wolfe Morris's build wasn't right for the script's description of the desiccated guru, so they diverged from faithfulness at this point. They may also have embellished with the scene towards the end when the artificially long-lived Padmasambhava, freed from the Great Intelligence, disintegrates. The surviving off screen photos don't confirm either way, and memories differ as to whether the scene was excised from the final version in 1967 or not. Russell's memory from originally watching the story is that the disintegration moment was in there, and Bentham, also of an age to have seen it first time round, agreed with his recall. The final audience question was niche, but to be fair the questioner prefaced his question with a disclaimer about its potential to invoke a rolling of the eyes. Why do Gary Russell's team's animations show Patrick Troughton with green eyes when he had blue eyes in real life? Russell explained that he'd asked all of Troughton's co-stars what their Doctor's eye colour was, and was told by all of them that they were blue-green. This was research long before the animations for his novel Invasion of the Cat People ("It's terrible" its author added as an aside, sotto voce), where the eye colour was a plot point. He chose the green rather than the blue end of the range in the animations because it would make the Doctor seem more alien and would stand out from the rest of the cast that would be mainly blue and brown-eyed. Earlier in the panel discussion, Russell confirmed that this is their last animation for now, and they're not working on any more. This was expected, but still a shame. He did add, though, that the animated releases to date have come in waves with gaps in between: "These things are cyclical". On the evidence of The Abominable Snowmen, and all the wonderful animations of recent years, I hope the next wave isn't too long.

In Summary:

It's not abominable. It's mostly pretty bominable, actually, particularly now one can see it move. 

The Name of the Doctor

Chapter The 192nd, which contains compound colliding continuity.

Plot:

The disembodied Great Intelligence, with his scary faceless nursery-rhyme spouting Whisper Men goons, feeds information to a murderer in 1893 as part of a plan to trap the Doctor. This is revenge for all the times the Doctor has thwarted the Intelligence (presumably including their couple of skirmishes in the 1960s when it wasn't played by Richard E Grant as it seems to be able to time travel now). The information prompts Vastra to hold a seance cum conference call communing across time with Jenny, Strax, Clara and the version of River Song stored in the Library hard drive after her death. The Whisper Men kidnap Vastra, Jenny and Strax (Jenny's dead for a while but nobody stays dead for long in a Steven Moffat script) and take them to Trenzalore, site of the Doctor's future grave. The Doctor breaks the rules about crossing his future timeline and lands there too.

Clara is still linked to the conference call and can see and hear River talking to her on Trenzalore even though nobody else can. River helps Clara and the Doctor enter the TARDIS, which is acting as the Doctor's tomb. His corpse is a wibbly vortexy tear in the fabric of space/time or something, and the Great Intelligence jumps in and rewrites the Doctor's history undoing all the good he's done. Clara jumps in after him and undoes all the undoing, fragmenting herself into different versions (explaining why the Doctor had met her before twice but she died both times). The Doctor has always been able to see River, and talks to her; her being still connected to Clara gives him the hint that Clara's still alive, so he jumps into his timeline to save her. He finds her, and they see a... memory? projection? of another mystery Doctor played by John Hurt who apparently did something bad and wasn't worthy of the name any longer. To be continued....

Context:

Watched the blu-ray from the series 7 box-set with the two youngest children (boy of 11, girl of 9) on a Sunday afternoon at the end of their half-term holiday. The Better Half also came in and watched sections of this as it played out, as she couldn't remember seeing it first time around. The children wanted to watch The Day of the Doctor immediately after watching this story, which I guess is what it's built to cause. The Better Half was a bit more dismissive about the end "They're just trying to recreate the end of Rose and David Tennant every time - it's been done". She left the room before I could confirm whether she meant the separation of Doctor and companion in wibbly time thing (Doctor and Clara) or the emotional goodbye when one's kind-of a hologram (Doctor and River), but there are certainly echoes of both.

First Time Round:

I can never usually remember much about my first experience of Matt Smith stories. I would have watched this on the evening of broadcast, probably time-shifted as the children were very young so we'd likely have been putting them to bed during Who's broadcast slot. As has become a habit in these circumstances, I will instead share a Doctor Who related reminiscence from a different time. This one is from near the beginning of the so called wilderness years, when Doctor Who was not being made as a ongoing series. It is the story of how I rediscovered my fandom at a time where I could have done without such distractions. The final BBC series starring Sylvester McCoy had finished broadcasting in early December 1989. Though I had still watched the show assiduously towards the end of the 1980s, and was starting to collect the sporadic VHS releases, I had stopped reading Doctor Who Magazine in 1987. The family had been paying for the magazine to be delivered from the newsagents alongside the papers until the price went up and they knocked it on the head. I could only pick up news about the series from said papers, and sometimes the Radio Times (though we didn't often get that publication), so my fan awareness reduced to its lowest level since I'd got into Doctor Who in the early 80s.

In April 1990, over four months after the series had last broadcast when it was becoming obvious it wouldn't be back for a while, I was in a shop in Bognor Regis when visiting my Dad. I saw a copy of Doctor Who Magazine issue 160. It had a good quality artwork cover and the content within seemed much more detailed and interesting than what I'd been reading a few years earlier. This, plus the videos starting to come out more regularly (with important stories like An Unearthly Child and The War Games having been released that February) rekindled my deeper interest. Before too long, I had become a member of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, was subscribing to Doctor Who Magazine and was enthusiastically sourcing back copies of the issues I'd missed. This re-found obsession wouldn't have been a problem except that I was supposed to be revising for my A-levels at the time. I did disastrously, and had to do another year of sixth form and retake the exams. It was nothing ultimately to do with Doctor Who, of course; that was just a symptom of my underlying dissociation, which with hindsight could have been stress or anxiety or depression, but we didn't talk of such things at that time (or nobody around me did anyway). It turned out fine; that third year - where I went from being the youngest in the year to one of the oldest - was enormous fun, and Durham University kept my offer open. Doctor Who Magazine and the VHS range went from strength to strength into 1991 and throughout the 1990s, as I've touched upon in the blog passim. 

Reaction:

Nothing much happens in The Name of the Doctor, or at least nothing much in the real world. The action is mostly in various dreamscapes or almost worlds. A long sequence takes place in what's referred to as a literal dream by the characters (the conference call), more takes place in the Doctor's timestream and is then undone and redone, meaning things return to their original state; sometimes this timestream appears as a dreamscape too. Even the events on Trenzalore, which seem imbued with deep meaning as it is the site of the Doctor's death - are in a possible future branch that, as we find out two stories later, never comes to pass as the Doctor does not die after all on Trenzalore.  What's left? Aside from the uncovering of some information about various ongoing arc plots, this is essentially the tale of Vastra doing a prison visit, and Clara receiving a letter. The Doctor says an emotional final farewell to River too, of course, I'm being a bit unfair not including that; but, he does give an emotional final farewell to River in - what? - two or three other stories, so it's not that special. This is the major flaw with a lot of writer and showrunner Steven Moffat's finales; they are too caught up in progressing the overarching narrative - often just by colouring in some exposition dolled up with clever dialogue and occasional pyrotechnics - to develop the scenario of the episode itself or have anything significant change in the characters' lives. You might get revelations, but no revolutions.

At first glance there seems to be a lot going on, I'll grant you, but perhaps this is itself the problem. By my reckoning there are four overarching plot lines that have run across multiple episodes and in some cases multiple years that continue or end in the space of the 45 minutes of The Name of the Doctor. Did any one of them have much chance of weight or significance in such a crowded space? In addition to the four - and its a useful example to touch upon - there's a scene just before the credits that acts as a taster for the anniversary special story that would follow it a few months later, The Day of the Doctor. This last scene has literally nothing to do with the rest of the story, it is tacked on. The fact that it doesn't seem that way is because of a clever bit of wordplay on Moffat's part. The confrontation between the Doctor and his previous self has a brief dialogue exchange where Matt Smith tells John Hurt that his actions were "Not in the name of the Doctor". The story up to that point has been about the Doctor's real name (well, a bit, anyway) and the words spoken are the title of the story - cha-ching! The coherence achieved by this slight of hand doesn't bear much scrutiny - give it much thought and the story of the week seems even more slight as it just looks like a bunch of filler material before a trailer for the main event to come. There's also a slight awkwardness in making a big deal that John Hurt's character, though the same person, is not called the Doctor, then emblazoning the screen with "INTRODUCING JOHN HURT as THE DOCTOR". But it would be petty not to let this casting coup be celebrated.

The first overarching plot line to feature is the 'impossible girl' thread which comes to an end having started in the very first story of this season broadcast in 2012 (Asylum of the Daleks). The positive here is that the solution to the mystery (Clara's split into lots of different people living different lives throughout the Doctor's adventures) allows for lots of clips of old stories where Clara appears, inserted into the archive Trials and Tribble-ations stylee; it's a little indulgent, but like the aforementioned Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode it was being broadcast as part of an anniversary celebration year. The inclusion of Clara aiding the William Hartnell Doctor in his stealing a TARDIS to flee Gallifrey is audacious, and I'm sure ruffled a few fan feathers at the time; now, of course, we know the moment was just a little interlude in the many long lives of the Timeless Child - how far we've come! Additional meta fun for fans is the ability offered by this for any continuity slip or visible crewmember in the history of Doctor Who to be explained away: it was probably Clara's helping hand holding down Sutekh's chair cushion, for example. Such boons are for a niche audience, though. Beyond them (us), did anyone care how the impossible girl stuff panned out? It's a self-defeating concept, really - the character keeps dying and coming back, so the sacrifice she makes at the end has no real weight as a) it's inevitable, so not that brave and b) by definition can't be final as it makes death have no meaning. No confusing references to leaves or "Run, you clever boy and remember me" or "soufflé girl" can change that.

It's a similar state of affairs with the second overarching plot, the face-off between the Great Intelligence and the Doctor. This plot started with the most recent Christmas special, The Snowmen, in December 2012, and its culmination is supposed to be the main point of this specific story; but it falls a little flat because there hasn't been that much of a build up. There's a sequence where they both confront each other in The Snowmen, but that's at the Intelligence's initial creation, so they don't have any history; the Doctor doesn't meet the Intelligence in The Bells Of Saint John and doesn't learn that it was behind the events of that story, and most of the way through The Name of the Doctor they're kept apart. Apart from one moment of nastiness where the Whisper Men threaten to stop the hearts of the Doctor's friends, there isn't much antagonism at all. The Intelligence does a bit of monologuing and then jumps into the big wibbly story exit device. We're told that's the end of him, but then we're told that it'll kill Clara too and it doesn't, and we're told that there's no way the Doctor could rescue Clara from it and he does. Again, the nerdier watchers can factor in the two Patrick Troughton Great Intelligence stories to make this plot a bit more epic, but there's very little actually there in the script if one doesn't come to it laden with that mental baggage.

There's a bit more emotion in the elements of the final two overarching plots, which makes them a little weightier; these are the Doctor's journey to his death in Trenzalore, and his interactions with River Song. Both of these plots have run since at least the beginning of Matt Smith's time as the Doctor and would both continue after The Name of the Doctor. When the Doctor is told where he must go to save his friends, he breaks down in tears. Smith performs this very well but it doesn't convince because it's such an abstract thing to get upset about. He's only ever heard it rumoured that this is his final resting place. Perhaps if his breaking down happened later when he saw something more concrete, like his own grave (and if it was perhaps a more traditional depiction of a grave) it might help to sell it. Finally, there's the Doctor saying goodbye to River as mentioned above. This is the most successful of the four plots, but is subject to diminishing returns as the character can always come back at an earlier time in her timeline, and indeed does. There are some other pleasures too. The Paternoster Gang are always good value, and between them get all the best lines. I particularly liked Strax's "Surrender your women and intellectuals" and Vastra's reply to Strax as he comments, when nursing her wife Jenny, that the heart is a simple thing: "I have not found it to be so."  These little moments stayed with me much more than the confusion of plotlines that surrounded them.

Connectivity: 

Both feature at least one other version of the Doctor appearing in something of a flashback (the Doctor sees her younger self the Timeless Child in a nightmare during Can You Hear Me? and The Name of the Doctor is chock full of glimpses of other Doctors within the weird vortex-scape of the Doctor's timeline). Both also have the Doctor helped by an unusually large team (five apiece - Clara, River, Vastra, Jenny and Strax with Matt Smith's Doctor; Graham, Yaz, Ryan, Tibo and Tahira with Jodie). 

Deeper Thoughts:

Mythology 101. I remember an early interview or column from Russell T Davies before he brought Doctor Who back to our screens in 2005, on the topic of how to handle continuity. It must have been in Doctor Who Magazine, I'm guessing, as nowhere else would have showcased material quite so geeky. He commented something along the lines of continuity being a possible problem, but not if you treated it as the more interesting mythology. I believe he made a reference to Harry Potter, but as someone who has read and enjoyed the HP books, but still struggled through some dull passages like the lengthy, detailed descriptions of each and every member of the Order of the Phoenix, I think I need to understand more what exactly is the difference. Concentrating on Doctor Who and its relationship with its long history, some patterns emerge regarding stories which look back. Mostly, writers in all eras look back less for inspiration and more for window dressing. A script might include a mention or two, or an in-joke - the so-called 'kisses to the past'. This doesn't normally cause a problem unless it's overdone and even the fan watching feels bombarded (so who knows how someone in the audience who isn't aware of the meaning of these references must feel). The worst example that comes to mind is the start of the Paul McGann TV movie which crams the Master, Daleks, Skaro, Time Lords, the concept of the regeneration and its limits into the first two minutes of the pre-credits sequence. The Name of the Doctor - already laden with a lot of old clips - also contains tiny references to obscure characters like Solomon the Trader or the Valeyard.

Another common approach is the sequel, of course, but a variant specific to Doctor Who is the story cobbled together from bits and bobs that have happened - or just been mentioned - in other stories. As it's a time travel show, it can go back and revisit events from different perspectives, or go back further and do a prequel. The Great Intelligence as featured in the Name of the Doctor is a villain from a couple of 1960s Patrick Troughton stories, who recently had got its own origin story in The Snowmen. The best / worst example of this type is probably 1985 Colin Baker tale Attack of the Cybermen that fashions its plot from a handful of moments or asides from 1960s Cybermen stories including that The Tenth Planet, the first ever Cyberman story, is set in 1986, twenty years on from its broadcast. Attack was shown and set the year before with the shiny Cybs trying to avert the destruction of their home planet from taking place as depicted in The Tenth Planet (it sounds better than it is, if you haven't seen it!). You didn't necessarily have to have seen that story, or The Invasion or The Tomb of the Cybermen which were also inspirations, but it might have seemed needlessly detailed and convoluted if you hadn't.

Attack also fits another common story type: bringing old things back only to get them wrong. The Cybermen in the sewers and tombs in Attack of the Cybermen are presumably the same ones from those 1960s stories. So, why do they look nothing like them but instead look exactly like the 1980s models? If the classic alien monster you're bringing back doesn't look or act the same, is there very much point in calling it a 'Silurian' or whatever? It's great that previous TARDIS stops Spiridon and Metebelis 3 are namechecked in more recent stories, but if they're going to be pronounced wrong, it undercuts it a bit. Ultimately, the common denominator of all the failures is that the focus of the story is something that it's unlikely anyone would care about. I mean, was anybody ever, even the most die-hard fan, calling out in 2012 or 2013 for a rematch with the Great Intelligence (but without the iconic Yeti creatures that it was linked with in the 1960s)? I don't think so. The bits of The Name of the Doctor that work (like River and the Doctor saying goodbye) are where we care. In other words, what I've found out is that mythology = continuity + emotion.   

In Summary:

Superficially entertaining; but, for something with so much going on, nothing much really happens.