Carnival of Monsters

Chapter The 23rd, roll up, roll up for the monster show...

Plot: 
Three squabbling bureaucrats on a once isolationist planet review the case of the first ever economic migrants who’ve just arrived: a pair of carnival entertainers with a device called a miniscope. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Jo find themselves off course, arriving on what seems like a perfectly normal ship bound for Bombay in 1926. But the passengers and crew are reliving the same few minutes over and over again, including an attack from a prehistoric and anachronistic sea monster. The TARDIS has materialised inside the scope, which is a miniaturised Zoo slash structured reality series, with specimens/housemates including that shipful of humans, a Cyberman, an Ogron, and a colony of Drashigs - fearsome predators who chase the time travellers through the works of the device, causing havoc. The Doctor escapes from the miniscope, goes back to his normal size, returns the scope’s inhabitants to their correct times and places, and – somewhat in passing – quashes the treasonous plans of one of the bureaucrats.

Context: 

Back to random selection: the whole family (me, better half and three kids – boy of 9, boy of 6, girl of 3) sat round and watched the Special Edition Re-visited DVD over two nights, two episodes a night. This was accomplished in an atmosphere of silent appreciative concentration from all. Wow.

First-time round:

A couple of months before Peter Davison’s first series, the producer John Nathan-Turner arranged for a set of archive Doctor Who stories to have a repeat broadcast on BBC2. They went out in an early evening slot, each a four part story stripped across the week, Monday to Thursday. This was The Five Faces of Doctor Who season, the first full season of Doctor Who repeats in the UK ever. It was intended as a reminder to audiences after seven years that someone other than Tom Baker could play The Doctor. One story from each of the Doctors up to Tom, with the only (at the time) multi-Doctor adventure, The Three Doctors, thrown in for good measure. Tom's finale Logopolis rounded off the season; it ended with him turning into Peter Davison to lead in to Davison’s debut, which was broadcast a few weeks later after Christmas.

Starved of adequate TV (more on that to come), I stumbled across this season just after it had got underway and found myself watching a black-and-white adventure show about cavemen. I couldn’t have known it then, but this was the first ever Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child, midway through episode 3. I tuned in the next day, and the next week, and thereafter I was hooked. Carnival of Monsters was the third offering, so was only the second complete story I ever watched, and the first in colour.

Reaction:
There’s a theory that Doctor Who, the supposedly ever-changing format, will never be as good or as ‘right’ as when you first watch. ‘Your’ Doctor will always be better than the next one when he or she comes along. ‘My’ Doctor was the first five chaps (more on that to come), so I’ve never really had a problem with change; but, I may have excess love for stories like Carnival of Monsters, as they were the first ones I ever saw. As such, when I was rewatching this time, I was trying my hardest to step away from that residual nostalgia and review it cold. But that extended silence that met its airing, from my usually noisy and distracted family, is a very good indicator. It’s brilliant.

Most of the brilliance comes courtesy of the writer, Robert Holmes. This is presumably the story Producer Barry Letts had particularly in mind when he said that Holmes was good enough to be doing serious TV plays of the week as well as genre television: a high concept piece with a hard kernel of seriousness under its playful day-glo exterior. Despite its meta claim that it is “simply to amuse, nothing serious, nothing political”, Carnival of Monsters shares themes with more famously metaphorical The Curse of Peladon, inspired by - still relevant now - issues of the UK joining up with a supranational community: isolation / strength versus compromise / unity. Whereas the Peladon stories were pretty heavy-handed, Holmes uses this theme for character motivation and world creation, sketching it in with only a few deft strokes.

The script is rich with wit and depth, and replete with fully-formed characters. Letts also deserves kudos for this; it’s maybe his best direction of actors for Who. One can feel the sheer rehearsal glowing off the screen: Vorg and Shirna click and spark like a double act; Kalik, Orum and Pletrac feel like they’ve been bickering for years of unseen backstory. At the climax, when the SS Bernice’s crew and passengers collapse as the scope dies, it is affecting in a way that transcends any tatty décor or wonky visual effect.

The regulars are well served too; Pertwee is at his least uncharming here, and Jo is clever and resourceful. Maybe this is the feeling of the show breathing clean air again; after years being cooped up on Earth, this is their first voyage of freedom into the unknown. There’s a lovely look of disappointment from the Doctor in the final episode when he realises that even after getting control of the TARDIS back, he still can’t steer it, and has ended up not on Metebelis 3, but planet Vote Leave instead. 

Connectivity: 

Both Heaven Sent and Carnival of Monsters place the Doctor into an enclosed environment where events repeat in a cycle.

Deeper Thoughts:  
New Faces, Old Faces. When I was a young boy, I peered through a crack in the door of my parents’ bedroom one evening, to see a frightful sight that was to terrify me for some time to come. At that moment, I didn’t fully know what I’d seen but I later worked out what it was: Nightmare of Eden episode 3.

The theme tune freaked me out, and as if that wasn’t enough a little miniature tin horse was rolling around spitting out fire and killing people; I ran off after only a minute, thinking I’d never watch this scary programme ever again. As well as I can calculate, that was the first Doctor Who I ever saw. After that, I caught the odd glimpse before switching over to ITV – bits of Full Circle and The Keeper of Traken in Tom’s final series, for example – but by the final months of 1981, that was all.

On the 4th November 1981, I was at my maternal grandparents’ house, just round the corner from our place in Durrington-on-Sea, West Sussex. I was nine years old, the same age as my eldest boy is now. We’d always go round with Mum to Nana and Grandad’s for tea after school. Dad worked in London so wasn’t ever back until what seemed like the middle of the night, but probably was around the time that I get home now from my daily commute (pause for a pang of existential angst while Circle of Life from The Lion King plays in my head).

You can picture what kind of boy I was in those days, and you’d probably picture right: I collected stamps, organised school football tournaments rather than play in them, and tracked the results of cup matches on a chart rather than watch the games. I didn’t get glasses or a school briefcase until much later, but they were there in spirit. And I was obsessed with television. I watched a lot, memorised schedules, read Look-In; my sister still calls me Mike Teavee.

One of the reasons for the attraction of the medium was scarcity. With only three channels and no satellite, cable, VCRs, PVRs, computers or tablets, the good shows were like diamonds, and there was an ever present danger that one would run out of things to watch. Kids telly on BBC1 went on until about half five. The programme after John Craven’s Newsround was usually decent – it would have been something like Screen Test or Jigsaw in 1981, great shows – but that was your lot. After that, it was a lull filled with dull things for grown-ups before the sit-coms and game shows started later. It always felt half an hour too early to finish with the good stuff. News at six, fair enough, but half-five should be for fun. (I clearly wasn’t the only one who thought this – later in the 80s, the slot would be filled with funner things like Fax, Go For It, Masterteam, and eventually, and for a long time after, it was the evening Neighbours slot).

Desperate for something to watch, and banished to the spare room and its portable set, while the adults watched Nationwide in the living room, I flipped channels and found the aforementioned caveman adventure. It had started before I switched on, vaulting me over the issue of the theme tune. I don’t even know if I realised it was Doctor Who immediately – at that time, I was always finding enjoyable old monochrome films nestling in the schedules, including examples of Saturday morning film series, like The Batman or Buck Rogers, which were the inspiration for Doctor Who’s episodic structure. If I took it as one of those at first, it would explain how I came to be rapidly hooked on something which a couple of years previously had scared me witless. Or maybe scared and hooked are not so different.

John Nathan-Turner could have gone a different way; arguably, he should have. Only a year on from taking over as producer – when he’d made many, many efforts to make the show seem new - he was now trotting out a load of repeats that accentuated its heritage, maybe hastening the eventual perception in some quarters that it was an old show past its prime. Had he held his nerve, I might have missed Doctor Who altogether. Yes, I may have caught the next series on weekday evenings, while waiting for those sit-coms and game shows to come on. But then again, I would have missed the first episode of Davison because of cubs, so maybe starting with episode two would not have seemed worth it. The TARDIS would have sailed on past me and off into infinity.

It’s no exaggeration to state that the rest of my life would have been very different.  But, seeing as I’ve enjoyed it, more or less, I’ll have to say a thank you to Carnival of Monsters and the four other stories, and here’s to producers not keeping their nerve. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

In Summary:

Devices showing moving pictures of monsters could very well change your life.

Heaven Sent

Chapter The 22nd, which goes round in ever increasing circles.

Plot: 
Consumed by grief and guilt after the death of Clara, the Doctor is forcibly transmatted into an eerie clockwork castle, where he is stalked by a creature from his nightmares. He can gain brief respite if he confesses things that will annoy online fanboys, but he runs out of those quickly, and realises he's going to have to spill about the 'hybrid'. He doesn't want to do this, because it's been clear for weeks that no one gives a toss who or what the hybrid is, so anyone that's gone to this much trouble to find out about it must be completely insane and dangerous. Instead, he strives to elude the nightmare creature and follow clues to find room 12. When he finally does find the room, it contains the exit, helpfully positioned behind a thick wall of pure space diamond. The Doctor escapes by punching the wall for four and a half billion years, while dying and - arggh! While dying and recreating himself - arggh! While dying and recreating himself, over and over and over again.

Context: 

This is another story not randomly chosen. For the - gosh! – nearly a year I’ve been doing the blog, I’ve only now had to deal with a Doctor Who box-set arriving and disrupting the flow. Yes, the latest series came out on Blu-ray recently, and naturally I received it immediately on release date after a pre-order. So, in the last few weeks, rather than skipping, fleet of foot, across the decades from story to random story, I’ve had to plod along the slow path of 2015’s ninth series.

I still had to inject some variation. Though not a set of stories I found unenjoyable, it did lack a certain spark - except for one story. It didn’t help that the music that underscores every Blu-ray menu is taken from the climactic sequence of the best episode of the year; but, even without that cue, I wouldn’t have watched many episodes in order before I cracked and jumped ahead and watched Heaven Sent. That I ended up watching it four times with different members of my family, is testament to how good it is. Additionally, I think I’ve watched that last sequence (“and the shepherd’s boy says…”) a few more times in isolation. It deserves and rewards multiple looks as a bravura piece of editing. Plus, even on a rewatch, it achieves a level of pure excitement that is rarely matched in the show; it’s up there with the last 15 minutes of Utopia, all of Androzani episode 4, and the bit in The Curse of Fenric where Ace sees her gran off safely to London just before the incidental music goes all Italian House piano.

Afterwards, my youngest two children (boy of 6, girl of 3) and I played ‘The Veil’. One of us would start talking about a mountain of pure diamond that takes an hour to walk around, while another would creep up behind with hands outstretched, claw like, grab the speaker’s head and ‘zap’ them. Great fun.

First-time round:

I’d heard that this one was going to be special, so stayed up and watched the recording late on the Saturday night of broadcast. Then, I watched it again with the kids on Sunday morning. And finally, we persuaded Mum (who’d given up on the series around the Zygon two-parter) to come and watch it too. Then, I watched it again on my own just before Hell Bent’s broadcast.

I’m seeing a pattern here: I do realise that the episode is all about endless repetition, so my adding another level of repetition by watching it again and again is somewhat apt. Anyway, I’m not sick of it yet.

Reaction:
One feels Tom Baker would have loved to have a crack at something like this, back in his day. He only got an outing without a companion as an experiment after moaning about having to share the limelight; but imagine the production meeting, imagine the smile on his face: Tom, we want it just to be you, no other characters, and you’re talking to yourself for 50 minutes.

In fact, the idea is so strong, it makes one want to see every actor who’s ever played the part have a crack at a one-man show. For now, though, it is Mister Capaldi in the limelight, and he delivers in spades. It’s like you’re watching someone who’s been practising being Doctor Who by themselves for their whole life. And in many real ways, you are. He gets a ton of gifts from the script as an actor, going through defiance, bravado, dread, fear, panic, relief… and that’s just in the first five minutes. The finest moment of his performance for me is the heartbreaking moment of reluctance and weariness as the Doctor fully realises his predicament “Why can’t I just lose?”. And in a beautiful bit of Moffat puzzle-box plotting, it makes sense first time you watch, but has even more impact second time around when you realise exactly what the Doctor has to do to win.

There are criticisms one could make with the logic, but they’re mostly ‘refrigerator moments‘ (things that only trouble the mind after watching, when one goes to the fridge for a snack). The entire premise is based on the rooms of the castle reverting to their original state when the Doctor first arrives, except for the stuff that doesn’t, like the painting. And the spade and the dry clothes must be reverting to their position on his second visit at the earliest. There’s also something that doesn’t feel quite right about the Doctor being trapped in his confession dial but also able to see recognisable stars from a real vantage point in the universe. All this doesn’t matter, though, as the story is operating on a metaphorical level. Moffat himself believes it's representative of the Doctor working his way through his grief, but it seems more fundamental even than that. It's a perfect visual and lyrical metaphor for life: every day we're born anew, punch a wall of futility, and die again, only to get up the next day and do it all once more.

Connectivity: 

Both contain threats that are at least partially mechanical, both see the Doctor trapped in a physical space locked off from the normal universe.

Deeper Thoughts:  
Retrospective. Watching series nine again from the vantage point of now, all Doctor Who fans can feel lucky. Even those, like me, who found the year mostly disappointing compared to Capaldi's first, don't need to worry. Whatever happened on screen in 2015, something probably unique in the history of the show took place: a commitment has now been made that Doctor Who will still be on TV in three years time. Has that ever happened before?

Ok, so the first of those three years will only have one episode broadcast, but still we've never had it so good. As the announcement mainly focused on Chris Chibnall taking over as showrunner, though, the fanfare and celebrations got a bit lost. News of the gap year too, seemed to fly out under everyone's radar: if it had happened in the 1980s, there would have been a distressing protest song written.

So, series nine can be viewed in context as just another year that Doctor Who passed through in its ongoing adventure in time and space. Not a lot of it worked for me 100%, and the show struggled to find as large a UK audience as it's reliably found in previous years (though it still performed well compared to other drama). Maybe the focus on two-parters was one of the reasons for that: not enough variety of stories or locations. If the idea was to allow more room for complex stories to breathe, I'm not sure it worked. They just felt longer. It was galling, for example, when watching the deleted scenes, to see how wonderful some of the character moments were that ended up on the cutting room floor, such as Clara and the Doctor talking about Danny Pink in The Girl Who Died, or the Doctor apologising to Prentis for what's to come in the underwater base one. (If you haven't seen these, I recommend getting hold of the DVD or Blu-ray, as there's lots of material from many episodes, and all worth a look.)

The season as a whole felt more inward looking and geeky than normal. A big reveal of the series trailer assumed that its audience would also be Game of Thrones viewers, and would be excited that Maisie Williams appeared - I'm not, and I wasn't. The big reveal of the series assumed that its audience would know that the gleaming spires in the big bubble were Gallifrey, and know why this was a big deal. I knew it was Gallifrey, but I was underwhelmed - the planet was better off lost.

Perhaps everything would have zinged a bit more with a different companion to shake up the dynamic. Jenna Coleman stayed too long, I think. Mind you, Last Christmas, which was also on the Blu-ray, would have been a bit too bleak had it ended with an aged Clara saying goodbye to the Doctor. As it was, apart from Heaven Sent, it and The Husbands of River Song were probably my favourites of the set; hooray for the Christmas specials. Just as well, as - grumble, grumble - that's all we're getting in 2016 (twelve months is too long to wait, bring back the Doctor, don't hesitate, etc. etc.).

In Summary:

Heaven Sent is like an expensive wristwatch: beautiful, precise clockwork. The season either side of it meanwhile is dull as strap.

Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel

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

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

Context: 

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

First-time round:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Connectivity: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

Mission to the Unknown

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

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

Context: 

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

First-time round:

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

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

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

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

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

Connectivity: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

Missing Mission.

State of Decay

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

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

Context: 

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

First-time round:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connectivity: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

The Doctor's Wife

Chapter The Eighteenth, the Doctor versus the Pathetic Fallacy.

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

Context: 

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

First-time round:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deeper Thoughts:   

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

 

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

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

Context: 

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

First-time round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Summary:

Firsts among a sequel.