Dot and Bubble

Chapter the 309th, while democracy is losing its way, and greed is getting greedier, console yourself with a selfie or two, and post them on social media...

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] Lindy Pepper-Bean lives in Finetime, with lots of other rich kids aged between 17 and 27, sent there from the home world. She does two hours work a day and moans about it to her online friends, but the rest of the day is for partying. Remotely, though - every interaction Lindy has with her friends or workmates is on a hemisphere of screens (the bubble) projected around her head by a floating light bee (the dot); she never meets anyone IRL. She notices there are less people online than there once were, but doesn't let it worry her when she can instead be watching online heartthrob Ricky September's latest video where he lip-syncs to a song handsomely. On one screen in her bubble, the Doctor appears warning her she's in danger, but she blocks his unsolicited contact request. After a while, Ruby tries and has more luck. Lindy engages with her and discovers there are giant slug-like creatures eating people in Finetime. Weirdly, though, they ignore some people and eat others, with no easily definable pattern. Ruby invites the Doctor to their group chat, and at first Lindy doesn't recognise him as the same person as earlier; she also seems shocked that the Doctor and Ruby are communicating with her from the same room. They are stuck outside Finetime and can't get past the security to get in. They persuade her to escape through some conduits that will lead her to the wilderness outside. Between her and escape, though, are many of the giant slug-like creatures. Luckily, Ricky is there - IRL and everything - and he helps her escape them.

En route to the conduit, Ricky discovers on a video link that the home world's population has all been eaten by the slug monsters. Once Lindy and Ricky are there, the Doctor provides them a set of codes to unlock the exit. Meanwhile, the Doctor is musing on the mysteries of Finetime's situation and realises that Finetime residents are being eaten in alphabetical order; the dot system has somehow become sentient and turned on its masters. Lindy tries to turn her dot off, but it starts whizzing around, swooping at her. When it is just about to kill her, she evades it by telling it Ricky's real surname is Coombes; C comes before P, so Lindy escapes and the dot kills Ricky. Once through the conduit, Lindy finds a handful of Finetime survivors who plan to go out into the wilderness of the planet as pioneers. The Doctor and Ruby are also there; the Doctor tells Lindy and the others that he can take them to safety in the TARDIS, as they'll never survive otherwise. They turn down his help as they are a racist society, and believe that the purity of their community will be contaminated by his presence. The Doctor tries to persuade them, telling them that he doesn't care about their views, he will save them anyway. They will not be persuaded and travel off to their certain doom. He leaves in the TARDIS with Ruby, quite upset by this turn of events.  

Context:

Another Ncuti episode. This wasn't intended to be the next story covered by the blog, but the blog post for another story (not a Ncuti episode) has had to be delayed, even though I'd almost finished writing it. All will become clear in a few weeks' time. In another first for the blog, I did this rewatch of the story (from the BBC iplayer in early September 2024, after only just having watched the story when it came out on Blu-ray) while running on a treadmill - I'm trying to get a bit fitter. Being in motion while watching something on a screen is rather apt for this story, now I come to think of it. I was doing Couch to 5K using an app, so like Lindy Pepper-Bean I had a recorded voice from a personal device telling me when to move and when to stop too.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. A big chunk of serial broadcasting was Ncuti Gatwa's first season, which was shown in May and June 2024. This is the fifth of those seven stories to be covered for the blog. Beyond that, I have completed 27 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

As with all the stories of this run, I watched Dot and Bubble just after midnight, seconds after it landed on BBC iplayer, on the 1st June 2024. Just this once, I was on my own. My usual viewing partner, the middle child (boy, aged 14 at the time) decided to go to bed and watched it separately from me the following day. I will admit now that on that first watch I was a little slow on the uptake. I was thinking all the way through that Lindy was elitist, and that that elitism was built into the insular society of Finetime. At the end of the story, I watched and saw that elitist society reject someone that it perceived as a member of an underclass, even when that someone represented their only hope of survival, meaning their certain death, but I thought I saw it reject Ruby too. It was only just before the credits rolled that the penny dropped: oh, they're racists as well. I then had to rewind Ncuti's performance of frustration and revulsion and watch it again in its proper context. It was early in the morning after a week of work and I was tired, if I can offer that as some defence. Also, I think the story itself is pulling some punches in those final moments. There's a time for subtlety and this wasn't it. I think it would have been fine to have one of the citizens of Finetime explicitly mention the colour of the Doctor's skin, or mention the word 'race', or be excessively accommodating to Ruby and offer her a way to rid herself of the Doctor's company - it wouldn't have the burst the bubble (ahem) in that moment.

Reaction:

Coming immediately after 73 Yards, my favourite story of the year, it was almost certain that Dot and Bubble would be something of a comedown, and then... it wasn't. It was just as good in a different way, and just as haunting in a different way. So, as it turned out, my favourite two stories of the year were the two containing less Ncuti Gatwa than the others. I don't think that's a factor, though: I've enjoyed his performances in all the other episodes, and stories that revolve around his character more (Boom and Rogue, as two examples) are very strong too. Perhaps it's instead because the restrictions of Ncuti's limited availability for filming early on (as he was still working on the fourth series of Sex Education) encouraged the writer of both stories, Russell T Davies, to produce more innovative and interesting narratives. Whatever, the reason - in the opinion of this viewer at least - Davies delivers the goods. He's a writer with a reputation for sometimes not plotting as tightly as he should, but he proves that wrong in Dot and Bubble; it is a masterclass in the careful and gradual release of information. The world and its inhabitants' default behaviour is set up in the initial section, then there are reveals and reversals following one after another as the tension and pace ratchet up to the ending and the final twist (of the knife). Just look at the development of the Mantraps' relationship to the people of Finetime through the running time: there are monsters; the monsters are ignoring Lindy; not just Lindy, they're ignoring some people and not others; the monsters are killing in alphabetical order, so they're not unthinking monsters; Lindy is a monster; every person on Finetime is a monster. Then, after the credits toll, the lingering thought occurs that the Mantraps weren't monsters after all.

As mentioned above, I thought the ending could have been more emphatic. It's fine for the microaggressions thrown the Doctor's way to be subtle before that, that's the point, and I'm sure people of colour picked up on them long before those like me with white privilege. At the end, though, I think the realities of Finetime should have been hammered home  - it's a polemic, after all. We all watch with our own preoccupations, and it sometimes needs a jolt to dislodge them; as an ageing student leftie type, I was hung up on seeing the story as about class, so missed what were only a couple of lines of dialogue at the end that should have clued me in. It's probably a minor point now that Doctor Who is a streaming show first and foremost; the episode certainly rewards further rewatching. Perhaps another detail of the end that should have been beefed up is the danger that the Finetime residents are in, having refused the Doctor's offer of escape. As they travel off in the boat, it needs waves and storm clouds and crashes of thunder to show - rather than just tell - that they aren't going to survive. Such effects for a short sequence might have been budget breaking, but I think they would have helped. I'm also perplexed by the choice of name for the surviving Finetime resident that presents himself as self-styled leader at the end. It's Brewster Cavendish with a 'C', meaning he has managed to survive since almost the beginning of the purge; around a week, based on dialogue elsewhere. He must have found his way out through a conduit sometime before, or discovered some other way to evade the Mantraps. It had already been established that Ricky September was more resourceful than others, but he's a special case. To suggest that others could be too undermines the underlying theme that the lack of diversity in thought and action in this group will be its undoing (or maybe that's my student leftie reading again).

  

The other connection between my two most favoured stories of the year is that they have the same director, Dylan Holmes Williams. He does another sterling job with material very different to 73 Yards. Along with the full crew working at a high, high level, he creates a distinctive and interesting look for this story's world. The Mantraps, like a lot of the monsters of this era of Who, are CG-enhanced real builds, tangible creations worked by puppeteers. They are brilliantly effective. Dots, bubbles and screen after screen of rich kids in stylised clothing, all are effectively realised. What Holmes Williams achieves more than the visuals, though, are some cracking performances. Topmost of these is Callie Cooke's faultless turn as Lindy. It is a knife-edge difficult balance to play: she must seem somewhat sympathetic, but not too much, and Cooke finds that balance and milks every nuance out of the script. The moment where she turns on Ricky so she can save herself is one of those jaw-dropping, spine-tingling reveals; it feels both surprising and inevitable, and that's largely down to the actor and her director expertly realising the excellent script. Also selling it is the reaction from Tom Rhys-Harries as Ricky. He does some great work elsewhere too, peeling back the layers to show a bookish diffidence behind the hunky self confidence of his online persona. He doesn't stay alive for the next layer to be peeled, so we'll never know if he is in goose-step with the misguided ideology of Finetime. I'm sure many a fanboy or fangirl is in denial: if he reads history thoroughly, isn't distracted by screens and is still a racist, he's arguably even worse than Lindy.

The script is full of reversals, but it also acts as one great big bait and switch at the thematic level: it pretends to be a standard issue 'older writer bemoaning a younger generation's social mores' thing, but then reveals its true and much deeper intent. This climaxes in another great moment of performance, Ncuti Gatwa's burst of frustration at the stubborn senselessness of Finetime and its people. It's wonderfully scripted and performed as almost non-judgemental. The Doctor will save people, even if they're racists, and he's more sad than angry; the moment, though, is still imbued with the energy of a God who can't persuade a colony of ants to let themselves be saved. It is a hell of a scene to give an actor on his first day's filming, but Ncuti is nonetheless electrifying.

Connectivity:

There is very little in common between Dot and Bubble and The Curse of Fatal Death, which is a shame as there were numerous fun connections between the Comic Relief sketch and the story I intended to blog next (see Context section above). Never mind, it's all random, and that is the blog's raison d'etre. In both stories, the Doctor is first seen on a screen (as part of Lindy's bubble, and on the Master's TARDIS scanner) before later appearing fully - that's about it.

Deeper Thoughts:

It's a bit like Black Mirror (oh, I'm so clever). Ironically for a story warning of the dangers of social media, this story drove me back to my online feeds, unseen for many months. Except for blogger (I don't count blogger), I had given up the last one that I was still regularly reading - the platform formerly known as twitter - for lent in 2024 and hadn't gone back. The day after my first viewing of Dot and Bubble, still a bit unsure that I'd read the ending of this story correctly (see First Time Round section above), I took a look back into the abyss to check other people's reactions. They were pretty much uniformly positive, which surprised me as no topic on social media usually has such agreement. But people loved it. There was nobody I could see moaning about virtue signalling or woke-ism or whatever. The one thing I did see, though, and this was replicated in online reviews I read over the next few days, were lots of people saying the programme had echoes of Black Mirror, or was ripping off Black Mirror, or was very similar to a specific episode of Black Mirror (2016's Nosedive). Each time I saw the comparison made, it annoyed me for two reasons. First, it felt like each individual was celebrating their own cleverness in detection, as if - forensic scientist style - they had pored over every minute piece of evidence to find this debt to Charlie Brooker's dark TV anthology series. But the writer and executive producer Russell T Davies himself was the one who highlighted it. In an interview. Before Dot and Bubble's broadcast. He was quoted as saying the story was the "clearest step into Black Mirror territory" that Doctor Who had made. All those forensic scientists on the web were examining a 10-foot tall pulsating neon sign pointing in the direction of the murderer, but patting themselves on the back for it.

Maybe Davies was getting the word out early to head off any accusations of plagiarism. Maybe. Was he though? The second thing that annoyed me about the comparison, was that it was wrong. Dot and Bubble wasn't really anything like Black Mirror. What does it even mean to be like a varied anthology series? I haven't seen every episode of Black Mirror ever, but from what I know I'd say its common thread comes down to two things: a focus on the dangers of modern technology, and a dark ending. Doctor Who has done the former throughout its long history; it doesn't do the latter so often, but it still has some history going way back. It's very loose anyway (you can't have too restrictive a template for an anthology series if it's intended to run for a good few years as Black Mirror has). One might as well say that Dot and Bubble was like Inside No, 9 (samples comedy and horror and often has dark twist endings) or Severance (extrapolates the dangers of technological choices with stylised visuals) or many other shows one could list. Dot and Bubble had whopping great drooling slug monsters eating people; the show it was most like was Doctor Who. Anyway, Davies - in the same interview - has said that the original idea was pitched for the 2011 series of Doctor Who, before Black Mirror had ever been shown, but it was felt that the technology wasn't there to do the topic justice at that time. What about the specific episode of Black Mirror that was often mentioned, though? Nosedive was written by Michael Schur and Rashida Jones from a story by Brooker. It deals with a world where social media is voluntary but all pervasive, and features a female protagonist, so it is superficially similar to Dot and Bubble at a very high-level. The warnings that each give about the technology, though, are polar opposites.

Dot and Bubble warns of the dangers of the technology excluding people outside the bubble, and perhaps the warping effect of the echo chamber impacting those within the bubble. It's not clear what's cause or effect - do the citizens of Finetime all live in the same virtual place to keep outsiders out, or did living in the same virtual place lead to them excluding outsiders? Either way, though, those plugged into the technology are all in it together, one exclusive club. In Nosedive, the very point is how the individuals that are plugged in can turn against each other; Nosedive is about people rating one another (something like China's Social Credit System spliced with Uber rankings). The protagonist strives to improve her score out of five, but events conspire to mean it keeps taking a knock. An interesting point to note on similarities between stories is that Nosedive itself was compared in many reviews to an existing piece, an episode of the comedy Community from two years before called App Development and Condiments, which has exactly - and I mean exactly - the same base premise, and lots of other things in common too. It's just a coincidence, though: sometimes ideas have a life of their own and rise up in different places independent of one another. One of the only things that Dot and Bubble and Nosedive have in common is a penchant for pastels in the production design. Again, this is just a coincidence as the reason for it is different in each piece. In Nosedive (and, as it happens, in the Community episode) its about not wanting to give offence by being too bold or colourful: a world where everyone fears the ratings bestowed on them by everyone else bleaches out individuality. In Dot and Bubble, it connotes the pre-existing uniformity and homogeneity of the populace. The final irony of the comparison is that Nosedive ends with its character freed of the fear of being rated, and able to be be bold and colourful and rude. Although it is a dark story, it ends on a tiny moment of hope (so very unlike the usual for Black Mirror, but very like the usual for... Doctor Who). 

In Summary:

Bubblicious.

The Curse of Fatal Death

Chapter the 308th, which may be taking the mickey a little bit.

Plot:

An alternative ninth Doctor and his companion Emma run into the Master. Leaving his speaker on when talking TARDIS to TARDIS, the Master gives away his plans to nobble his fellow Time Lord, but the Doctor isn't interested anyway. He invites the Master to join him in a castle on the planet Tersurus where he announces he's giving up his do-gooding to get married to Emma. The Master tries various attempts to capture the Doctor using many traps he has travelled back in time and bribed an architect to install in the castle. The Doctor, though, has also gone back and bribed the architect to undo the stuff that the Master insisted on. The Master keeps falling through a trap door into the Tersuran sewers, then taking hundreds of years to climb back out. Each time, he pops back to the right moment in his TARDIS having aged more and more. Fed up with this, the Master teams up with the Daleks who rejuvenate him with Dalek technology. The baddies plan to use a Zektronic energy beam to conquer the universe. The Doctor and Emma escape, but the Doctor is wounded and regenerates into a quite handsome Doctor. Fixing the out-of-control Zektronic beam causes the Doctor to regenerate into a shy Doctor and then a very handsome Doctor. He is then zapped again. With his powers of regeneration halted by the energy of the blast, it looks as if he's died after an emotional farewell to Emma. The Daleks and the Master vow to turn to good in memory of the Doctor. Then, miraculously another regeneration starts, and the Doctor becomes a woman. Emma is no longer attracted to the Doctor, but the Master is. As they walk off together, the new Doctor asks the Master how he got his nickname, and he says he'll explain later.

Context:

So, is this taking the mickey? As per the milestone watch below, I am running out of stories to cover on the blog, so am on the look out for spin-offs and non-canonical Doctor Who to keep things going a little longer (otherwise this blog will just be writing up Ncuti Gatwa's new stories one by one in order, spoiling the intended random approach). There's got to be limits, though: in a recent post I set out the questions that I would have to ask myself about any story included for the blog. Does it star the Doctor? This is answered by an emphatic 'Yes' in the case of The Curse of Fatal Death - it starts five of them. Does it have visuals? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes (after its broadcast as part of a telethon, it received a VHS release as part of the Doctor Who range). Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. Finally, though, there was this question: is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? I think that The Curse of Fatal Death goes beyond just being a skit. It's a BBC-commissioned live action version of Who, the only such between the Paul McGann TV movie and the 2005 relaunch; it's a love letter to the show, and has a structured narrative with beginning, middle and end as well as cliffhangers and surprises. Rowan Atkinson is playing it pretty straight too. I watched on Youtube one evening on my own (an extended Doctor Who sketch from 25 years ago would have been a hard sell to any of the family, so I didn't try).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. Apart from a few extra bits and bobs like The Curse of Fatal Death that I throw in occasionally, I have completed 27 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

I had a strong memory of this, and it was completely wrong. I can remember very well having a discussion with mates about going to a St. Patrick's day night at a pub, but they were staying in to watch Comic Relief. I was astonished that anyone, even a Doctor Who fan anticipating some new televisual material, would choose to stay in and watch the - forgive me, I know it's for a good cause and all - protracted bore-fest that is Comic Relief when they could be drinking Guinness and singing an off key version of Dirty Old Town with complete strangers. But I got no takers. I went to the pub on my own, and did indeed drink Guinness and sing an off key version of Dirty Old Town with complete strangers. I thought this was 1999, when Doctor Who was forming part of Comic Relief's offerings, but looking at the date of the broadcast that year it was on the 12th March, too far away from St. Patrick's Day for any pub to have a tie-in. I'm guessing that I'm remembering events from two years later in 2001 when patron saint and charity telethon more closely aligned. I then remembered that I have access to my 1999 diary, so checked out the entry. I was instead at a leaving do for someone at my day job of the time. So, I did indeed skip the live broadcast, taping and watching back The Curse of Fatal Death at a later date (I must have had to use an entire E180 on LP mode to capture everything from the evening, fast forwarding to the Doctor Who bits). There's nothing in the diary entries of the next few days about the skit (I was 26, it's not the sort of thing I was writing about at the time) but I estimate I wouldn't have waited much after the 13th March to watch it.

Reaction:

Imagine a parallel universe where this was the last ever Doctor Who broadcast on television by the BBC. As I've mentioned in blog posts before, the period encompassing the end of the 1990s and start of the 2000s was a low point for my favourite show. The excitement of the 30th anniversary in 1993 and an American co-production TV movie in 1996 had faded; Doctor Who appeared to be dead, and there was nothing, not even the slightest hint, to suggest it was going to lurch back into life again. If the 2005 relaunch had not happened, and there's all sorts of reasons why it might have stalled, The Curse of Fatal Death wouldn't be the worst send-off one could imagine. It's full of love for the programme, has a couple of really rather good jokes, and some fun cameos of stars as the Doctor giving us a glimpse into how they'd play the role. At least a couple of those, Jim Broadbent and Hugh Grant, were - and I think still are - too big to take the role on properly; they were flippin' movie stars, we were briefly very blessed. Of all of the cameos, Hugh Grant plays it straightest, even more than Atkinson, and his death scene is almost emotional. He's still playing it a bit 'Edwardian' compared to the more modern and slightly more down-to-earth approach that became the norm from 2005 onwards; Doctor Who had not yet dumped that baggage. Who could still hold its own as an entertaining segment on primetime TV, though, which was a good sign for the future. Another sign of the future was its writer, Steven Moffat, someone who subsequently has written by far the most Doctor Who episodes to entertain audiences of primetime TV of anyone (as contributing writer and/or showrunner from 2005 to date); so, it's good that he started practising early.

Moffat's key aim is to generate jokes, and there's three types of these on show in increasing levels of specific geekiness. First, there's general humour: there's a lot of fart jokes, for example, emerging from the premise that the people of the planet Tersurus communicate by controlled release of methane. A lot of these jokes were - in my opinion, natch, humour is subjective - rubbish; but the line about how the Tersurans died out ("They discovered fire") is a 24-carat killer line. It still falls a bit flat, though - what the programme needs is an audience laugh track to lift it. I don't remember whether it did have as part of the telethon, but none of the versions I've found online do. The second type of humour is the generic, i.e. jokes about general science fiction tropes like Jonathan Pryce's cackling and monologuing as the Master. A long sequence that is gleefully ripping off Bill and Ted falls into this category, where the Doctor journeys back in time to undo the mischief that the Master has done, then the Master travels back to undo that undoing, and the Doctor travels back to undo that, and so on. Finally, there's the third category, humour specifically about Doctor Who: jokes about Daleks not having noses or chairs, for example, or jokes about the ubiquity of quarries. The running gag of waving away the need to clarify the action with an "I'll explain later" was presumably directed at Who too, though I don't think the programme does this as much as is made out. Just when Moffat looks to be overusing the phrase, he saves it by turning it into the Doctor's faltering final words as he is dying, then puts a cherry on it at the end by turning it into a bedroom double entendre about why the Master is so called.

Moffat is clever enough not to do any jokes about Doctor Who's sets wobbling. Firstly because he knows that was never really true anyway, but also because he was probably aware that - being for charity - his story would need to be done on the cheap. The sets, props and effects are as good as can be expected in those circumstances. The score uses many recycled cues from the Who archive, so even if one wasn't enjoying the comedy one could play a game of name that tune (and name the episode it comes from) as one watches. The overall result of all this is a little cheesy, but inoffensive and at times almost magical. It also gives Moffat a chance to road test some things he would return to in his future stories: the Doctor falling in love and getting married, a gender swap regeneration, a Time Lord aged by a thousand plus years, the Doctor miraculously regaining the power to regenerate when it was thought that he could do so no more, the Daleks having a chair for no apparent reason, a character quoting Terrance Dicks in saying that the Doctor was "never cruel or cowardly", having a character say a line something like "Look after the universe for me - I've put a lot or work into it". It's not just Moffat getting the benefit, though. At the time it seemed like Doctor Who needed Comic Relief, but looking back now I think that it was more likely that Comic Relief needed Doctor Who. There's something special about the programme that started in 1963 that makes it able to endlessly generate concepts and visuals and jokes (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more of this topic), which is exactly what the charity that started in 1985 consumes rapaciously to power good works.

Connectivity:

Both The Curse of Fatal Death and Rogue feature the Doctor attracted to someone, with hints about his getting hitched (wedding plans with Emma, a proposal on one knee from Rogue); they also both feature a fleeting appearance by Richard E Grant playing the Doctor.

Deeper Thoughts:

Sketchy History. The history of Doctor Who take-off skits and sketches is almost as long as the history of Doctor Who itself. This is literally true: Michael Bentine comedy show It's a Square World featured a sketch with Clive Dunn as a parody of the Doctor (in a William Hartnell style costume) that was broadcast on the last day of 1963 when only one complete Doctor Who story had yet been shown. Writing and production were even earlier than that, with pre-filming done on 9th December 1963 (when only three episodes of Doctor Who had aired) and studio shooting on 20th December 1963 (when only four episodes of Doctor Who had aired). The concepts and visuals of the show clearly had an instant impact such than any comedian or satirist could be sure that the audience would know what was being parodied; this was, of course, even before the Daleks had reared their ugly domes. Once Skaro's finest had glided into the public consciousness, the chances for making fun were multiplied. Through the 1960s and 70s, many comedy and variety shows would use the show's iconography, with and sometimes without Daleks: Bernie Winters, Wayne and Shuster, The Black and White Minstrels, Crackerjack, Basil Brush, Rod Hull and Emu, Spike Milligan, and many more - all did sketches, and some even resisted basing their material on the old canard that Daleks can't go upstairs. These were affectionate (towards Doctor Who, I mean, the Minstrels and Milligan's sketches were likely to offend in other ways), which represented how the show was thought of in wider society in those times. By the 1980s, it felt to me like something changed and the humour tended to be slightly more at the programme's expense, but it was a big programme by then and could take it.

Clive Dunn and Michael Bentine

A trio of late 1980s sketches from BBC TV programmes were included on the VHS release of The Curse of Fatal Death as extras, and so became most well known to fandom: a sketch from The Lenny Henry Show, a very short sketch from Victoria Wood As Seen On TV, and an unused sketch from French and Saunders (which was shot on the set of The Trial of a Time Lord). All these took some pot shots at the complicated continuity of the show, or its lack of good material for women, or its silly design, or its silly names. Some of the barbs were unfair, but it's hard to argue with most of that. Henry's portrayal of the Doctor, and a little anti-Thatcher political humour (a few years before the series did something similar itself in The Happiness Patrol), make his sketch one of the most worth watching. Once the show was off the air, there was still the odd skit being made occasionally. Doctor Who fans on the writing and performing sides of the Dead Ringers crew meant that show - on radio or TV - featured Doctor Who-related gags frequently, and this continued when their sketches were riffing on Doctor Who made after 2005. Though some talented people have made Doctor Who sketches in the 2010s and 20s (not least Harry Hill and Rhys Thomas) and Who-related material has featured again in Comic Relief nights over the years, there's been little to my mind that made as much impact as The Curse of Fatal Death, even the very funny and reasonably well budgeted The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot made by Peter Davison for the 50th anniversary. But there was one sketch that did draw a lot of attention, albeit partially for the wrong reasons, which aired only a few months after Steven Moffat's Comic Relief opus.

Lenny Henry

On BBC2 in November 1999, there was a Doctor Who Night, a few hours where the channel was given over to themed programming about the series. During the night, there were three sketches made by and starring Mark Gatiss and David Walliams, both Doctor Who fans and comedians who subsequently became much more famous than they were then (and both appeared in Doctor Who subsequently too, with Gatiss also writing multiple episodes). Moffat was magnanimous enough to say that the sketches were much funnier than The Curse of Fatal Death, and I felt the same (it was the difference between broad mainstream jokes on BBC1 and edgier humour on BBC2). Two of the sketches were innocuous enough, even though one did feature a couple of fans kidnapping Peter Davison ("Do you think it would be alright to kiss Peter Davison?" "Yes"). But then there was The Pitch of Fear. It was a clever sketch that involved Walliams pitching the whole of the 26 years of the classic series to the BBC as if it were fully planned in advance - a sample gag is that Jon Pertwee's agent had been approached and he's becoming free in 1970, but they have to release him in 1974 because he's "got Worzel Gummidge". Again, harmless stuff, but there was also another line in there about casting that caused more of a stir. "I don't want to do this show," says the pitcher, "Unless we get the most charismatic, talented actors to play the Doctor." "For the whole 26 years?" asks the Exec. "Nah, towards the end, just any old f**ker with an equity card." It's a very funny line, but - unlike the Doctor, according to Terrance Dicks's famous description - it was a bit cruel, and maybe also a bit cowardly.

Mark Gatiss in The Pitch of Fear

The writer-performers of the sketch were probably referring more to public perception of Doctor Who performances in the 1980s than their own views of their quality. A lot of people felt and still feel that Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy - and less but some think this of Peter Davison too - weren't as good hires as the earlier Doctors. It was also likely (given that pot shots had been taken earlier in the sketch about his costuming decisions) that it was John Nathan-Turner, the producer in those later years, that was the real target of any criticism. A celebratory night about Doctor Who, however irreverent, probably wasn't the place to suggest anyone who'd worked on the show in a prominent role was not charismatic or talented, though. Gatiss had worked with Davison, Baker and McCoy on fan projects when he was less well known, which made it personal for some involved. Gatiss expressed regret and the sketch was re-edited, shorn of its funniest line for its official release (as an extra on a DVD release a few years later). With new episodes regularly being made, turning in a short scene for Comic Relief or for Children in Need now is an easy ask, but obviously will be less special than in 1999 when any tiny fragment - even if played for laughs - would be all that fans had seen for years, and might be the last they ever saw. So, unless anyone is prepared to be outrageously rude about people who star in or make Doctor Who again, I can't see any future sketch having the impact of those broadcast in 1999. But maybe that's a good thing.

In Summary:

A bit naff, but it was for charity.

Rogue

Chapter the 307th, which is super (thanks for asking) - © South Park The Movie.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so be warned there are spoilers ahead.] Bath, 1813. The Doctor and Ruby attend a party in regency era Britain to play act as characters in Bridgerton, and they're not the only ones. There's also Rogue, a handsome time-travelling bounty hunter that the Doctor takes a shine to, and a family of shape-shifting Chuldur who are killing party guests and taking their place as a form of cosplay (they are fans of Bridgerton from having caught the TV signals beamed out into space). These are the villains that Rogue is tracking, but unfortunately he believes for a long time that there's only one Chuldur and that the Doctor is it. Rogue takes the Doctor back to his invisible, cloaked spaceship and scans him, discovering his true identity. Having both realised they like one another, they talk about teaming up and exploring the universe together (Rogue may as well have said that he's only doing the one last job, or that he's a day away from retirement.) They both return to the party and do scandalous things - including Rogue proposing to the Doctor - to make the Chuldur want to cosplay them rather than innocent humans. A brief chase ensues, but the Doctor and Rogue elude the Chuldur. The party culminates in a society wedding where one of the Chuldur is going to marry Ruby. The Doctor thinks Ruby is a Chuldur but she's just pretending. He activates a forcefield trap of Rogue's which has been programmed with plot contrivances - it can only hold a certain number of people and it can only be used once. Ruby is caught in the trap with the Chuldur. Seeing that the Doctor cannot make the decision to sacrifice his friend, Rogue jumps into the field, knocking Ruby out, just before everything in the trap is transported to an uninhabited dimension to act as the Chuldur's prison. The Doctor is sad as he has no way of tracking Rogue down. Ruby comforts him.

Context:

On arriving home after a recent holiday abroad, four packaged-up Target novelisations were on the doormat amongst the rest of the piled-up post (see Deeper Thoughts below for more details of the books); only one of the four, Rogue, was of a story I had not yet blogged at that point. A day later, another package arrived; this one contained the Blu-ray box set of Ncuti Gatwa's first series, including Rogue. I often will chose a random episode of any newly arrived box set to blog, and the delivery of the same unblogged story in two different media was enough of a deciding factor: Rogue would be the next story to cover. I proceeded to binge all Ncuti's stories in order from the box set, from his full debut in a Christmas special through to the stories of his first season. When I got to Rogue, I asked the Better Half if she'd join me. She's a big fan of Bridgerton (or Peter Stringfellow's Pride and Prejudice as I like to think of it, with a tip of the hat to Stewart Lee), but she'd been pretty cold on the new Doctor Who stories. She asked how faithful an imitation it was (i.e. if there were any sex scenes - she's honest enough to admit that this is a big reason for watching Bridgeton, don't trust anyone who pretends different); I told her there was not, but that two attractive blokes did a bit of snogging; that was sufficient to sway her.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. May and June 2024 delivered seven new stories (six single-parters and one two-part finale) that would postpone the point of catching up a little. This is the fourth of the seven to be covered for the blog in random order. Beyond that, I have completed 27 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13).

First Time Round:

As with all the stories of this run, I watched Rogue from midnight, seconds after it landed on BBC iplayer. It was the 8th June 2024, and I was accompanied by the middle child (boy, aged 14 at the time). This run has prompted more post-screening discussion with fan friends on Whatsapp than before, stories have generally proved more divisive (I don't remember us ever commenting on a story during Jodie Whittaker's era, for example). For Rogue, the conversation was not about the quality of the story, but the quality of each of our powers of facial recognition. A scene of Rogue scanning the Doctor has hologram heads of the Time Lord's past incarnations float around. One of them is Richard E Grant, a fun inclusion to confer some form of canonical status on Scream of the Shalka. Only, it didn't look much like Grant. The images of some of the other Doctors weren't clear either (Capaldi certainly didn't look right), and with no context as to who was the floating head fleetingly on screen, I had no clue. It looked more like Christopher Walken to me (imagine him playing the Doctor - I'd pay to see that!). Some of my fan friends with better pattern matching skills couldn't believe my prosopagnosia, but I wasn't the only one suffering it. There was a long while after the midnight screening before any official confirmation of whose was the extra face, during which speculation reigned. The main alternate theory was that it was Michael Jayston, who played an evil future version of the Doctor in stories in 1986. There was also one fan that thought it was David Warner (an alternate Doctor featured in multiple Big Finish audio plays). In one way, this is all Paul Cornell's fault. One of Grant's most famous features is a big toothy grin. Cornell, though, wrote the Shalka Doctor as consistently grumpy. If Grant had been allowed to smile, I might just have recognised him.

Reaction:

It's taken me a while to catch up with a few of the streaming era shows that were touted as rivals to Doctor Who, or as models that Who should seek to emulate in the years before it relaunched with Russell T Davies back at the helm. My middle child has seen them all, I'm sure; he is the biggest TV sci-fi and fantasy enthusiast in the house, putting even his Dad to shame. He turned 15 years of age recently, and wanted to go with me to see a 15-certificate movie at the cinema for the first time; a nice idea. The movie was Deadpool and Wolverine. I was therefore instructed that - because he'd heard that there was significant plot in the Deadpool sequel concerning Marvel's Time Variance Authority - I would have to watch all of the Disney Plus series Loki, which features the TVA extensively, as homework. I managed to get through both seasons (12 episodes in total) in the week leading up to our cinema trip, and very much enjoyed what I saw. A major creative force behind Loki was Kate Herron, co-writer of Rogue with Briony Redman, and it was indeed one of those series heavily compared to Doctor Who when it aired, and touted by some as a model that Who should seek to emulate. It's understandable to see why: it's a narrative about time travel, it's timey-wimey in its telling, and it has at its centre a charismatic performance by a British actor playing an anti-hero. It's very like Doctor Who, or rather - and here's the rub - it's very like a particular type of Doctor Who: the stories set on Gallifrey. The TVA, powerful but bureaucratic police of the timeline, are just Time Lords without the impractical collars. Maybe its a coincidence, or maybe there was something in the air, but the TVA first appeared in the comics in 1986, the same year Doctor Who was at the height of its love affair with Time Lords and time lore.

The trouble is that the Doctor Who stories set on Gallifrey with Time Lords were not popular, or not as popular as the ones set anywhere and everywhere else in time and space, to the extent that two - two! - separate 21st century showrunners have destroyed the place to rid the show of the Doctor's planet and people. Who wants to see the Doctor in his equivalent of the headmaster's office, when he could be running free on the playing field? Thankfully, Herron brings none of that to this Doctor Who story. What Rogue does have in common with Loki, though, is a lightness of touch with regards to the interactions between its main characters. The onscreen relationship between Tom Hiddleston's Loki and Owen Wilson's Mobius is one of the main reasons Loki is much more entertaining to watch than, say, Arc of Infinity, even though the subject matter isn't that different. The onscreen relationship between Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor and Jonathan Groff as Rogue was every bit as engaging (and had almost as much star power) but was romantic. It's a slow burn to start, but there's so many great scenes; their bickering about their spaceships and gadgetry, the Doctor dancing to a Kylie Minogue banger much to Rogue's chagrin, the sequence of them trying to out-scandal each other to distract the Chuldur. Rogue's noble self-sacrifice doesn't tug much at the heartstrings, despite the imploring final line of "Find me"; this may be because it is a fate that was telegraphed to a ludicrous degree. As soon as the Doctor starts talking about taking Rogue for a spin round the stars "when we both get out of this", everyone watching knows the bounty hunter's not making it to the end credits. Gatwa's final scene with Gibson bottling up his sadness sold the emotion better, as did the sequel-hunting decision to keep Rogue's fate offscreen and up in the air (the Doctor still has the ring that Rogue gave him!).

Unlike in Loki, where the lead character's bisexuality is covered in one 'blink and miss it' line, the LGBTQ+ nature of the romance in Doctor Who is full-blooded, out and proud, and it's much more enjoyable for it. None of this would sit well with those fans who like their Doctor to be unsexual, obviously, but that dimensionally transcendental ship sailed a long time ago. Of all the snogs the Doctor's had over the years since he got a taste for it in 1996, the vast majority have been with women, so it was about time to redress the balance. Despite the setting sampling a larger than life TV show in Bridgerton, there isn't much in the way of camp, but lots of colour. Locations, costumes, hair and make-up, all are excellent at recreating the heightened period drama of Netflix's flagship show. The choreography is a perfect replica, but that's not so surprising when the same choreographer Jack Murphy is responsible for both (and does great work here). The chamber music versions of modern pop songs (Billie Eilish and Lady Gaga) are icing on the cake. The script is very clever at keeping ahead of the audience too; just when one might be groaning at how derivative it is, the rug is pulled out from under one's feet with the revelation that it's the aliens themselves that are recreating a TV show. Doctor Who has done tourist aliens before, but cosplaying aliens is a new twist on the idea. Otherwise, the motivation of the Chuldur is the most refreshingly traditional of those included in the stories in Ncuti's first year - they're not misunderstood, or supernatural, or god-like, they're just wrong'uns that want to kill humans. The masks, each one distinct and based on real but exotic birds, are fantastic, and Indira Varma is great as the head of the Chuldur family.

Varma, as a recurring character on 2000s Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood, is a link back to the early days after the relaunch of the Whoniverse 19 years before Rogue. This is somewhat apt, as Rogue is not only sampling Bridgerton, but also 2005 Doctor Who. Just like Space Babies echoing a number of scenes from the first journey for companion Rose in The End of the World, but this time for Ruby, Rogue is channeling The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, like Rogue a story from towards the end of the season just before the finale. The character of Rogue, with his invisible spaceship, time travel to Earth's past on a mission, embarrassing slip-ups with the psychic paper, playing popular music, and his desire to dance with and snog members of the regular cast, is so similar to Captain Jack in 2005 that it can't be coincidence. Whatever other reasons there might be for not using the same character, John Barrowman is too old now to be romantically partnered with Ncuti Gatwa, who is more than 25 years Barrowman's junior. Dare we hope that Groff can be tempted back and Rogue can become a semi-regular just as Jack was a couple of decades before? Here's hoping.

Connectivity:

Both Rogue and The Ice Warriors feature the Doctor teaming up with someone (Rogue, Clent) to replace a previous partner who is now gone; it may just be me that can see the Man Love subtext in The Ice Warriors - see the last blog post for more details - but it's definitely there in Rogue.

Deeper Thoughts:

Staying on Target: four more books for 2024. It only seems like a few months ago that the last Target novelisations came out (this is probably because it was only a few months ago - see the Deeper Thoughts section of Wild Blue Yonder from February 2024 for capsule reviews of the previous batch). For many years before 2024, the pattern had been for a handful of books per year to be published, mixing classic series stories (plugging previous gaps or providing alternate versions of existing books) and adaptations of new series stories dotted around in many different Doctors' eras; in 2024, this seems to have changed and now we are just seeing novelisations of the most recently broadcast stories. As mentioned above, with this latest blog post the four stories selected for this Target batch are all covered on the blog. I've also blogged another starring Ncuti Gatwa, The Devil's Chord, but that hasn't been novelised yet - a shame, as it would be interesting to see how the big song and dance number at the end was covered. This is also a challenge for the writer of the first of the four paperback releases, Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson, capturing The Church on Ruby Road, including The Goblin Song, in prose. The book was previously published in hardback (the first new hardback novelisation of a Doctor Who story for many decades) in January 2024, only a month after the broadcast of the TV version. This version has a new cover by Dan Liles, as do the other three novelisations being published for the first time. His are more detailed photo-realistic covers than those of previous artist for the range Anthony Dry, and depict a complete scene from the story rather than a combination of different elements; for long-term Doctor Who Target fans, it's reminiscent of the switch of styles between regular cover artists Chris Achilleos and Andrew Skilleter in the 1980s.

Jikiemi-Pearson does a Terrance Dicks-like job in effectively and efficiently telling the story. There's very little in the way of new, extended or alternative material: the odd line of dialogue is different and there's a section in the book where the Doctor explains the psychic paper to Ruby based on a short deleted scene. That's about it. The TV version suffers a bit with an overlong period between saving the baby Lulabelle in 2023, and Ruby being erased from existence (and the Doctor then going back to 2004 to fix time). From watching special features on the Blu-ray, I now understand this was because an action sequence with the Goblins attacking Ruby's flat was cut for budget reasons. The book doesn't reinstate that, but it handles the talky dialogue scenes that replaced it such that they don't drag as much as on the telly. A third-person limited narration style is used throughout, with first Ruby and then the Doctor as the viewpoint character. There's a few nice moments where we're presented with a little more detail of both characters' thoughts and emotions, but mostly they are just responding to the events of the plot, and there's no additional backstory dished out beyond what we already know from watching the TV version. As for the song, it is printed in full, in a standard publishing approach of italicised, centre-justified text blocks interrupting where appropriate the prose describing the action. No other explanation is given as to why the Doctor and Ruby are singing, other than the Doctor just wants to join in. The next novelisation is of Space Babies, and as on TV the Christmas story leads directly into the opener of Ncuti Gatwa's first season. In turn, that next book in its early chapters links back with Ruby reflecting on events leading up to her stepping into the TARDIS.

Space Babies has been adapted by Alison Rumfitt; like Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson, an up and coming talent who has not been involved in writing Doctor Who in any format before. Again, the book doesn't take any major liabilities with the plot. There's the odd bit of material included that one suspects was cut from the TV version; one part is the Doctor playing the Sugababes' Push the Button on the TARDIS jukebox, linking in to his repeated use of the phrase "Push the Button" throughout the rest of the story, which otherwise seems to come from nowhere. I'm guessing a rights issue scuppered the song being heard on TV, but clearly no such limitation applies to the written word. Another part is an extended set of fart gags at the end after the Doctor has used the built-up diaper gas to propel the station through space. If this was indeed cut from the original script, then those that like their Doctor Who on the more serious side will be dismayed to see it reinstated here, but I found it perfectly fine. Again, Rumfitt uses third-person limited, but cuts between the POV of characters - Ruby, the Doctor, Jocelyn Sancerre and even baby Eric - more frequently. There's small details of extra backstory slipped in there, Jocelyn craves doughnuts in isolation, even though she never particularly cared for them before, and reads the crew's non-confidential files for something to do, as there are no books left onboard. One little embellishment Rumfitt allows herself is occasional cutaways to an oblique passage, a mini-ghost story  about finding openness towards the 'other'. I'm not sure I fully understood it, or its relevance to the wider story, but maybe it wasn't intended to be fully understood.

In broadcast order, the next of the novelisations is of 73 Yards written by script editor of Ncuti's first season Scott Handcock. Before that gig, Handcock worked for years at Big Finish. As such, he has most experience of Doctor Who storytelling of any of the authors of this batch. He also has one of the strongest scripts of the year with which to work. Like the authors of the previous two books, he keeps the style simple, managing to capture the intrigue of the original and in places its chills (it isn't possible for the prose to quite match some of the scarier visual moments, but it comes close). His being part of the production team no doubt affords him more leeway than others to invent material. There are fascinating and emotional glimpses into the lives of landlady of the pub Lowri and the regulars, there's an additional sad moment during the sequence where Carla turns against Ruby, there's some asides about how the world has developed politically and ecologically in the years between 2024 and 2086. Handcock confirmed in a Doctor Who Magazine interview when the books were announced that the script for this story had very little cut, so any new stuff is likely invention. This also includes some fan service. There are cameo appearances by a couple of characters from the programme's long and rich history. They're fun, but also fit well within the world of the story that's been established. The ending in prose form is inevitably a bit more spelled out than on TV, but is just as affecting. Given that it was my favourite TV story of the year, it was likely that the book would be my favourite of this batch, and it has indeed turned out that way. The final book, though, the prose retelling of Rogue, gave it a run for its money.

Handcock's book was 20 pages longer than the first two, understandably as the story on TV ran long (it had to eschew its title sequence to fit into its broadcast slot). Rogue is another 40 pages longer again. As the only TV writers adapting their own scripts this time, Kate Herron and Briony Redman had the most leeway to embellish and extend, and they took the opportunity. They also did things in a different style to the other three books. There's more - but not blanket - use of third-person omniscient narration in a Douglas Adams style, including asides and footnotes about various interesting features of the universe. Some of this material is witty, but I feel the tale and the characters are strong enough to tell and sell themselves without these adornments. Where the book is most powerful is in the strong, unfussy passages from the Doctor's or Rogue's POV describing their attraction to one another. A lot of the new material is a prologue and then some later flashbacks to Rogue's bounty hunting past. At this point he is working with partner Art (the authors retain the TV story's mystery of what exactly happened to Art). There's also a sequence that may have been planned then cut for cost or logistical reasons where the Doctor and Rogue hold their breath underwater in a pond in the stately home's grounds, to avoid detection by the Chuldur. This is an excuse for them to emerge with their regency finery clinging to their bodies, a la Colin Firth in the 1990s Pride and Prejudice TV adaptation. There are many chapters told from Emily Beckett's perspective including some of her backstory. Of course, Emily turns out to be a disguised Chuldur, so those chapters - even accepting that the Chuldur have access to all their victims' memories - seemed like a bit of a cheat. Overall, though, it's a good book. All four are worth collecting, but if you only buy one it's a toss-up between 73 Yards and Rogue. 73 Yards just edges it for me. 

In Summary:

Colourful and gay (not that there's anything wrong with that - © Seinfeld).

The Ice Warriors

 

Chapter the 306th, Ice Cold in Ealing (and Lime Grove studio D).

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in a very cold future Earth.  A drastic fall in carbon dioxide has brought catastrophic climate change, a global cooling. The TARDIS team meet Leader Clent and his crew, who run the nearby base that is just one of many around the world that are going to work together using ionisation to defeat the advancing glaciers of a new ice age. They are having trouble with their ioniser as their expert Penley has left to become a scavenger (an underclass that are not participating in the plans to save the world) and is hiding out with friend Stoor nearby. The Doctor is roped in to replace Penley's expertise. One of the base crew brings back to the base what they believe to be archaeological find from the ice. When defrosted, it is revealed to be Varga, an Ice Warrior, who had crashed there thousands of years before. Varga takes Victoria hostage and goes back to where he was found, digging out his spaceship and reviving his crew of Warriors. The Doctor helps to sort out the ioniser, and the base is ready to go. There's just one complication: the Ice Warrior spaceship's power source will be destroyed when the ioniser is used, and could cause an explosion and fallout. Various different parties go to try to rescue Victoria and find out about the ship's power source. Storr is killed by the Warriors when he attempts to ally himself with them. Varga and his warriors attack the base, but the Doctor uses weaponry from their ship to drive them away. With every surviving human including the TARDIS team back at the base, and the glaciers almost upon them, it comes time to choose. Clent cannot bring himself to take the risk, so Penley makes the decision. The explosion of the Ice Warrior ship is small, only destroying the Warriors, who have returned there. The Earth is safe.

Context:

As I've done almost every year for the blog, I took a Doctor Who story away on holiday with me. The family (Me, the Better Half and our three offspring, boys of 18 and 15, girl of 12) went back to Corralejo, which we'd visited a couple of years earlier (see Deeper Thoughts section below and the blog post for Hell Bent for more details). There are so few Doctor who stories left to blog now that it would be difficult to pick something that tied in to the holiday location as in the past. The Romans is still in the 'To Do' pile and it features the main characters having something of a vacation in a villa; there's The Two Doctors too, with its location filming in Spain. These, though, are my final stories left to blog for the first and sixth Doctors respectively; I wasn't sure whether I was ready to deliberately accelerate goodbyes to those old boys yet. So, I left it to chance. The randomiser picked Patrick Troughton story The Ice Warriors, a story so misaligned to viewing in a warm climate that the incongruity tickled me and the choice was made. I downloaded the episodes to my phone using the iplayer app, parts two and three being officially made animations, and watched an episode every other day while away, the final one watched on the flight home. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another season, the 27th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, these are classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13). Though there are a couple of black and white stories still left to blog after this one, The Ice Warriors marks the final story for the blog with any episodes missing from the archives.

First Time Round:

I borrowed a pirated VHS in the early 1990s (probably from David, long time fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog) that had recordings of some, but maybe not all, of the extant episodes (it can't have been many years after they were recovered in 1988) burned with a timecode. I don't know where they'd been sourced from before several generations of copying from tape to tape had led them to me, and I didn't ask. They were anyway of too low quality for me to follow. So, I properly engaged with the story for the first time when it came out as a sell-through VHS release in November 1998, the range's big release for the end of that year. The Ice Warriors was part of a box-set with a documentary and an orphaned episode of another Troughton story; the missing episodes were reconstructed from the audio and still photographs. Later still, I got the DVD with the two episodes replaced by animations; this was in the Summer of 2013. I took those shiny discs on a holiday that year (a couple of years before the start of the blog) and remember that at that time the youngest, still a babe in arms back then, was in the process of being weaned. There were a few four o' clock in the morning stints of rocking my grizzling wee daughter in my arms, accompanied by the episodes, volume low, on the living room TV of the cottage we'd hired in Shanklin, Isle of Wight. The theme music seemed to soothe her.

Reaction:

Briefly starting with the animation, the recreations of missing episodes two and three, married to the off-air soundtracks that still survive, are perfectly good at bridging the gap, covering narrative developments in the middle of the story. The simple style might have struggled to visualise more kinetic or climactic action, but there isn't much of such action in those two parts or, frankly, in the remainder. The visual design of the Warriors is a highlight, and they are equally as effective in cartoon form, a demonstration of the strength and distinctiveness of the costumes of Varga and the other Martians. They're a little bit unwieldy, but that isn't much of a problem as Varga and the other Martians don't do a whole lot, and certainly not much that's kinetic or climactic. They are an interesting complicating factor in the narrative, but most of their activity is just a lot of walking about. Bernard Bresslaw's performance - the breathy, whispered sss-ibilance that laid the foundations for how the creatures would be played forever after - is great, but it would be pretty much as great just vocally. The other performances are also strong, and it would be a bit of a shame to lose the facial expressions and physical touches, but the one thing that most struck me about the story this watch was that it could function perfectly well as an audio play. It is the least animated of any story that has had all or parts animated. There's only three significant locations (and you could probably lose one of them without too much trouble), and the question of how to defeat the nominal forces of antagonism is answered early on (they like it cold, and the base by necessity has a massive heat gun at its disposal).

What moves and develops in the story is instead at the interpersonal level. For this is a bromance tale, a weird semi-professional (but going beyond the bounds of professionalism in places) interaction between Clent, Penley and the Doctor. Penley has spurned Clent, leaving his important role on the base team to go off into the frozen wilderness; the Doctor is the replacement boffin who turns up and takes Penley's place. Ice Warriors and glaciers take second place for most of the running time to this odd platonic love triangle. Aside from Varga and maybe Storr (Penley's new partner, the exact opposite of Clent) none of the other characters has much of a look in. Victoria spends all her time as prisoner of the Ice Warriors, including a whole episode playing hide and seek with one in ice caves; Jamie spends a few episodes knocked out and then lying down; the other base staff are mainly bit parts and/or sonic cannon fodder. Instead, this is mainly a simple tale of who Clent will end up with, mysterious new man the Doctor, or will he tempt Penley back from the arms of the rugged Stoor, into which he was forced by Clent's uncaring robot heart? Yes, I'm taking the piss but only a bit - the plot never gets quite to homoerotic levels, but it does at times veer towards Mills and Boon. Many of the bases depicted in Patrick Troughton's time have brittle bosses in conflict with their underlings, but it's never normally played so emotionally. A clue might be that Peter Barkworth is playing Clent with a pronounced limp. Reportedly, he unsuccessfully tried to persuade the director to let him give Clent a stutter too. This seems to me to be a talented actor making a dull part more interesting. According to multiple lines of dialogue, Clent is supposed to be a robotic drone, but Barkworth just doesn't play him like that.

It may be that some adjustments in rehearsal meant the intended central dramatic question isn't very clearly delineated, but I don't think it can all be blamed on the actors - the script is contradictory in many places. As will be dwelt on a little more in the Deeper Thoughts section below, The Ice Warriors was being broadcast at the same time as the first run of another 1960s telefantasy classic, The Prisoner. Like the central character of that series, Penley has dropped out of a society that he has found to be dehumanising. Both these shows were reflecting fears / hopes in the wider world of 1967 about "dropping out" and there were no doubt some early-adopter hippies in the UK then attempting to create an alternate lifestyle to the rat race. But Penley has dropped out at a time of international crisis, and is neglecting his essential role in combatting that crisis such that the world is put at risk. His motivation for this is sketchy. Sometimes it seems that he's rejecting the computerised nature of the world; but it stretches credibility that he could have grown to become a scientific expert in this society without having used computers extensively, so what's changed recently (apart from the crisis)? In one telling moment elsewhere, he bemoans Clent using "scientists' craniums as stepping stones for his ambitions". So perhaps his reasons for going were more personal. This also muddles up Clent's characterisation some more - can he be both robotic drone and ambitious user of others? In the technologically advanced society as presented, it's hard to rationalise how there would be scavengers like Storr. The threat of societal collapse may have pushed people to abandon society and technology, but Storr is an expert hunter. Has he learned those skills since the ice age, or did he have them before? It seems like the former, but why and how would such skills be learned in the civilisation as presented?

No skills will be enough to keep Penley and Stoor alive anyway: their lifestyle is shown only to be sustainable if they steal supplies from the society they're denouncing (as seen in a couple of occasions in the story) and in a very short period they and everyone else is going to be frozen to death because Penley has abandoned his post. There's separate scenes where the Doctor and Miss Garrett implore him to come back as he's desperately needed, and Penley stubbornly refuses. He's no hero, and Clent's not exactly a villain either: he's someone with an exemplary record, is shown to care about his team (witness his consoling of Arden when the latter is beating himself up about bringing the frozen warrior to the base), is pretty brave in playing for time when the Warriors invade the base, and always has his focus on the important job at hand. When the crunch moment comes, the decision to be made is whether to go against the computer (which doesn't have enough information to give a decisive instruction) and use the ioniser, even though it risks a nuclear explosion. Dramatically, the logical person to make the final decision is Clent: the influence of Penley and the Doctor convince him to trust his instincts above the data, and he takes the risk, the culmination of the plot linking in to decisive character growth for him. This isn't what happens, alas. Instead Clent can't make the decision and Penley steps in. So, Penley is the ultimate protagonist and his journey is to end up working as the ioniser expert of the base, which was exactly where he started; the drop-out has dropped back in and there's no real character growth at all. At least Clent and Penley are reconciled at the end, sharing a few nice words as well as a hug and a kiss (I may have made some of that up).

A few other points of note: the story has a special title sequence for all the episodes, with some interesting music by Dudley Simpson (including vocal performances - eat your heart out, Murray Gold). The TARDIS materialises on its side, for I think the first time ever in the history of the series, and there are a few chuckles had from the regulars extricating themselves from their mobile home (shame that this orientation is forgotten about by the time of the dematerialisation in episode six). The whole running reference to people being shipped off to Africa as if that's the worst fate imaginable is pretty dodgy. Also dodgy is the dialogue at the end of episode one where Jamie leeringly discusses short skirts and attempts to persuade Victoria to wear one (also a minor continuity error as she has already worn a minidress two stories earlier, with comments arising on the length thereof). The ioniser base is not the only workplace with overfamiliar colleagues: Varga seems to spend the whole of one episode chanting Zondal's name. Troughton has some great bits of business with the Doctor using stink bombs against the Warriors, or using a chemical machine to get himself a drink of water. The sets of the icy areas aren't too bad; the movement of the glacier is effectively sold by sound effects and the actors' conviction. One other personal note: the hotel where me and the family stayed had a foam party in the swimming pool during our stay (it's a weekly occurrence apparently). It was fun for the kids particularly, but it had extra resonance for me: what could fit better with the Troughton era story I'd taken with me than the ubiquitous foam machine. It isn't used in The Ice Warriors (it would be in its sequel story The Seeds of Death and many other stories around this time); you can't get away from it!

A foam machine in Fuerteventura

Connectivity:

Both The Ice Warriors and 73 Yards feature snow, and the TARDIS landing in a cold environment with the Doctor wearing a big coat.

Deeper Thoughts:

Back to Life, Back from Gallifrey. We were away in Corralejo, Fuerteventura for 10 days at the start of August 2024; the weather was hot during those days but it was the UK that we'd left behind that seemed to be on fire. As explored in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post for Hell Bent, which I posted after our holiday there two years ago, somewhere in the dunes and volcanic hills of Fuerteventura is the shooting location for Gallifrey as seen at the end of Heaven Sent and for a lot of Hell Bent. Those episodes, and indeed every reference in Who's long history to the Doctor's relationship with his people, align with the - slightly muddled, see Reaction section above - themes of The Ice Warriors about the freedom of the individual versus the compromises of collectivism. By coincidence, such themes were also prevalent in one of the holiday reads I took with me to enjoy poolside, Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. The book is a thoughtful and sometimes breathtaking overview of recent politics as illuminated by the ongoing situation where Klein gets confused with another writer with a not dissimilar background who has covered similar subject matter to her in the past and shares the same first name: Naomi Wolf. This was a manageable inconvenience for many years, but got more and more difficult for Klein as Wolf delved into more and more extreme conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines. This culminated in Wolf being banned from Twitter in summer 2021, around the time that she was opining that vaccinated people's urine and faeces should be separated from the rest of the general sewage system until the impact of the waste on unvaccinated people through drinking water could be ascertained. She's back on the platform now, having been reinstated when it came under new management.

Klein is generally empathetic towards her namesake throughout the book, believing that conspiracy theories are based on a kernel of real, understandable feeling, but with the response to that feeling wildly misdirected. The book brings back to mind a period one could easily forget. The first time we went to Fuerteventura in 2022, less than two years before this latest visit, we needed to bring proof of vaccination status with us, and spot checks were made as passengers disembarked and made their way to passport control. At the time, we didn't see this in any way as a restriction on our freedom, nor as a scheme by some shadowy cabal of world governments and big pharma corporations to monitor us. On the contrary, it seemed like the important latest step of many collective steps, lockdowns and social distancing and masking, that had to be taken to break the virus's hold on individual freedoms. Unfortunately, a vocal minority felt very differently about the vaccine (and lockdowns and social distancing and masking). Klein eruditely sees that a cultish focus on the individual can come from many places. Unexpectedly, the anti-vax conspiracy was bought into not only by the usual rabble-rousing suspects like Steve Bannon but also a good deal of online wellness and workout influencers who had previously seemed apolitical in their content and outlook. The belief in the power of the individual to shape their own health overpowered everything else, and Klein gives examples of such people making some dodgy statements along the lines of letting the weak go to the wall. If there's one thing that demonstrates more than anything else that healthcare must be a collective and universal endeavour it's surely a pandemic. If everything that happened with Covid-19 didn't manage to convey that message, then I worry about the future of the human race.

The Doctor as lone wolf outside of his society?

I can't get too high and mighty about this of course, because my favourite TV programme, Doctor Who, a programme I've spent nearly ten years documenting, championing its politics and philosophy, has at its heart a character who has rejected his own society and become a lone-wolf individualist. The programme was born in the 1960s, and it's a particularly 60s theme, though still lingering in our collective unconscious many decades later. It's not that simple, though, as the Doctor separated himself from the Time Lords because they weren't interventionalist enough. He champions science, so could never be an anti-vaxxer - he's definitely shown as different to the resolutely anti-science character of Storr in The Ice Warriors, so blinded by his hatred of big science that he's driven to attempt to ally himself with forces that have no interest in his wellbeing. Even the 1960s programme The Prisoner (which, as mentioned above, was first being broadcast at exactly the same time as The Ice Warriors) is not all it seems. It appears to be the epitome of individualist cheerleader, with it's central character's repeated cry of "I am not a number, I am a free man", something one can imagine Penley in The Ice Warriors saying; but, in the final Prisoner episodes (broadcast a few weeks after The Ice Warriors had finished) it's shown that the individual, no matter their achievements on their own, cannot necessarily make significant changes outside of society. The protagonist of the programme is literally shown to be his own worst enemy. If even a genre drama like Doctor Who or The Prisoner is complex, then reality is even more so, and it would be wrong to trust anyone - of any political stripe - that says there are easy answers, or even easy problems. The misinformation keeps on coming, though.

The Prisoner

As well as depicting Gallifrey, Fuerteventura was site of some location filming for the two-part story The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion, earlier in the same season, its - slightly muddled, see Reaction section of the Zygon post - theme being immigration-related paranoia leading to stand-offs and violence. This is another topic covered in Doppelganger, and sadly at the end of July and start of August, while me and the fam were unaware enjoying a holiday many hundreds of miles away, it was re-enacted in cities of the UK. There were riots, initially sparked by one terrible act of violence by an individual. It was another case of feelings misdirected that were stirred up or harnessed by other people acting in bad faith (misinformation online connected the wholly unconnected topic of immigration to a terrible tragedy that was not being treated as any kind of terror incident and whose suspected perpetrator was born in the UK). Again, there was the desire for easy answers to problems: it would be less difficult to believe that these were some kind of anti-immigration protest, rather than an excuse to have a racist riot, if it was clear exactly what the protestors wanted: more budget for quicker processing of arrivals on UK shores? More agreements with France for processing centres on their side of the channel? Or a magic barrier around the country that protects a nation state as defined imprecisely in each individual's own prejudiced head? The story didn't end there, though. Hearteningly, for an overseas observer (the news where we were having caught up), the plan for a rolling wave of violence overreached themself, and the wave collided with a wall of counter protest. A much hyped rally in Brighton ended up with four - four! - 'anti-immigration protestors' versus thousands of anti-racist counter protestors. It made me worry just a little less about the future of the human race.

That's still not the end of the story, though. Doppelganger urges a collectivism within class lines, ignoring distractions like race being pitted against race, to fight against the excesses of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. I would like to see such a collectivism exist, and I still have hope (even though sometimes it feels like I'll be waiting until the next ice age).

In Summary:

A cool mess, but not without some good points (though they're buried a bit and might need digging out).