Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel

 Chapter The 21st, is set in a world that's not quite as good as our own.

Plot: 
The Doctor and Rose at the height of their smug couple phase, with Mickey tagging along as gooseberry, end up in a parallel universe where they discover alternate versions of family members, and also a terminally ill billionaire, struggling to survive, who has invented parallel versions of the Cybermen. Like all dying men struggling to stay alive, he wants to enslave humanity also. Why wouldn't he? Anyway, these Cybermen turn out to be even more rubbish than the ones in our universe, and can be killed by a mobile phone signal or something (and it's not even a gold mobile phone). Mickey graduates to full hero, and stays behind to look after his Nan / fight the remaining Cybermen / sightsee in Paris. Even though things feel a little unconcluded, the Doctor and Rose leave this world behind never ever to see it or anyone from it ever again, because it's completely impossible. Never again. Definitely over. Absolutely finished with. Honest.

Context: 

Along with the Better Half and middle child (a boy of 6), I was horribly ill with cold during the week of viewing this; we all snuggled up on the sofa and watched this on DVD to cheer ourselves up. Didn't really work in my case.

First-time round:

In a fair example of 'difficult second album' syndrome, Doctor Who in 2006 did not quite maintain the levels of audience excitement seen in 2005. The return to screens in March of that first year was hard to top, but by Christmas and David Tennant's first story, the fervour had managed to increase: the show even made the front cover of the Christmas Radio Times. And at the end of The Christmas Invasion, there were the first clips from Tennant's first full series including its Cyber story: gosh, he's wearing a dinner jacket, and there are Cybermen and explosions, and - ooh - Billie Piper is dressed as a French maid for some reason.

Inevitably, once Tennant got past tantalising glimpses and into the weekly episodic grind, it could never be so special. Coinciding with this, at least to yours truly, was a small but noticeable dip in quality, and the 2006 stories are collectively my least favourite year of 21st century Who. Or maybe I was just distracted by more important matters - my better half was heavily pregnant at this point with our first child. I don't remember any specifics of seeing these two episodes for the first time, but I must have started completing the Panini Sticker book for Doctor Who at this time, as it came free (plus six stickers) with the Radio Times issue that advertised the Rise of the Cybermen episode. Yes, I was preparing to become a father simultaneously with collecting stickers aimed at young children. Like the show, it was a period of transition for me; hopefully, like the show, I improved slightly.

Reaction:
I'll preface this with the fact that my son, though subdued by illness, enjoyed the story, and my Better Half kept telling me I was being overly harsh on it; but, alas, ten years has done nothing to improve this disappointing mess in my eyes.

From the first scene where Roger Lloyd-Pack outrageously overacts the killing of a unwitting minion, one wonders what unkindnesses the intervening years have delivered to Graeme Harper; the fantastic director of 1980s Who can no longer seem to get a decent performance out of anyone. But the fault clearly lies in the screenplay. Reportedly, there were many script problems with this two-parter; no-one could really ever work out what it should be. The story seems to have gone through many major changes in direction, echoes of which remain in what was finally made, and no character in it ends up with a satisfactory motivation for their actions.

Lumic, Lloyd-Pack's character, is a case in point: he is dying, and wants to survive. He's frightened to experiment on himself, so he gets his goons to round up the homeless and experiments on them. So far, a bit whacko, but not beyond the limits of genre. He perfects his cyber process and then seeks the right authority to proceed to use it; you'd think he'd crossed the line of caring about legality when doing vivisection on unwilling humans, but he still seems very keen to get the governance right. Okay. Permission is denied, so he enslaves all of London's population with hypnotic signals, marches them into a power station, extracts their brains and sticks each into a steel suit. Overreaction, much? Imagine what he'd do if he failed to get planning permission for his underground lair in a hollowed out volcano? To give the writer the benefit of the doubt, in the process of redrafting it's probable that a change was made from desperate amoral bad guy to full-on cartoon supervillian, but the end product retains a sticky-taped patch-up of both.

The characters are not the only thing that's inconsistent, the whole world of the story doesn't make coherent sense. It must have seemed a good idea not to spell out exactly what decided the parallel path that this alternate world took, but there are heavy hints that we are in some kind of unequal totalitarian state (talk of curfews, underground resistance groups, black market whiskey for the special few, etc.). But this presents two problems - first, it doesn't square with the more free market liberalism of downloads, upgrades and crowd scenes of everyone having the latest accessory; but second and more crucially: if this is happening to a lot of Nazis / Vichy French, why do I care when they get cybernised? Again, there's a conflict between different directions tearing this story apart.

 

Positives: Camille Coduri and Shaun Dingwall are solid amongst the regulars; the rest including Tennant are having something of an off day. Noel Clarke is half good - Mickey's great, Ricky, not so much. Some of the pointless continuity references (IE, Torchwood, "Above, Between, Below") are fun to spot. The downbeat ending with Pete Tyler rejecting the girl who's his alt-Daughter is a nice change, but everyone knows (knew even at the time) that it's not going to be left that way.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature top tier Doctor Who baddies, and both - while purporting to be stand-alone - are clearly setting up stories that will be continue later down the line.

Deeper Thoughts:  
There's never been a good Cyberman story. Discuss. All that follows is in my humble opinion, but it’s an opinion that I’m not alone in holding within Doctor Who fandom: 50 years on from their first appearance, the Cybermen are still waiting for a TV story that’s worthy of them.

Where they’ve been in a good tale, it’s usually a man versus alien action story where they may as well be any old iron giants (think Earthshock or The Invasion). And when a story dwells on what they are, or what they mean, it usually only does this briefly, or at a superficial level, or it picks on one aspect of them (they’re emotionless, they want to convert people). Dark Water / Death in Heaven probably comes closest to exploiting the concept successfully, but even there the Cybs are the reanimated dead. But Cybermen are worse than zombies; they are people who have willingly converted themselves into machines, bit by bit, in order to survive, and in so doing have removed all their emotions. They are not walking dead, they are volunteer monsters, and their actions are cruel but always logical.

On paper that’s great, but no story has ever managed to bring that to life visually. A lot of the difficulty stems from their creation: they were developed as an idea in themselves – during a brainstorming period where the show’s scientific adviser Kit Pedlar and its Script Editor Gerry Davis were coming up with more plausible story concepts – rather than emerging organically from a particular story being written. This is why they almost seem shoehorned into their own debut, which doesn’t really foreground what they are, bar some brief backstory expositions. They are also a concept deserving a slow reveal, more prose than telly: you’d need a lot of screen time to cover their gradual relinquishing of humanity at the appropriate pace to do justice to the scary truth: they do it to themselves, they do, and that’s what really hurts

The vacuum created by the lack of a Genesis of The Cybermen on TV has led to many attempts in other media to tell that tale properly. I have never heard the Big Finish story Spare Parts, but it’s generally felt to be the best attempt, and formed something of the basis for Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel. As I understand it, though, over many, many redrafts and reimaginings, the 2006 TV story came to bear no real resemblance, despite the credit thanking Spare Parts’ author Marc Platt.

The major issue is that, whatever point they started from, every choice ultimately made by Tom MacRae and Russell T seems to be the wrong one: the conversion comes about not because of the necessities / caprices of a whole species, but the insanity of one man; the change isn’t gradual, it’s sudden; it’s forced not voluntary; emotions are removed not because of accident or because they are no longer felt to be needed, it’s just a side effect of the process. Essentially, one is left with something that’s a pale imitation of a Cyberman. But perhaps that’s all that a family show on a Saturday evening can handle. Done properly, perhaps the Cybermen are too chilling a body horror concept for Doctor Who.

In Summary:

Further evidence that the Cybermen are too frightening to do properly in Doctor Who. (There’s still hope, though: all we need is a spin-off from Doctor Who aimed at adults; just imagine what it could make of them - that story could not fail to be utterly amazingly superb.)

Mission to the Unknown

Chapter The 20th, sans video, sans regular cast, sans happy ending.

Plot: 
A three-man rocket crew including Marc Cory, the Space James Bond, are stuck on the hostile planet Kembel. But any minute the Doctor will come along and save them. As well as killer plant life, there are Daleks based on the planet scheming with a bunch of evil co-conspirators to take over the solar system. But any minute the Doctor will come along and defeat them. The crew scramble to fix their ship, but it gets blown up by the Daleks before the Doctor can arrive. Desperately, they record an SOS, but all are killed before they can transmit it. The Doctor doesn’t show up.  Next Week: Ancient Troy. So, erm, The End.

Context: 

This is one of the few whole stories for which no visual material exists, no master tapes, no film copies, no clips, no off-screen ‘telesnaps’, only audio. But, as luck would have it, it’s also the shortest ever Doctor Who story to date - ignoring charity skits and online prequels - at only 25 minutes long. There are fan-made animated versions of Mission to the Unknown online, but I stuck to listening to the BBC audio release with narration by Peter Purves. I did this using my generic fruit-based MP3 device during a commute to the day job, and I had the time to give it a couple of listens all the way through for clarity. (For the uninitiated, although it was scheduled as a stand-alone story, Mission to the Unknown acts as the prologue to the twelve episode epic, The Daleks Master Plan, two stories later, but I’ll blog that separately when the randomiser drags me back to Kembel).

First-time round:

For perhaps obvious reasons related to the majority percentage of communication that is conveyed visually, my memories of first experiencing audio-only Doctor Who stories are not as potent as for those that I could actually see. The multi-CD set of Mission to the Unknown / Daleks Master Plan came out in late 2001. This was before I started regularly buying anything online, but I was already commuting to work in those days; so, I likely bought it either from the MVC on London Bridge, or from Borders in Brighton. Crikey, I feel like I’m writing about the 18th century: neither of those establishments exists anymore.

Reaction:
I suppose it’s a good one to lose if you have to lose one, with only three main characters to keep track of; mind you, it doesn’t make it easy that their names all end in a ‘y’: Cory, Lowery, Garvey. Also, because I’m over familiar with the footage from Master Plan episode 1 of another doomed spaceman on Kembel, Kurt Gantry, I picture everyone as being played by Brian Cant. (Hey, Gantry is another one that ends in ‘y’, the space security service really needs to review the diversity of its hiring practices.)

It’s a shame not to have the mad delegates with their spots and stripes and Christmas tree hats to look at, but there is footage of them surviving from Master Plan later. Aside from them, one mainly has to picture Daleks, a jungle, and a rocket. And if one’s imagination isn’t good enough to do that, it doesn’t matter, as Terry Nation handily included Daleks, a jungle, a rocket, or some combination of the three in every Doctor Who episode he subsequently wrote, so you just have to remember those instead.

The story succeeds in channelling a Flash Gordon style Saturday morning picture vibe, with shrill stock incidental music, aliens, and transformations. But there are some issues: it feels a bit out of character for the Daleks to be forming a grand alliance, but one immediately rationalises this assuming that all their seven emissaries are rapidly gonna get offed. However – like most things in Mission to the Unknown – it’s not concluded in these 25 minutes.

Cory and Lowery bitch like theatrical luvvies, in a way hardened spacemen shouldn’t, and they’re the most unlucky crew in the universe: they choose to land on Kembel, but somehow manage to crash in such a spectacular way that their ship and the radio is rendered inoperable and they’re reduced to using a Space Message in a Bottle. But the story works nonetheless, and the piece is not long enough to outstay its welcome. One wonders, though, how many people at home in 1965 were watching confused as to why the Doctor never featured.

Connectivity: 

Both stories are about three members of a spacecraft crew stuck on a planet with something alien that will transform them. Both can lift out of the schedule without causing any head-scratching regarding following the overarching plot.

Deeper Thoughts:
What do you call someone who strives to collect something that can never be completed? Human.  Star Trek fans can own every episode ever made of their favourite SF show in the original broadcast format, the poor deprived souls. Where’s the imagination in that? Doctor Who, on the other hand, and despite its longevity, has scarcity built in. Even if they stop making episodes tomorrow, you’ll never have them all without some kind of miracle. This could be frustrating: clearly, Who attracts those of a collecting mindset, but it can’t ever possibly satisfy them.

The reasons for this are more than adequately documented in 'Wiped: Doctor Who's Missing Episodes' by Richard Molesworth, a very good book that tells the story far better than I can hope to do here. But to summarise: the BBC didn’t have a process for throwing recordings away, they only had a process for keeping them. Throwing recordings away was the default option, the path of least resistance; keeping them required effort and justification.

This wasn’t a callous or wasteful policy, it made perfect sense in the context of how TV drama originated, as broadcast live theatre. Programme recordings, filming in advance, video editing, all of these came gradually, and less from any desire to introduce film aesthetics than due to the convenience of not having to get a cast to perform the damn thing again a day or two later for the repeat. The BBC and Doctor Who were also not unique in this regard, of course.

The Beeb may not have been a commercial entity, but it was a corporate one, and it had a duty of cost effectiveness to the public. The tapes that Doctor Who were made on were as big as a bin lid, as heavy as a bin lorry, and as costly as a bin Laden, so they were wiped and reused. Film copies were made, but they took up valuable space, so they wouldn’t be kept forever either.  With hindsight, they should have woken up a few years earlier to the importance of their archive, but that’s easy to say now.

Now, this could be frustrating, and no doubt often is (we Doctor Who fans can be a miserable lot sometimes), but it’s also wonderful. Those lost episodes have inspired so much. For a start, dedicated individuals have made it their own mission to the unknown in trying to locate every last missing scrap. Thanks to all those efforts, the soundtrack to every episode has been located, as have clips and off-screen photos from most, and remarkably, the missing total of whole episodes has been reduced to only 97 at the last count. Beyond that, many technological advances of restoration have been inspired - bringing colour and video look where they had been lacking - and creative endeavours of reconstruction and animation.

I hope it's not too much to say that, in this regard, Doctor Who is a metaphor for life. You can strive for completion, and you'll never fully achieve it; but, the striving is the point.

In Summary:

Missing Mission.

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.

The Doctor's Wife

Chapter The Eighteenth, the Doctor versus the Pathetic Fallacy.

Plot: 
The Doctor is lured to and left stranded on an asteroid in a bubble universe outside our own when a nebulous green nasty, who likes to kill Timelords, nicks his time/space craft. As part of this, the TARDIS matrix, its consciousness, has been extracted and deposited in a woman called Idris. The Doctor and this living embodiment of his ship join forces, save Amy and Rory whom the nasty and his pet green-eyed Ood have been torturing, and win. Idris dies and the TARDIS returns to normal, but just for a short while the Doctor was able to talk to his longest-running companion, or 'wife' hence the (slightly forced) title.

Context: 

Watched the Blu-ray with the whole family, the kids happy it was 'a new one' for a change. Nothing much scared any of them, not even the bits that scared me (the psychological horror of House toying with Amy and Rory in the TARDIS).  Elder boy, 9 years old, realised while watching how much he's missed Matt Smith who's 'his Doctor'.

First-time round:

No clear memory of first seeing this particular episode, but almost certainly it was watched late on during the evening of the original BBC1 screening, timeshifted as the live transmission coincided with the kids' (only two of them at that point) bedtime.

Reaction:
This is a gem. In a year which saw the show get a little bit too wrapped up in its own mythology (not for the first or the last time) this story somehow stood head or shoulders over the others in terms of quality by… well, by being even more wrapped up in the mythology than they were. Why does it work? It must be love. Not just the soppy stuff, but that does help to give a human dimension to the story. For the pedants thinking that a human dimension has no place in the love story between a Timelord and a Gallifreyan time machine: fear of upsetting you boys was the reason that Idris’s parting “I love you” is so low in the sound mix, shame on you!

But it’s also the love that the writer has for the mythology that shines through. Neil Gaiman, the geek-lit Robert Smith, might at first glance seem too super cool and above this sort of thing, but at heart he's always been a fan writer in the best sense of the term. Consistently in his work in all genres, he revels in upending the toy-box of myths and legends, both ancient and pop, and playing with them in new ways. It's done here to great effect, but it works also because the setting and characters Gaiman creates are equal to the legends they are pitched against.

House is a fantastic creation, chillingly voiced by the always excellent Michael Sheen; those scenes of Amy and Rory at his mercy in the TARDIS corridors (ooh TARDIS corridors!) are the best moments that Gillan and Darvill shared in their time on the show. As ever, Darvill is great value at delivering a funny line. Suranne Jones is obviously wonderful as Idris, but even the less showy roles in a small cast are perfect in writing and performance, Auntie, Uncle, and Nephew, with Paul Kasey reliably delivering full-on sinister with only body language. 

Quibbles? Why start with the scene showing Idris becoming the TARDIS? Would it have been so difficult to follow what's happened without that scene? As it is, it just calls attention to the fact that there's a character we never get to mourn. And given it's the punchline of the piece, Matt Smith's line "Bigger on the inside" is a little too thrown away.

Connectivity: 
Tough one this; not much connects The Doctor's wife to The Dalek Invasion of Earth. There's a significance in both to something at the centre of a celestial body, but that's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:   

Baby Let's Play House. The first book by Neil Gaiman that I ever read, I adored; it was not Good Omens, or a Sandman graphic novel, though I came to them and enjoyed them soon after, it was Don’t Panic: The Official Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion. Neil himself started as pop-culture journo, and wrote a few non-fiction fillers before he found his way to his true i.e. fiction-based calling. It was a very good read, and spoke of a love for the referenced material, as does the Doctor’s Wife. I didn’t realise that he’d written it until much later when I knew much better who he was, and it sparked that immediate recognisable feeling that I’m sure everyone gets, an excitement that someone you like likes someone or something else you like.

Perhaps because of this, or because they have a new record out soon, I find myself thinking of the Pet Shop Boys. The only happy obsession of my life that’s come near to my fanaticism for Doctor Who is being a Pet Shop Boys fan since 1986 (I refuse to call myself a ‘Pet Head’ as some, probably Americans, do – it is the cool self-deprecating pop electronica version of Whovian).

What shapes one’s personal taste? Phaedrus, need we ask anyone to tell us these things? Why do I so very much like this thing and also this other thing? The (Dr.) Who and ver Pets don’t seem connected particularly. In fact, because I am the sort of person who likes to make lists here goes: starting with the most obvious, David Tennant took his stage surname from Neil Tennant after reading about him in Smash Hits (I like David Tennant and I liked Smash Hits – I’m getting that feeling again); Ian Levine, Doctor Who superfan and missing episode hunter but also music producer, was approached to work on It’s a Sin, and did some remixes of early Pet songs; Doctor Who is mentioned amongst many other pop culture memories in a drunken conversation recorded in the 1989 tour diary book 'Literally'; John Nathan-Turner, 1980s Who producer, lived near Neil Tennant at one point, and asked the group to remix the Doctor Who theme tune for the 1993 Children in Need 3D Who skit, Dimensions in Time, which they presumably politely refused; the Pets themselves were subject to the same 3D technique when performing a hit on the same Children in Need telethon; the title of the song Radiophonic is a homage to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop; David Walliams, Kylie Minogue and Babs Windsor have worked with both institutions... and I'm out.

There may be the odd bit of trivia I've missed, but it doesn't amount to a hill of beans; so, why are they connected in my affections? Maybe it's not a trivial thing; both in their way mine the sands of human emotion and - when on form - present those blown into perfected cut-class creations. Maybe that's the connection, the true aim of the craft of writing: presenting something immediate and fantastic that can be appreciated by the audience, but still delving deep into the human condition on the sly. In other words, it's all about being bigger on the inside, isn't it?!  

In Summary:

A thing I like that clearly likes another thing I like.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

 

Chapter The Seventeenth, where - as a novelty - some aliens invade the Earth.

Plot: 
The Doctor with his first and arguably best TARDIS team, Ian, Barbara and Susan, arrive in a London of the future where the Daleks have invaded. The Daleks want to mine out the core of the planet so they can pilot the Earth anywhere in space. It isn't very clear why. Typical large scale project - delivery at all costs, but no one's thought through whether the overall aim is actually useful. Anyway, the Doctor and his friends ally themselves with some rebel humans, pit their wits against the Daleks, and defeat them. Susan falls in love, and the Doctor leaves her behind to have a new life, a home and an identity. She doesn't look 100% happy at this turn of events, it has to be said.

Context: 

Watched the DVD - with original effects not the CGI alternatives, nice as they are - over a couple of weekends, again with the better half by my side, uncomplaining. The kids were slightly more interested in this than The Daemons, and stuck around for one or two whole episodes. After this, in time-honoured fashion, like generations before them, they proceeded to play Daleks for a few hours - some things are reassuringly consistent.

First-time round:

This was another of the glut of back and white stories released on VHS in the early Nineties. I remember I was already familiar with the plot from seeing the big screen remake on TV previously, but this was the first time I'd seen the original.

Reaction:

This is the very epitome of a solid, straight-ahead no nonsense Doctor Who adventure story.

This is a revolutionary watershed marking multiple changes in the programme's format.

Somehow it manages to be both. Looking back from now, it takes an effort to realise, as subsequently it's become the de facto story template for the series, but this is the first time that the programme has presented an alien invasion of the Earth. Up to now, Who has been a programme of exploration, whether that's exploration of another time or place, or of the idea that one's vehicle would shrink one if the doors were left open, or melt all the clocks if one of the switches jammed. Alien planets, history, 'sideways' ideas: we go to them. But in this story, for the first time ever, they're coming to us.

No wonder there was no need to do anything massively original with the invasion story, just doing one at all was so successful it changed the show forever. And that's not all. This is the moment that the Doctor becomes the hero of the show. Up to now, through the first season, there's been a gradual shift from the protagonists, and particularly the Doctor, being unwillingly involved participants just trying to work their way back to the TARDIS and escape, to actively wanting to fight whatever naughtiness they come across. This final change happens here: the TARDIS gets blocked off by a tumbled-down bridge in the first episode. So far, so season 1. But no one mentions it again, tries to get back there or clear the blockage. In episode two, the Doctor decides there's a moral imperative to defeat the Daleks, and sheds the last vestiges of the amoral anti-hero he'd been at the programme's outset.

Heroes need arch enemies, and the vacancy is neatly and forever after filled by the Daleks, who've handily been transmogrified into evil empire builders. This is just the first one of Doctor Who's many sequels, bringing back it's most successful aliens for a rematch. As such, there's some stage show misdirection retconning, and the visual ante has to be upped: forget about the fact they could only move on metal and had never left their city, look at the gorgeous location film work. And it is gorgeous: never mind the earlier scant footage of a stand-in walking along a path in The Reign of Terror, this is the first time the programme's done it with gusto.

Some of the changes that happen were forced upon the story; made at the end of the first recording block of Doctor Who, it marks the first regular cast member departure as, after a year, Carole Ann Ford had got fed up with twisting her ankle, or getting the blame for things she didn't do (check out episode one - she's threatened with a smacked bottom for bringing down the bridge onto the TARDIS, but she never even went near it!). But it works very well, gives us one of the best and oft referenced Doctor speeches ("One day I shall come back..."), neatly bookends the first set of stories, and leads in to the next.

Connectivity: 
Both stories involve digging into the ground for something that turns out to involve a spaceship. Rarely for Who, both contain alien races who have managed to successfully take over and rule the Earth.

Deeper Thoughts:   
The Daleks = the Nazis, right? “It was right there in the open what they were and what they symbolised,” says Ben Aaronovitch, in 1993 documentary Thirty Years in the TARDIS. (He’s the Who writer and Who fan one of the Aaronovitch brothers, who I always think of as a more geeky version of the Hitchenses). Perhaps not quite from the start, though. The first Dalek story is, if anything, a cold war fable, showing as it does the results long after an atomic war between two intractable power blocs. If the Daleks represent anyone at the beginning, it’s not the Nazis, or even the Ruskies, but The West. If Nation had anyone in mind, it’s the very people watching his cautionary tale, I’d say: the Dals were the less aggressive of the two sides, and only went crazed xenophobic after they mutated. The Daleks in their first story are maybe supposed to be us.

It’s this, their second story, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, where they become full-on Nazi analogues. Well, to be more accurate, they become film Nazis. And the story samples a WW2 resistance movie, filtering it through a sci-fi invasion prism. Well, that’s what I always thought, and there are some wonderful moments showing the human cost of the invasion which are clearly channelling that genre, involving as they do collaborators, black-marketeers and so on. The Daleks start to appropriate some actions from their war film villain forebears too, doing Heil Hitler salutes with their plungers as they tour London's landmarks. It becomes distasteful, though, when they directly reference the historical Nazis and their worst actions. At one point, the Daleks crow about "the Final Solution" when talking about knocking off their remaining human slaves, and that's a step too far.

The resistance in this story don't, though, act like their WW2 counterparts either in movies or reality. Things are too far gone for that, and there's no hint of any existing underground organisations or functioning foreign governments. No, it's more like the more defeated pockets of resistance found in The War of the Worlds. Just as the first Dalek story was inspired by The Time Machine, a Wells story also seems to have been a touchstone for its sequel.  As is often said of Doctor Who: all you need is an original story; it doesn't have to be your original story... 

In Summary:

Firsts among a sequel.

The Daemons

Chapter The Sixteenth, where Sisyphus watches a diabolical story.

Plot: 
An excavation of a mysterious barrow near an English country village releases a powerful alien creature, a Daemon called Azal, who - from the many millennia of him and his kind experimenting with Earth and its people - has passed into race memory as the mythological devil. The Master uses the Daemon's scientific methods - what we think of as black magic - in an attempt to get Azal to bequeath him control of the Earth. Jo Grant flaps and whines a bit which makes the all-powerful creature explode, then everyone has a dance. Except the slightly more butch UNIT men, who have a pint instead.

Context: 

Watched the DVD with the better half over a week, an episode a night; the kids didn't bite. The boys are currently only interested in Doctor Who if he's an inch and a half tall (they received Lego Dimensions with the Doctor Who Level Pack for Christmas and are still addicted to it).

First-time round:

This is the first story covered by the blog that I didn’t first experience by buying it or watching it on a broadcast; The Daemons was delivered unto me from a traded VHS. Through the 1980s and 1990s, nth generation copies of not yet commercially available stories were exchanged or lent out amongst fans. As a youth, I wasn’t a joiner of things – not for me the countrywide local fan groups that were affiliated with the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, where I might have gained access to a distribution network for this material (most of it taped from foreign stations who repeated Doctor Who repeatedly: Australia, New Zealand, US local PBS stations).

Then, one day in my first week at university in Durham, I was – with some of my peers – prowling unfamiliar college corridors of an evening looking for someone making toast they might share, and I heard the Doctor Who theme tune (Peter Howell arrangement). It must have emboldened me, as I would normally  have been too shy to do what I did, which was to barge into the room after the briefest of knocks, point and state “Logopolis episode 4”, which it was, and only after that to introduce myself.

This was how I started a still enduring friendship with my fellow enthusiast David. David had pretty much every episode that existed up to that point (with the exception of three episodes of The Mind of Evil which he’d sacrificed in as showy a way as possible, unravelling the tape all over the cathedral green as an initiation to join a college fraternity called the Bleach Boys). He lent me a number of tapes to take home for my first Christmas vacation, The Daemons amongst them.

If any BBC Worldwide lawyers are reading this, I would point out that no money changed hands, the episodes were in black and white, which was the only way to get them back then, and – only a few months later - I dutifully tuned in to the broadcast of the cleverly colour-recovered repeat on BBC2, and also purchased the BBC video (and eventually the DVD too). So the Corporation lost no revenue whatsoever!

Reaction:

The reputation of The Daemons is based on a lot of great moments joined together by lots of bits that are sketchy, rubbish or don’t make any sense; it’s like a necklace of fine pearls strung on frayed, grimy twine. The first episode is great: atmospheric and nicely structured, using the device of a fictional TV outside broadcast (by the then hypothetical BBC3, one of the rare correct predictions made by the show over the years). This makes things immediate, and brings them to a superb cliffhanger as the barrow is opened and all hell breaks loose. No one, mind, seems overly bothered about the live transmission of people dying; plus, the real BBC3 would never leave up a ‘Technical Fault’ caption card for that long before they cracked and stuck on an episode of Family Guy instead.

Of course, the reason it looks like a lot of moments strung together is that’s exactly what it is: it started out with producer Barry Letts wanting to extrapolate an audition scene he’d written earlier that year into a full five episode story, which he and his co-writer Robert Sloman did by chucking in every satanic image they could dream up. It clearly needs another few drafts to remove the sense that characters are just being moved about to get ready for the next set piece.  The Doctor suddenly gets a never-explained feeling that something’s wrong from hearing the name Devil’s End, and so he rushes off there. Jo Grant sleepwalks into the cavern secretly for no reason, except that it’s got to the point in the story when she’ll need rescuing.

Like a lot of imaginative fiction, and a lot of 20th century Doctor Who, there’s a strange attitude to village life which as a townie I’m not able to disprove: for example, I did not think white witch was actually a profession. Also, Azal goes to the trouble of creating a heat barrier around Devil’s End, but only the milkman and UNIT notice. All the locals never seem to leave the pub.

This is also the story where the Doctor is in a mood throughout; not a new observation, as I think it was picked up on by Gary Gillatt for his Doctor Who Magazine DVD review (Gary was a contemporary of mine and David’s at the same college in Durham, by the by). Pertwee is a sod in this story. He often is, I find, but in The Daemons he’s more so. The nadir of the whole era, and maybe Doctor Who altogether, is him tearing a strip off Jo for agreeing with what he’d said about the Brigadier moments before; then, as an encore, the non-conformist pacifist lectures her on respecting the military chain of command.  I bet a silver ceremonial dagger that Roger Delgado never asked the script editor to give him a weekly “moment of charm” as Pertwee reportedly did of Terrance Dicks. If you are naturally charming, you don’t need it to be scripted. What’s odd is that Pertwee was perfectly charming in person, and in character in many other programmes. Perhaps undue worries about this being his first serious lead after a lot of comedy parts made him overcompensate and play the role too straight.

In the pearls before twine column, meanwhile, is all the great stuff: “Chap with wings”, The Master having fun pretending to be a vicar, Miss Hawthorne, The Brig in his dress uniform, Yates and Benton in civvies (although I would have thought it was against protocol for them to be flying a military helicopter out of uniform), the final scene with its ‘end of term’ feel, and much, much more.

Connectivity: 
Atlantis! Azal mentions that the sinking of Atlantis was down to him, therefore taking ultimate responsibility for The Underwater Menace, the devil. Also, both stories deal with mythology, and conflict between science and superstition. The Daemons includes a section where they watch a slide show; The Underwater Menace DVD had two whole episodes that were slide shows. 

Deeper Thoughts:  
No such thing as science. The theme of this story is that there is no such thing as magic; what we know of as black magic is remnants of the Daemons’ advanced science to harness the energy of emotions.  It’s a neat idea, but it doesn’t stand up to any examination, because the Daemons don’t follow anything but the nuttiest version of a scientific method, and their experiments don’t appear to follow the physical laws of the world on which they are being performed. Which makes them indistinguishable from, you know, magic.

Unlike a responsible scientist, Azal only appears three times, disappearing off again each time. Why? When I was an unhappy A-level chemistry student, I did not go to classes very often, but I certainly managed it more than thrice. And when I turned up I didn’t freeze or burn anyone, or make any gargoyles come to life. He’s never going to get tenure or attract funding acting like that.

The wife and I both had more or less the same thing running through our mind when the Doctor says “What does any scientist do with an experiment that fails?”; we both thought: “Write it up and publish in a journal of record for peer review”. The correct answer according to the Doctor is “throw it away”. Now, it’s been a long time since chemistry but I seem to recall whether or not I got a titration right or wrong, I didn’t keep the liquid afterwards. All experiments get thrown away. Maybe Azal is conducting a social experiment. Maybe it’s like a Big Brother thing, where he traps a village in a heat bubble, scares the bejesus out of them, and sees if they’ll turn on each other. Now I see why BBC3 wanted to screen it.

This wouldn’t matter normally, as Doctor Who hardly ever does science fiction, it’s usually not even science fantasy, just a thinly veiled tale of good versus evil with a magic wizard as the titular character. So, it does jar when a script chooses to draw undue attention. It’s very like the moment in The Mind Robber where the Doctor makes the Karkus’s zap gun disappear because it’s scientifically implausible despite that he's always meeting other people who have them. Every. Single. Week.

Finally, spare a thought for Petronella’s Dad (we assume it is he), Sergeant Osgood. Despite much bullying from PMT Pertwee, he is completely right in his hypothesis. He tells the Doctor the Macguffin-o-tron Pert’s made him build will overload, and he’s proved 100% right. Does anyone thank him? Do they hell. 

In Summary:

Erm… I seem to be saying it’s like a pearl necklace.

The Underwater Menace

Chapter The Fifteenth, which has bits missing.

Plot: 
Sometime around 1970, the Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie arrive in the lost kingdom of Atlantis, now submerged. The Atlantean royalty has taken in and sheltered a renowned but barmy scientist Professor Zaroff for the last twenty years, and now they form a joint reign of terror: any passing shipwrecked mariners are put to work as slaves in the mines, sacrificed to the Atlantean god Amdo by being fed to the sharks, or operated on and turned into fish. Zaroff also plans to drain the ocean into the core of the Earth, blowing up the whole planet. The Doctor thinks things have got too silly, even in this period where he himself is recently regenerated for the first time and is essentially mad and wearing a different hat every week. So, he puts a stop to it, not before time.

Context: 

This wasn't randomly chosen, but was watched as the DVD had just come out, the final ever original series Doctor Who story to come out on DVD. But delayed, two years after its original scheduled release date, and therein hangs a tale.

Like most of the last few stories that came out before it in 2012-ish, The Underwater Menace has episodes missing. The BBC destroyed the original recordings and all known copies, for reasons, and in circumstances, too involved to detail here. Those previous gap-tooth serials filled the narrative holes with new animation matched to the soundtracks (which the BBC does have, because fans with more foresight than they illegally recorded the audio on reel-to-reel machines at home). No one would have considered The Underwater Menace for the expensive animation treatment, though, as three of its four episodes were missing; but late in 2011 it was announced that a film recording of episode 2 had been found. Animating two out of four was economically viable, and the release would have an additional draw of a previously unseen 25 minutes. Plus, the rest of the story is such a cartoon anyway that people might not even notice the join.

Alas, the animation fell through (at the time it was rumoured that the animators got higher priority work, but the Doctor Who Magazine review in last month's issue suggests that a different company were lined up, but unfortunately went bust). The release date got pushed out, but was still promised for a while. But because the rest of the range was done and dusted, the team that worked on it had dispersed, and no one was around to champion this final release. The title disappeared from the schedules, and Doctor Who fans the world over stoically accepted that all the episodes of the 20th century series were theirs to own. Except one. Which they'd never seen. But which had been restored, and had lovely DVD extras made to accompany it. Which they would also never get to see. They grinned and bore it, and got on with their lives.

No, of course they didn't. They moaned and contacted switchboards and arranged online petitions.  And good on 'em, because it worked. With something of a "Stop calling us, here you go, now shut up" approach, BBC Worldwide tossed The Underwater Menace into the shops at the end of October.  The missing episodes were represented by the soundtrack accompanied by off-screen stills taken at the time of broadcast. This has worked in the past because of clever use of pans, zooms, overlays, text narration and such to make the visuals interesting, and help the viewer know what's going on.  They haven't done that here, and the refresh rate of getting a new image is low; so, sometimes, one is looking at a fuzzy close up of someone's head for two minutes, while various noises off happen, not very clearly.

 

What's very annoying is that the person who put it together is a fan, and has gone on record that he begged the management to be allowed to do a better job, even offering to do extra work for free. He was denied. Try explaining all this to your kids, mind! Mine sat happily through 50% of this story, but for the other 50% moaned and threw things at me for being so sad as to watch the barely moving monochrome slide-show. Cheers Beeb.

First-time round: 

The at-the-time only known surviving episode (3) was released as part of a box-set on video in 1998. I watched it, but felt it was a bit disposable, really, as the main draw of the set was a complete version of The Ice Warriors, a similarly Swiss Cheese-esque story which has two episodes in the middle missing. The video cleverly used off-screen stills with pans, zooms, overlays, and text narration to bridge the gap. Yes, a video in 1998 was produced to a better standard than a DVD in 2015. Cheers Beeb, again.

 

The soundtrack with narration was brought out on CD around 2004, and I bought it and listened to it, but it didn't make much of an impression. I do remember first watching the found episode 2 well however. It was May 2013, almost two years after its discovery, and the footage was leaked onto Youtube. No one knew then it would take another two and a half years to stumble out on DVD, so I'm glad I gave in to temptation and watched it then and there.  The trouble was the then and there was a day job working weekend, and I was staying in a Hamburg hotel with the worst wi-fi in the universe.

There was much buffering. Then a bit of footage, then more buffering.  And for every two periods of buffering, it would crash and go back to the beginning.  I'd get a bit further in each time, but overall it took about five times 25 minutes to get to the end, and felt something like punching a diamond wall over and over for four billion years.

Reaction:

One interesting point is that Atlantis is a society where superstition and science rub up against each other in an uneasy truce, which results in a story where superstition and science are both shown to be evil. Doctor Who has depicted similar clashes before and after The Underwater Menace, but it's usually picked a side. I'd love to think that this was deliberate, but likely it's just part of the story's general approach of throwing whatever it can at the viewer without worrying about sense or consistency.

The Atlantean leaders scheme to return Atlantis to the surface at great cost: but they already have a lift that takes them there. Zaroff can turn people into fish and blow up the planet, but can't invent a fridge. Despite having built every kind of machinery imaginable (except for a fridge), no one's considered that automating food gathering on the seabed might be more efficient than stitching gills on disgruntled slaves. And if anything, the Doctor's plans are even crazier and more inconsistent than Zaroff's; he ferments a fishy rebellion and floods Atlantis. Why? Answers on a postcard from the Mexico Olympics.

Does it matter? Steven Moffat just staged a spectacular finale, returning to Gallifrey and presenting a moral quandary about how far one should go to save a friend, but my two boys only remember it because there was a new sonic screwdriver revealed at the end. (You can't buy it in the shops for Christmas, which caused some tears. Cheers Beeb, yet again.) Similarly, nothing stuck with them from The Underwater Menace as much as the different types of fish people on display. This provoked lots of discussion about whether they were males and females or different castes. I didn't want to ruin it by telling them that the production probably just ran out of sequins halfway through.

Connectivity: 
Both this and Earthshock involve a plan to destroy the Earth that doesn't quite come off. And both contain sequences set in subterranean areas.

Deeper Thoughts:  

Farewell physical format. Poor old Underwater Menace always seems an afterthought: one of the latter stories to be novelised, last missing story CD, last DVD released after years of delays. Even this little blog has taken two months to get round to writing up its post. This has been due to multiple factors making me very busy, not least of which some builders taking the roof off my house and then putting it back on again different.  But I don't want anyone to misunderstand: I did not wait to get the final Classic Who DVD, I preordered it and watched it as soon as it was released - why change the habits of a lifetime.

Now, the collecting is over.  Yes, I'll have a new series of 21st Century Doctor Who every year to buy on Blu-Ray, but that's not the same. I have preordered my last pre-order; I have torn open my last BBC Shop card envelope; I have swapped over my last reversible cover sheet; I have heard the nice lady say "To select audio navigation, press enter now" for the last time (as long as I mute it every time I rewatch a DVD henceforth and it was getting a bit irritating, so I probably will).

I started collecting Doctor Who on home video formats in 1986, so it's the best part of thirty years of my life I've wasted. In that time, the format has gone from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray to midnight download. In that time, I've gone from buying in high-street stores on the day of release to pre-ordering online. I've seen play247 change to play.com change to Rakuten change to a place I don't purchase from any longer. And I wouldn't change a thing. God bless my collection of shiny discs, every one.

In Summary:
It doesn't matter when stuff doesn't make sense, if you just let yourself be distracted by sequins.