The End of the World

 

Chapter The 213th, in which we witness the end of the world. So it's not just a clever name. 

 

Plot:

The Doctor takes Rose on her first TARDIS journey through time to an Earth-orbiting observation station, Platform One, 5 billion years into the future. An elite event for mega-rich space tourists is being held there, to witness the end of the world as the sun expands and destroys the abandoned planet. Many aliens arrive including The Face of Boe, the Moxx of Balhoon, a tree person called Jabe, and the 'last human' Cassandra, who has had so much cosmetic surgery that she's just a flap of skin on a frame, plus a brain in a jar. There is a ceremonial exchange of gifts between the attendees, but some of the gifts exchanged are little four-legged bots that come to life unseen and get into Platform One's circuits, sabotaging them. As Earth death approaches, the shields that protect the platform from the destruction of the sun's expansion fail. This is all the work of Cassandra, who teleports away from the platform leaving everyone else to die so she can reap monetary rewards (she has shares in their competitors companies). Rose is trapped in a room, nearly killed by unfiltered sunlight coming in, but the Doctor saves her. Then, he and Jabe go to the manual shield controls in the engine room, which the Doctor activates just in time, but the heat is too much for Jabe who catches fire and dies. The Doctor reverses Cassandra's teleport, and returns her to Platform One. With the heat, and without her aides to moisturise her, her skin starts to dry out. The Doctor won't step in to help, and watches her die. The Doctor returns Rose to Earth when it's still in one piece, and they have chips.

Context:

The family are just not into Doctor Who at the moment. Two out of the five of us (Better Half and boy aged 15) have not watched any of Flux yet, though the eldest child does plan to at some point. The younger children (boy of 12, girl of 9) watched and enjoyed Flux as it went out, but it hasn't caused any increase in enthusiasm for watching old stories, even those of a 2005 onwards vintage, with their old man. They are still enjoying their weekly episode of The Box of Delights (it's a Christmas tradition to watch this 1984 BBC serial in the run up to Christmas every few years), so it does seem just to be that they're Doctor Who-ed out, rather than against old television in general. Maybe a new Jodie Whittaker festive special with Daleks on January 1st will rekindle things. Anyway, this meant it was me on my own watching the DVD on an evening in December 2021.

First Time Round:

On Saturday 2nd April 2005, the day of The End of the World's debut BBC1 broadcast in the UK, the Better Half and I were visiting friends in New York and New Jersey; we stayed for a week and didn't get back to Blighty until the following Friday. Of course, this was only the second episode of the relaunched Doctor Who, and in those days it had not gathered enough momentum outside of the UK to be shown on BBC America simultaneous to, nor quite frankly even shortly after, being shown at home; the US premiere on the Sci-fi channel was not until the spring of 2006 when in the UK Christopher Eccleston had bowed out and David Tennant taken over as the titular Time Lord. This was before the days of the iplayer too, so I had to rely on the VCR timer that I'd programmed before we flew out to record this exciting new instalment (the first second episode of a new Doctor Who series since 1989). Before we went out for dinner with our friends that Saturday I went online (on my friends' home PC as this was a time before smartphones too) to various fora to check what the initial reaction was, trying not to get too spoilered; but that was the extent of what I could do to satisfy my curiosity until the following weekend. Fairly jetlagged, we came back to our home in Kent (where we lived together for a brief period while the Better Half was teaching in a school in the Medway), and I watched the recording. It was such poor quality (a fuzzy picture due to atmospheric interference) that I couldn't tell that the Doctor shed a single tear when talking to Jabe. Even through the fuzz, the story shone out, and I only had to wait a day for the next instalment.

Reaction:

There had been advance pictures of the Moxx of Balhoon from this story seen before the series started; he even made the cover of Doctor Who Magazine in the month the series returned, as I remember. I saw the significance immediately; as the opening story Rose had used an old monster, the Autons, and the only previous attempt to relaunch the show (the Paul McGann TV Movie in 1996) featured the Master, this was the first new Doctor Who monster / creature for 16 years (since the slightly underwhelming Cheetah people in final 1980s story Survival). When one's watching the episode, though, the Moxx turns out to be just one of dozens of new aliens. There's a catwalk scene, where each one is introduced and makes an entrance: tree people, a big head in a jar, a lady made of skin stretched across a frame, bird people, creatures made of wicker, creatures made of gas masks. This sequence is making a statement, I feel; like the Doctor taking the TARDIS further and further into the future in the first scene to impress Rose, the writer Russell T Davies has clearly decided that being tentative is not required. The previous episode had shop-window dummy creatures, i.e. beings that could just be people dressed up, to allow the audience identification figure Rose to be plausibly skeptical. Now, it's time to bombard her, and the viewer, with how weird this programme can get - it's not going to be gradual, it's going to be very much 'in your face'. The programme is proud of its weirdness, and confident to express this. It's a bold move, and clearly worked as people kept tuning in.

This isn't the only bold moment in the story. There are a couple of uses of diegetic pop music, big signifiers that what we're looking at is something new. Doctor Who's always had weird aliens, but we've never seen the Doctor dad-dancing to Soft Cell before. Even better is the dramatic moment of Rose in peril being underscored by Britney Spears' Toxic, including a sweeping CGI shot of Platform One. It's thrilling. I was thrilled the first time I watched it, and this latest time too. Other new concepts introduced here that would endure are the psychic paper (minimising any wasted moments of the Doctor getting locked up or mistrusted by authority), and - biggest possible stamp of the new - the removal of the Time Lords from Doctor Who's overarching mythology. Of course, it's not just a tidying up exercise, it is used by Davies to drive the Doctor's character and actions, just as the cavalcade of aliens is used to highlight Rose's culture shock. Eccleston and Billy Piper are just so right for these characters and give it their all - every frame they appear in, together or apart, is a joy. The two-shot of their reactions to the increasingly outre aliens and their gifts - more and more shock writ on Rose's face as the Doctor's grin of glee gets wider and wider - is just one wonderful moment. I think you could freeze frame on any scene here and they'd look like heroes (I love, as another example, the late scene where Rose is looking out at the remains of the Earth floating in space, and Eccleston stands far behind across the vast room, framed leaning in the doorway). All the performances are great (Yasmin Bannerman is great as Jabe the tree, flirting with Eccleston, for example).

The story is visually sumptuous. As well as the costume and make-up of the many aliens, there is great effects work, and clever use of locations to create the five-star interiors of Platform One as well as the industrial maintenance tunnels and engine room - it really feels like the characters are interacting in a vast space. Murray Gold's music is just as effective as the pop songs used, with the waltz-time theremin theme for Platform One / Cassandra a favourite. Marshalling both performances and visuals is Euros Lyn, one of the directors consistently asked back during this era, doing his earliest work on the series: he makes every scene fizz with energy. Providing the basis for all of this, though, is a magnificent script. There's such effortless world-building in Cassandra's thrown away references to the "Arctic desert" or "The Los Angeles crevasse". There is also so much wit: "Platform One forbids the use of weapons, teleportation and religion.", "How did you get in? This is a maximum hospitality zone.", Cassandra believing a Wurlitzer is "An i-pod", "Whatever I am, it must be invisible, do you mind?", "Quick word with Micheal Jackson", "What you going to do, moisturise me?", Cassandra's last words: "I'm... too... young!", and many more. Beyond the zingers, though, there are quieter moments of true emotion, like Rose and the Doctor challenging one another, or Rose talking to her Mum on the phone across millennia, or Rose's chat with the plumber Raffalo (a lovely scene that was just added as padding when the episode was running short). Then, there's the coda where the Doctor takes Rose back to the intact Earth of her time. Interestingly, Rose doesn't answer the pertinent question of whether she's happy with the dangers of her new life; she gets distracted by chips. It's a question to which the series will return.

The script is great conceptually too. Cassandra became an instant hit, so it's easy to miss how 'out there' such a character concept was: a flap of shin stretched out on a frame, with masked attendants moisturising her every few minutes? It's pretty bizarre. Zoë Wanamaker gives the character such life and verve, and has such fun with the bitchy dialogue. Just when you think it's all a bit of laugh, though, she says something about being the last pure human, and you realise queasily the fat streak of racism that cuts through her thin, thin self. Davies constantly undercuts at precisely the moment we might be getting too comfortable. The Doctor waxes lyrical about optimism, but also watches stony faced letting a character die in front of him. Eccleston plays the trick a lot, in this story and throughout his brief time as the Doctor, bit it's always enjoyable to watch his happy face (mask?) disappear to be replaced by a cold, hard, focussed look. When the story comes to an end, it's straight in to a trailer with Victorian costumes and theatres and a coach and pair. We've done mad, it seems to say, and now we're going to show you trad. 1860s baby, old school. With two episodes done, 2005 Doctor Who had by that moment won the whole of television. It's no surprise it's still going to this day.

Connectivity: 

Both this story and Logopolis involve characters witnessing the destruction of celestial bodies in space. Both stories involve the villain attempting to engineer a hostage situation by sabotaging technical equipment. Cassandra's plan in The End of the World is more sensible than the Master's in Logopolis, but that's not much of a stretch.

Deeper Thoughts:

Early Christmas Gifts (of Peace in all Good Faith) - Part 1. In blog posts passim, I've tried to explain the mentality of the collector as objectively as I can from my position trapped fully within that madness. Here then is another cautionary tale that sometimes the gift of completionism just keeps giving. This year, I have had rekindled my obsession with collecting the Target novelisations of Doctor Who stories. I'd gone for decades with almost all of these, but it didn't matter to me that the collection was not complete, as there wasn't a novelisation published for every story, so the collection couldn't ever be complete anyway. This was rectified by BBC Books in March of this year, though; the last remaining TV titles (a couple of 80s Daleks stories by Eric Saward, the prose version of Douglas Adams Tom Baker story The Pirate Planet, and an updated version of the TV Movie novelisation) were finally published on the Target imprint alongside some novelisations of stories from post the 2005 relaunch too. I bought these, read them, and reviewed them (see Deeper Thoughts sections of The Pirate Planet and The Awakening for the details and my reviews of that batch), and that was that. Ah, completion! Except, no. That threw the spotlight on the last couple of books that I did not have. These were long out of print and therefore reasonably expensive to obtain, and could be argued to not be Target books as they were released when the publisher Virgin books were adopting a new cover style under their own name. But they did have the Target logo on the inside cover, and they were versions of two TV stories broadcast between 1963 and 1989, when all the other stories of those years were present in my collection.

This internal argument - were these titles part of my overall target (see what I did there) or not - continued at the back of my mind for a while. My resolve weakened after a few months, and I bought, read and reviewed both books (prose adaptations of the two Patrick Troughton Dalek stories, Evil and Power) by August - see Deeper Thoughts of The Sun Makers for more details. So. glorious completion ensued and I was finally satisfied? Again, no. Even as I wrote the review, I was minded of one last novelisation (this time of a radio serial The Paradise of Death starring Jon Pertwee from 1993), and wrote in the blog the following words: "I wonder how long I'll hold out before I crack and buy that too." Up to October 2021 as it turned out, by which time I had bought, read and reviewed that title (see Deeper Thoughts of The Sea Devils). All the novelisations were done now, but you can probably guess where I headed next. There were a few Target books that weren't Doctor Who broadcast story novelisations per se. There were novelisations of unproduced scripts, but I had all those; there were quiz and crossword books, but I had all those too; there was even a travel book (see the Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for more details) that I also already had in my collection. But. There were also three books in a short lived offshoot "The Companions of Doctor Who" that Target published in 1986 and 1987. I didn't have those. Now I do. It seemed neater and tidier to my completionist mindset to finish off my collection before 2021 was out, so I bought second-hand copies of each (they're not nearly as expensive as the Troughton Dalek stories or Paradise of Death, and - let's face it - are much less likely to ever get reprinted either).

The Target novelisations had been a minor publishing phenomenon of the 1970s and 80s, but as that second decade wore on, and less stories were being made for the TV per year, it became obvious that the revenue stream would eventually run dry. A full range of original novels was the obvious replacement, and it would come to pass in 1991 with the Virgin New Adventures, only when the TV show had been put into mothballs indefinitely. In the middle of the 1980s, though, as more of a supplement to the main range, this short run of original novels set in the world of Doctor Who, but not featuring the Doctor, was tried out. The first of these was Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma by Tony Attwood, published in May 1986. I remember flicking through the book in a shop with curiosity when it first came out. I read a part of the introduction by Turlough actor Mark Strickson where he said that any actor would rather play the Doctor than a companion - that stuck in my mind. Back then, though, I decided to save my pennies for Doctor Who books that featured Doctor Who, and did not buy it. Had I done so, I'd have found that it was the longest Target book published up to that point. It was also the first ever original Doctor Who novel (only short stories and novellas had previously been published). As such, it is a definite precursor to the Virgin novels to come. It's also very similar to some examples of that range in that it's convoluted, impenetrable, and - both tonally and in story structure terms - completely unlike Doctor Who.

It gives me no pleasure to say this, but Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma is not only the least enjoyable Doctor Who book I've read, it's a contender for the least enjoyable book I've read ever. The one thing of note that ever cut through about the book as part of the history of Doctor Who is that the main villain was called Rehctaht (i.e. Thatcher backwards, a reference to the UK Prime Minister in 1986, Margaret Thatcher). That might have indicated a playful nature regarding the story, but alas this would be a false impression. The book takes itself very seriously. It's a space opera where Turlough roams to various planets and time zones (he's invented his own time travel mechanism using knowledge cribbed during his time with the Doctor) to investigate a link between his home planet Trion and Earth, which he thinks is due to nefarious activity by a race called the Gardsormr. This is all described using some no doubt thoroughly researched science about gravity and time and nuclear force that just left me cold. Turlough's backstory is fleshed out: he is part of the elite intelligentsia on Trion who engage in study for practical purposes. This doesn't really fit with the Turlough seen on TV, but that's fair enough - this is a different medium. It does mean though that he has dialogue such as "Do me the honour of at least realising that I too have studied a little of ultimate unified theory", and that he realises a key character is not who they say they are because "When I said 'G equals M to the power minus one by L cubed by T to the power of four'" the interloper corrected him and said it was actually T to the power two. (I'm not shitting you, that's an actual plot point and section of dialogue verbatim.) There's also extensive use of slow scientific method painfully described in microscopic detail, when what this reader craved was for something to happen, anything to happen, with some rapidity.

There are no real monsters or villains featured. The Gardsormr turn out not to be monsters at all, but instead are a quirk of time travel, people from the future trying to repair damage done by others (which they do in a long-drawn out way involving breeding and burying creatures to fertilise soil, and this is all revealed agonisingly slowly). The main villain Rehctaht was the person who took over Trion and caused Turlough to be exiled to Earth in the TV series, so she logically has to be out of the way before the start of the story. In the book's one concession to adventure story tropes, Rehctaht returns from appearing to be dead, having been manipulating events secretly before that. This means though that the forces of antagonism are diffuse and seemingly uncoordinated through most of the narrative. Rehctaht is revealed only about 20 pages before the end, the climax of the story, and Turlough kills her without much difficulty. There's then a resolution where Turlough uses his time machine to avert the damage that Rechtaht has done (nuclear explosions on Earth and Trion) that goes on for pages and pages with Turlough creeping about a maze, and being experimented on. Of course, there are no absolutes in writing, so what I really mean is you'd have to be very clever to structure a narrative like that and have it be satisfying, but I'm going to use a shorthand for my position thus: you can't do that! You can't have the climax be easy and swift, then have the post climax resolution long and drawn out. You can't go from the reveal and defeat of the antagonist to long passages where the hero creeps around mysterious corridors. Mysterious corridors are best used earlier in a narrative. It's just another of the terrible pacing problems that the story has from beginning to end.

It doesn't quite end there. The Time Lord that has accompanied Turlough through his adventures, the Magician (yes, really), who I've not mentioned before as he adds nothing to proceedings up to this point apart from gnomic utterances that irritate Turlough (and this reader too), takes Turlough to another timeline where he can live happily ever after with his love interest, who got killed in his prime timeline. I don't think it makes sense by any of the usual rules of time travel stories, but anyway it's a terrible cheat: if one can do that, why bother with any consequences at all? Just hop over to another timeline whenever things get rough. There's other issues too: loose ends and odd asides that make it feel like the text needed more editing before publication, odd choices of POV where events that are happening to one character are recounted or reacted to by other characters who are less close to the action, or less interesting, or both. It almost seems like it's a deliberate act to keep the reader at a distance. When I compare this to The End of the World, another space-set story that might alienate an unwary audience, it just hammers home how good the choices were in the TV show's script to make things immediate and witty, and to make the jeopardy meaningful. I had to start in on the next book, Harry Sullivan's War by Ian Marter, immediately after the Turlough book just to check that they weren't all going to be as bad. Thankfully, based on its first couple of chapters, it's much better, though it does have its own flaws (more about them next time...).

In Summary:

Full of aliens, but not alienating; in fact, it's rather "Fantastic!".

Logopolis

Chapter The 212th, entropy, entropy, they've all got it: entropy!

Plot:

The Doctor plans to fix the TARDIS chameleon circuit, so takes Adric to early 1980s Britain to find one of the last police boxes in service to materialise around and then measure. Unfortunately, the Master is out for revenge / mischief / gain / your guess is as good as mine, and has disguised his TARDIS similarly to the Doctor's and materialised round the real police box first. One TARDIS inside another creates lots of dimensional instability, but this doesn't stop air hostess Tegan Jovanka - who, along with her Aunt Vanessa, has broken down when driving nearby - from entering the TARDISes thinking she can call for help. The Doctor and Adric eventually escape the nested TARDISes, and discover that Aunt Vanessa has been shrunk by the Master's tissue compression eliminator. The Doctor is all up for a crazy plan to flush the Master out of the TARDIS with water from the Thames, when he talks to a mysterious ghostly figure who has been popping up occasionally nearby watching. After the conversation, the Doctor programmes the TARDIS to arrive on the planet Logopolis, home of a bunch of mathematical monks that can create any space/time event out of pure mathematics. The Doctor's going to use all their awesome power just to fix a minor function of his time machine that he hasn't been bothered about not working for years. The mysterious ghostly fellow brings Nyssa, who the Doctor and Adric met on Traken, to Logopolis, her father Tremas having been taken over by the Master. 

Having hitched a ride, the Master takes over Logopolis, stopping the Logopolitans from chanting their mathematical sequences for a while. Unfortunately, their calculations were keeping the universe from dying; in normal circumstances, the universe would have already passed its point of heat death due to entropy. By opening windows - CVEs - into other dimensions (for example into Adric's universe of e-space, which the Doctor's TARDIS had passed through previously), this has been kept at bay. Alas, the Master's tampering means the CVEs are closing, and the universe is unravelling (Traken, for example, is completely destroyed - it's really not Nyssa's day). Logopolis also starts to fall apart, so the Master and the Doctor have to work together to save the universe. The Logopolitans were using a replica of the 20th Century Earth Pharos project (played by Jodrell Bank played by a model) to fire signals into space to keep the CVEs open. The Doctor and the Master travel to the real Pharos project, as do Adric, Tegan, Nyssa and the ghostly fellow - in one or other of their two TARDISes. In the control room at the top of the radio telescope, the two Time Lords fix it up to send the signal to make the CVEs stay open permanently. The Master, though, double crosses the Doctor - he intends to use this set-up to blackmail the peoples of the universe to obey him. The Doctor decides to pull out the cable to prevent this, which he does (presumably after a CVE has been permanently opened, as the universe doesn't end), but after a scuffle, he falls from the top of the telescope. The ghostly watcher figure turns out to have been the Doctor all along (somehow), and he merges with the prone Doctor (somehow) and turns him into TV's Peter Davison.

Context:

When this story came up for the blog, I remembered recently being alerted to the 40th anniversary of the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat season on BBC2 in late 1981 (see the Deeper Thoughts section of a recent blog post for more details - there was also an interesting article about the repeat season in last month's Doctor Who Magazine if you're interested and can get a copy. Logopolis was the final one of the stories shown in that season, stripped across the week Monday to Thursday from November 30th to December 3rd of 1981. In 2021, I only had to hold off for a couple more days to mean I was able to watch each episode stripped across the week, November 30th to December 3rd of 2021, exactly 40 years later (a couple of episodes were watched pretty much to the minute of when they went out all those decades before). It was Tuesday to Friday this time, but you can't have everything. I watched the episodes from the Blu-ray (part of the season 18 box-set) but I watched the as-transmitted version rather than the special edition with improved special effects. Members of the family wandered into the living room occasionally on many of the evenings, but only fleetingly, not staying put.

First Time Round:

Logopolis was probably the only story that both my Dad and my sister (never particularly interested in Doctor Who) watched before I did. I'd caught glimpses of the odd episode in the late 1970s and early 80s, but didn't start watching until that aforementioned repeats season, eight months after Logopolis first aired on BBC1. As such, Tom Baker leaving the role after his unprecedentedly long run didn't mean much to me. I nonetheless got a hint that it was of some wider cultural significance, but not enough to make me tune in. My Dad and sister, though, must have been intrigued. When I was watching Logopolis episode 4 in early December 1981, my sister came in to the room in my grandparents' house and told me about that first watch with Dad when the story had first gone out; I'd obviously been out that Saturday evening. I was a little bit jealous on hearing this, I have to say. By then, the season of repeats had turned me into a fan (see post here for more details) and let me know what I'd been missing. I'd have loved to have been part of that family watch. Neither sibling nor parent - nor my other parent, so the full fam - ever watched Doctor Who with me again throughout my following years as a fan and to date, except on sufferance; that brief moment of interest in spring 1981 was all there was until 2005 when both Dad and Sis (but still not my Mum who's remained consistent) got interested in the new series.

Reaction:

The first post-regeneration story, The Power of the Daleks, pretty much nailed the template for future such stories. The regeneration story, though, took longer to evolve. Logopolis was only the fourth such story in Who's near twenty years of history up to that point. The initial couple of these stories, seeing out William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, didn't use the term regeneration and posited that the change of actor could be just because of old age, or could be deliberately instigated. It was only with Jon Pertwee that it was established that the Doctor's metamorphosis is brought on by an accidental near-death, and this would remain the rule forever thereafter. Logopolis refines things further putting another rule in place, that the accidental near-death happens as a result of the Doctor's heroism (Pertwee's is more a moment of self-realisation as he faces his own inner demons, apt for a Buddhist parable, but perhaps not useful longer-term). From Logopolis on, every Doctor that bows out is saving something at the cost of his own life; sometimes (as in Tom Baker's case) it's saving the entire universe, sometimes it's saving one planet, sometimes it's saving one person, and that's all established here. As such, even if Tom hadn't been in the part for such a record-breaking length of time, this would still be a significant story in Doctor Who's history. The longevity in the role of the lead actor is maybe the reason for the doom-laden atmosphere of Logopolis, something that hasn't ever been tried in quite the same way again since. There's no sense - aside from a couple of sets of flashbacks that last the briefest of moments - that this is a celebration of Baker's time in the role, that would be too soft and fluffy - Logopolis is instead ominous.

A key script decision to create the tone is the inclusion of the Watcher in the narrative. Interestingly, this is something that was done in Pertwee's finale too: a character that's a future projection of a Time Lord who's yet to regenerate. Perhaps Barry Letts, who cowrote the earlier story and was executive producer of Tom Baker's last year as Doctor, gave writer Christopher H. Bidmead the idea, or perhaps Bidmead reviewed the last regeneration story in preparation for this one. Whoever thought it up, it allows for some very doomy portents to be included in Logopolis. The mysterious figure being glimpsed in the background on location and in studio is very effective. Also intriguing are the couple of moments when characters speak directly to the Watcher. What does he say to the Doctor on the bridge, for example? We're left to speculate, but the Doctor does then immediately and knowingly deliver the Master to Logopolis, which is an action that starts the unravelling of the universe, and he seems to know for certain that he's heading toward his 'death'. Fate is just as much of a force impacting the narrative as entropy. Another interesting factor influencing tone is how lonely and empty it feels. Aside from the regular characters and the Master, there's only one speaking role in the studio (the Monitor), and the other roles on film are no more than cameos (and there's only three of them: Auntie Vanessa, the Police Inspector and a Pharos Project security guard with one line). The Master is also held back until episode three, only being heard to chuckle occasionally before that. The exteriors look cold, and Logopolis is described as cold. Chilly as well as ominous is Logopolis.

There's nothing much in the way of action until the tussle high up on the radio telescope at the end. Instead, the story is propelled by interesting concepts and a lot of talk. The concepts are cleverly designed to appeal to children of all ages. There are things featured that one wonders why they hadn't ever been done on screen before, like what would happen if one TARDIS landed inside another, or exploring how the interior TARDIS could be an infinitely big space to get lost in. The TARDIS shrinking is also fun, with the trippy interior scenes of the Doctor trapped inside. Block transfer computation is a nifty way of essentially allowing the Logopolitans to be magic wizards and create objects from thin air, but ground it in enough scientific rationalisation that it doesn't seem too out of whack with Doctor Who's principles. Entropy too is just enough of a tricky science classroom topic to make people watching feel clever when it's used as an antagonist, but not so obscure as to be alienating or just sound like gobbledegook (cf. tachyonics). The talk meanwhile includes some great lines, including at least one that's gone down in Doctor Who history "It's the end, but the moment has been prepared for." The reason I think that, despite the lack of action, it never feels too talky, is Peter Grimwade's energetic direction keeping things moving. It is well paced throughout.

Grimwade gets some great performances from everyone. Anthony Ainley gives one of his best (or possibly even his best ever) performance as the Master. His plan is absurd as usual, but he's at least got the excuse that he's making it up on the hoof after having been blind-sided by revelations about Logopolis's importance to the universe's survival. I often picture some civilisation on a distant planet that heard his broadcast warning that he was holding them to ransom, and are waiting, wondering if he's ever going to turn up or say anything else (Big Finish has probably done this as a story). New girl Janet Fielding is shown to be suitably resourceful and sparky, and looks to be an interesting addition to the future crew. Baker is relatively subdued, as he has been all this season, but still has enough moments of greatness that this is a fitting send-off. The music and sound design are both great, so evocative (for example, the Cloister Bell effect, which was used often thereafter and to this day - it sounded when the Doctor and friends crash-landed in the Crimean War during the latest story Flux). Of course it's got flaws and silly moments (A Take Your Litter Home sign next to a bin, a madcap scheme to flood the TARDIS, everyone taking the shrunken people that are clearly dolls very seriously, Tom Baker appearing to fall much faster for Tegan's eyeline compared to Adric's and Nyssa's), but I'm so used to them after having watched this iconic story so many times over the years, I almost welcome them as part of the fun.

Connectivity: 

Both Logopolis and The God Complex feature TARDIS trips to labyrinthine places where matter seems to be created from thin air (the rooms and objects that the Doctor and friends interact with in the Matt Smith story could be holographic hallucinations, I suppose, but they seem to be tangible in various scenes); both these places fall apart toward the end.

Deeper Thoughts:

"There'll be no question of Gallifrey." In any long-running TV series - like in any life - developments for good or bad will hinge on tiny moments and coincidences. A thread of such events running through Doctor Who, classic and present eras, relates to the Doctor's home planet Gallifrey. Its influence on the series hasn't always been 100% positive, so when in the final moments of Logopolis episode three there's a dialogue exchange which suggests that the Doctor, in allying with the Master to save the universe, is burning his bridges and will never be able to return to his home, some viewers may have been relieved. As it was, the series forgot about this soon enough and the Doctor was back on Gallifrey again a couple of years later. This is just one part of a waxing and waning interest in the planet that over the years has seen the place ignored and then featured, being bad then good then bad again, vaporised then not vaporised, missing, found, and finally reduced to ruins. Why should it be that the Doctor's home planet should be destroyed not once but twice (thrice, if you count other media, as the Doctor Who books in the early 2000s before the series came back got rid of it too)? It's partly the fluctuations of any series with longevity where many different production teams, and writers searching for new stories, are involved over the years. My theory (which is mine) is that it may not have been necessary to get rid of the planet ever, if it hadn't been for one writer's movie homage and another's slightly over-reaching ambition.

For the first six years of Doctor Who stories, things were simple: the Doctor was a mystery, and there was only the rarest and tiniest hints given about his origins. Whether this could have sustained for longer one can only debate, as the decision was taken to finally uncover some of those secrets. The Doctor, it was revealed, had got bored and run away from his powerful but stiflingly boring people, the Time Lords, in a stolen TARDIS. Despite this big revelation (in the final episode of Patrick Troughton swansong The War Games), thereafter the Doctor's planet and people still stayed unmentioned most of the time. The aimless adventuring remained, but was supplemented by the occasional Time Lord instigated mission, which the Doctor would unwillingly complete. He was still in opposition to them, a rebel. This state of affairs lasted another 10 years, more or less. It changed only when Robert Holmes was writing a Doctor Who conspiracy thriller (The Deadly Assassin) and looked for his inspiration in Hollywood movies of that type, particularly The Manchurian Candidate. That led him to include an assassination of a political figure and an election in his story. A little joke was in there too that the Doctor - who has put his hat in the ring for the presidency as a ploy to help buy him time to investigate what's going on - may end up as president.

This on its own wouldn't be too bad, if it hadn't been for a script the following year falling through. David Weir was originally commissioned to write the final 6-episode story of the 1977/1978 season, but his epic about killer cats was felt to be too expensive to realise. The script editor and producer had to bash out a replacement in short order (not the final time that would happen) and fell upon a sequel idea to The Deadly Assassin that would see the Doctor becoming the president for real. The story is savvy enough to reverse this by the end, but the damage is done, and in later stories it's picked up again, and the Doctor is president once more for a while. It's fine for the character to be shown in opposition to the Time Lords, but it becomes damaging as soon as he becomes one of the establishment, and not just any one of them but the most powerful of the powerful but stiflingly boring people (who also by now have been shown to be corrupt and hypocritical). They can't send him on covert missions anymore, he's the boss; and if they're still corrupt or boring, that's down to the Doctor - he's the one in charge. From that point on, Gallifrey's days were numbered. In the final years of the classic series, the day to day business of Time Lords and Gallifrey was ignored. Then, as soon as the series came back in 2005, it was established that the planet was gone, blown up in a time war. The Doctor himself is said to be responsible for its destruction, putting him in the ultimate position of opposition to his people, and giving him intergalactic quantities of survivor guilt to propel his character arc for a few years.

There's a seductive charm to lore, though, and even showrunner Russell T. Davies couldn't forever keep from dipping his nib back in that inkwell; to up the ante in his final story in charge, The End of Time, he brought Gallifrey and the Time Lords back with a bang, as they tried to escape from the past of the Time War. The Doctor, having spoken quite kindly of his old people all the time that they weren't around, does an immediate volte face: the Time Lords are evil (so, sets himself up in opposition to them again instantly). It was only the one story, though, and was followed by another reset. Time Lord lore was forgotten again for a while. But then the new showrunner Steven Moffat needed to up the ante again for the 50th anniversary story, so he visited the Time War again. This time, though, Moffat wants to do a story about the character of the Doctor, and how he could never have been responsible for an action like the destruction of Gallifrey, so when Gallifrey is brought back, it stays back, never having been destroyed in the first place (albeit still lost somewhere waiting to be found). That means there's tedious references to it for the next couple of years, with the Doctor actively searching for the place (rather than running away from it, as is his usual mode). By the time the Doctor makes it back there, he's become a war hero who can kick out the current president - back to being part of the establishment. It came as no surprise at all then, that as soon as someone else took over as showrunner, the place was burned to the ground again.  

Of course, another problem with too much focus on the Doctor's people is that with loads of Time Lords around our favorite Time Lord seems just a little bit less special. As such, after the pendulum has swung too much into the realms of the Gallifreyan multitude, there tends to follow a commensurate swing back into some other new idea to highlight how special and unique the Doctor is. In the late 1980s, the Doctor suddenly became more than a Time Lord and hints were dropped about his having been a pivotal figure in the dark times of Time Lord pre-history. This is very similar to what current Showrunner Chris Chibnall has been doing with the Timeless Child arc. As at the end of the Flux serial, he's hedged his bets - the Doctor is special and mysterious, but only because she was kidnapped and experimented on as a child, not because of any position of authority she was in. It's a tough balancing act, and - because of that constant requirement for ante-upping - there will be a temptation to create more definitive lore before Jodie Whittaker bows out. I hope the temptation is resisted and enough is left mysterious. Sometimes, less lore is more.

In Summary:

Ominous, lonely, chilly, occasionally silly, but iconic.

The God Complex

 

Chapter The 211th, where you've not gotta have faith, you've not gotta have faith, faith, faith-uh...

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive in what appears to be an empty 1980s hotel, but the walls are moving - separating them from the TARDIS - and each bedroom is filled with a different horror that seems to have been specifically tailored for a particular person. They meet with others that have been brought there against their will: Rita, Howie, and Joe are from Earth, Gibbis is from Tivoli, a planet of mole-like people who pathologically yearn to be subjugated by invading forces. Joe is already possessed by some process that makes him worship a Minotaur creature, also resident. The Doctor sees that the place is designed to evoke fear, so tells everyone to hold on to their deep rooted certainties to keep the fear at bay. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of the right tactic, as it is the faith in a higher power invoked by the fear that makes people susceptible. Joe trusts in luck, Howie believes in conspiracy theories, Rita has her Muslim faith; and, one by one, they are taken over and killed, the Minotaur devouring their life force. When Amy starts to come under the influence too, because of her faith in the Doctor, the Doctor has to break her faith in him, Curse of Fenric-stylee, and that interruption in its food supply let's the Minotaur finally die. The hotel disappears to reveal a holodeck-like area where the TARDIS is parked. The creature is one of a race of beings that descend on planets to be worshipped as gods, and was imprisoned by ex-worshipers that turned against him. The rest, the kidnapping and scaring of people to keep him fed, was an automatic process he could not stop. The Doctor drops Gibbis home, then, concerned about Amy and Rory's safety, leaves them on Earth in a nice new flat, and goes off to face his fate at Lake Silencio.  

Context:

As a festive thing, I am watching an episode of the BBC adaptation of John Masefield's The Box of Delights weekly with the whole family (Better Half, boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9) on Sundays, 37 years on to the day from when they were first shown in 1984. The first episode on 21st November (it was a Thursday in 1984), with the final episode planned for Christmas Eve 2021. I watch this serial in the run up to Christmas periodically as a tradition, but - given that the youngest child's age is almost into double figures - this might be the last time we can do it as a family (I didn't expect the eldest to be up for it this time, but he surprised me). With one weekly telly of yore watch ongoing, I didn't want to chance my arm suggesting another. As such, I watched The God Complex on my own later on that Sunday evening after watching the latest episode of Flux earlier, from the Blu-ray disc as part of the series 6 Box set.

First Time Round:

I always find it difficult to remember the details of my first watch of stories of this vintage. The series had been running long enough to become part of the furniture, rather than shiny and new, by Matt Smith's second year, and there was enough going on in my life to distract me. In general, I was still watching with the Better Half on the day of broadcast, time-shifted after putting our then two young children to bed. It would be another year or two before the youngsters were regularly watching new Doctor Who. The only thing of note I can recall was that long before it was shown, a dedicated trailer for the story was available online, before even a glimpse was revealed of the other episodes in this subsection of the series (Matt Smith's second run was split into two with a mid-series gap of a few weeks in the middle). At first, this looked like a big vote of confidence in the story: it must be one of which the producers were very proud if they were trailing it months ahead of broadcast and ahead of the three episodes set to air before. It turned out, though, that the trailer had just been prepared for Comic-Con as the writer Toby Whithouse had been on a panel to talk about it there. 

Reaction:

Despite it not necessarily being thought worthy of being trailed ahead of every other story in series 6 part 2, and it just being a Comic-con related coincidence, I still think this is one of the best of the bunch (not just of the second half, but of all the stories of 2011). Some of those other stories had dabbled in overblown space opera, or got too deep into the intricacies of the human condition, and most had got tangled up in the increasingly convoluted series arc plots. The God Complex just presents a high-concept horror scenario, efficiently and cleanly. It also touches on the overall arc, but just with a well-integrated and significant character moment between Amy and the Doctor at the end. Sometimes less is more, and if The God Complex is simple compared to the stories around it, it is elegantly so. First up, the concept is a strong one, an abandoned hotel with bespoke fears in every room that's really a prison with in-built feeding system for a fake god. This allows for a wide diversity of different tableaux that could appear in each room, some of which get almost Fellini-esque in their gleeful visuals. It also allows for a decent "the Doctor's got it wrong" reversal, when the Doctor realises that it is not fear that the Minotaur at the centre of this labyrinth feeds on, but faith, and that all his advice up to now has been the opposite of what was required. The transformation of each person as their faith gets hijacked is nicely chilling, with the possessed getting a catchphrase "Praise him" as is a tradition in Doctor Who stories (like "Burn with Me" in 42, or "Contact Has Been Made" in classic Who story The Invisible Enemy); as people succumb one by one, obviously and inevitably the ante is upped as one of the regular cast (Amy in this instance) says "Praise Him" towards the end of the story.

The production design to encapsulate this concept is very strong throughout. There's clearly something about the idea of abandoned hotel corridors and rooms, particularly ones with chintzy 1980s decor, that is unsettling. If I remember right, some idea of a story set in an empty hotel was one that had been discussed from around the relaunch of the series in 2005 but never made it to screen before this point. As well as the retro furnishing, there's all the different fears to visualise, and they are all done very well, with the roomful of laughing ventriloquists' dummies being a highlight for me. The design and execution of the Minotaur is impeccable too: this is an aged and weary beast, and that really come across. Its dialogue being whispered groans that only the Doctor can understand and translate is a good choice too. It's a teensy bit clumsy at the end though, when the Doctor translates the creature's dying words about an aged creature drifting through space to whom death would come as a release, and we realise that the creature is talking about the Doctor when the Time Lord slavishly repeats "I wasn't talking about myself". The line just needs to be forced out of him a bit more - he repeats the other stuff, the creature says something else, the Doctor pauses with a sad look, Amy asks what it said and maybe asks again, and finally he tells her. That would work better. It's a minor flaw, though.

Another quibble is with the character of Gibbis, and again it's a minor one. The Tivoli are an interesting race, a planet of space Uriah Heaps, outwardly humble but inwardly calculating. The make-up job is good, and David Walliams (a lifelong Doctor Who fan) is having fun playing him as the cowardly comic relief. It's just that the script then has to hammer the point home of his cowardice being a passive aggressive technique to allow his survival, in a way that Dickens never had to for Uriah. It was already shown, it didn't need to be told too. As well as Walliams, the cast - guest and regular - are on top form, and their talents marshalled well by director Nick Hurran. Matt Smith has some great moments, not least the emotional (temporary) farewell with Karen Gillan as Amy at the end, but also in smaller moments - near the beginning, there's a scene where he's doing the eccentric act (the Doctor I mean, not Matt Smith) and turns in an instant to thoughtful and worried when nobody else can see. Arthur Darvill as Rory does dry humour very well, but also gets a nice moment where he mentions that Howie had previously overcome a stammer, an everyday victory far away from "saving the universe" but nonetheless important. It's nice too that Rory, normally the weak link who's always getting killed, is the one who's immune to the effects of the Minotaur and his prison, and for a similar reason - he believes in simple kindness as a nurse, and doesn't get into anything more high falutin'. It's a bit odd when the Doctor says that this is why the Minotaur prison "kept showing [Rory] a way out", as that only happened once and Rory didn't get to tell anyone about it - I'm assuming this means some moments ended up on the cutting room floor for time.

Best of the guest cast is as Amara Karan as Rita; the character is presented immediately as unflappable and resourceful, with the Doctor joking that she's companion material, so the savvy in the audience know her life expectancy is limited. She has some great moments both serious and sparky / funny ("You're a Muslim." "Don't be frightened."). When her inevitable death comes it's a magnificent scene: she bravely draws danger away from the rest of the party, then begs the Doctor not to watch her fate on the close circuit TV and instead remember her as she was before her dignity was taken away. She faces her final moments "at peace", and then Matt Smith gets to do righteous rage once she's gone (which he does very well too). The story has some nice little nods for fans (linking the Minotaur back to the titular foes in The Horns of Nimon for example) and some links into the overall story of the eleventh Doctor - we see Caitlin Blackwood as little Amelia again, the Doctor looks into his room and sees his greatest fear but the audience is not privy to it, and won't find out what he saw until his swan song story. As well as this, there's great music and good effects work; it's a gem.

Connectivity: 

The God Complex is the third story in a row (following The Myth Makers and The Lazarus Experiment) with a three word title starting with the definitive article and themes taken from writings from antiquity (here it is the legend of the Minotaur in the labyrinth).

Deeper Thoughts:

Nick Fletcher MP's speech; a restrained reaction. Though it doesn't go as far as to say faith is bad exactly, The God Complex does posit that it is dangerous and leaves one open to exploitation. This made me muse on my own faith or lack thereof; I'm probably closest aligned to Rory in this narrative: I have no particular religion or superstition. I suppose I could be seen to be more like Amy in one regard, though, in that I do have a disproportionate amount of admiration for the positive power of the Doctor. Really, of course, I mean Doctor Who the series more than the character. It's a large set of generally well written and well intentioned drama segments, often with a moral position to be accepted or challenged, and it all comes together to form an enriching cultural artefact - no, in fact, more than that, a cultural phenomenon. I truly believe that it makes the lives of those that engage with it just a little bit better; it certainly has for me. Is this faith, though? It's not exactly going to be a faith that's tested too strenuously. Even if one doesn't like it, the worst that one could say about Doctor Who is that it is a bit silly but harmless. Nobody could seriously think that what happens in a family TV show about a benevolent time-travelling alien could possibly have a negative impact on the world. Could they? This would, of course, mean that I would struggle to stretch the topic to make up a few paragraphs of Deeper Thoughts, and would have to think of something else to talk about (Maybe a treatise on why 80s decor is inherently such a good a fit for a horror story? "The long shadow of the Overlook Hotel"? Hmm... needs work.) Praise be, then, when on Thursday 25th November 2021, Nick Fletcher, a Conservative MP in the UK, made a speech in a Westminster Hall debate and suddenly gave me all the material I would need.

A positive role model

It was a speech that - if one is charitable, which I don't see why I should be, but I'll try - was based on a dubious premise. If one isn't inclined to be charitable, one might describe it as batshit crazy. Fletcher's vague thrust was that the dramatic arts (his focus being TV and film) have reduced the number of positive male role models, and - deprived of these - young men have increasingly turned to crime. I know this is demonstrably bobbins even in summary, but I still think it is worth going through the relevant section of his words - words, don't forget that were planned and written in advance, not said off the cuff by someone's crazy uncle in the snug of some pub after a boozy Sunday afternoon - line by line. "There seems to be a call," said he, the Member of Parliament for Don Valley, "From a tiny but very vocal minority that every male character, or good role model, must have a female replacement". Maybe this minority is so tiny that they don't show up in a scan, because: where are they? There's no organisation, no pressure group, not even a discussion forum I've ever seen that has been actively calling for any male character to be recast or rewritten as a woman, let alone all of them. One of the examples he gave was of course the Doctor in Doctor Who, and that's a world I know a great deal about. In all the years since Tom Baker first joked about his replacement potentially being a she - decades in which I have been studiously aware of the minutiae of every aspect of the programme and its fandom - I have never seen any person of any sex or gender orientation ever demand that the Doctor becomes a woman. They might have thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to try, or they might have considered that they'd be pleased if it ever happened, but that's not the same thing. Once it happened, though, I did see a small but vocal minority of fans that whinged on about wanting to turn things back the way they were, but the less said about them the better.

Another positive role model 

Fletcher continues: "One only needs to look at the discussions surrounding who will pay the next James Bond". Which discussions are these? If one googles "Who will play the next James Bond?" the first hit, as anyone who had been following the discourse over recent years would probably have guessed, is about Idris Elba. The next ten hits are lists of the usual suspects. Apart from Elba, there's Henry Cavill, Tom Hardy, Regé-Jean Page, etc. etc. The odd site's article pops a woman onto the shortlist to spice things up a bit, but a concerted campaign it is not. The simple but effective rejoinder to Fletcher would be that the discussions surrounding who will play the next James Bond are silly-season puffery, of no import whatsoever, and maybe shouldn't be a source for a politician's speech even if they said what the politician intimated they said, which they don't. There's more: "And it's not just James Bond, in recent years we have seen Doctor Who, Ghostbusters, Luke Skywalker, The Equaliser, all replaced by women." The sheer desperation of not being able to list four roles without having to scrape the barrel by including The Equalizer is quite something (many people online hadn't even realised that this female-led version existed, so Fletcher might have succeeded in getting it some new viewers). It's an odd mix of titles. The Paul Feig Ghostbusters is five years old now, and famously didn't make sufficient money back to be considered a success. The franchise lurched back to the original cast in a film that was new and in cinemas at the same moment Fletcher was making his speech. So, those particular role models - if they ever were such a thing - are restored to masculinity. The Equaliser is a recast in the relatively low profile series, but in the big Hollywood film version before that (going back a bit, but only two years before the female Ghostbusters flick) it was still a man in the title role.

Fletcher giving the speech, 25th November 2021 

Luke Skywalker didn't get recast, so I'm assuming that Fletcher thinks he's been replaced by Rey. But they're different characters, and they both appear in the Star Wars films together, so how exactly has been Luke been replaced? Is Fletcher upset that Luke isn't the young swashbuckling hero anymore? Putting aside that I'd ideally like my politicians' statements to be several cuts above the level of chatter you get in an online nerd boy forum, the only way for Luke to still be the young hero is if he was played by someone who is not Mark Hamill, a recasting choice that would likely be the only thing less popular in those nerd boy forums than The Last Jedi was. Fletcher continues: "Men are left with The Krays and Tommy Shelby". Where to start? The Krays were real people not characters, why have we suddenly switched? Is there a fictionalised TV series or film about the Krays on at the moment? Legend was 2015, but I suppose that's only a year before the Ghostbusters were last played by women, so maybe he was referring to that. Peaky Blinders hasn't been on TV for over two years either, though it is coming back in 2022. The main thing, though, is that these aren't the only two examples of TV or films around that feature male characters. What about Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Doctor Strange, Sherlock Holmes, Endeavour Morse, Withnail, Marwood? Completely random selection off the top of my head, but none of them has been recast as a woman in a big film or TV series - they are still around as positive role models (it might just be me that sees Withnail that way, but even so I'd pay to see a reboot with two female leads - that could be fantastic).

Some other dummies

Maybe these examples aren't current enough for Fletcher. So, what about the top ten films in the UK at the time Fletcher made the speech? First off, there's the slight embarrassment for him of a James Bond and a Ghostbusters film in there, with the roles being incontrovertibly played by men. There are then a couple of ensemble pieces (The Eternals, The Addams Family 2) which include men in positive lead roles as part of the ensemble. Of the remaining six, only one has a female protagonist (Spencer), and the remaining five (Dune, King Richard, The Boss Baby 2, Venom: Let there Be Carnage, and Ron's Gone Wrong) all have male protagonists and none of them are crime lords. And even if they were, that would not cause a single person watching to turn to crime. Criminals are not made by TV or film. It's seductively easy for politicians to suggest that there is some causal link, because the things that are much more likely to have an impact - poverty, educational under-investment, cuts to council facilities for young people, reduction in police, reduction in health funding including mental health services, etc. etc - are all things for which the government, run by the party of which Nick Fletcher is a part, are responsible. If Fletcher wants positive male role models, he should maybe try to become one, and fight to get that investment flowing again to help the nation's male youth. If he doesn't want to do that, maybe it's time a woman took over his role? 

  

In Summary:

I like it a lot, and as it has some strong roles for women in there it would probably annoy Nick Fletcher MP, and that makes me like it even more.