Remembrance of the Daleks

Chapter The 165th, which sees a return to some unfinished business

Plot:

The Doctor left some unfinished business in 1963 Shoreditch, the time and place where he was based for a few months many years back, with the TARDIS in a junkyard and his granddaughter Susan enrolled in the nearby Coal Hill school. Recently becoming aware that the Daleks were following him, out to obtain a Time Lord superweapon - the Hand of Omega -  he'd left there, he leads them back. However, he hadn't anticipated two factions of Daleks, the Imperial and the Renegade groups. Teaming up with Group Captain Gilmore and his team, a sort of proto-UNIT, the Doctor endeavours to stop the humans getting killed while the Daleks fight amongst themselves. The Renegade faction obtains the Hand of Omega, with help from a schoolkid wired into a Dalek battle computer and a local neo-Mosleyite group called the Association.

One of Gilmore's soldiers, Mike, has been feeding information to this Association, and it just so happens he's the very same squaddie that Ace has taken a shine to: rule 1 of Doctor Who, anyone Ace fancies will probably betray everyone. He gets killed soon after, anyway, as is customary. The Imperial Daleks bring out their big guns, well, big gun singular, really - the Special Weapons Dalek. It helps them defeat the other faction and make off to their mothership with the Hand. Davros reveals himself to be the new emperor of the Daleks, and the Doctor - having lashed up the 1960s tech equivalent of a Zoom call - broadcasts to the mothership, advising Davros not to use the Hand. Davros takes no notice, of course, and the Hand destroys the Dalek fleet and their home planet Skaro.

Context:

Like the Doctor in Remembrance, I too am returning to unfinished business. After a summer holiday (staying at home), I took a short break from doing the blog for the rest of August and the start of September. But during that time I had watched two stories which needed to be written up. After watching The Lodger on my own, youngest child (girl of 8) requested a specific story, which she described as the one where the girl beats up the Dalek with a baseball bat. She's not seen it before, but the Better Half has talked about it to her previously. Over the many years I've been doing the blog, I don't think she has ever requested a story, so I was happy to override the randomiser to allow this. The whole family - Better Half and youngest being joined by myself and two boys (aged 14 and 11) - watched an episode a night from the revisited special edition DVD. It's taken a while to get back to the notes I took and write them up for the blog. That's not to say I haven't been watching Doctor Who in the meantime, of course; I have been working my way through a lot of animated Pat Troughton goodness, the new improved special edition of Power of the Daleks, and the recently released Fury from the Deep (I'll try to find an appropriate point in a future blog post to share some mini-reviews of those).

First time round:

I'll inevitably and rightly need to discuss below in my review of the story the kind of impact it had when it was first shown, as it is an intrinsic part of every viewing of the story even to this day. But there is an anecdote to tell about my own very first encounter with episode 2, or half of it at least. I don't think it's giving too much away to say I'd been blown away by the first episode on its debut UK broadcast. A week later, on the 12th October 1988, a few hours before it was shown, I was looking forward to seeing the second part; this was the point at which my sister decided to play a trick on me. She systematically went round our house changing the time on every clock, putting them all forward to the time of Doctor Who's BBC1 slot. Then, she played my tape of the Doctor Who theme, loudly, on the home hi-fi in the living room (where the TV also was). The idea was that I would come running thinking that Doctor Who had started, and I was missing it. I came running instead as I was intrigued why anyone in the house would be playing the Doctor Who theme who wasn't me. My sister hadn't counted on my extreme nerdiness in being able to tell the difference between the Peter Howell arrangement (on the tape) and the Keff McCulloch arrangement (on the current episodes) from fifty paces. 

The joke was on me in the end though, as I failed to reset any of the clocks, nor work out exactly how fast they all now were. I was then distracted by my other lifelong obsession apart from Doctor Who, the music of the Pet Shop Boys. Their album Introspective had come out at the beginning of that week, and I was at the time listening to it over and over again on my personal stereo in my room (quite rightly, too, it's brilliant). Returning to this activity after my sister's trick, I lost track of time completely, and couldn't rely on any clocks around me either. Had I not had a new PSB album, I'd have been watching TV in the run up to the episode, poised to start the video recording. As it was, sometime during my third or fourth time marvelling at the piano break in Frankie Knuckles' remix of I Want a Dog, I was suddenly jerked into the realisation of how late it was getting. Rushing into the living room, I jabbed at the VCR's record button in time to catch the last 15 minutes or so of the episode. The first thing I saw was a split second of Joseph Marcell, playing an unknown character, disappearing out of shot. 

I'd missed the resolution of the cliffhanger, some action scenes and what later became a famous and lauded scene of Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Joseph Marcell as John - the latter later to become famous as the butler in the Fresh Price of Bel-Air - talking about slavery in a late-night caff. Asking my friends at Sixth Form the next day wasn't much help in filling in the gaps, bagging me as it did threadbare explanations along the lines of "A soldier turned up at the school with big guns" and "The Doctor had a chat with a bloke about sugar". It was five more years before I saw that missing section, when the VHS of the story was first released in the Dalek tin, the first ever Doctor Who home video release to come in such a container (there would be many more). I still have the tin, but - unlike the others, which I've also kept - it's got a bit rusty since 1993. 

Reaction:

Luckily my sister didn't play any tricks on me (see above) one week earlier. The beginning of episode 1 of Remembrance of the Daleks is not one you would want to miss. The BBC globe ident faded out and another image of the globe of the Earth hanging in space faded in (nice little formal gag, probably intentional?); every fan in the audience will be automatically aware that we are seeing a pre-credits sequence, a rarity during the 'classic Who' years - this would be only the fourth time it had ever been done, and the last time before the show was resurrected in 1996 and 2005 onwards. If those watching were clued in already that what was to follow would be a bit special, they wouldn't have been wrong. We hear snatches of speeches of 1963 vintage "I have a dream", "Ich bin ein Berliner", etc. coming in and out like a radio being tuned. A tense, but still energetic music cue comes in (part of what is probably Keff McCulloch's most successful incidental score for the series). It's an excellent model shot of the earth, and as the scene continues and builds, the shot zooms out and we see an alien spacecraft heading sleekly and ominously toward the planet. Bang - we're into the beginning credits. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think that it is the best opening few seconds of any Doctor Who story up to that point. Simple; cheap, even, but damned effective. Could the rest of the story live up to this early promise?

Yes, is the short answer. The rest of this blog text is a slightly longer way of saying it, but it is but one of a chorus of such reactions, longer and more detailed from all across fandom and for years since it was first shown. In Doctor Who magazine polls of all the broadcast stories to date, Remembrance made the top ten in 1998 and 2014 (it was slightly relegated in the intervening poll in 2009, but only dropped to number 14 of 200).  It stands on its own, but for those of us who were watching around the time it is probably inextricable from its context at that moment. The last story shown before this, the final episode of the previous year, Dragonfire, was a good enough script, and had some good performances and a few good effects. At the time, I'd latched upon it as the most traditional, and probably best executed story of the year. But it's so outclassed by Remembrance, that the difference is like night and day. But in one of those extreme North Scandi areas where the night lasts for months. It felt like a long time since we'd had a story so good and so self-assured. To me, it was the best story since The Caves of Androzani, four years previously, and - with no hyperbole, I assure you - the best Dalek story since the 1960s.

With Davros hidden for most of the action, the Daleks get to dominate the story in a way that they hadn't in their more recent previous outings, where they were playing second fiddle to their creator. And, by restating their xenophobia in a fresh new way, contrasting it with the racism (both casual and full-on neo-Nazi) of some of the human characters in the 1960s setting, Doctor Who's biggest baddies are revitalised. It doesn't hurt that the props are revitalised too. The Daleks themselves, and all their tech - including a full-size shuttle craft - gleam, and it's nice to see innovation too, with the Special Weapons Dalek being a memorable creation that lived on in viewers' imaginations, finally making a cameo appearance in the new series (in Asylum of the Daleks). The colour schemes of both factions are great (gold and white Daleks led by an Emperor based on the old 1960s comic strip look, and grey and black Daleks, led by a traditional black and silver Supreme Dalek). The idea of two factions is a complicating factor to allow the narrative to fill its running time interestingly, and allows some comments on the Daleks warring over racial purity, but it also extends the mythology of the series admirably. The last time we saw Davros, he'd created a new race of  gold and white Daleks, and was taken off - by grey and black Daleks - to stand trial. Somehow, the wily Davros has turned the tables sufficiently that he has once again managed to take charge, and his old captors have become the renegade splinter group. It's not spelled out, it's just there as a nice bit of world-building for the fans, allowing imagination to flood into the gap (at least one tie-in medium has since written the story around that connecting narrative tissue).

It's not perfect, few things are, but any flaws are minor and seem to be borne out of ambition, so it's hard to criticise too much. For example, the concept of the battle computer (a child plugged into a Dalek-like casing) is an interesting and chilling one, and the child actor Jasmine Breaks performs it perfectly; it provides a nice shock reveal moment for anyone watching, but particularly for fans as every scene up to that point has been framed to suggest that it is Davros. It's let down, though, by the staging - the set or the prop in the room where George Sewell as Radcliffe is conversing with the computer should be constructed so that he can't see that there's a schoolgirl in there. And it isn't. He'd have to have zero peripheral vision and zero curiosity for it to be in any way credible. The writer Ben Aaronovitch, working on his first TV screenplay, is feeling his way. The feint about Davros, and the reveal of the girl were all in his screenplay as it developed, but he hadn't actually included Davros elsewhere until someone suggested people might wonder where he was.

Adding that particular character and another wonderful reveal in the final episode was welcome, but another minor flaw of Remembrance, shared with a lot of stories of this period, is that there were already too many characters chasing around for this week's cosmic MacGuffin. Pamela Salem and Karen Gledhill (as Professor Jensen and Alison respectively) are both great, but their characters contribute nothing to moving the narrative along. Simon Williams as Gilmore is the class act one would expect, but he doesn't do very much more. In fact, the whole cast is excellent, even down to the extended cameos from a couple of actors who kept coming back for guest spots in Doctor Who over the  years, Michael Sheard and Peter Halliday. The dialogue they're all given is nice and colourful, and they're directed well. It's just that they aren't needed really. The story boils down to a very simple bait and switch con trick that the Doctor is playing on Davros. Everyone and everything else that happens just defers that; but, the script makes something of a virtue of this - it's the dark chess-playing Doctor's finely tuned clockwork scheme being interfered with by humans and Daleks that won't quite play ball.

The performance of Sylvester McCoy to achieve the dark chess-playing Doctor is something else that's wonderful to behold. Though there are occasional flashes of a more thoughtful or brooding nature in the previous year's stories, that side of the character hadn't been very much explored; from here on in, the writing and the leading man's performance bring this expertly to the fore. Another new aspect that has been thoroughly embraced since the series went off air in 1987 is Doctor Who's long history. There's an excuse for it here, given that this is the opening salvo of a season that acts as an anniversary 25-gun salute, but forever after this point the Sylvester McCoy stories will be informed by, and build upon, without slavishly copying,  the show's established mythology. This is exemplified by the first ever sustained and successful depiction of a Dalek levitating up a flight of stairs. A triumph, and just one of many many magical moments in this superlative serial.

  

Connectivity: 

Remembrance of the Daleks and The Lodger both take place in the South of England, and both see the Doctor stay for a night or more in the house of one of the guest characters.

Deeper Thoughts:

This Time Machine Kills Fascists. Remembrance of the Daleks, the TV story, started a trend of the series being more socially conscious in its subtext, in highlighting modern racism through both a 1960s and a Dalek lens. Remembrance of the Daleks, the tie-in novelisation, published a few years after the broadcast, arguably continued that trend into a new medium and kicked off a whole new line of original Doctor Who novels, the New Adventures, that would continue Doctor Who's ongoing narrative in the years when the TV show was not being made. Aaronovitch, in adapting his own scripts for 1990 publication, was the first of the set of new young Doctor Who writers who'd recently written for the TV show to flesh out the world and characters of his story on the page to a much greater extent that had generally been done before. A year later in 1991, with no sign of Doctor Who returning to TV any time soon, Virgin started publishing a range of original novels. They'd been producing novelisations of broadcast stories before then, but were rapidly running out of those that hadn't been done already. Aaronovitch was again one of a group of writers - with pedigrees either in professional or fan-fiction Who work - involved in producing these original stories, "too broad and too deep for the small screen" as the cover blurb styled it. The range was featured in a number of articles in this month's Doctor Who Magazine (I'm not sure why now, though - holding off until next year would have meant they could have tied in with the 30th anniversary of the first book).

I remember when that first book (Timewyrm: Genesys by John Peel, but not that John Peel) came out. It was the summer before I started at university, and I snapped it up from my usual supplier of all things Who, Volume One in Worthing. The excitement wore off a bit quickly for me: the book isn't that great. The title being two not-quite words connected by a hyphen was not a good sign, but things were just starting out. Anyway, I was still only a beginner fan when it came to viewing old episodes. I didn't need new worlds of Doctor Who's ongoing narrative to explore, as I was diving into its history by dint of the VHS releases. I've probably given the impression talking about collecting the videos in blog posts passim  that I had unlimited funds in those days. I was certainly lucky, but alas I still had to count the pennies to an extent, and videos came first; so, I was never exhaustive in collecting the New Adventures novels. Later in the Summer, I bought the second one (Timewyrm: Exodus by Terrance Dicks) because Terrance Dicks. Thereafter, though, I was choosy. I managed to find a few second-hand in later uni years, in a Durham sci-fi emporium, amongst the many, many Red Dwarf T-shirts (it was the early 1990s, what are you going do?!). Then, I bought a few more new when I was working after graduation, but by then the range was almost at an end. 

Like anything established in the world of Doctor Who fandom, the New Adventures soon became a battleground. The main fault line that cleaved fandom in two was the 'Trad versus Rad' divide. In summary, all that social conscience and innovative, dangerous subject matter (i.e. sex and swearing) was loved by a certain group of regular authors and fans, but the other group (writers and fans alike) just wanted to tell an engaging story of the kind that Doctor Who used to tell on telly. As usual for an awkward sort, I didn't feel at home in either camp; I liked some of the the Trad stuff and some of the Rad. Sometimes, the Trad stuff did get a bit stodgy, and the Rad stuff did disappear up its own space-time vortex. The range - never really settling down into one style or the other - lasted until 1997; the Paul McGann TV movie's launch the previous year had prompted a general reboot of BBC Worldwide's Doctor Who products, and they brought the ongoing original novels in-house to be published thereafter by BBC Books (there wasn't much sex and swearing after that).

Another battleground in fandom that's emerged since is in discussions of the legacy of the New Adventures, and particularly what impact they had on the series when it came back onto television screens in 2005. Russell T Davies is his usual perceptive self when interviewed about this in the magazine, and makes many good points, but he downplays any influence. He's right in his point that the relatively inexperienced writers had things made easier for them by being given free rein; writing books (or indeed TV stories) that would appeal to a wide audience without offending material takes more discipline. It is true though, that the writers of the first return Doctor Who season in 2005 bar one had all written for Virgin, including Russell himself who had a New Adventure published (Damaged Goods in 1996). And  later, possibly the most successful of the New Adventures, Human Nature was adapted for TV on Russell's watch. Anyway, Russell T Davies can't throw stones about the lack of discipline in writing something with adolescent sex and swearing. We haven't forgotten series 1 of Torchwood, Russell; how could we?! 

In Summary:

Like a Dalek hovering up the stairs, this one rises up above any competition to be one of the very best the series has to offer.

The Lodger

Chapter The 164th, the one that's basically a house share situation comedy.

 

Plot:

A time disturbance affects the TARDIS after it materialises in present day Colchester, stranding the Doctor, who'd just stepped out of the doors, and trapping Amy in the ship within the time vortex, unable to land again. The Doctor traces the disturbance to the upper floor of a terrace house, and moves in to the bottom floor as a lodger with existing tenant Craig Owens. The Doctor investigates, while trying to blend in as ordinary person. Craig meanwhile has been building up confidence to tell his friend Sophie how he feels about her, but the Doctor cramps his style. He outshines Craig on the football field and at his work, and even seems to have persuaded his beloved Sophie to leave Colchester and chase her dreams.

With Craig on the point of throwing him out of his home, the Doctor has to perform a psychic exchange with Craig (by headbutting him) explaining who he is. Voices and mysterious figures have been luring people up to the upstairs flat where a mysterious death befalls them. Realising the latest victim is Sophie, Craig and the Doctor rush upstairs in time to save her. The upper floor is really a disguised timeship whose autopilot software has been luring people in trying to find a new pilot. Craig is immune as he doesn't want to fly away - he has a reason to stay exactly where he is. Expressing this love for Sophie forces the ship to do an emergency shutdown, and it implodes. Craig and Sophie become a couple, and the Doctor and Amy get to travel onwards, but the ominous crack in time is still following them... 

Context:

Back to a random selection after a directed trip to a quarry and Kastria. One evening, at the end of a week's staycationing, in the middle of a period where - for various reasons - I was taking a bit of a rest from doing the blog, I popped the Blu-ray of the story on (from the Series 5 box set) and watched it on my lonesome, while drinking a couple of nice glasses of red. This is probably the best way to enjoy The Lodger, and certainly apt as it reflects Craig and Sophie's evenings of "pizza, booze, telly". I didn't have any pizza, though. I should have got some pizza in. Mmm... pizza. 

First time round:

I often don't remember my first interactions with TV showings of stories from this era; in 2010, the show had been going a while after its 21st century resurrection, so it wasn't such a novelty anymore, and generally things don't stand out in my memory. This particular story, though, I do recall, because the family was on holiday during its initial BBC1 broadcast. In 2010, my daughter hadn't yet been born, so it was just the Better Half, me, and the two boys (who were both quite small in those days). We'd hired a cottage in the Isle of Wight (it was not too dear), and indeed we had a ticket to Ryde, where the cottage was situated. We'd arrived on the ferry the previous day, and so the Saturday of The Lodger's debut was our first full day of holiday. As the boys were very young, though, we didn't have plans for the evening apart from putting them to bed and watching Doctor Who. We had booze as well as telly, and on that night I think we had pizza too: art imitating life or vice versa. Another element of unintentional immersive theatre was the occasional groans and cheers which could be heard from people watching football. This was apt as - uniquely for Doctor Who - a match features heavily in the narrative. In reality, the broadcast was clashing with an England game in the ongoing World Cup on the other side, and we could hear people in other places nearby watching en masse through the window.

My first interaction with a prototype version of the story was a few years earlier, in the pages on Doctor Who Magazine. The episode is a reworked version of a comic strip that writer Gareth Roberts wrote of the same name, which featured David Tennant's Doctor intruding on Mickey Smith's life with hilarious consequences, while Rose was stuck in the space/time continuum. I thought it was a funny little piece at the time, and Steven Moffat agreed - in his first year in charge of the show, he got Roberts in to expand it into a full TV story.

Reaction:

If one doesn't like James Corden, then - given how much he appears in this story, and how the narrative revolves around him - one isn't going to like The Lodger. I think that's self-evidently true, so I'm not going to go into too much detail on it here (though I will talk more about Who's history of eyebrow-raising casting decisions in the Deeper Thoughts below). He is clearly a polarising figure based on my experience of online and social media discussions. I like what he does here, and elsewhere, so this wasn't a barrier for me. Putting that aside, there's another barrier for a certain type of viewer, The Lodger is a comedy. In my experience, a lot of fans don't like too much humour in their Doctor Who, and that's going to cost this particular story heavily, as it is probably the purest, most straight-up comedy the show has ever done to this date.

There's no monster, the science-fiction elements are a minor subplot, and the occasional cut-aways to mild peril (the mysterious upper floor of the house tempting people in, an ominous patch of mould on a ceiling) take up so very little of the overall running time that they're practically not there. Writer Gareth Roberts' later scripts in a similar vein, Closing Time and The Caretaker, forming a loose trilogy, are more traditional, leaving The Lodger as the boldest experiment. And this isn't a barrier for me either; I don't know why it puts many fans off - most people rave about the much less funny and arguably less innovative The Romans, a William Hartnell story that was the series' earliest foray into out-and-out comedy (sampling Carry on Cleo as greedily as this 2010 story does Gavin and Stacey).

It's a sit-com, but it's also a rom-com. The dramatic question of the story is no more or no less than whether a couple will get together, and every part of it is perfectly put together around that. The main cast trio, Matt Smith, Corden and Daisy Haggard as Sophie are all adept comic performers, with very good chemistry with one another. There is some great dialogue and comic scenarios; I love, for example, the Doctor's reaction to Craig's proposal for how they can make themselves scarce when the other brings a date home: "I'll shout if that happens, yes. Something like, I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS!!!!". There's also the wonderful moment where the Doctor goads Sophie into realising her own potential. Like a lot of the best Doctor Who stories, The Lodger mines the  juxtaposition of the everyday - football, call centres - with the mysteries of space (both outer and inner). In it's own small way, it's profound, but it doesn't make that big a deal of it.

So, a lovely little story with some lovely moments, well performed and put together.  It's not the most frightening or exciting story, but is comfortable and confident to be very, very funny. It's not "game-changing" in terms of the wider narrative, but it isn't trying to be. And Matt Smith, who was very close to becoming a professional footballer earlier in his youth before injury got in the way, gets to kick a ball about and be paid for it. It's a palate cleanser before the big banquet of the two-part season finale that followed it, and it succeeds on those terms. If, and only if, you don't hate James Corden, of course.

Connectivity: 

The Lodger and The Hand of Fear are both contemporary set stories which focus more than usual on ordinary humans doing their jobs. In both stories the Doctor is accompanied by a sole female companion, and one of this TARDIS duo is left behind on Earth while the other one disappears off into time and space. 

Deeper Thoughts:

(Cupid) Stunt Casting. Kenny Everett never appeared in Doctor Who, I just like name-checking his fantastically rude Spoonerism-named character. But, if it had indeed happened sometime in the mid to late 80s (he could easily have played the zany DJ in Revelation of the Daleks, for example), I don't feel anyone would have been that surprised. At that time, 'stunt casting', as fans referred to it, was causing ructions between the production team and its most vocal critics within fandom. Like a lot of metaphorical sticks used to beat the 80s producer John Nathan-Turner then, it's probably not entirely fair, but perhaps not entirely unfair either. Strict definitions are resisted to allow maximum range of ire, but it's generally taken to mean a publicity-seeking inclusion in a cast of someone more known for non-acting work, or - as we get to the more snobby end of the criticism - for performing in light-entertainment or comedy programmes. In the classic era, only Nathan-Turner era caught this flak - the 1960s and 1970s may have had casting decisions that led to a duff performance, or an over the top performance, or a racially insensitive performance, but there's no example I can think of for what fandom would call stunt casting. Even Nathan-Turner's first year never comes in for any criticism in this regard. Maybe the casting of the new companion that year, Adric, a role that went to a teenager who only had one acting credit to his name, raised eyebrows for different reasons, but the guest casts were a cross-section of the usual solid BBC repertory with nary a game show host or stand-up comedian among them.

It was the following year that this changed, but even then it was gradual. In that year Michael Robbins and Beryl Reid played a theatrical highwayman and a hard-boiled space captain respectively; they were more known for sit-com or light entertainment work at the time, but they had both done dramatic acting too. Robbins comports himself well, and Reid is perfectly fine if a little distracting - there's no reason why she shouldn't play such a role, but given it's not the focus of the piece, it does slightly bring one out of the drama every time one wonders "Why did they cast Beryl Reid?!". Given the fantastical elements of the programme, one is already suspending enough belief when watching without adding to it. From there it gathered pace slowly, with a Liza Goddard here, a Chloe Ashcroft there, Leeeeee John, of course, and Alexei Sayle hamming it up a bit (though maybe it's the character he's playing that's hamming it up) as the aforementioned zany DJ. Rumour has it that Nathan-Turner briefly attempted a kind-of reverse stunt casting in that same Dalek story, wanting to cast Larry Olivier as the rambling mutant in the first episode - the most accomplished actor of his generation stuck in scabby-face make-up and being clubbed to death in the snow after saying three or four lines. Luckily for all concerned, this never came to pass. There was even - according to fandom at least - the first stunt casting of a regular, with Bonnie Langford being cast as the new companion in 1986.

Next, Delta and the Bannermen in 1987 is perhaps the apotheosis of this trend, as almost everyone and everything in it seems to be included as some kind of stunt: Bonnie herself, Hugh Lloyd, Stubby Kaye, Ken Dodd, the costumes from Hi-De-Hi, the Incidental music composer and his doo-wop band...  After that, though, it still didn't stop until the show did, with Nicholas Parsons and Hale & Pace appearing in the final year of regular broadcasts of classic Doctor Who. Whatever the motive for their casting, though, even if it was more about column inches in the tabloids rather than expected quality of performance, the hit rate is to my mind no worse than casting by any other method. Parsons' sensitive performance as the vicar in The Curse of Fenric is generally felt to be much better than the scenery-chewing performance of Graham Crowden in The Horns of Nimon (I like them both!), but Crowden came in via a much less publicity-worthy and more standard casting route. This all links, I think, into a snobbery that goes beyond Doctor Who and seems to be pervasive in the entertainment business, the belief that the 'lighter' (like comedy) is easier to do than the heavier drama. Not only is this incorrect, but - based on my own experience and knowledge of the opinions of many other people I respect - it's arse about face. Comedy is much harder to perform and to master than straight drama - there's nowhere to hide. This is even more difficult within the confines of Doctor Who, where there is a very narrow scope of acceptable comic performance.

Stunt casting, or at least accusations of it, continued into the new series. Peter Kay, particularly, caused a bit of a fan meltdown, but quite a few others - including James Corden in The Lodger - caused negative comments online as well. One interesting aspect of the intervening years between John Nathan-Turner bowing out and a regular series returning in 2005, though, was speculation on who would play the new Doctor if the show came back. From the press during that time, it appeared that the ghost of stunt casting was haunting even the title role. All sorts of odd choices and non-actors were suggested, the nadir being Paul Daniels, who was confidently predicted to be picking up the keys to the TARDIS early in 2004. Only a few weeks later, an announcement showed that instead of a TV magician of yesteryear, a proper serious actor - Christopher Eccleston - would be the new Doctor; that put paid to all the silly speculation, seemingly forever, which shows that - when it really counts - Doctor Who tends to cast it right.

In Summary:

It's not exactly fine cuisine, but nobody wants that for every meal  - this is perfect pizza and booze telly.

The Hand of Fear

Chapter The 163rd, in which Sarah Jane gets a hand upon her exit.

Plot:

The Doctor, attempting to return Sarah to her home in South Croydon (presumably to pick up some more clothes, as she's reduced to wearing an Andy Pandy costume), materialises the TARDIS in a quarry instead. An actual quarry. A blast buries the Doctor and Sarah in rubble. Sarah reaches out for a hand, which turns out to be made of stone (except for a ring on one of its fingers). While Sarah is unconscious at hospital, the Doctor and pathologist Doctor Carter examine the hand, which seems to be alive and absorbing radiation. The Doctor theorises that it is the remains of a silicon-based lifeform that crash-landed millions of years before. Sarah wakes, zaps people in her way using the ring, takes the hand and breaks into the nearby Nunton Power station's nuclear reactor. The hand comes back to life, and scuttles around. The Doctor and Carter follow, and Sarah is saved, but Carter and then a member of the complex staff are taken over by power emanating from the ring; they chant "Eldrad must live" and then get themselves killed in various ways helping the hand absorb more radiation.

The reactor looks like it's going to go critical, but all the power is absorbed. Eldrad is trapped in the reactor core, and the director of the station orders an air force missile strike. It could have been very nasty that, blowing up a nuclear power station, but luckily Eldrad absorbs the radiation and emerges fully regenerated in a female form. Eldrad tells the Doctor that aliens invaded her home planet and turned the people against her, which caused them to shoot her off into space and blow her to bits. To avoid her being stuck on Earth, the Doctor takes Eldrad to her home planet Kastria, whereupon she turns into her real form, a bloke. It turns out that all the talk about an alien invasion was hooey, and Eldrad's own people rebelled against his tyranny. They have all committed suicide to deprive him of any victory. Eldrad wants to enslave Earth instead, but the Doctor and Sarah escape back to the TARDIS and leave him there alone. The Doctor gets the call to go back to Gallifrey, and can't take Sarah with him, so he says an emotional goodbye and drops her off somewhere that isn't South Croydon.

Context:

Full disclosure: I have overridden the controls and journeyed deliberately, not randomly, to land upon this story for the blog. From when it was announced, I had pre-ordered the Season 14 Blu-ray box set showcasing Tom Baker's third year on the job. It's a very impressive set of stories, and I've collected all the other previous sets in the series now; as per the psychology of the sunk costs delusion, I'm in for a penny, in for 40 pounds plus per set approx. Early in May when it came out, it sold out very fast. It looked a bit touch and go for me for a day or two as well. Many people were being disappointed, even those who like me had pre-ordered the set; perhaps this was due partially to Covid-19 disrupting distribution. In the end, I got the discs only a couple of days late. Then, having built up lots of anxiety about obtaining the set, I proceeded to not watch it. Progression through the set was sluggish; I'm not sure why exactly, but it may be something to do with the volume of other non-Who stuff I was viewing during lockdown (more on this below). I watched the first story The Masque of Mandragora early on, and have slowly been working my way through the special features since then, but have not been particularly enthusiastic about the episodes. As The Hand of Fear hadn't been blogged before, I decided that covering it here would be a good spur to progressing through it and the rest of the remaining stories on the set. So, this was watched from the Blu-ray disc over four consecutive evenings in the company of the whole family (the Better Half, boys of 14 and 10, girl of 8).

First time round:

This story has some memorable visuals and emotional moments, so is perhaps an obvious choice for clip packages. I remember seeing the striking clip from the end of episode 1 - the hand coming to life accompanied by Dudley Simpson's scuttling score and sirens blaring - in 1986 as part of a celebration of 50 years since the start of broadcast television (TV50). There were other Doctor Who clips too, but that's the one I remember clearest, so it must have stood out. I first got a proper look at Lis Sladen's infamous Hand of Fear outfit, which can't be seen in its full glory in the episode 1 cliffhanger, on Resistance is Useless, a filler documentary shown on BBC2 early in 1992 to usher in a series of Doctor Who repeats. I saw the final scenes saying goodbye to Sarah Jane Smith on The Tom Baker Years VHS, a clips compendium on two tapes released later in 1992. Finally, I saw the - slightly less impressive - connecting tissue of the story that contained these nice moments in February 1996 when the VHS was released. I snapped it up on its day of release, as was my manner at the time. This was a good move, as it turned out. The Paul McGann TV movie had recently been announced, and a decision was made to clear the decks of any old Doctor Who product - including deleting many titles on VHS - before the big merchandising push accompanying the broadcast of this, the first new Who since 1989, in May of that year. This was particularly harsh on The Hand of Fear, which was deleted when it had only been out a few weeks, and made it a very rare and sought after VHS for the many years until the DVD of the story came out.

Reaction:

There is a screenwriting maxim that states that a lacklustre beginning or middle of a dramatic story will be forgiven by the audience if the ending is good enough. This is usually taken to mean the climax of the plot, though, not any short resolution scene. The Hand of Fear's final sequence - the Doctor and Sarah (and Tom Baker and Lis Sladen) understating the emotion of their goodbye - is magnificent, one of the best moments in classic Who. It saves the story it completes, which for the rest of the running time is decidedly average; but, it doesn't actually have anything to do with the previous 90 minutes approx of story to which it is tacked on. It wasn't written by the authors of the story Bob Baker and Dave Martin, but instead was extrapolated by Baker and Sladen themselves from an original version set down by script editor Robert Holmes. Aside from a few mentions of Sarah's home being in South Croydon, and maybe a few teasing moments where Sarah is in great danger as if this could be the moment she bows out (though even that's pretty much par for the course for Sarah anyway, she holds all the records for jeopardy-friendliness) there's no build up in the story proper to Sarah's departure. The abruptness is what makes it even more poignant, though, so this isn't a problem... for the final few minutes. What that screenwriting maxim leaves unspoken, though, is that the audience has to reach the ending for this forgiveness to work. I couldn't blame anyone who'd bailed out of The Hand of Fear before the final episode, as it seems to run out of plot partway through.

The first episode is okay, with an intriguing enough premise of the Doctor and Sarah stumbling on the remnants of a pre-historic alien crash-down. The beginning sequence of Eldrad's botched execution on Kastria should probably have been snipped out, as it removes the last shred of doubt that Eldrad might be a good gal / guy, and removes some of the mystery about what happened for the hand to have been buried all those years ago.  Better to keep the mystery and ambiguity going longer and explain all that later (they explain it all later anyway). The second episode is a belter: the fictional locale of an experimental nuclear reactor is pretty original, and the real world location is impressive too. The next stage of the fossilised hand - now energised and scuttling around - is very effective, and there's no better tension builder than the ramp up to a possible nuclear explosion. After the midway point and the end of episode 2, though, and there's nothing left to happen. All that really occurs in the second half is that Eldrad is revealed, whole, and the Doctor takes him/her to Kastria. From the start of episode 3, it could all be wrapped up in five minutes - there just isn't anything else of note left to happen.

Things are drawn out by a few different means. First, episode 3 spends a lot of time having the power station bombed, but that is just repeating the earlier story beat when the reactor was going critical, only not as good. The earlier beat has Glyn Houston's Professor Watson calling his family for a clichéd but nonetheless affecting final conversation. The reprise has everyone crouching behind a range rover as if that's going to protect them from the blast. It's silly, but even if it were as clinically accurate as the recent mini-series Chernobyl it would still not be very good, because the exact same thing happened last week. It's not a screenwriting maxim, but it really should be, that you can't have a nuclear reactor threaten to blow up twice. The next diversion to stretch the plot a little further towards the total running time is the gender swap that Eldrad goes through in episode 4. It is a nice idea, but doesn't add anything - apart from duration - to the piece; no value or circumstance of any character changes just because she becomes him. In its final attempt to reach the finish line, The Hand of Fear activates the episode 4 fail-safe of stories of around this period whose plot is petering out: the journey through a booby-trapped inner sanctum. If it weren't so obvious that the story has structural problems beyond this last episode, one might even think it was homage. The Doctor and Sarah had a part 4 spent avoiding such traps in Pyramids of Mars, and the same thing happened in Death to the Daleks too (Sarah only got to hear about that afterwards though, as the Pertwee Doctor didn't take her with him that time).

Aside from the long stretches of treading narrative water, the structure of the story is damaging at a character level too. We're introduced to interesting enough people (Doctor Carter, Professor Watson, even the bloke from the quarry) and then they disappear again never to return; it makes the story feel bitty and unsatisfying as every character arc feels prematurely cut off. In fact, when I later did my fan completist bit working though the Blu-ray, watching the episodes again with the information text, which gives details of the production as subtitles, I found that this was not bug but feature. Script editor Robert Holmes provided Baker and Martin with a structure that changed focus every episode, engineered so no character bar the regulars would appear in more than two episodes. I don't know if it was for budget reasons or artistic ones, but either way I think it was a mistake. This just shows that even the great Robert Holmes had his off days. It would need a bit of work to fix. The reactor just about to blow up is clearly your part 3 cliffhanger - it can't happen any earlier than that, and obviously can't happen twice. This means that Eldrad emerges at the start of episode 4, throwing the plot into a new direction with the trip to Kastria. That also means there's no time to faff about with sex changes, so just keep her as a female - it's more interesting anyway (Doctor Who baddies were almost always male during this period).

There's then the challenge of making the plot from the finding of the hand through to the build up to the reactor explosion cover three episodes. This is possible, though, if the action is slowed a little and a virtue is made of the gradual investigation and gradual change. The ring taking over Sarah and others would be better if not so sudden, with the Doctor unaware at first that his companion is working against him. The gentler it is - suggesting, not coercing - the better for not giving away just how evil Eldrad is too soon. A whole episode with a hand missing in a nuclear power station, scuttling in the shadows as our heroes search, then jumping out and strangling people, could have worked well (though it would presumably have put pressure on the effects crew). Despite the structure, the story still manages to be okay because of some memorable moments and visuals, and mostly high production values (the Kastrian dome model and the crystalline Eldrad costumes being particular highlights). It could have been so much better though, and then perhaps the extreme jolt upon entering that last wonderful sequence wouldn't have been so pronounced.

Connectivity: 

Both The Hand of Fear and Love & Monsters feature a single villain who first turns up in a different form, then reveals their true self towards the end.

Deeper Thoughts:

My so called life in film. At the time of writing, I have been at home for isolation / lockdown / not going out because the rules are too confusing (delete as applicable) for twenty weeks. Right from the start, I had no illusions about learning a foreign language or writing a novel or any other fantasy achievement during this period. This is not least because I'm one of those lucky people who can do their day job from anywhere, so I haven't had a single day on furlough; the amount of extra time I had was never going to be significantly increased. Sometime in May, when I'd had the Tom Baker Blu-ray boxset containing The Hand of Fear for a while, and barely scratched the surface, I did wonder where all the time had gone. So, I retroactively created a viewing diary of everything I'd watched to date, and then kept it going thereafter. As cinemas are now opening (I listen to Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode's movie podcast, and for the first time in a long time within the last week, Kermode has reviewed a film he saw in a theatre rather than on a smaller screen, so punters will surely follow), I thought the moment had come to stop cataloging and look back over this period. From a Doctor Who point of view, I started the lockdown period still watching the episodes and extras on the Season 26 box set, and then rapidly received The Faceless Ones, then later the Jodie Whittaker series 12 box set, then the Tom Baker set. I've also watched various stories for the blog and some of the early twitter watch-a-longs.

Beyond Doctor Who, I've managed to see a pretty good tally of 67 films or TV movies, and 26 full series, the latter ranging from the three episodes of ITV's Quiz, which was an early lockdown distraction, to 20+ episodes of some series of Community, which the family and I have done a full re-watch of from beginning to end. We're doing a similar re-watch now of Red Dwarf, but are only partway through, having finished series 8, but still having all the Dave episodes left to cover. We've done all of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes too; we started in line with the similar twitter live watch-a-longs of LoM, but one episode a week wasn't enough for us, and we ploughed ahead and enjoyed them in about a month elapsed. Life on Mars only gets better with age, but Ashes to Ashes was the revelation for me - much better than I remembered (and I'd remembered it as pretty good). I used a mixture of methods for accessing these series, and the films. Aside from Doctor Who (and one other collectible which I mentioned in a previous blog post, the Pet Shop Boys film It Couldn't Happen Here) I no longer purchase anything on DVD or Blu-ray. Well, never say never. Sometimes, old DVDs were dug out of a cupboard to be watched over the weeks, but mostly - even if I did own something on disc - it was streaming services that were the more convenient to use. For me, that meant Netflix, Amazon Prime, the BBC iPlayer, and the BFI player (which I started subscribing to during this period). 

I also used Apple TV for hiring the odd film, pay per view. Of these, and I know I'm very late to the party, but last year's Oscar winning best film, Bong Joon Ho's Parasite, was the best: slippery, uncategorisable, funny, scary, heart-breaking - believe the hype. I also enjoyed the Mister Rogers picture A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, and quiet British comic adaptation Days of Bagnold Summer. Good new films debuting on streaming services that I watched included The Vast of Night and 7500 on Prime; Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods and Will Ferrell-starring Eurovision comedy The Story of Fire Saga from Netflix; also, britflick psychodrama Lynn + Lucy on the BFI player.  Series new to streaming that I caught in the last few months included Space Force, which I thought was underrated by most critics, and Staged, the quick turnaround Covid-era comedy starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen (or - if you've seen it - perhaps that should be Michael Sheen and David Tennant, or various other combinations). It already feels somewhat dated, with jokes about zoom etiquette and drinking too much during lockdown, but it's hilarious and surprising (don't find out anything about the cast list if you're coming to it fresh, just watch). I also caught up on lots of recent things I hadn't caught when they first came out: Bait, Ready Player One, both series of Derry Girls, Russian Doll series one.  

The other way I consumed films was more old-fashioned: I recorded them off the telly. The aforementioned film podcast had always had a subscription free TV movie of the week feature; during lockdown, they expanded it out and recommended six films per week. I took the advice, and found other films too. Particularly good freeview channels in this regard are filmfour (where I caught up with Logan, Sicario, A Quiet Place and many others)  and the peerless, essential Talking Pictures TV (where I saw This Sporting Life and Whistle Down the Wind for the first time, and quite a few more). A few rare things I had to watch by putting aside my concerns about copyright law as they weren't available anywhere else. But mostly, people would have got paid (the tiny amount that people get paid for me streaming something, or that they got when I bought the disc way back when). The whole period has given me a new appreciation for home viewing that I didn't necessarily have before. I wonder how much this will change things in the future. I've very rarely paid to view individual new films before this year. If I couldn't catch it at the cinema, I was happy to wait for it to hit streaming services. I wonder whether this is something that will just reset once things go back to normal. I also wonder whether I shouldn't be reading more books rather than watching the tube quite so much, but I don't have any time to muse on that right now - the DVD box set that I impulse purchased of every surviving episode of The Adventure Game just arrived. Never say never.

In Summary:

The Hand of Fear is all about the digits, so here goes: the first three episodes and first 20 minutes of episode 4: 3 out of 5; the final 5 minutes: 6 out of 5.