Deep Breath

Chapter The 242nd, is not that deep, really. 

Plot:

The newly regenerated Doctor and Clara arrive in Victorian London, accidentally bringing a giant dinosaur with them as the police box got stuck in its throat. Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax take them in to their place in Paternoster Row, so the Doctor can recover. At night, the dinosaur mysteriously catches fire, one of many recent cases of supposedly spontaneous combustion. The Doctor goes missing, investigating. A mysterious personal ad appears in the next day's paper, which the Doctor and Clara both see and believe was placed by the other, bringing both of them to a restaurant that turns out to be a trap. Clockwork droids surround them, and they are transported underground to the droids' original spaceship. It had time-travelled back and crashed in the past; since then, the droids have been patching up their ship, and their control-node leader Half-Face Man patching up himself, using parts harvested from humans (with the combustion of the corpses covering this up). The Half-Face Man is doing this as a malfunction in his programming (presumably) has made him believe it will lead him and the droids to a 'promised land'. The Doctor joins him in an escape pod attached to a hot air balloon made from human skin, floating over London. The Doctor either talks him into suicide or pushes him from the pod, and Half-Faced Man is impaled on top of a spire. The Doctor disappears again, but after some time passes, returns to pick up Clara. He's by this time redecorated the TARDIS interior, and donned a new outfit. Clara is still unsure about the Doctor's new self, but receives a call on the TARDIS phone from his previous self, made on Trenzalore just before he regenerated, telling her to give his new self a chance. Half-Face Man meanwhile appears in what appears to be heaven, greeted by Missy.

Context:

On the second weekend of September 2022, I was away meeting up with some university friends in London in around the same area as I was the previous weekend for the Abominable Snowmen screening at the BFI (and which a few days after my second visit would be the site of a long queue of mourners working their way towards Westminster Hall to view the queen's coffin as she was lying in state). In advance of travelling, I realised we wouldn't be too far away from the Embankment and Westminster Bridge, both featured settings for Deep Breath, which the random number generator had already chosen as the next story to blog. Nothing of Deep Breath was filmed in London, though, those Victorian locales having been recreated on location in Wales or in the studio. I didn't know it at the time, but I did walk directly through many parts of the bankside near The Clink Museum that weekend that had been used to recreate Victorian London, but for a classic series story, The Talons of Weng-Chiang; this excellent youtube video by Gav Rymill, which I only watched later, explains all about it. I recommend giving it a watch if you're interested in detailed Doctor Who investigations (and if you're reading this, there's a good chance that you are). Anyway, I considered downloading the story and watching it at some point when I got back to my hotel room, then remembered that the last time I met up with this same group of people in London I brought along a different story (this was back in 2019 and it was the Pting one, if you're interested) and failed to find any time to watch it. I didn't bother this time, and ended up drinking cocktails and dancing until the early hours like last time, having no scope to watch even the shortest video. In the end, I got round to watching Deep Breath at home from the Blu-ray in the Complete Eighth Series box set almost two weeks later, on my own late one evening.

First Time Round:

Sometimes certain events create a collective phenomenon where masses of people get a bit too carried away and there is behaviour displayed that in normal times would seem extreme; writing this in the UK just after the period of mourning for Queen Elizabeth II, I can say that I saw no hint of this during that period, of course - the entire populace of my country behaved entirely appropriately, with no going over the top whatsoever. I did see this phenomenon in the world of Doctor Who in 2014, though. An actor took on a role that previously was played by another actor. This perhaps should have been run of the mill by then, as it was something that had happened for this specific role nearly a dozen times before, but for a brief period it was treated like the biggest event in the world. Stars of the show Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman went on a world tour, and big crowds came out to meet them. Their first full story was a feature length one, directed by a big name UK movie director, Ben Wheatley, and it was shown in cinemas worldwide. This was the last echo of the noise made about the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who the previous year, during which Capaldi was announced in a primetime shiny-floored live entertainment show (which even at the time seemed a bit much, and to my eyes Capaldi looked a bit uncomfortable with the excess of it). After Deep Breath, everything calmed down a lot and even the announcement and debut story of the first female Doctor a few years later wasn't quite as huge an event. All this rigmarole surrounding it could have risked the story being an anti-climax, but at the time I thought it held its own. The family was on holidays from work and school at the end of August 2014, and after the weekend would travel to a cottage in Kent for a short stay. On the night of the 23rd, though, we were still at home and had friends Alex, Rachel and Phil (all mentioned many times before on the blog) visiting. They watched with myself and the Better Half, and the elder two of our three children (youngest was only a toddler at that time and would have already been in bed). I think it would be one of the last, if not the last, time we got a reasonable crowd together to watch a new Who story broadcast; interest started to wane with some parties from then on.

Reaction:

Unless you are someone that thinks that The Meg is a more important film than Jaws, you'll know that size doesn't necessarily equate to impact. Like that Jason Statham vehicle, Deep Breath features an oversized CGI creature - in the case of the Doctor Who story, a dinosaur - that's just a bit ridiculous. If you're going to depict something an order of magnitude larger than any known dino fossil, then why not just make it a new original space creature rather than pretend it's a time-displaced great lizard from prehistory? Narrative plausibility has already been left far behind, after all, if we're expected to believe that the history books just looked the other way and never recorded God-flippin'-zilla wandering around Westminster in the 1890s. The first fifteen to twenty minutes or so of the story focussing on this OTT-Rex could lift right out, and the plot would be undisturbed - the dinosaur's narrative function is merely as the latest victim in a series of suspicious deaths, the Doctor's cue that there's a mystery to solve. There are numerous ways such an inciting incident could have been done that would have been more in keeping with the rest of the narrative, so why graft on a beginning that's of a different scale to the rest of the proceedings? The short answer is no doubt that it's to create spectacle. The story needs to instantly grip its audience (some of whom have paid for a cinema ticket). Could audience engagement not be generated by a gradual investigative beginning, more in keeping with the Sherlock Holmes / Jack The Ripper trappings thereafter, though? The Half-Face Man is a good adversary, well written, well performed and well realised. Hints of him from the off, followed by a slow burn reveal, might have cohered better than a comic monster movie opening. If the idea is to create something filmic, well, not all films have to begin with action sequences, do they?! It speaks to me of a lack of confidence. Paradoxically, at a time of grandiosity (with the cast going on world tours and such - see First Time Round above), there is something tentative about Deep Breath.

The giant dinosaur up front, if a bit silly, whizzes by so fast on first watch that it's not so big a problem. Where I feel the story is also too tentative, in a way that's much harder to forgive, is in relation to its new leading man. Deep Breath is doing something somewhat rare for the new 21st century Doctor Who, a post-regeneration story with a regular cast member carried over from the previous lead actor's tenure. The only other time this had been done was with Rose's reaction to Doctor Nine Christopher Eccleston turning into Doctor Ten David Tennant. That was the first time such a change of actor had been done since the return, and was very early on, still in the first year that the show had come back. As such, the script of that story rightly pushes hard on Rose's doubts about and eventual coming to terms with the change, to mirror what the audience might be feeling. Writer of Deep Breath Steven Moffat wants to emulate this, but time has moved on since 2005, and multiple different actors playing the Doctor (sometimes simultaneously) has been normalised. Clara is also the worst possible character to express any doubts about the Doctor changing, because she has been set up in the previous year as someone who has met the Doctor in all his different bodies. So, the script, seemingly desperately casting around for a motivation, has her deeply concerned about the Doctor being suddenly too old. But two stories previously, Clara met the Doctor played by septuagenarian John Hurt, and one story before that she was shown meeting him as William Hartnell, who was in that footage exactly the same age as Capaldi in Deep Breath. The conflict seems confected; it doesn't convince that this behaviour would emerge from the character, so it seems more like a behind-the-scenes preoccupation that's bled through into the world of the story.

Did Moffat have lingering doubts about casting Capaldi because his age was so different from the other 21st century Doctors? Probably not, but he seems to have inadvertently suggested this in the script. It all comes to a head with a scene that I think is a serious misstep, where Capaldi's predecessor Matt Smith cameos as the pre-change Doctor calling up Clara through time on the TARDIS phone to reassure her that this new version is the same person. The series had never done this before, and it's not hard to see why. Imagine if Capaldi's later companion Bill had stayed on, and Capaldi had a scene in Jodie Whittaker's debut calling Bill to reassure her that Jodie was still a man underneath. It would be rightly decried, and I'm struggling to see why the Deep Breath scene is that much different. The first story of a new Doctor should be a clean break, and Capaldi should have been left to make his mark alone. Ironically, the awkward phone call scene functions only because of the performance of... Peter Capaldi - he really sells it with minimal acting, just stillness, and the barest flicker of facial expression. He is as good as anyone could expect in the role, burning up the screen in every moment despite some of the dialogue ("Planet of the pudding brains") being questionable. All the cast comport themselves well, including the previous era's recurring guest actors, playing the Paternoster Gang in their final baton-passing TV appearance. They mainly provide the light relief. Special mentions also should go to Peter Ferdinando as the Half-Face Man, and Brian Miller as the unnamed homeless man (in the credits, he's called Barney). Both get one-on-one sequences with Capaldi, and in both Capaldi raises his game above the - still more than adequate - performance he gives elsewhere, seemingly enjoying the sparring with these characters / actors. The dark ambiguous ending - did Half-Face Man jump or was he pushed by the Doctor? - is great for the story and the character too.

Jenna Coleman does what she can with the material she's given, and is much better once the clockwork droids plot starts up properly and gives the story a single focus. The central idea of characters having to hold their breath to fool the droids into thinking they are also robotic is a strong one, and gives rise to some good sequences in the latter part of the story, such as the POV shot of Clara walking through a group of droids while rapidly running out of air. Clara applying her hard-won teaching skills to the scenario is a nice character moment too. There is a lot to enjoy here: the production value in all departments adds up to a handsome look and feel. The new trappings that come with a new Doctor - new costume, new theme arrangement, new title sequence, new incidental music motifs - are all nice. Wheatley and the crew capture some magnificent imagery, including at the end the shot of the Half-Face Man impaled on a spire, and the Doctor full-frame, inscrutable, looking out from the hot air balloon where they had tussled. There are a few good gags, and the set-ups for the overarching plot of the series are intriguing. Looking back on these now its all been resolved, however, and this aspect too seems not to have the courage of its convictions. It's ages since I've watched  Dark Water / Death in Heaven, the two-part finale of the season that started with Deep Breath, but I'm sure the plot was something about Missy - using a corporate institute as a front - fooling humans into being uploaded into her fake afterlife, and then turning their bodies into Cybermen. If so, what's the point of her uploading Half-Face Man, and how did she do it? And when did this happen, given he died so suddenly? Why did the Half-Face Man develop a fixation on going to some undefined 'promised land'? Why is Missy so keen to put and keep Clara and the Doctor together? Something was later said about how they are somehow a bad combination that will bring the Doctor down or something, but it wasn't convincing, and didn't really pay off anything set up in Deep Breath.

Connectivity: 

Another story like Castrovalva where the Doctor is erratic after a recent regeneration and spends a lot of time recuperating.

Deeper Thoughts:

Voluntary Memory. I am currently reading the mammoth multi-volume Proust novel Remembrance of Times Past, or In Search of Lost Time (the two English versions of the original title 'À la recherche du temps perdu', as I am most assuredly reading an English translation, being not clever enough to read it in French). I have a few times in blog posts previously mentioned the concept of involuntary memory that forms part of Proust's philosophy within the novel, and have often done this in relation to Doctor Who (e.g. when talking about 1993 and a particular kind of 3D specs in the Deeper Thoughts section of The Green Death post earlier this year). I'm now though thinking I was incorrect to do so. To summarise: involuntary memory is when one's brain, presented with a surprising external trigger, is flooded with unexpected memories. The famous example from Proust is his unnamed narrator and author proxy in the first of the seven volumes of the novel tasting a madeleine cake that's been dipped in tea, and this bringing about a rush of memories about his childhood spent at his family's country home. I have experienced something a bit like this with Doctor Who, but nowhere near as extremely or surprisingly as true involuntary memory would be, for the simple reason that I've never stopped watching, reading, and studying Doctor Who. My avidity over the years has taken away any possible element of surprise, as I'm too well versed in the detail. And yes, the external trigger of watching a story will bring back some memories, but they are memories that I've experienced over and again, having watched all these stories many times each. Even something relatively recent and relatively less re-watched like Deep Breath has still settled in my mind somewhere not far from the surface. The memories are stubbornly voluntary, and their retrieval a more controlled process.

My enthusiasm for the show long ago spilled over into a knowledge of other archive TV fare, further limiting the scope of finding a truly surprising trigger. If ever I see a post on social media saying something like "Who remembers Blakes' 7 / Words and Pictures / The Book Tower / etc.?" my answer will always be: "Oh course I bloody well do!". Is there anything from TV that could cause such a reaction after 50 years of obsession? Madonna performing Like a Virgin in a pink wig on Top of the Pops in 1984, for example, brings back some strong memories - I don't even need an external trigger to recall them. This is, I think, a different phenomenon, driven by youthful lust, and something Proust definitely knew about as it seemingly forms the bulk of his immense novel. One short passage about a cake dipped in tea, and the remainder of the seven volumes is all about girls and women he fancied. So, probably it can be described as Proustian, but it is not involuntary memory. No, I would need to go further back into childhood to find my own madeleine, and - given the nature of these things, this could not be forced. I would have to wait until something came up that acted as a trigger to memories that I'd actually given myself opportunity to forget. A few weeks back, it finally happened, and then very rapidly happened again. Both times were prompted somewhat inevitably by nerdy blog posts on a linked theme that I'd happened to find. Thankfully, everybody out there in nerdy web land is looking for more obscure topics than Blakes' 7 or Words and Pictures or The Book Tower. Not that the first madeleine-like trigger was obscure when it was first around, being a best-selling book, Masquerade by Kit Williams. This was the perfect candidate, something that I had been obsessed with for about eighteen months around 1980 and 1981, before my interest in either Doctor Who or Madonna in a pink wig came along to distract me; after that, though, I hadn't really thought about it again.

The blog coverage I referred to earlier is by Jimmy Maher and is in two parts, Part 1 - The Contest and Part 2 - The Aftermath; it gives the background of the book (and is a very interesting read). In short, Masquerade was a picture book that held clues to a real buried treasure that had been hidden somewhere in Britain by artist / author Williams, a nifty publicity wheeze of the time that captured the imaginations of many an adult or child worldwide, myself included. This meant that I spent many hours poring over the pictures across an extended period of time, looking for the clues. The pictures are in a style that I found, still find, quite disturbing, so a shiver of memory hit me as soon as I stumbled across the blog posts. Once the treasure had been found back in 1982, the book was not of much value to me (it is not a great story, nor really even a great puzzle, and I'd had enough of the art). So, it was much more potent when the memories flowed back, suddenly jumping a 40 year gap and flooding the present. It was nice to remember being part of a brief international craze (I never came anywhere near to solving the damn thing, by the way). Interestingly, I reached that blog using a link in another and this had given me it's own Proustian rush. This was In Search of the Golden Brain by John Hoare, and talked about the first Spitting Image tie-in book, which I had owned when it first was published. This again acted as a trigger for similar reasons: slightly disturbing artwork - tick, mightily obsessed with it for a brief period - tick, not thought about it since I last read it 30+ years ago - tick; I was transported back to Christmas 1985 when I received it as a present. Amazingly, the book had it's own similar treasure hunt, which Hoare expounds upon in the post, which is also a very interesting read. Because the puzzle was presented as a parody of Masquerade, most people probably - as I did - assumed that it wasn't real, but it was, and eventually two parties worked out the puzzle and shared the treasure.

These examples of being parachuted directly down into memory lane have made me a little regretful that I could never feel exactly the same way about Doctor Who. The only way to achieve it would be to go cold turkey and not watch any of it, new or old, for an extended period. How likely is that ever to happen, though, even if I didn't have a blog to write?! 

In Summary:

Tentative about things it should be sure of, but also overconfident about some less good elements; in other words, a bit half-arsed as well as half-faced.

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

Chapter The 104th, in which there are some dinosaurs. On a Spaceship. Exactly what it says on tin.

Plot: 
The Doctor is called in by the Earth authorities of the future, as a mysterious object is hurtling towards the planet. He has only a few hours to investigate before it is blown up by missiles, so he assembles a team to help him comprising Amy, Rory, Queen Nefertiti, and a big game hunter. Rory's Dad, Brian, is brought along too by accident. They all materialise aboard the object, a huge Silurian spaceship that left Earth millions of years previously. It was designed to contain the escapees from a catastrophe on prehistoric Earth - including the last remaining dinosaurs - in suspended animation; but, while the dinosaurs are now roaming free on the ship, the Silurians are nowhere to be seen. Instead, inside the vast space of the ship's interior, is a second smaller spaceship.

On this second ship is a trader, Solomon, who's been injured after a dino encounter. He threatens the Doctor's friends to compel the Doctor into healing his wounds. Solomon proves to be not very nice at all: he has ejected all the Silurians into space, to steal their expensive Jurassic cargo. He's not able to steer the ship, though, so it has reverted to its point of origin. Solomon loses interest in the dinosaurs, even killing a Triceratops, when he realises Queen Nefertiti is even more valuable. He makes to flee with her in his ship, but Nefertiti escapes, and the Doctor traps Solomon in with a signalling device which draws off the approaching missiles. Solomon's ship gets blown up.  The Doctor settles the dinosaurs on a new planet, Siluria. Rory's Dad, Brian, enlivened by his adventure gets over his reluctance to travel, and goes off to see the world.

Context:

I watched this from the Blu-ray with my three kids (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6) one evening during half term; it went down well with everyone. The dinosaur effects on screen didn't blow the children's minds, they just took them completely for granted. This is probably an even better response, thinking about it  - they all assumed they were real rather than just realistic. The only comment that the dinosaurs did elicit was a chorus during the engine room scene of "Christmas Pterodactyl!!!" from the two youngest. You'd need to have watched a Christmas episode of a particular comedy show a few too many times to understand that reference. In general, the children are excited about Doctor Who again after a little while, with the massive presence of the ongoing Jodie Whittaker series being the main reason. In the past week, we've passed a Doctor Who billboard, and seen a Doctor Who trailer at the cinema. It's like a mixture of 2005 and 2008 all over again.  Also, one of the pro-am dancing couples on Strictly did a dance to the Doctor Who theme, with one dressed as Thirteen and the other as a Cyberman. Such a thing has never before happened, even back in the days of David Tennant's imperial pomp. As good a fit as the Doctor's new Sunday scheduling is, it was nice to see the TARDIS back on Saturday night TV just for a few minutes.

First-time round:

I've thought about digging out my old journal from 2012 for reference, as there's only so many ways to write "I have no strong memories of watching this one"; but, I've tried that before, and found that I didn't usually write anything down about Doctor Who. Maybe I was living too exciting a life to dwell on the latest episode of my favourite show, but I doubt it. Anyway, I would have seen this first on or very shortly after the Saturday of its debut broadcast on BBC1. I seem to think that my area of the South-East had finally got BBC1 in HD through the Freeview box by the time of this short run of Matt Smith episodes, so I'd have been watching this story in crystal clear high-def. I remember liking the story very much, and thinking the five stories shown that Autumn were something of a renaissance for the show.

Reaction

This story is an absolute joy. It starts at a fair lick, packs in some great jokes as well as exciting moments, then keeps barrelling along, never letting up - with the narrative clock of the impending missile strike ticking all the while - to its conclusion. It's not in any way an intricately plotted construction, nor is it thematically deep, but it isn't aiming to be. It is unashamedly a straight-ahead adventure for children of all ages. So straight-ahead is it, in fact, that it announces its title just before the credits. What you see is what you get, but that's more than enough as the spectacle on offer is superlative: terrible lizards of which Invasion of The Dinosaurs - the last Doctor Who story that attempted to depict such creatures, in 1974 - can only dream.

At the end of the story, I very nearly pressed play to watch it over again. The characters and situations are larger than life, but it works, with almost all of the guest performances shining. Rupert Graves has lots of fun playing the lovable rogue, Riddell: I love his larking about, pretending to lose his balance while creeping through a room full of sleeping dinosaurs. Riann Steele more than matches him playing Nefertiti. David Bradley, in his first of many Doctor Who-related roles, excels as a very nasty villain. It's almost - but not quite - enough to make the Doctor's bloodthirsty dispatching of Solomon seem acceptable. The character of Brian Williams slots nicely into the by now well-established dynamic of the three regulars, disrupting it just a little, but enhancing things overall. Mark Williams is perfect casting too: watching him and Arthur Darvill standing side by side, you really do believe that Brian and Rory are father and son. The presence of a family member instantly makes Rory a more believable and rounded character too. The overriding impression is of a great cast having fun sinking their teeth into an enjoyable script. It's just a shame that Sunetra Sarker is wasted a bit, in a slightly 'meh' part.

Apart from Rory, the other two regulars are also well served. Matt Smith is effortlessly charming throughout - I love the bit where he kisses then slaps Rory - but able to turn on a sixpence into simmering anger when confronting Solomon.  Amy, a character hard to warm to and never previously well used, is found a perfect function: she becomes the secondary back-up Doctor (this was a role that Romana, as played by Lalla Ward, occasionally fell into in the late 1970s / early 80s episodes, and it worked then too). She has grown too far from little Amelia after years of time crack energy, rebooting the universe, giving birth to a time-baby, being turned to goo, etc. The only option is for her to drop any pretence of being an audience identification figure, and step up. The script is explicit about this with the dialogue such as "I will not have flirting companions" and "I need you sober" and the like.

There's a few niggles; the plot contains a couple of major contrivances: before he knows exactly what he's up against, the Doctor has luckily gathered up a big game hunter who can shoot tranquiliser-blasts at dinos, and he just happens to have got himself a father and son who can use the DNA-locked spaceship dual controls. The fey robots are a one-joke concept that are quickly overused. But it's churlish to pick holes, when the story is so enjoyable and light.  

Connectivity: 

Both this story and The Mysterious Planet feature a warrior queen, a rogue trader, two robots and at least one double act.

Deeper Thoughts:
A tale of two Chibnalls. It was casting my mind back to Dinosaurs on a Spaceship that first made me hopeful that its author Chris Chibnall would make a good showrunner when he took over. He made a significant contribution to the 2012 mini-season (the first part of series 7, which continued with a second - and, to my mind, less successful - run in 2013, which Chibnall had no part in). Chibnall wrote two of the five episodes, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and The Power of Three, plus the series of short online season prequels collectively called Pond Life. Each focused on Rory and Amy, and how their normal lives on Earth in the Doctor's absence were balanced or unblanced with their intermittent otherworldly adventures alongside him.  After having sat through a lot of convoluted timey-wimey bobbins in the couple of years before this, I found much appeal in such a theme; it had a resonance that the sci-fi superheroics could never have, and finally made the Ponds into more rounded characters.

A lot of this was down to Steven Moffat as well, of course - it was on his watch; but, as it covered  stuff he was not usually too interested in for his own scripts (he'd not given Rory any family before this point, and had given Amy only an unrealistic couple of fairy tale characters for parents who cameoed and then were never seen again) it seems likely that Chibnall was the one bringing this to the mix. I was hopeful something similar would be part of the show when he was running it too. Now that the Chibnall era is well underway, and Bradley Walsh is breaking all but the stoniest of hearts with his majestic but understated performance of Graham's grief and loss, it's obvious to see that Chris Chibnall specialises in real grounded characters with a full life beyond their adventures in the TARDIS. It was also interesting to compare and contrast other aspects of Dinosaurs on a Spaceship with the episodes of series 11 that have aired to date.

The obvious similarity is the Doctor operating with a 'gang'. Although Chibnall was probably running with an idea of Moffat's from the previous year (when the story A Good Man Goes to War saw the Doctor calling in favours owed to bring together a team to rescue Amy), the focus is much more on people using realistic skills, more than trying to be The Avengers assembling: Rory's moment where he talks about collecting nursing supplies wherever he goes, is a similar plot function - and character moment - to Graham in the current series using his bus driver knowledge. It's a world away from the same character threatening Cybermen dressed as a Roman centurion, as Rory does in A God Man Goes to War. The Dinosaurs story is a straightforward adventure narrative, of the kind much favoured currently; it contains a villain just as nasty as Tim Shaw with whom the Doctor gets to have a nice confrontation, and display some righteous anger. The story contains strong female and minority ethic characters.

The differences are key too: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship's characters are larger than life, and spout glib one-liners rather than grounded dialogue. This fits in with the style of the time, but now looks a little false when compared to the still enjoyable and memorable but much less shallow dialogue and characterisation on display in the 2018 episodes. Most interesting of all, the backstory of the 2012 story is only fully understandable if you have knowledge of some specific Doctor Who lore: who are the lizard people that built this ship? What is their relationship with the Earth in its prehistoric times? Why would they have needed to escape from the planet at some point in the distant past? None of these points are explained in the narrative. The show assumes you've been watching for a few years; in contrast, everyone feels welcome to 2018 Who: no special knowledge is required.

At the time of writing, there have been four stories broadcast of Jodie Whittaker's debut series - each one of them of a very high quality, and none using any previous element from Doctor Who stories past. If they manage a whole season in the same vein, which Chris Chibnall has stated is the intention, then this will be the first time the show has managed such a feat for 40 years (the Tom Baker Key to Time season, which started broadcasting in Autumn 1978 has no kisses to the past). It's very exciting. If, by the time you read this, it's turned out that was all shameless misdirection and there's a big Dalek story on the air, then that will be exciting too, of course.

In Summary:
I'm still loving these m****r-f***ing dinosuars on this m****r-f***ing spaceship.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs

Chapter The 93rd, is one that just might be from a golden age.

Plot: 
The Doctor, trying to get new companion Sarah Jane Smith back home, arrives in central London only a few weeks after they were last on Earth, but the city is deserted: Londoners have fled after some menace has spread, and the area's under the control of the military. The two time-travellers get arrested suspected of looting, which is the biggest problem in the evacuated area (with the exception of all the giant lizards that keep popping up only to disappear again). Eventually found and rescued by the Brigadier, the Doctor and Sarah help UNIT to investigate what's causing the dinosaur invasion. Unfortunately, seemingly everyone involved in the investigation except the Doctor, Sarah, the Brig and Benton are part of a conspiracy.

The Doctor goes on the run after being framed as the monster maker (despite there literally being zero evidence against him, except his being caught near a dinosaur, which - given they are popping up in London at random - doesn't amount to a hill of beans smoking gun-wise). Sarah ends up imprisoned in what appears to be a spaceship three month's out from Earth. Benton ends up having to arrest himself. The conspiracy is led by an MP, Sir Charles Grover, who plans to revert the whole of the planet and its population, reversing millions of years, so that he and a group of people (those he's duped into thinking they're on a spacecraft to a new world, when in actual fact they're in a bunker under London) can start humanity off again along a better path. The Doctor stops the plan, just in time, and reverses the polarity on the time manipulation equipment, so Grover and the mad professor helping him are sent back in time on their own.

Context:

The Better Half and I watched from the DVD an episode an evening every so often. For some reason, we kept getting interrupted by other priorities, and this stretched to a number of weeks all told. In the middle of the watch, I squeezed in 10 episodes of The War Games in one evening, before spending another week or so finishing eps. 4-6 of Dinosaurs. Although it was ages ago now, I can remember that we chose to watch the first episode in colour: the DVD uses the clever technique applied to a few other Pertwee episodes that only exist as black and white film of recovering the colour information somehow burnt into each frame. This was the least successful attempt at the process, so the colour version of episode 1 is presented on the disc as a non-default option. To my eye, though, it's perfectly serviceable and doesn't detract (although episode 1's bleak abandoned London lends itself well to a black and white presentation anyway, so one can't really lose).

First-time round:

I missed any showings of Invasion of the Dinosaurs on UK Gold, so it was left to home video to allow me to watch it for the first time. By the time of Doctor Who's 40th anniversary late in 2003, the VHS range was approaching its end. The next range, re-releasing everything on DVD, had already got underway a few years earlier, but the BBC had decided to reward / exploit the loyal fanbase by completing the run on tape nonetheless. Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the final full story released in October of that year, probably left until last just in case they found the first episode in colour, or found a way to colourise it. In the end, it was released with the first episode in black and white. Then, by the time that DVD range was starting to peter out in 2012, Dinosaurs came out in DVD with the aforementioned option to watch it all in colour, and that completed the experience for me. The first season box set of what may turn into a full-blown range of Who Blu Ray re-releases has just come out, but they're starting with season 12, Tom Baker's first, the year after Invasion of the Dinosaurs. This is undoubtedly because that's the first year that is trouble free in terms of missing episodes or missing colour. So, it may be that I've collected my last ever version of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. What a thought!

Reaction

There were many sniggering schoolyard criticisms one could level at the many different series of cartoon franchise Scooby Doo, but the thing that always got me more than anything was a frequent plot standby they used where the baddies invented a photo-realistic holographic technique, but instead of exploiting this for commercial gain, they just used it to scare people away from a minor league smuggling operation based in the abandoned funfair. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, the villains don't just have bleeding edge time manipulation equipment, they also must have engaged some very good set designers and visual effects artists to mock up their pretend spacecraft fleet. And they presumably have invented some kind of workable suspended animation technology too. What a waste of effort just to use all that for a monumental misdirection, while they do an insane scheme to reboot life of Earth.

The first episode famously is titled merely 'Invasion', which was intended at the time to preserve the surprise; watching now, though, it's tempting to think it was just because they didn't want anyone to get their hopes up. The dinosaur models used in this story, and all the different methods of integrating them into the live action, produce results on a scale from 'risible' all the way up to 'laugh out loud funny', but crucially it doesn't harm the action as they are - literally - a side show. It may even enhance it: the dinosaurs are victims, after all, just minding their own business when wrenched out of time. It's quite apt that they are more cute than frightening.

A much bigger problem is how many holes there are in the villains' plot: how did they get everyone, even those who weren't in suspended animation, into the pretend spacecraft without anyone twigging, for example? How were they planning on getting them out again without spoiling the illusion? That this doesn't matter either, really, is testament to the writer Malcolm Hulke's skill in creating character. Everyone has solid enough motivation to keep things on the right side of credible, just about. He pulls the rug out from even the long-term watchers of this era, by making the bad guys motivated by what previously had been the series' number one good guy priorities: the anti-pollution, anti-nuclear, anti-war characters are on the wrong side of the argument in this one. Is is too grand to compare this to Animal Farm? Hulke was none-more-lefty, but he could still write a parable where the world reshaped by those with good intentions rapidly deteriorates to include sinister 're-education' of the individual, and even the threat of execution to weed out the disruptive elements. Just like his work in The War Games and elsewhere in Doctor Who, Hulke is gleefully anti-establishment, whatever that establishment might be.

However one rationalises the holes in the spacecraft subplot, it does give the story its best cliffhanger (episode 3's) where Sarah has woken up and may be three months into deep space. And not just because it's the only cliffhanger that doesn't involve an entire suspension bridge of disbelief on the audience's part that the rubber toy dino on screen is real - it wrong-foots everyone, and comes out of nowhere, though it will be satisfactorily explained later. It doesn't matter either that footage of the Doctor and UNIT is intercut with the spacecraft scenes (a move that has been criticised in the past): we're supposed to see early on that it's all a con. Elizabeth Sladen's performance is very good in the second half of the story, doing her best to wake up the underground sleepers to the truth. In fact, all the performances are top notch: Peter Miles, Martin Jarvis, Noel Johnson; best of all for me is Carmen Silvera's icy turn as Ruth. Director Paddy Russell gets the best out of her cast, and also makes the most from some guerrilla filming in the early hours of the morning, providing episode one its remarkable deserted London scenes.

Connectivity: 

Like The War Games, this one has scripting duties contributed by Malcolm Hulke (writer of Invasion of the Dinosaurs) and Terrance Dicks (its script editor). Also, it's the third story on the trot (including Turn Left) to feature soldiers, an area visited by our heroes that's under martial law, and a plot involving the abuse of time travel.

Deeper Thoughts:
It's so easy to laugh, it's so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind. In Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Sir Charles Grover, famous environmentalist, author of Last Chance for Man, admired even by the Doctor, let's everyone down. I've often wondered how I would feel if a famous person I really admired, like someone from TV's Doctor Who, was embroiled in some scandal, present or historical. There hasn't been a shortage of questionable Television Centre-based activities by certain persons reported as happening during my childhood in the 70s and 80s, but so far it hasn't involved anyone I really cared deeply about, certainly nobody from Who: mostly, it has to be said, the alleged perps were hardly surprising news at all to anyone who lived through TV of that era, a lot people on the box back then exuded a less than healthy vibe.

The day has now sadly come: it is not a hero of my childhood but of my older years who has besmirched his reputation, such as it was. That person is Steven Patrick Morrissey. His pronouncements have got more and more reactionary of late, but his latest crossed a line, defending as it did the indefensible, and supporting the insupportable. Heaven knows I've stood up for him in the past, like many an obsessive fan (as another hero of mine from that time, Sean Hughes - whose own  reputation took a hit when his obituaries came to be written - said: everyone gets over their Morrissey phase; except for Morrissey, of course). The Moz was misquoted, he was misunderstood, he's playing a persona, it's irony - I trotted out all those lines. Maybe he too always exuded a less than healthy vibe, and I just didn't see it back then.

So, what do I do now? Ignore it? The work is not the same as the creator, of course; but, Morrissey's modus operandi was always to include a lot of himself in his art. Should I get rid of all my albums as Stewart Lee advises? That seems unfair to the people who wrote the music, particularly Johnny Marr. All I can therefore do is feel foolish for my past; but maybe I shouldn't feel too bad. It's only empathy, after all, taken a little too far. Like any bad direction or decision, excessive hero worship starts with something natural, good... or at least understandable. This is why a plot like Malcolm Hulke's Dinosaurs story, despite its being OTT nutso sci-fi, still resonates - the bad guys don't know they're bad guys; they started with a desire to create a better world. Even nationalism, to pick one example, starts off from a desire to protect the ones we know or associate with most. The only way we can understand or counter these dangerous directions is by being open to empathy. If the price of that is that sometimes we feel foolish for singing the praises of a person or idea which turned out not to be as good as we first thought, that's probably a price worth paying.

In Summary:
All in all, it's something of a (temporal) paradox: a story with loads of big flaws, but it's still absolutely excellent. Final word on the matter: KKLAK!