The Savages

Chapter The 153rd, which captures the essence of Doctor Who, quite liderally, mate.

Plot:

The Doctor, Steven and Dodo arrive on a planet inhabited by a technologically advanced race, who are so superior they even know of the Doctor and have been tracking his adventures in time and space. They haven't been paying that much attention, though, as they should have realised the venerable time traveller would not look kindly on the dark secret of their society. Their skills and knowledge are bought at a price, and involve exploitation of an underclass, the so-called savages who live in the wilderness outside their city. Soldiers from the city capture savages to have their life essence drained from them, which is then injected into members of the elite populace. Steven and Dodo team up with the savages, while the Doctor is forced into the extraction process. His life force is injected into the lead elder of the city, Jano. He gets more than he bargained for, absorbing aspects of the Doctor's personality as well as his energy. With this new outlook, Jano helps the TARDIS team and the savages to smash the extraction equipment. Looking towards an uncertain future, and needing a neutral arbiter to help heal the divisions in their society, the combined populace of the planet ask Steven to stay on to lead them. Dodo and the Doctor bid him a sad farewell.

Context:

I'd decided to have a brief break from the blog, but it then occurred to me that - what with one thing or another - regular readers (Hi Mum!) may just believe I was unwell or worse. I am happy to report that this is not the case; myself and all the family are all still feeling well and showing no symptoms of the dreaded virus, on day 30+ of our lockdown experience. The break was instead because I was 'Whoed out' - I am still working my way through the recent Sylvester McCoy Blu-ray boxset (only have the final one of three separate versions of The Curse of Fenric to watch and then I'm done), and the three-disc The Faceless Ones animation. As well as that, I've watched with other fans on the internet for some - but by no means all, they're coming thick and fast - of the online tweet-a-longs of Doctor Who stories. All of them to date, though, have been for stories I have already covered for the blog. So, to prove I was still alive, I had to have another story to write about. It was a gift to get this one selected by the randomiser; it being one that is missing from the BBC's archives in visual form, I had to listen to it  - the version from the CD with narration from Peter Purves - which was a nice change of pace. 

First time round:

The stories that I first experienced in audio form never left as much of an impression as those I could see as well as hear. I have no strong memories of the first time I listened to The Savages, but I know that it was from the official BBC audio release, but it would have been November 2002 when it first came out, or shortly afterwards. Most likely I would have bought it in the Borders bookshop on the corner of the Churchill Square shopping mall in central Brighton, and listened to it on my discman once I got back home. Seems like a different age now, 2002. A decade or so after that, I saw the 'telesnaps' - offscreen photographs taken to record the production - published in a Doctor Who Magazine special, in picture book style. I remember The Savages being one story that I read in that format while also listening to the audio. Don't know why I chose it for that particular treatment, as I didn't make a habit of digesting missing stories in that way - my guess is that it was because I had no memory of the plot at all from first time round, so it seemed like the most fresh and interesting of the stories covered in that volume. Certainly, a key aspect of the story is visual: the difference between the riches of the elders, and the rags of those that they prey upon. This doesn't really land when all you get are the voices. 

Reaction:

This story is from a brief run that constitute the cusp between two very different eras of Doctor Who. It originated in the more thoughtful, ideas-led, and less action-adventure oriented era of the producer / script editor team of John Wiles and Donald Tosh, but was finally commissioned and made in the brasher, more crowd-pleasing and definitely more successful reign of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. The production bears hallmarks of both teams. There is no monster, and the story forms a simple parable with historical and political themes about colonialism (the working title was The White Savages). Conversely, the story is kept simple, avoids too much speechifying, and progresses through the action sequences of chases and ray gun fights, culminating in the explosive destruction of the extraction laboratory. The new regime imprints itself in other ways too. This is the first story since the start of Doctor Who which dispenses with the individual episode titles - another decisive step towards the evolution of the show from being an adventure (singular) in time and space, visiting different places, times and genres every week, to being the series of multi-part big, scientifically informed monster shows into which Lloyd and Davis will eventually refashion it. The following story would see this evolution almost complete: The War Machines would bring in the ideas of the show's new scientific adviser Kit Pedler, and introduce more contemporary settings and companions.

As a necessity of that adjustment of the companion characters, this story features the first of Innes Lloyd's many abrupt writing out of regulars. It's not for another couple of years, with the departure of Debbie Watling as Victoria, that a cast change is properly integrated into the story and a beloved character gets a proper send off. Steven Taylor, one of my favourite companions on any era, perfectly played by Peter Purves, stays on to rule the planet at the end. He does at least get to do some action and heroics through the piece, and gets to lead, showing he's matured (though Purves always joked that Steven would turn out to be a tyrant after a little time had passed). But the ending still all seems to come out of nowhere in the last five minutes of the final episode. It's unfortunate that there are probably a couple of stories earlier in his time that would have been much better as swansongs, both because of the events of the stories themselves and because he was centre stage throughout to ease pressure on an ailing William Hartnell. In The Savages, though, it's all about the Doctor.

This is another subtle evolution of the show. In the second year of Doctor Who, the character of the Doctor had become more the hero, having started as a darker somewhat untrustworthy mentor character who assisted and sometimes complicated things for the true hero of season 1, Ian Chesterton. By the time of The Savages, this has developed so the Doctor is verging on turning from hero to superhero. In The Celestial Toymaker, two stories previously, we've seen the show's first super-villain, and for the first ever time found out from reported action of a previous tussle the Doctor has had with that super-villain we've not before been privy to, building up the mythical status of the Doctor's wanderings. He is fast becoming the righter of cosmic wrongs that he would continue to be ever after. This story goes a couple better. For a start, the elders are aware of the Doctor and awaiting his arrival like some expectant fan group ready for a personal appearance and autograph signing. Then later it makes a plot point of the Doctor's heroic character, giving Jano actor Freddie Jaeger a chance to do his best William Hartnell impression, showing that even just the idea of the Doctor can be as powerful as the Doctor himself - the show is eating its own aesthetic. It just about gets away with it here, but comes very close to self-parody.

Aside from these innovations and changes in the wider scheme of things, the story itself is pretty simple. It plays out in linear fashion with nary even a subplot. There's only the very sketchy star-crossed lovers scenes, where Nanina shows the soldier Exorse that her people are more than they seem, and he gradually comes round to her way of thinking. There's a hint of attraction, albeit downplayed almost to the point that you'd miss it, but I don't think it's enough to qualify as a romantic subplot. Aside from those brief distractions, what you have here is a straightforward tale, a through-line developing the fairly obvious set-up to its logical conclusion. Oddly, though, it never drags. The concept is just intriguing enough, and there are heroics and zap gun fights sufficient to nicely speed along the running time to its conclusion.

Connectivity: 

Both this story and Hide feature a misapprehension that characters are savage, when they are no such thing.

Deeper Thoughts:

But who are the real savages, eh, eh? Eh?!!!!! As noted above, The Savages is usually interpreted as a treatise on colonialism. This presumably means that the savages are supposed to be the native race on the (unnamed) planet, and the elders have come from elsewhere  - probably another planet rather than another continent - at some point, and taken over. This isn't spelled out, though. There's no dialogue about the elders coming from somewhere else, and there's none of the usual trappings of sci-fi colonial analogies, which Who did many, many times over the years. Jano and Co. should definitely be living in their original Mayflower-esque pioneer spaceship, if this story were to follow the template set by subsequent tales of a similar type in Doctor Who's long history. It's hard to tell from the surviving photos, but it looks very much like there's been some make-up applied to the city dwelling characters, which serves if not to black them up completely, to suggest a difference in skin tone between them and the savages outside the city. Even though they dropped the word 'White' from working title The White Savages, this still feels a little on the nose. Not as bad as the Star Trek episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (which has different races of characters with different halves of their faces daubed in charcoal or icing white greasepaint) but not far off.


Nobody in the usual Who commentariat seems troubled by this; certainly, it is remarked upon much less than The Talons of Weng Chiang's problematical make-up job. I don't think this is forgiven because of any right-on themes of the story, mind, I just think it's because the moving pictures are now lost to history, so no one knows about it. Even I'm not 100% sure looking at the small smudgey slides that remain available. It would be interesting to see what the reaction would be, if the film were ever to be found. As it is operating mostly in sound only, it means the themes can be more all-encompassing, though. The Savages doesn't have to have a purely racial subtext. As the story of an elite that rely for their wealth, status and leisure on a shunned underclass, who are marginalised even though they are vital, The Savages is a perfect analogy for capitalism itself.

A light has been shone on this recently by the impacts of Covid-19 lockdowns throughout the Western world; the National Health Service is being rightly praised in my country for its essential role in managing the Coronavirus cases, just as healthcare professionals are in every country. Beyond those heroes, though, there are groups of other workers who we now realise, if we didn't before, are indispensable and irreplaceable. And guess what? They're pretty much all groups we have denigrated, underfunded and zero-contracted before now: hospital cleaners, refuse collectors, shop workers, delivery drivers, care workers, to name just a few. My day job is less important than any of them. I know my place. I'm lucky enough that I can still work full-time remotely, as can many others. We do so, though, only because of the efforts of this important support network. The rest of us are not exactly as callous and parasitic as Jano and the elders, but it does strike me that we need to remember when all this is over how important these people were to our continued existence, and make some changes in how society rewards them.

Another sad fact brought to light by current events is that this virus is not the great leveller of romantic imagination. It has a disproportionate impact on the economically marginalised. Not only do those that society hasn't previously valued comprise a large number of the heroes of Covid-19. they also comprise a large number of the victims. And sadly, because of the bent shape of our society, that means it is falling harder upon black and minority ethnic people. The economical and racial are closely interlinked, which means The Savages works as a parable on all levels. Let's hope when all of this is over, we can learn to live and work together better; but who will be the great global leader, the "Steven Taylor" of this crisis? I don't see anyone shaping up to the role at the moment, but time will tell.

In Summary:

A straightforward morality tale with zap gun fights, and none the worse for that.

Hide

Chapter The 152nd, where people stay inside a house while something a bit scary's going on.

Plot:

The Doctor brings Clara to a stately home, Caliban House, in 1974, where a former WW2 special operative Professor Alec Palmer and an empath Emma Grayling are doing experiments trying to contact a ghost that's historically recorded as haunting the site. With help from the Doctor, they discover that the ghost is a pioneer time traveller called HIla Tacorian, stuck in a pocket universe, echoing into our world. Also inhabiting the house is a scary monster thing, but there are for some reason no records of this creature relating to the site or the house, even though it looks nothing like the ghost of a woman, and it scuttles about in the open, and even holds hands with people; nobody's thought to mention it before. Harnessing Emma's psychic powers, and using a blue crystal from Metebe-lis 3 (twin planet with the similar but presumably different as it's pronounced differently Mete-be-lis 3 that Jon Pertwee visited), the Doctor goes through a portal into the pocket universe and saves Hila, sending her back through, but gets stuck in there himself. He is being stalked by another similar creature, but the TARDIS comes to save him. Once back in Caliban House, the Doctor realises that Hila is Palmer and Grayling's great, great, great, great, great granddaughter, or thereabouts, which is why there was such an empathetic link between Emma and her (and presumably also explains why Palmer was drawn to investigate the house too, or else that's a massive coincidence). The Doctor also realises that the two creatures are not dangerous, they are mates, separated, and he asks Emma one more favour, to open the portal again, so that he can reunite them.

Context:

During what I guess will be the early adjustment phase of the Coronavirus lockdown, but I hope like hell is the middle or towards the end of it (I can hope, can't I?), I was alone of an evening as all the family had gone to bed, and watched this story from the series 7 box-set Blu-ray. I'd waited for this sort of opportunity to watch it unaccompanied. It's not a story I revisit regularly; but, from what I remembered when the random number generator picked it as the next story to watch, it was a bit scary for the littler of my little ones. Having now watched it, I think I was overcautious and it would have been okay. No chance of a re-watch with the kids, though. Right now, they are in the middle of enjoying the (colour) animated version of The Faceless Ones, watching an episode every couple of days; so, I doubt they will be watching this story any time soon. So much for the idea that the lockdown would allow more time for catching up with new things; I seem to still be ploughing through the same build up of discs and books and watch-lists that I ever was (more on this later). 

First time round:

Would have been watched on the day of its original broadcast on BBC1 in early 2013, probably slightly time-shifted to allow for putting the kids to bed. I remember not being blown away, but it being generally okay. That was my default mode for the whole of the 2013 mini-season. This is one of only a handful of stories from the David Tennant and Matt Smith eras that the Better Half and I judged too frightening for our children to watch; the others were Blink, Midnight, Night Terrors, and The Waters of Mars, the last of which they have seen since. There's no hurry to show them this story or Night Terrors (no offence to either of them) but imagine how it's going to be when Midnight and Blink come up for the blog, and my children finally get to see them for the first time.

Reaction:

The role of the Doctor is in many ways a dull and thankless one for an actor. There's obviously some fun that can be had performing - play-acting - as the hero, but that can only get one so far. Like James Bond and maybe a few other showy roles, the Doctor doesn't change. Every week is the same, there's never going to be the interest of a plot where the Doctor is, say, bitter for the loss of his early promise as a scientist, or humiliated in a dead end teaching job, or shocked by a cancer diagnosis, or starting a double life cooking meth in an RV. Bryan Cranston as Walter White (in Breaking Bad) famously got to change by small degrees "from Mr. Chips to Scarface" and each gradual change on the way was a moment of drama that was interesting to play. Matt Smith as the Doctor saves the universe, every week, week on week. You can sometimes tell the moment the lead actor gets bored of trying to find different ways of saving the universe, and I think Hide is where this happens to Matt Smith. The performance displays a lack of discipline to me, particularly in the comedy, but even the tense moments don't really work. When Smith is doing lines like "Come on then big boy, chase me" or "You old romeo, you" or even "I am the Doctor and I am afraid", I don't believe him.

Aside from those occasional overripe lines of dialogue, there isn't really much wrong with Neil Cross's script. It's a contained chiller, making the most of a small cast, and it has some interesting surprises and reversals. It's another in the many, many examples in Doctor Who's history of "Nigel Kneale called and he wants his plot back" syndrome; it's set-up, tone and some plot details are shamelessly paying homage to / ripping off The Stone Tape and The Road. It's none the worse for that, though, and if one had to discount any Doctor Who that borrowed a bit liberally from Kneale, there wouldn't be many good ones left. There are definitely some plot points left frustratingly unexplained - how long has "the crooked man" creature been in our universe, for example? If nobody - not even Palmer who has bought the house and is thoroughly investigating the place - has noticed it, it can't have been a long time, so it is a big coincidence that it is only in view once the Doctor has arrived. I'm also uneasy about the TARDIS acting autonomously to save the Doctor, as she does in this story; if that can happen this week, what's to stop it happening every week? But these are fridge moments, as Alfred Hitchcock had it, they only bother you when you've finished watching and have gone to get a snack.

I suspect that the issue is with the direction, or parts of it at least. Jamie Payne manages to achieve atmospheric scary scenes creeping round the empty house, with ghostly things happening just behind our heroes, and lightning flashes and other jump scares: that's all great. There's also some reasonable visuals, particularly in the sequence where the Doctor travels through the history of Earth taking pictures of the ghost. The performances, though, are not quite there; it's clear that Payne wasn't strict enough to rein in Smith's excesses, but that's not the major issue. If "this isn't a ghost story - it's a love story" as the Doctor has it in the script, then it's the love story moments that let the side down. Dougray Scott and Jessica Raine, playing the mutually lovelorn pair, are both very good actors, and the script hits all the right notes, but there's no chemistry between them. The scenes of their gradual realisation of the romance that's been under their noses the whole time are stiff and a bit dry. When Raine as Emma is connected to the Doctor's lash-up, and it's causing her pain and torment to keep the link open to another world, we're supposed to feel worried for her, but we just don't know enough about her to feel anything.

It doesn't help that both the actors aren't the right ages for their roles. Based on Dougray Scott's age (and he looks pretty good for a 48 year old in Hide) Palmer would have been 19 when the Second World War ended; it stretches credulity that he would have got to the rank of Major, or been in a significant role within the SOE (or whatever fictional equivalent is presented in the narrative); even the cover story of his spending "most of the war in a POW camp" isn't believable, unless he lied about his age and enlisted very, very young. My guess is that Jessica Raine was cast first, also too young, and a younger actor had to be cast as the Professor to avoid the distraction of an age gap (but replacing it with the distraction of everyone like me doing hurried mental arithmetic as they watched instead). Jenna Coleman as Clara isn't very well served either, which given that there's only two other main cast members to give lines to, seems a shame. There's not much of her arc plot as the "impossible girl" this time; just some scenes where the TARDIS takes a dislike to her (was this ever adequately explained?), and the ulterior motive the Doctor had for visiting Caliban House in the first place (he wanted the famous empathetic psychic to secretly scan his friend for clues, which is slightly creepy). Ultimately this is a perfectly serviceable script, which has a few flaws, and is not held together sufficiently by the direction, so further flaws creep in - it's not bad, it's just a bit juiceless.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature experimental time travellers from the future travelling back to a historical period, and being mistaken for something they're not (a god in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, a ghost in Hide). By the time of Hide's production, the 1970s (the decade when Talons was made) has become a period setting.

Deeper Thoughts:

Coronavirus and hiding from the sun. At the time of writing, everyone in the UK (and many other  countries around the world) is on lockdown, staying in their homes to stay safe, and to slow the spread of Covid-19, the Coronavirus. No social events, no going to the pub, no visiting friends or family; no sporting fixtures, no concerts, no meetups; no restaurants, cinemas or theatres open. Everyone has to stay inside and amuse themselves with whatever they can receive or stream on their devices. Three things occur immediately. First, I marvel at how lucky we are to have even these limited options; if this pandemic had happened back when I was the age of two out of three of my children now, I would have had only three TV channels and whatever books were in the house. I'd have gone mad in a week. Even if it was when I was the age of my eldest child, it would only have granted me an extra TV channel. I didn't yet have a video player, let alone any kind of tape collection. As it is, in 2020, I can find and watch pretty much any TV show or film I care to see, by hook or by crook; this includes new releases, and even theatre. I feel for those who are sports fans, instead of pallid geeks like what I am. Second thought: lots of commentators are saying how this emergency could be a golden opportunity for everyone to catch up on all those books and films they haven't had time for. I assume these commentators must go out a lot, but I'm a pallid geek with three young children: the amount of extra time I'm getting back is not a significant proportion, and my read- and watch lists are ever growing. But that brings me to my final and more positive point: I'm a pallid geek, I'll never run out of stuff to entertain me - I've been training for this lockdown my whole life!

If you are looking for ideas, there have already been a few Doctor Who mass watch-a-longs, with more planned: The Day of The Doctor on Saturday 21st March, and Rose, on the 26th at 7pm - the 15th anniversary (to the minute) of its original broadcast. This allows a communal experience, with fans (and some of those involved in making the programmes) syncing up the story, pressing play, and then hitting social media with comments to share each moment. I enjoyed both. The latest one, still in the future at time of writing, is Vincent and the Doctor, with a lot of the cast and crew joining in - I will pass it up, though, as these events are all about positivity, and I don't rate the story highly, but what do I know. If you're looking for something less communal, more just for you, then the history of Doctor Who throws up plenty of thematic material. If one wants to put together a 'virus playlist', then there are lots of contenders. Terry Nation particularly loves wiping out humanity with a micro-organism, or at least threatening to, in such stories as The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Planet of the Daleks, Death to the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks, The Android Invasion, and probably a few others I've forgotten about.

It wasn't just a predilection of Nation either; other Doctor Who plague parables by many different writers include The Ark, The Seeds of Death (sort of), Doctor Who and The Silurians, The Visitation, The Curse of Fenric. In Tom Baker space opera The Invisible Enemy, they actually have someone playing a virus (it looks more like a prawn when it comes down to it). You could add cyber stories The Moonbase and Revenge of the Cybermen to the list too, as they both feature an infection that affects more and more people cooped up together, but it turns out both are cases of surreptitious poisoning. Other stories that might resonate at the moment are in the "trapped inside, going a bit stir crazy" sub-genre, which would include many of the so-called 'base under siege' stories that have been popular in many eras of Doctor Who, plus three other notable examples: Kinda, Heaven Sent and Gridlock. The last of these shows a community were every person or family group is trapped inside a box going nowhere, while the environment outside is liable to kill them, but they communicate to one another remotely and still have hope.  Of course, if all these feel a bit too close to home and you just want some escapism, then your playlist can be all the other episodes of Doctor Who, every last one, it's all good. Testing times will continue, but be thankful for good things, and embrace your pallid geekiness - we'll get through this!

In Summary:

Hide's a bit dry.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang

Chapter The 151st, where Britain's Got Talons.

Plot:

The Doctor and Leela visit late-Victorian era London to see a Music Hall show, and by a million-to-one coincidence the theatre they choose is the centre of an intrigue involving a magician, a criminal gang, and a time travel experiment from the 51st century. Magnus Greel, the infamous Butcher of Brisbane, a war criminal from the future, uses a prototype time cabinet, and ends up in 1800s China, horribly altered by the process. He's taken in and looked after by young peasant Li H'sen Chang, to whom Greel appears as a god, Weng-Chiang. Soldiers confiscate the cabinet, which is taken for a Chinese puzzle box, and it ends up in the family of police pathologist Professor Litefoot, given to his father, a former palace attaché, as a parting gift from the Emporer. Greel, travelling with a group of assassins from a politico-criminal organisation called the Tong of the Black Scorpion, searches for the cabinet, and the search brings him to London. Chang accompanies him, performing at the Palace Theatre as a magician, presumably as some sort of elaborate cover, so he can set Greel up in a secret lair beneath the theatre's basement (actually, though, it seems that he likes the performing more than the crime, and who can blame him?). Greel has given Chang enhanced mental powers - which Chang uses to do conjuring tricks - and a vicious 51st century robot, the Peking Homunculus - which Chang, erm, uses as a ventriloquist's dummy. He loves the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd.

Chang is abducting young girls in the area for Greel, so that his master can extract their life essence for himself, to temporarily subdue the ravages the time experiment has done to his body. When the husband of one of the girls connects her disappearance to Chang, the Tong gang members and the Homonculus, known as Mr. Sin, attack and kill him. Stumbling upon this on their way to the theatre, the Doctor and Leela become embroiled. They investigate with help from Litefoot, and the owner of the theatre, Jago. They nearly come a cropper from an encounter with giant rats in the sewers under London, remnants of Greel's experimentation; then, they lose the Time Cabinet when Greel and his followers steal it from Litefoot's house. Luckily, one of the gang leaves behind the cabinet's key, which the Doctor uses as a bargaining chip. Things reach a climax at the House of the Dragon, where the Doctor, Leela, Jago and Litefoot battle against Greel, and win, bringing the 51st Century's dangerous time experiment to an end.

Context:

Saturday 14th March 2020, a BFI screening (see below for more details) took place in the midst of a pandemic. I am a BFI member, and a few weeks earlier had booked three tickets for myself and two fan friends (David and Alan, who I've attended many of these BFI events with, and mentioned many times on the blog before) to see Talons on the big screen with improved CGI rat. Also with tickets, booked separately, were other friends Chris, Dave and Tim, who we also usually meet up with at these things. As the date got closer, all of us were wondering whether it would go ahead, and whether we should attend even if it did. I am generally predisposed to do the opposite of what the current UK Prime Minister advises, and he was saying everything was fine; but, I also felt honour bound to go, as the tickets needed to be picked up from the box office by the card holder who purchased them, and that was going to be tricky for the other two, if I wasn't there and they still decided to go.

In the end, Alan and Chris decided it was best to stay home, and Trevor (another fan friend who I've attended these events with, and mentioned many times on the blog) took Alan's ticket. I packed my tissues and hand sanitiser, and travelled up to London on the morning of the screening. The train was empty enough that I had a metre between me and anyone else for most of the journey, and the weather was nice enough that I could walk rather than take the tube; I was still, though, nervous that I'd done the wrong thing. Three days later, the BFI closed indefinitely, and everyone was told to stay home unless they could possibly avoid it, so it was definitely my last social night out for a while; luckily, it was a good one. Writing this, only a few days later, stuck inside and preparing to home school the kids (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7), it seems like a whole lifetime ago.

First time round:

This is one of only two stories on VHS that I ever received as a Christmas present (the other one being The Five Doctors Special Edition, which came up recently on the blog). It came out on VHS in late 1988, and I remember being completely surprised to receive it that Christmas from my Dad. I hadn't asked him to get it, and it must have been sheer luck that I hadn't bought it myself before that (although this was back in the early VHS era when distribution was patchy, so I may not have seen it in any shops by then). Looking at genome for 25th December 1988 brings back a lot of memories. I remember watching the Top of the Pops Christmas special live before lunch (the Pet Shop Boys, who I had recently become mad keen on, did two numbers) and Back to the Future was the big BBC1 afternoon film premiere, with some terribly clumsy dubbing to eliminate swearing. Then, later in the evening, I alas set the video for Silverado, presumably thinking it would be a laugh riot, starring as it did two of the main cast of recent cinema smash A Fish Called Wanda, John Cleese and Kevin Kline (I have tried a couple of times since with Silverado, and just don't get it). So, probably, I watched my new precious thing sometime between, when the TV and video weren't otherwise occupied, sometime between 5 and 9 pm on Christmas Day 1988. I was blown away from first watch: the richness of the staging, and the period trappings, all seemed apt for the festive season.

Some things I wouldn't have seen that Christmas were nunchucks. A shot or two featuring these in the fight scene in episode 1 were excised because the BBFC were very against nunchucks at the time. And I say episode 1, but what I really mean is the first 22 minutes, as Talons - like all the presentations on VHS of the time - was one stitched together omnibus version. I finally got to see it in full in 2003 when the DVD release came out. One other thing that was significant about this first watch is embarrassing to admit: I did not realise that the actor playing Li H'sen Chang wasn't Chinese. The character is played by a white actor, John Bennett, 'yellowed up'. It is the most infamously dodgy casting decision in Doctor Who's history, and it completely passed me by. I was old enough that you'd have thought I'd have been a little more savvy, but no. It only gradually occurred to my cloth-head over many re-watches: it's uncomfortable to admit, but it's a very good make-up job, and a good performance. Viewed on a small screen at home in VHS tape quality, it convinced. None of this, of course, makes it right, and I cringe at my younger self for being such a dolt. I can't, though, pretend to feel any hurt or offence, even though I completely understand and empathise with those who do. It would almost feel like appropriation for me to feel offence on behalf of anyone or any group of people. I'm just trying to be honest, and place this story in a personal context.

Reaction:

This is a story the many fans, me included, do feel an overwhelming urge to position in an appropriate context; they seek most of all for Talons not to be misunderstood, and this can look like we're making excuses. I will try to find the right balance here, and I most definitely am not seeking to offend. The major issue for contemporary analysis is that Talons is so very good - it's well made and delivers a superlative example of the achievement of Doctor Who's aims of the time (which were not to engage in any sociological discourse, but just to produce exciting adventure stories without much of a budget). I don't think this can be in any doubt - almost every aspect of the production is of a high quality by any objective measure, and I'll pick out some of my favourite bits anon. It is consistently popular, being a top ten story in all three of the official Doctor Who Magazine polls run to cover all the broadcast stories to date in 1998, 2009 and 2014. But The Talons of Weng-Chiang has two flaws, and they're biggies. First, the realisation of the monster, a giant rat, was overambitious for what could realistically be achieved, and the finished article is cuddly, which makes any attempt at dramatic scenes involving it seem comical. And second - it's racist.

I'm not seeking to equate the two in any way, but fans' reactions to those two flaws (one frivolous, one serious) is very similar: they ignore them, and mentally edit them out, as limitations that the production team couldn't quite manage to lift up to the same level as the material surrounding them. Obviously, we Doctor Who fans are used to ignoring naff bits of our programme and concentrating on the positive, but the pressure here is greater because the story is otherwise so great. If it was truly rubbish (and I wouldn't put any broadcast Doctor Who in the truly rubbish category), people wouldn't still be watching it after all this time, so a sort of natural selection would remove it from any debate. Even the worst Doctor Who story has more entertainment value to offer contemporary audiences than any episode of, say, The Black and White Minstrel Show. Talons is still being released, this latest time on Blu-ray, and still being shown - as it was at the BFI - to audiences. The temptation is there to make that editing out more than just a mental exercise. The version of the story shown at the screening had a CGI replacement for the cuddly rat. Crucially, on the box set this is only an optional extra, and doesn't replace the original. One day the technology might exist to replace John Bennett with an East Asian actor, and I'd like to see that version. But if one were to make that the default, erasing the history, then one would become even more of an apologist for the flaws, pretending that they didn't happen at all. This is my logic for saying that we have to grapple with Talons in its original form, deal with it head-on: we can't forget it, we can't change it.

So, to deal head-on with the statement that I so casually made two paragraphs above: is The Talons of Weng-Chiang racist? [Laurence Fox alert: white man is just about to define what's racist and what isn't; please understand that he is aware that this is a definition only for him, and others may disagree.] I think the answer is: yes, but not perhaps in the way many people think. There are unquestioningly racist lines in the story; this was even more obvious when watching at the BFI with an audience where some of them caused an audible discomfort in the room, albeit very briefly. Most of these can be seen as a realistic depiction of the mores of the Victorian era, but then Leela has a line where she describes Li H'sen Chang as "the yellow one". She's an Earth colonist from the far future with no knowledge of Earth or its history; there is no way by observation that she would refer to him that way: East Asian skin is not yellow, any more than mine is white, these are socio-political constructions. The Doctor doesn't criticise or correct any instances like this in the story, even when he's accused of believing all Chinese people look the same; it might have made it more acceptable if he had, but that's not in keeping for this Doctor; this is Tom Baker at his most mordant, brooding and alien.

The aspects more generally picked up on are of course John Bennett's 'yellowing up', plus that Talons presents all the Chinese characters as simplistic bad guys, a crude and monolithic expression of Chinese culture in a negative way. I sympathise with these interpretations, but I don't agree. For more details, I have previously written on this subject in the Deeper Thoughts section of The Keys of Marinus blog post, but in summary: Bennett's performance is probably a bad decision, but it's not racist - dressing up as other people is what actors do. They do this to please audiences, and if, as has happened in the years since the story's original broadcast, things change in the wider world, and it becomes clearer that this upsets or annoys a section of the audience, it doesn't get done anymore. Any moral argument about whether performances should or should not upset or annoy is so thorny, it's best to ignore that and follow the money. Changes in the wider world are instigated by activists leading the good fight, no doubt, but they only gain traction where there's risk that audiences will be lost; any perceived moral good is probably a side effect. Maybe this seems callous, but that's showbusiness. Once one accepts the kind of make-up and performance done here was a standard practice that has subsequently stopped being standard, then the other criticism falls away too. Whoever plays him, Li H'sen Chang is the best character in the piece, and he's a Chinese character - most of the nuance regarding the presentation of Chinese characters and culture in Talons comes from his story - he's clever, layered, full of subtle contradictions. That he is a bad guy is neither here nor there - it's a gift of a part, and the number one role in the guest cast that anyone would want to play.

Beyond Chang, every role is performed perfectly, and every character feels like they have a life of their own outside the narrative (Jago and Litefoot indeed had their own spin-off audio series that lasted many, many years), Robert Holmes' script has great examples of world building, fleshing out the day-to-day business of the Palace Theatre, Litefoot's family's previous life in China, Chang's life before Magnus Greel crashed in, the world of time agents and wars in the 51st century. Even the smallest roles - Patsy Smart chewing the scenery as a Docklands hag, Conrad Asquith as the Peeler that had a sneaky drink on duty - have their place to shine, fitting perfectly into the wider proceedings. The regulars are at their absolute best here too, Tom is at the height of his powers, making it look effortless, bringing in a lot of wit with some lines that are surely his rehearsal ad-libs, but never risking sending things up as he would in later years. Louise Jameson is peerless, probably the best actor ever to play a companion, and lifts every scene she's in to even higher heights. The script has such rich language (with Jago's polysyllabic alliterations a particular pleasure), and synthesises it's many influences - Sherlock Holmes, Sax Rohmer, Jack the Ripper, Phantom of the Opera, many many more - in such a clever way, that it all feels like one coherent whole rather than a set of riffs. Dudley Simpson's score is one of his best, and his band of players surpass themselves in its performance (Dudley gets to cameo as the theatre's conductor too). Great production design, great direction, and - rat excepted - good effects work too.

The new version does subtle improvements to some effects (like Chang's mesmer vision and the House of the Dragon's laser battle), but the new version of the rat is the main attraction. It's much better, but it's still not perfect. In a couple of shots, it looks like it has human hands. The requirements of the script are clearly still a big ask, even with today's technology, and the animator Niel Bushnell has done the best job possible. This watch did prompt a few other flaws to come to my mind: the story lasts 2 extra episodes just because of the coincidence of a character forgetting to pick up a bag when vacating the theatre; that could have been reworked to be a deliberate complication caused by one of the heroic characters. Why does Greel not use the life essence of young men as well as women? When he's in hiding, it's possible he felt women were less likely to be missed in Victorian London, but when he's about to leave he could dispense with that, and process a couple of young Tongs if he needs a snack. Chang makes a big deal of not being able to read the Doctor's mind to work out who this mystery person is, but why doesn't he just read Leela's mind to get details about the Doctor? It just goes to show nothing is without its little flaws, even things with a couple of other massive flaws. One other criticism, which could be levelled at any story in this particular era, is that there is no depth: Talons has no message or subtext, it exists simply to entertain. It's ironic therefore that a couple of points about its production mean that it has encouraged more serious debate than any other Doctor Who story ever made.

Connectivity: 

Both this story and Mummy on the Orient Express see the Doctor and the one female companion he's accompanied by have a bit of a night out, going to the theatre or on a posh train journey; they also get to dress up, with the Doctor not in his usual togs for the time, and the companion getting a nice period frock to wear. Both stories have a scene where a female singer entertains an audience with a diegetic performance (Foxes and 'The Sheffield Song Thrush"). There are allusions to vampirism in both stories.

Deeper Thoughts:

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy 

Palace Theatre Playbill: BFI Talons screening 14th March. Coronavirus worries, for very good reasons, sadly depleted the line-up for the day. Producer Philip Hinchcliffe and Christopher Benjamin, who played Jago, were due to appear, but had to send their apologies. The panel that was intended to kick off proceedings on the representation of ethnicity in archive TV had to be cancelled as people could not attend. Instead, our usual hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy had a conversation on this theme at the start, and quoted statements from a couple of those who were due to be on the panel. Johnson, who was in particularly funny form (though the discussion was treated seriously) pointed out the irony of it ending up as two middle-aged white men tackling the subject. The points discussed covered much the same ground as I did above. Emma Fo felt that it was problematic and hard for her to watch, with clichéd representations involving triads and Kung Fu moves dehumanising these characters, avoiding the need to explore them. Matthew Sweet added some context about Robert Holmes's influences: Sax Rohmer, writer of the Fu Manchu stories, had apparently said that he'd made a lot of money out of China without ever learning anything about it. Sweet also believed that the racist comments used in Talons were historically accurate, and the Doctor's aloofness was in character. Dick stated that the BFI should never be an apologist, but should be a contextualiser: Talons was made nearly 45 years ago, and it was the norm then - with only a few dissenting voices - for white actors to play non-white characters. It was only the next decade afterwards that the idea that it was wrong gained traction. Dick was also keen to point out that despite this, it still does happen occasionally to this day.

(L to R) Fiddy, Bushnell

Once the usual quiz was completed, the first three episodes were shown. After that, Dick spoke briefly to Neil Bushnell, the animator of the new CGI seen in the episodes. He had worked on a lot of the DVDs and Blu-rays, tidying up special effects and doing on screen graphics. He was keen to rise the challenge of replacing the rat as it is "One of the worst effects in Doctor Who and the whole of entertainment". The process is always a balance, and involves negotiation with the box set producer, with spreadsheets kept of all the possible shots that could be replaced. Some of his favourite work is subtle, material he'd be happier if people weren't consciously aware had changed. One shot he's particularly proud of was adding a London Skyline to a scene in an early episode of the Doctor and Litefoot in a boat on the river (and I didn't spot anything out of place when those shots had come up on the big screen earlier, so he's done his job well, and I'll be keen to have a closer look at that when the Blu-ray box set comes out in early May).

The final three episodes were then shown, followed by a selection of extracts from the special features planned for the box set. Then, Louise Jameson came out for a Q&A with Justin, and she really impressed. In general, she came over as self-effacing, but incredibly on the ball with detailed knowledge of every aspect of which she was asked - she even tried to give a reasoned response to a slightly unfair audience question late on asking for an explanation of the lack of East Asian actors in the whole of Doctor Who's history. A lot of performers I've seen talk about how much they enjoy doing Doctor Who audios for Big Finish, but I've never seen someone when asked about them give the titles and authors of her favourite ones. But then, I don't think anyone I've seen on the BFI stage before has created an original range of dramas for Big Finish, as Louise has done with the ATA girls audios. Early questions talked about her career before Who, and later questions touched on later work, and what she's going to be seen in next, and it's clear that she's very busy and always in demand.

(L to R) Jameson, Johnson

One topic that kept recurring was her stepping into the companion role after Liz Sladen left, and so feeling a bit in the shadow of Sarah Jane Smith. She told the story of getting delivered a bag of Liz's fan mail by mistake "which of course I read", and it all said how the correspondents missed Liz so much. There was such modesty on display by Louise in this regard, that one of the audience questioners made a point of telling her that she was every bit as loved as Liz, which got a big round of applause in the room. Louise also touched on the oft told tension between her and Tom Baker when they made the show together (they're better pals now, Louise telling of how he regularly emails her, always signing off as 'Old Tom') and she put a lot of the problems down to her not being able to replace Liz, at least in Tom's eyes. Tom always managed to hit her "crumple zones", and would have preferred the Doctor to be travelling on his own, or "with a [talking] cabbage". Some of this antipathy made it through into the performance, with Baker hardly ever making eye contact. Someone once edited together all the times the Doctor tells Leela to "Ssh" during their time, and "it's enough to fill an episode". None of this, though, ever made Louise stop respecting him as a charismatic actor. He was someone, she said (like John Hurt who she'd worked with on a TV play) who could instantly be sensed entering a room, and all eyes would be drawn to him.

She also shared some details of those early days after having taken over in the companion role. The make up session to apply her fake tan took one and a half hours, and was applied exhaustively to "some very personal areas". She had to wear red contact lenses to make her blue eyes seem brown, which she hated, and which made everything she looked at have a sepia tint. News of her casting leaked, so she had to do a 16 hour working day at one point as the press launch was handled at the same time as she was in studio for a full day. The flap on the back of her costume, covering her derriere, was added at her insistence. On her first shooting day, she kept a pink dressing gown on during camera rehearsals for as long as possible, delaying the point she'd have to reveal her scantily clad new image. When she finally had to shed her outer garb, the lighting man said leeringly "I don't mind lighting that for the next six months". Interestingly, though, Louise was fine going back to the savage skins look after having different costumes for a couple of stories, including The Talons of Weng-Chiang, saying "Part of the impact is the image", and though the Victorian frock was nice as a one-off, "I'm not much of a fan of corsets".

I don't think the Q&A lasted longer than any others, but because of Louise's vast intelligence and attention to detail it covered too much for me to include it all here. Also touched on was the #Metoo movement, and Louise's slow, gathering understanding over her career that she had a voice and could speak up; working with Jago and Litefoot actors Christopher Benjamin and the late Trevor Baxter (like working with two 7 year old boys); her reluctance to write an autobiography for fear of upsetting her children ("You'd have to leave out all the good bits"); the growing confidence of fandom, and how Doctor Who has pretty much single-handedly made geeks fashionable; handing over to Mary Tamm, who she knew well ("Only two questions - how much were you paid, and what's Tom like?"), and filming 11 takes on the scene in Talons of the Doctor and Leela climbing into the sewer, only for the final one having to be overdubbed as a small boy watching had encouragingly shouted "Go to it Doctor!" at the end.  Once it was over, David, Trevor and I had a few drinks together in the BFI bar (we're all still okay a week later, thank goodness, and we're not going out again, I promise). On the way home, Louise Jameson retweeted my message about attending the event, which made me love her even more, and I didn't think that possible.  No disrespect to Liz Sladen, but Leela was the best (except maybe for my absolute fave Caroline John as Liz Shaw, but Louise Jameson - who spoke admiringly of Caroline that day too - might not be too bothered on that point). 

In Summary:

Come for the entertainment, stay for the discussions on ethnic representation in TV. This theatrical marvel keeps on giving, and gets my personal top billing.

Mummy on the Orient Express

Chapter The 150th, in which various people are gone in 66 seconds.

Plot:

Clara has got the hump with the Doctor after he's acted callous one too many times, and is going to stop travelling with him. As a last hurrah, he takes her to the Orient Express in Space. Enjoyably - for him - it turns out that this is no pleasure trip. Most of the crew and passengers are holograms, and onboard computer Gus has brought most of the rest - all experts in their fields - together deliberately to investigate the Foretold, an ancient creature of fearful repute, who has the appearance of a bandaged Mummy straight out of a Universal horror movie. The Foretold can only be seen by his next victim, and once seen will kill that person exactly 66 seconds later. Gus provides one carriage fitted out as a lab to allow the creature to be studied, and will kill the other passengers and crew if they stop work. It wants the assembled to capture the creature so that its technology can be reverse-engineered; Clara and one of the passengers, Maisie, discover a hi-tech containment unit - which looks like a sarcophagus - in one carriage, for this purpose.

Using the data gleaned from victims as they are picked off, and helped by chief engineer Perkins, the Doctor discovers that the Foretold is attacking not at random but going for the most vulnerable, physically and mentally, first. He works out that the next victim will be Maisie, because of mental trauma, and gets Clara to lie to her to get her to the lab. He uses some tech to fool the Foretold into thinking he has Maisie's symptoms and in 66 seconds works out that the Foretold is actually the remains of a cyber-enhanced soldier, who can't stop killing until his long forgotten war officially ends, so the Doctor says "We surrender", and that stops the creature, who collapses into a pile of rags. Gus doesn't want any survivors, so tries to kill everyone, but the Doctor gets them away in the TARDIS before the space train explodes. Clara decides to continue travelling with the Doctor, understanding that he sometimes has to lie and be callous for the greater good.

Context:

Another one with all the family (Better Half and three children - boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7); we watched this, from the Blu-ray series boxset, on the first Sunday evening without a new broadcast Jodie Whittaker episode, to plug that gap. Everyone enjoyed it (the boys maybe enjoyed it more - or more visibly, at least - than Jodie's recent offerings). The youngest of the children was a little scared in places, but stayed with it. 

First time round:

We'd fallen into a pattern by the time of Doctor Who's regular broadcasts in 2014, where the Better Half and I would watch the latest episode time-shifted on the Saturday evening of broadcast and gauge it for suitability for the children. If it was not too scary, I'd watch it again with them the following day. That particular year was pretty intense, with a high proportion of stories felt to be too much, particularly for the younger ones. The very next story, Flatline, by the same author Jamie Mathieson, was one which only the eldest child was allowed to see at the time. Why we thought Mummy on the Orient Express was more acceptable is hard to quantify; it essentially comes down to an instinct. Immediately that the show starts, the threat is made plain to be something a long distance from anything they would encounter in real life, and genre is a kind of hard protective carapace for the young minds watching, I think. Compare this to Flatline where the danger is real and close-to-home: graffiti and the patterns you get in a suburban living room wall. As I remember, everyone enjoyed the Mummy story at the time; the younger two have still not seen Flatline, though. 

Reaction:

Speed is the key word for this story. Whether it emerged from the story-lining process, or writer or showrunner came up with the title first, the setting of the Orient Express, even a space-bound version, inevitably turns this from a pure horror tale to a genre splice with a disaster movie in miniature. There are consistent aspects of a standard disaster movie scenario: a group of different passengers expecting a luxurious pleasure jaunt instead are thrown into chaos that they must survive. A mismatched group battles through, but not all of them will make it, and the audience is left guessing as to which ones will die. The key thing, normally, though, is that disaster movies take time to play out: the suspense is ratcheted up by having a long period where everything seems fine, with hints about the oncoming tragedy but tension about exactly when it will strike. Then, the period of survivors battling through needs to be fairly gruelling, and there needs to be mystery about who will and won't make it through. The only other time that Doctor Who had previously tackled a disaster movie in a serious way was the Christmas special with added Kylie, Voyaged of the Damned, and that was more than 70 minutes long. Mummy of the Orient Express has to wrap things up in 45 minutes. 

Mummy hits every trope, but in a super condensed timeframe. The 66 second duration for the Foretold to kill each victim is a genius stroke therefore; as well as keeping everything moving at a fair lick, it's also a great gimmick - turning on its head the usual tradition that Mummies are slow and lumbering: this one is guaranteed to get you in just over a minute. The onscreen clock ticking is a nice touch to bring this home, and it allows for periodic bursts of frenetic excitement interspersed with the rest of the action. In the end, the implicit - and latterly explicit - promise of the script is realised as the Doctor is the one to face the antagonist, and manages in a minute to do his usual cleverness at top speed, working out and diffusing the threat, and throwing in a joke and a cheeky continuity reference ("Are you my mummy?" - they presumably couldn't resist) for good measure. Capaldi is excellent in that sequence, as he is throughout the episode, playing the early grumpy version of his Doctor. He's supported admirably by Jenna Coleman and Samuel Anderson, who are really nailing the relationships in their regular roles. 

The guest characters are impeccably cast; again, this is required because of the brevity. It's obviously going to be broadbrush, but this is still pretty much in keeping with the disaster movie genre; if you want a frighteningly severe old lady, who better than Janet Henfrey (she played one many times in Dennis Potter's works, and once before in Doctor Who too); Daisy Beaumont is every bit the anxious put-upon younger female carer, Christopher Villiers is impeccably suave and intellectual; John Sessions' vocal work is perfect for the bumptious Gus. David Bamber, who is always great in everything, manages to deliver shade and contradiction in only a handful of lines. When he answers an earlier rhetorical question of the Doctor's of how many people would need to die before he finds his backbone, saying "It turns out it's three", it's a lovely line, and nicely delivered. Again, the heightened final 66 seconds of the characters as each faces the Foretold gives extra opportunity for everyone to shine. Frank Skinner's performance is an interesting one. It's very... I can't find the words for it. It lacks nuance, but is still enjoyable. Sometimes, one can look and see a performer who's just very happy to be there, which jars a bit (one never ever loses sight of Frank Skinner in the character of Perkins). But Perkins is a character who seems to be having enormous fun working with the Doctor (as Skinner is working with Capaldi) so it works.

Every aspect of the production is perfect, which raises this up to be something special: sets, graphics, effects work. The costumes and decor are exquisite, and getting a pop star (Foxes) in to play a chanteuse and sing a lounge version of a Queen song adds to the opulence. They really pushed the boat out. The Foretold is one of the most amazing looking monsters the show has ever produced, too, for my money, and just as impressive as the similarly excellent designs for Mummies when they appeared against Tom Baker. The score is one of the best of this period, with the bombastic bit of Murray Gold's Capaldi Doctor theme kicking in as the Doctor confronts the Foretold (the first time I really became aware of it, as it had been more subtle in the mix in stories before this, at least to my ears) and the twinkly bit accompanying the aftermath. Even cramming all of that in, the story still finds room to keep the ongoing series arc going, with Clara finding new perspective on the Doctor's methods, lying to Danny and continuing her adventuring with the Doctor in secret. Combining a clever feat of writing and a richly staged production, this is one of the very best of this era, and well up there for the whole of Doctor Who too.

Connectivity: 

Mummy on the Orient Express is another story, like The Moonbase, which features an ensemble cast of characters stuck in a place without means of escape; in both stories these people are being attacked by cybernetic killers. The Doctor clashes with an authority figure, before eventually winning them round, and an antagonist opens up the secure base to the vacuum of space at one point in each story.

Deeper Thoughts:

Finale and Finality. I hope enough time has passed now to discuss the ramifications of the latest series of Doctor Who's final episode, The Timeless Children. If you haven't seen it yet, proceed no further as there will be spoilers. Mummy on the Orient Express was a story that, lest we forget, covered the aftermath of revelations that the moon was a big space-dragon egg in the sky, so Doctor Who has most definitely done audacity before, but perhaps not ever on the scale witnessed in The Timeless Children. So, to summarise then, partly to make sure I've got it straight in my head, we now have a filled-in backstory of how the Time Lords became able to regenerate, which also changes everything we knew, and the character herself knew, about the Doctor's origins. It centres on a figure from ancient Gallifrey, Tecteun (who we've never ever heard about before, but she is a woman so it's plausible that the patriarchal Time Lord society would have only remembered Omega and Rassilon, the men; I can buy that). Tecteun is a pioneer of space travel, and landing on a world where there is a portal allowing entry from other parts of the universe, she discovers a lone, abandoned child, assumed to have come through the portal from a time and a place unknown. This is the person that eventually we will know as the Doctor, and an accident reveals her ability to regenerate, which Tecteun studies until she can transplant the required genetic material into the elite of Gallifrey, who later become known as Time Lords. The Time Lord regeneration limit of twelve times is imposed on everyone by Tecteun, and doesn't apply to the Doctor.

The grown-up Doctor is recruited into a secret force, the Division, who are permitted to bend the rules about Time Lords' non-interference in other worlds. Nothing on screen states that this isn't a division of the CIA (the Celestial Intervention Agency) which was a similar entity mentioned in the classic series, so I'm going to assume they are one and the same. At some point, things turn sour and the Doctor breaks off with the Division, hiding out as a human after using a chameleon arch. The matrix from this point on is redacted, except for some encrypted scenes put there by Tecteun, potentially for the Doctor to one day find, that show events happening in Ireland (nice little in joke - several times in the classic and new series Gallifrey is assumed to be in Ireland somewhere). From these, it seems that the Division caught up with the Doctor, wiped his/her memory, forced a regeneration that made the Doctor a young (baby?) boy, and he then started life again as just another Time Lord, joined the academy at age eight, met the friend who would one day become the Master, looked into the Untempered Schism, grew up to be William Hartnell, stole a TARDIS, left Gallifrey, etc. etc.

It's rather neat, creates a new mystery about the Doctor, means that she is both normal and special without that being contradictory, and fits in very snugly with existing lore without too many loose ends. The Shobogans, for example, mentioned in passing in The Deadly Assassin, are revealed to be the indigenous Gallfreyan people. The Doctor as a child - seen in Listen - is part of the character's second lifetime, post the mind wipe. During a sequence in The Brain of Morbius, many faces appear that - from the dialogue - appear to be earlier incarnations of the Doctor, but prior to that - and since - it has been unequivocally stated that the William Hartnell incarnation is the first. That little crease has finally been ironed out. The many hints that were dropped in the Sylvester McCoy era that the Doctor was more than just a Time Lord make sense now, but only if we assume that he had some of those pre-Hartnell memories - but there's no reason to suggest that he couldn't have had a partial mental restoration just during that one life. The arch manipulator style of the seventh Doctor isn't much like any of the others, so presumably from Paul McGann onwards it has all gone from his mind again. The character of the 'Other', a third Time Lord pioneer alongside Omega and Rassilon, could be Tecteun, or the Doctor himself, but either way he could have - for that incarnation only - had memories of that time (this also handily explains away why it wasn't picked up on in the show before or since). 

What doesn't work? Biggest issue is that River Song can regenerate, even though she has no genetic material from the Doctor or any other Time Lord to allow this. But, we also have the often mentioned concept of regeneration energy, so it seems that over the years of time travel (which came to the Time Lords after regenerative ability), the time vortex has altered the genetic transfer in such a way that it can be passed on as pure energy, and this was what altered River at the time she was conceived in the TARDIS. It's still just on the right side of plausible. There's the issue that the Ruth Doctor seen in Fugitive of the Judoon has a TARDIS disguised as a police box, when we saw (in The Name of the Doctor) that the Doctor's TARDIS was stolen only when he was in his William Hartnell incarnation, and got stuck as a police box only in the first ever story An Unearthly Child. I like to think that it must be the same TARDIS and - as we know the TARDIS has a telepathic link to the Doctor - the ship made sure that he picked the same one he'd used in his previous life. It's a very old model compared to other Time Lords', which would fit - it might have been top of the range years before when the Doctor was first working for the Division. As to why it was previously shaped like a police box, perhaps it was an appropriate disguise when Ruth and her companion first landed on Earth (we don't know exactly how long they've been there), or perhaps the chameleon circuit was already on the blink. It was halfway through repairs when the Doctor (re-)took it, so worked for Hartnell for a while before falling into an old pattern stored in memory. 

Talking of The Name of The Doctor, that story also features Clara entering the Doctor's timestream,  splintering into lots of different space-time events, but she never encounters any Doctor prior to Hartnell. This is also explainable, though, as she never meets the War Doctor either, as the Doctor somehow blocks it (as he doesn't consider the John Hurt version to be worthy of the title Doctor). It seems sensible that a similar block on his memory of pre-Hartnell incarnations would prevent Clara from interacting with them. Why hasn't the Doctor ever bumped into any of those incarnations before the Ruth Doctor? Well, perhaps she has and not realised it. Or perhaps the Time Lords have set up some kind of time lock (similar to that which prevents anyone travelling back to the Time War) that prevents our Doctor from ever travelling anywhere where she may bump into them. This would fit, as once the Master has destroyed the Time Lords, that time lock is presumably gone, and the Doctor runs into Ruth pretty much immediately. It's also not very clear how much the Time Lords know about the Doctor's history. For the conspiracy to work, it would make sense for only a few people to know, and they may be long gone now. So, when his people bring him back for The Three and The Five Doctors, they aren't aware that there's previous Doctors before Hartnell, and when they gift him another regeneration cycle in The Time of The Doctor, they presumably believe he needs it or else he'll die.

The only other thing that I can think of (though five or six more points may occur to me in the next few days) is how to explain away how the Doctor appears to be half human just for one night in San Francisco in 1999. I doubt that one will ever be rationalised to anyone's satisfaction, so I'll just keep ignoring it like I have been the last 20 odd years! 

In Summary:

Your Mummy should know: this is one of the very best!