Full Circle

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

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

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

Context:

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

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

 

Deeper Thoughts:

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

Chris Chapman

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

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Ayres 

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

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Skinner

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

Thompson (L) shows Johnson the Rutan puppet

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

Johnson (L) and McTighe (R)

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

Warriors' Gate

Chapter The 195th, which features at least three lions and an escape to victory.

Plot:

The Doctor, Romana, K9 and Adric, trying to escape the e-space micro universe, find themselves in a white void whose only landmark is the frontage of a ruined building with a working door. It's called the Warriors' Gate, even though it isn't a gate, it's clearly a door. Also trapped there is a spaceship of human slavers, and their 'cargo' of leonine time-sensitives - the Tharils. One of the Tharils, Biroc, had been forced to act as navigator through the space-time vortex, and brought the ship deliberately to this place. Escaping, he took control of the TARDIS and brought it there too. The Doctor realises that the void's zero coordinates mean it is the point where one can go from e-space (negative coordinates) to his home universe of Gallifrey and Earth, n-space (positive coordinates). In order to keep the rest of the Tharils from escaping, the slave ship is made of super-dense dwarf-star alloy, the gravitational effect of which makes the void contract exponentially, putting everyone at risk.

The crews of both ships explore the area piecing all this backstory together. The Doctor manages to go through a mirror within the building beyond the gate / door and sees it in the past: the Tharils back then were the callous overlords until the people rose up and sent Gundan robots to attack and enslave them. Biroc tells the Doctor that he just needs to do nothing to escape. The captain of the Slave ship Rorvik has a mad plan to back-blast the ship's engines into the mirror, but this just destroys the ship. The crew are presumably killed, but the Tharils escape through the broken hull. Romana decides out of nowhere to stay with the Tharils to help them free their enslaved people throughout the galaxy. She takes K9 with her. The Doctor and Adric say goodbye to them, and escape in the TARDIS to n-space.

Context:

I scoured my overloaded shelves of Doctor Who discs to dig out the DVD of Warriors' Gate, and put the box by the player waiting for an opportunity to watch it. Before that moment came, after it had sat there for a day or two, I realised that I had Warriors' Gate on Blu-ray as part of the season 18 box set, and so got that down instead. Perhaps I should be selling all my old DVDs once they've come out on a superior medium, to avoid such confusion in future and save some space. I know a lot of people have made a little bit of pocket money from doing just this, but I just can't bring myself to at the moment. There's too much sentiment in every box and cover. The same thing happened during the long crossover period of VHS to DVD; I could have made a reasonable sum getting rid of tapes before they were released on DVD, knowing full well they would eventually come out on disc, but I decided against it. I still keep a folder of the sleeves for old time's sake, even though the tapes themselves have been consigned to the chronologically-arranged shelving unit in the sky. Anyway, when I finally got round to watching, I viewed an episode a day now and then over the course of about a week, culminating with the final episode on the 11th July, the day of the UEFA European men's football championship final (more on that anon). I was on my ownsome for the most part, though middle child (boy of 11) did wander in at one point, saw Adric on screen and said "It's him, it's... thingy. Didn't he die later?" Spoilers son, spoilers!

First Time Round:

My earliest memory of this story was seeing a clip as part of an item where Mat Irvine demonstrated the model effects work. This was on the UK Saturday morning kids' show Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, and must presumably have been shown in early 1981 around the time of Warriors' Gate's broadcast. I watched Swap Shop religiously in those days, but not Doctor Who. I wouldn't start watching the adventures of Gallifrey's finest for another 10 months, when a series of repeats was shown on BBC2 that got me hooked on the programme in time for Peter Davison's debut run at the start of 1982. About a decade later, I was coming to the end of my first year at Durham university; it was the year in which my fan friend David, mentioned many times before on blog posts here, was graduating. As something of a parting gift - though as you'll know if you've read those other blog entries we stayed in touch and are still watching Doctor Who together to this day - he gave me a number of his tapes of old stories to copy. I spent a good few hours with two VCRs linked together (neither of which were mine, so I must have required the beneficence of other parties too), copying from tape to tape many stories from Doctor Who's past that I hadn't yet seen. Warriors' Gate was one of that batch. Despite a crackly noise throughout that was added by dodgy tracking, I still enjoyed watching it thereafter. It would be another five years or so later, towards the end of 1997, when I got the less crackly version released by BBC video.

Reaction:

In keeping with the reverse coordinates of the E-Space trilogy which it concludes, Warriors' Gate is something of a Bizarro-world Doctor Who story. It's much more common for a story in the programme's long history to have a solid enough script that shines through any flaws in the execution. Warriors' Gate is the reverse. It's a beautifully well-made production, far better and more original visually than anything that had come before, even those earlier stories of the 1980/81 season that were trying hard in that department. This overpowers any difficulties with the script, and - boy! - are there difficulties with the script. They're not the obvious Doctor Who ones though. It doesn't have unactable characters or dialogue - it's got a great cast all performing well. It's not that there isn't much incident (stuff happens, not a huge amount of stuff, but there is some); it's not that it doesn't make sense (though it doesn't in places). I suppose the main problem is trying to work out whether the gnomic and impenetrable aspects of the narrative are deliberate or accidental, before one can work out whether they are appropriate or not. In the end, fathoming that out is too much of a cognitive load, and one's brain just capitulates and enjoys the spectacle. I think this makes it unique in the Doctor Who canon: it's not just a Doctor Who art film, which arguably had been attempted before in the 1980/81 series, it's a successful Doctor Who art film, slippery and defying categorisation.

Covering the story for the blog, I am going to have to decide on my own categorisation: accidental masterpiece, finely-tuned visual experience, or just a mess? I may be biased, though, by knowledge that another viewer of the story might not have: the interviews and articles over the last 40 years about the making of the story, and specifically the too many people who intervened in the scripting. Credited writer Stephen Gallagher has gone on record as being unhappy with the changes made by script editor Christopher Bidmead and director Paul Joyce. There were notes from executive producer Barry Letts to be incorporated too. The final scripts, though, with no time left to develop them further, did not satisfy Letts or producer John Nathan-Turner as they had rendered the story too confusing. My speculation is a lot of (maybe too much?) material was cut (Gallagher's original scripts were reported as being overlong). An example of a possible symptom of this is towards the end when Romana tells the Doctor she's leaving and Biroc chips in on behalf of the Tharils with "And we need a time lord." What? What for? Since when? Why haven't you mentioned this before? Why would you need a time lord? Doesn't your race have the ability to, you know, travel in time? Aren't you the least likely people to ever need a time lord??!! There's a brief exchange shortly afterwards to try and resolve all these uncertainties, where Romana talks about a plan to integrate the Tharils power with her time technology, but it's too little too late happening as it does in the dying moments of the final episode.

Maybe Gallagher's original longer scripts did not have more build up to this, or clarification of exactly how Romana was going to help free the enslaved Tharils, as that subplot was imposed by a regular cast member leaving so might be expected to be the script editor's responsibility. It seems a good bet, though, that his original scripts would have had more plot about the Doctor and friends helping to free the enslaved Tharils from the ship. Gallagher, after all, presents a classic Doctor Who set up: slavers being nasty to an alien race come into contact with the Doctor. The classic Doctor Who plot that would ensue practically writes itself: the Doctor and friends help to free the Tharils. In the finished show they just don't. They don't help at all; instead, they investigate -  a little about their current situation trapped in the void, but not much; the bad guys do most of the heavy-lifting investigating that. Instead, with timey-wimey transitions, the Doctor investigates the backstory of the Tharils, which is intriguing and unique for Who. They were enslavers before they were enslaved, but now they've been punished enough. Some of the best moments of the script dwell on this. The Doctor walking through an echo of a former time represented by Cocteau-style superimposition on black-and-white photographic backgrounds, the cuts back and forth from the banqueting hall in its prime to its future as a cobweb-strewn relic, the slow motion Gundan robot attack. Even a small moment like the Doctor filling up the goblet of wine until it's overflowing then knocking it over is magical. (I have been known, if ever I accidentally spill some wine, to follow that up with my best Tom Baker impression saying "This is no way to run an empire!")

If not about rescuing slaves, then maybe the story is actually about escape? Lots of Doctor Who stories are just about escaping calamity not necessarily about righting wrongs. But no; nothing doing there either. The TARDIS travellers don't do anything to escape, it just happens. The script makes something of a virtue of it, by hinting at pre-destination: Biroc has seen into the future and set in motion everything that needs to happen to free the ship's slaves and get the Doctor back to his own universe. Whether this is because the slave ship causes the void to vanish, or whether it's because the back-blast destroyed the 'gate', or destroyed the ship, or whether it's a combination of all these factors is not clear, but that doesn't really matter. It does, though, mean again that not much is happening in the story. It is somewhat apt, I suppose, in a story so focused on shifting time-zones that the traditional Doctor Who story material all happens either in the past or is hinted at for the future. In the here and now of the void, people wander about, get frustrated, bad guys threaten our heroes occasionally but not with much conviction, and people have lunch. This works as counterpoint to the grander moments, and is an effective depiction of the banality of evil in the down-to-earth crew talking about bonuses and cargo and scrap value when they're trading in and torturing sentient beings. It helps that the cast is uniformly excellent and work well as an ensemble. The comic double-act of Aldo and Royce are fun too.

Whatever the original scripts were like, it's hard to know whether the cuts made were aiming to simplify the plot but inadvertently had the opposite effect (which would fit everything subsequently known about the approach of Bidmead) or were deliberately obfuscating the plot to create that art film feel (which might perhaps fit the mode of Joyce, someone who stubbornly and heroically challenged the BBC crew to work in a different way to create Warriors' Gate, and was fired and reinstated during the course of its production). Maybe this doesn't matter, and maybe it doesn't matter that Joyce's vision and approach - or the massive studio overruns to which it led - meant that he never worked again on Doctor Who. The end product is ultimately what matters 40 years later, and it is very good indeed. Sets, costumes, video and model effects, music: every aspect of the production is sublime. Whether all the contributors agreed with Joyce's vision, or whether they just thought they were salvaging a doomed project, they managed to create something very special.

 

Connectivity: 

In Warriors' Gate and The Girl in the Fireplace alike there is a titular stone object that acts as a portal between different times and spaces; both stories feature a scene where robots come through the portal en masse attacking a set of nobles enjoying a celebration (banquet, ball). For the third story in a row there's an emotional goodbye at the end too.

Deeper Thoughts:

Here comes the future and you can't run from it, if you've got a bandwagon I don't want to be on it. The cliché of the Doctor Who fan as pallid wheezing nerd is no doubt unfair, even though it is true in my case. As I've said before on the blog, I am against sport and the causes of sport. Even I, though, was caught up a little bit in the palaver around the England Men's over 18s professional association football team's progression through the recent Euros competition, and specifically their somewhat historic performance in getting to the final of an international tournament for the first time in 55 years. I started writing this section of the post on the day of the recent Euros final before the match took place, and the tenuous "three lions" connection with Warriors' Gate briefly occurred to me. A rush of enthusiasm ensued, and I started to type, with the aim of completing and publishing the blog with a few paragraphs of Doctor Who's references to the game in time before the start of the match. Then, I stopped, and left it for a week before resuming again. The reason? I realised I would just be jumping on the footie bandwagon like any number of other reprobates had in the run up to the final. At that point, you could suddenly see all the politicians in their newly purchased squad strips, with the creases yet to be ironed out, snapped cheering on "our boys" in posts on social media, while clearly having no clue about the game. I didn't want to be like them; not one bit.

It's always the prerogative of politicians to try to hijack any national feelgood moment for their own ends, of course. The added hypocrisy here is that many Conservative MPs in England, including government ministers and the Prime Minister, had previously been very critical of this England squad, incensed by their peaceful protest of taking the knee at the start of games to highlight racial inequality and discrimination. These MPs refused to condemn fans booing the players as they made this protest, boycotted games, implied that the players were Marxist (tenuously and incorrectly linking their protest to a one-off comment by one of the original founders of the Black Lives Matter organisation in the US) and so on. It wasn't just politicians either but also the usual suspects from the right-wing talk radio / social media commentariat all spouting similar culture war-stoking nonsense. And most did the same volte face once the team were winning. What's most interesting about this is the lack of foresight displayed, at least by the legislators (I had no such high expectations of, say, an actor that once played a DS in a long running crime show). They didn't anticipate that the team might do well, just as they didn't consider that they might not be on the more popular side of this confected culture war. As the woes of the recently launched UK channel GB News seem to indicate, UK hard right-wingers are a very small audience, and nothing will ever be hard enough or right-wing enough for them (GB News viewers threatened to boycott when someone on this free speech advocating channel took the knee themselves this last week, so he was sacked).

It would have been difficult to put together my planned few paragraphs of Doctor Who's references to football anyway, as there are so few. Matt Smith - who played youth football and planned a professional career before an injury redirected his energies toward acting - displays some of his soccer skills in The Lodger and The Power of Three; 1980s companion Ace professed her fandom for Charlton Athletic, 2000s companion Mickey was keen on watching the odd game at the pub. That's about it. Such a paucity of material would be matched only by trying to find politicians in the past wanting to jump on the Doctor Who bandwagon. Even at its most popular, the show has never attracted politicians wanting to reflect in its glory. The closest was probably a Radio Times interview with the last UK prime Minister Theresa May where she mentioned Doctor Who amongst her faves - see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe blog post for more details. The plurality of messages in such a long-running show, including Warriors' Gate with its resonant sympathy for the enslaved, probably make it too complicated for the bandwagon-jumpers. These sort of people can change their minds pretty quickly anyway. I watched the match, and when Marcus Rashford missed his penalty I instantly knew that he was going to come under attack because of his race, and because of his work for disadvantaged children. In but a few hours, I was proved correct on both counts. I truly believe, though, that the sort of people that do this are in a diminishing minority, their world and worldview contracting like the void around Rorvik and Co. Like Warriors' Gate, I have faith in the future even if the present isn't that great.

In Summary:

It's an accidental masterpiece and a finely-tuned visual experience, and also a mess. Somehow, this doesn't stop it being great.

State of Decay

 Chapter The Nineteenth, The Nineteenth Chapter is The Nineteenth Chapter.

Plot: 
The Doctor, Romana and Adric face an attack of the definitive articles: The Three Who Rule serve The Great One and regularly hold The Selection to find The Chosen One for The Time of Arising. And there's something about The Wasting. The Wasting is The Wasting. Basically, nobody knows what The Fuck The Wasting is, but apparently it's bad. Vampire story with some spacey-wacey bits, essentially.

Context: 

Watched the DVD episode by episode over a few days with various of the three kids drifting in and out, but only middle child (boy, 6 years old) gripped enough to sit still and pay attention. During our watching together, he told me that Tom Baker is his favourite Doctor, with Slyvester McCoy next, and David Tennant after that. He's making lists! I'm so proud. Once he's putting all 12 main actors in one ordered sequence of preference (plus fretting over whether John Hurt should be in there or not) then my work will be done. Apologies to his mother.

First-time round:

I may be misremembering, but I seem to think that towards the end of my first year at university in Durham, just before the long Summer vac, my good friend and fellow fan David (see this post for more details) had a cache of videos, and sufficient cables, and I had sufficient blank tapes, to transfer over some of his unreleased Who episodes, so I could own them myself like a happy little pirate. Presumably I'd convinced another friend, fellow first-year Mike, the only other person I knew with a VCR in college, to let me borrow it to complete the set-up.  I seem to think Mike sat there in David's room monitoring to ensure I didn't break anything.

David was at the end of his final year, close to graduating, and this would have been a farewell present (though he came back to visit us several times during my second and third years, and we're still firm friends to this day). Funny how some things stick in your mind: as I transferred various episodes - somehow with a slight tracking issue, so every one had a crackling noise of the soundtrack, but never mind - David said I was "seizing the day" in doing this. We'd just been discussing Dead Poets Society and Carpe Diem, probably with me gnashing my teeth in self pity at how I wasn't making anything of my life (I did that a lot as an undergraduate). I appreciate that he was trying to cheer me up, but I don't really think having even more Doctor Who vids was necessarily going to help much in the self fulfilment stakes.

Anyway, I copied both Full Circle and Warrior's Gate, the first and last stories of the E-Space trilogy, but didn't do State of Decay which comes in between them. This means that either David or I had made a decision that this was the one of the three that was dispensable, and that we wouldn't be carting it around. I think it was his decision, but we'd have both been pretty much correct.

So, the first time I would have seen this story was when the trilogy came out to buy on video in the late nineties. I'm sure I would have been excited about seeing it for the first time; but I may have been equally excited about seeing the few minutes of bonus footage they'd bunged on of Anthony Ainley in character as the Master from the computer game that was soon to be released, or indeed seeing Warrior's Gate without crackly audio. This is State of Decay's issue in a nutshell: it lifts right out, and you hardly even notice.

Reaction:
The first thing of note is the titles which still feel wrong; Tom Baker, like his predecessor, changes his familiar title sequence in his final year for a new style that subsequently is reused and becomes much more associated with his successor. In retrospect, it feels like he’s wearing some other guy’s clothes.

The next thing I notice is that the script is fine; it takes a bit of time to get going, and clearly suffers from the script editor and writer pulling in different directions. All in all, though, it’s a solid effort.  The execution, mind you, has some big problems.

Peter Moffat’s work often comes in for some stick, but he usually is given a free pass for his first directional outing. Hmm. There are bits that might be odd choices or might just be errors, e.g. Baker is at one point talking to the arse-end of K9. The use of slow, balletic movement of actors is also something I’m not sure was fully intentional. Sometimes it works, sometimes it feels very stagey, e.g. the deliberate, stilted positioning of Lalla Ward’s head into close up as she’s about to get her neck bit.

The other major let-downs are Adric and the bats. On balance, of the two, the bats give the least worst performance, but they rarely convince, whether they are portrayed by rubber toys on strings, stock footage, or radiophonic tinkling. As for Adric, I mused as to whether viewers at the time were wondering in the first few minutes where the new boy had got to, or whether they collectively sighed when he finally showed up and thought “Oh God, he’s back”. Matthew Waterhouse, in his first recorded Doctor Who performance, and only second ever gig, cannot walk across a room convincingly, and cannot say a line without my wanting to punch him.

Something else that doesn't sit well is having too much focus on the 'lord' in Timelord: the Doctor and Romana act and are treated by the downtrodden natives like royalty, and it's only with them to inspire and lead them that the beardie proles manage an uprising. The Doctor is even shown to have blue blood. It's all part of Terrance Dicks's aristo agenda, I tells ye! 

Connectivity: 

Another tale of a vampiric entity that dwells at the centre of a celestial body in a smaller universe linked to our own; and, in both stories, the entity controls the people living there. The Doctor again is trapped in that universe, turning up with one male and one female companion.

Does both e-space and House being green count as a connection?  Not really: the colour for almost everything in Doctor Who is gween.

Deeper Thoughts:
You say technacothaka, I say museum, let’s call the whole thing off. State of Decay was not the first or last time there was an equal and opposite tension between Doctor Who writer and script editor, but it's probably the most interesting; much more interesting at least than watching the episodes themselves without knowing the behind the scenes gossip. In the red corner, we have Christopher Hamilton Bidmead, whose mission statement in the script editing role, and anything he’s said about the writing of Doctor Who since, I profoundly disagree with; but, he wrote three of my favourite 1980s stories. In the blue corner, is Terrance Dicks, who could more than hold his own against his opponent, as an old hand; but, most of Dicks's actual story credits on Who are a bit rubbish compared to the stories he magnificently script edited.

It would have been perhaps better instead to see a story Bidmead wrote and Dicks edited, but that never was to be, and we have to take what we can get. State of Decay is consequently a game of two halves that don't quite meld together. All the Gothic stuff is how Terrance Dicks wanted it; all the bearded procrastinating science men, and the inclusion of spaceships and escape hatches, is pure Bidmead. Normally, I'd think one more draft would have sorted it. But, from what I've heard of their process, one more draft would have pulled things further apart.

Bidmead made himself look silly trying to remove the silliness from Doctor Who. He didn't twig that silliness is a key strand of its fibre. Time man travels in phone booth = rigorous educational primer in science? Not likely. He didn't edit two stories before a cactus man was threatening to blow up a planet.  You will never remove the silliness from Doctor Who. Even if its leading man is not the type who can't see a set with a swinging door without introducing some improvised comic business where it bonks him on the nose (as Tom Baker does in State of Decay). Big but, though: Bidmead instigated - nay, insisted on - the Grimm brothers sequence (O'Connor becoming Aukon, etc.), which I think is magical. And it's because of his idea to make the tower an abandoned spaceship that the story has its bravura ending.

Dicks also doesn't come out of things blameless: he'd taken and rewritten top-to-bottom many a script in his time, but does seem to get a bit more precious when it's done to him in return. All in all, State of Decay does benefit from Bidmead's input. And season 18 does benefit from a dash of Dicks Gothic (as indeed it benefited from the odd cactus man) to offset the many earnest bearded men talking about science.

In Summary:

A little pale and bloodless, but still with surprising bite.