The Dominators

Chapter The 230th, when life gives you lemons... take your name off the finished production!

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe materialise on a nuclear test island, a space Bikini Atoll, on the now peaceful and pacifist planet Dulkis. Also recently arrived are a couple of Dominators, Navigator Rago and Probationer Toba, ruthless alien warmongers with cute robot assistants, the Quarks. Their ship uses radioactive material for power, and once they have absorbed all the fallout from the island, they set about drilling through a thin part of the planet's crust to deploy a bomb in a shaft, to turn the planet into radioactive magma that they can use for fuel. They are also investigating whether any of the indigenous lifeforms are suitable for slave labour. Elsewhere on the island are a survey team doing the annual check on the island, and Cully, the rebellious son of the head of the Dulkis government, who's been running unofficial tours of the island in a craft that looks very like a lemon squeezer (it really does - one of his party even talks about their illegal activity adding "a bit of zest" - they know it!). Cully is stranded on the island when the Dominators kill the rest of his party and destroy his ship. Luckily, the Dominators waste a lot of time bitching at one another and conserving the power of the Quarks, so by the time they are ready to plant their bomb, everyone has teamed up and dug a cross-shaft intersecting with the bomb tunnel. The Doctor catches the bomb, then sneaks it aboard the Dominator spaceship, slipping out before they take off. They blow up in orbit, the surviving Dulcians set off in an automated transporter back to safety away from the island, and the TARDIS team rush into their time ship before a localised volcanic eruption engulfs them.

Context:

Seven years ago, almost to the day as I write this, I finally decided to start something I'd been considering for a while, and created this blog. In one place, I could write Doctor Who story-by-story reviews, mini-essays of Doctor Who opinion, and a fragmentary almost-memoir of how Doctor Who has been there as part of my family's and my life since I started watching it as a nine-year old in 1981. It was a modestly ambitious endeavour, particularly the decision not to differentiate between new and classic Doctor Who stories, meaning that I would always - as long as the show remained on air - be presented with a moving target. In the very first post where I set out my stall before covering my first story I noted that it would be "My howlings into the void, tangentially connected on that particular day to, for example, The Dominators".  As I wrote that, I don't suppose it occurred to me that it would be seven years before I reached that particular story, nor that I'd have at least three more years worth to get through before I caught up. Today's howl into the void is just to say that I didn't even try to interest any of the family in a five-episode long black-and-white story with a reputation for being dull. Instead I watched on my own over two evenings; for the first sitting, it was the weekend, so I had an accompanying beer. The second sitting was on a work night, so I did parts 4 and 5 stone cold sober. I will leave it to your imagination which night had the better approach for experiencing The Dominators.

 

First Time Round:

In September 1990, I was starting my Third Year Sixth, a grand label for my situation, which was returning to college for another year to retake the A-levels I'd completely screwed up in the spring. I have mentioned before on the blog that, during the period when I was supposed to be revising for those exams, I was instead rekindling my Doctor Who fandom after a period of relative cool towards the show. I never stopped watching on TV or collecting the sporadically released VHS tapes, but earlier in 1990 I started reading the official magazine again, invested in back numbers from John Fitton - a retailer that provided Doctor Who merch by mail order at the time - and even joined the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, reading their regularly posted publications too. This was a symptom rather than a cause of my flunking, though; I was clever, and wasn't even afraid of work, I'd just become completely dissociated from the whole process. I remember one multi-hour A-level maths exam where all I wrote was "I wonder where Salman Rushdie is right now; he's probably having a better time than me". I thought this disproportionate comparison - the fatwa against Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini had happened the year before and he was still under effective house arrest for his own protection - would give the examiner a giggle, and I'd get at least one mark in sympathy. Of course our situations could not be compared, but I was intrigued to read that being under 24-hour guard had created in Rushdie, in his words, "a curious lethargy, the soporific torpor that overcomes", which very well describes how I was feeling at the time for different reasons.

This had lifted by September, though, and I was in good spirits, looking forward to the coming year. That third year turned out to be one of the best of my education; I edited the college magazine, got involved with college theatre, started other writing - sketches, plays and poetry - in earnest, and eventually passed my exams and got in to a good university (where I'd meet many more Doctor Who obsessives, with whom I'm still close to this day). Accompanying this were more and more releases in the Doctor Who VHS range, which had established a regular release pattern in 1990 that would endure for the first half of the decade. For some reason, almost all the releases in 1990 were black and white stories, brought out every couple of months in pairs - one each for the first two Doctors William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. The Dominators was one of the last pair released that year, accompanied by The Web Planet. These are two stories - if not the two stories - with an immense reputation for being the most boring the series had to offer. They may as well have called it the Soporific Torpor box-set. For me in 1990, though, any Doctor Who was a novelty, and I enjoyed both on the first watch.

Reaction:

This story is one of the rare times in the history of Doctor Who where the author (or authors) asked for their name to be taken off the broadcast episodes. Credited writer of The Dominators Norman Ashby does not exist; the scripts were originally written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who had delivered the two very popular Yeti stories for the previous season. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Dominators is not as successful, certainly not they themselves; they disagreed with the rewriting done by script editor, and future Who producer, Derrick Sherwin, and therefore asked for their writing credit to be replaced with a pseudonym. What was in the original scripts is lost to the mists of time, but one fact that is indisputable is that the commission was for six episodes. One of the acts that Sherwin did in editing was to condense the action down into five. If Haisman and Lincoln's basic plotting and characters are reflected in what made it to the screen (and it's hard to believe that any busy script editor working on Who in this era would have the time to change things so radically that there isn't at least the blueprint there), it is very hard to come to the conclusion that the original writers should have been left to create their own vision, let alone to have it drag on for another whole episode. It's not exactly that the story is short on incident; things happen in the Dominators, it's just that they're mostly the same four things over and over: less experienced hothead Dominator Toba gets mildly provoked by some shenanigans (Jamie throwing a small rock at a Quark, say); Toba shouts at his Quarks the order to "Destroy" repetitively and histrionically; more experienced sneery Dominator Rago rushes in to belay that order and tick Toba off for wasting the precious energy levels (which, he reminds us for the nth time are dangerously low); Toba says "Command Accepted" in a passive aggressive way. Rinse, repeat.

I counted up, and Toba says "Command Accepted" 19 times in the story, that's almost twice as much as is mentioned the phrase "Contact Has Been Made" in Tom Baker story The Invisible Enemy, to take one example of a supposedly ubiquitous refrain. Just because something is repetitive doesn't necessarily mean it's dull, but there has to be progression. The Dominators' plan though doesn't go up a gear until late in the final episode, when they drill a shaft down which they want to drop their bomb, and our heroes dig a tunnel sideways into the shaft so they can intercept it. There's an obvious joke to be had about how at this point everyone in the cast is literally boring, but at least these scenes have a bit of momentum, and the dramatic question of who will be first to break through does engage to a certain extent. In the four and a half episodes leading up to that there isn't any progression, and instead the dullness is leavened by cutaways to scenes away from the Dominators' main operations, bits of fun amidst those repetitive story beats. The regulars of this period are all wonderful, and there are some great comic Troughton moments (his pretending to be stupid to fool the Dominators for example), new girl Wendy Padbury is settling in nicely too; mostly, though, this episode belongs to Frazer Hines as Jamie. He gets to partner with Cully in lots of on-location antics, knocking Quarks over and blowing them up. The film work is good, the location looks good, and the pyrotechnics of exploding Quarks are fun; models and optical effects are variable but the good outweighs the bad.

The bad guys may not be dramatically up to snuff, but how do they fare design-wise? The Dominators' outfits are striking, but not very practical. Plus, Ronald Allen as Rago can curl his lip disdainfully so well that he could probably curdle milk from ten paces. They aren't the main bad guy focus, though - this story is all about introducing a new metal monster that could endure like the Daleks previously had. The Quarks are a distinctive design - a simple enough shape that they could be drawn by any youngster no matter their artistic ability, and recognisable from a rough doodle - that's very important. Their movement, and how an actor fits inside them, is a little easier to discern than with the Daleks, but nonetheless it is still a little bit of a mystery at first glance. Nice touches like their retractable arms that fit snuggly back into their box-like bodies stand out too, and I feel sure they would have made fine toys for 1960s kids. As it was, disagreements between the BBC and the writers about the merchandising of the Quarks killed any chance of that, and meant that Haisman and Lincoln declined to work on the show again. An alternative universe exists where the Quarks returned in colour to menace Jon Pertwee the following year, and I'm not saying I would want to live there but it might be nice to visit. The only major issue that I have with the Quarks is with the voices; clearly they wanted to do something different to the Daleks, but the childlike sing-song voices used just don't work for me, and their dialogue is sometimes very hard to hear. The effect on film where someone is zapped and goes freeze-frame then bursts into flames is quite interesting, but isn't an effect they could do in the studio, so we only see it once.

The other main point of interest with this story is the attempt at satire. Eschewing the action adventure approach of their two Yeti stories, the writers wanted to do something a bit different, and they had the 1960s hippy counterculture in their sights. If the purpose of their script was to critique that current youth movement and its pacifist tendencies - as is generally accepted, though I've not been able to find a solid citation online to either of the writers confirming this - the main issue is that there aren't any hippy characters in The Dominators. Maybe Cully (a trust fund rebel, if ever there was one) and the group that he brings to the island at the beginning are supposed to represent 1960s long-haired youth. They are shown to be languid pleasure seekers, that's for sure, but there were young, languid pleasure seekers in the 1920s, in the Victorian era, and doubtless all through history. They aren't a precise enough distillation of the Haight-Ashbury peacenik. It isn't just the young who are being skewered in the story either. The leader of the survey group Educator Balan is shown to be a credulous duffer, accepting of contradictory data without question or thought. Balan's not a hippy, and neither is he a student; criticisms of the un-worldliness of liberal intellectuals and higher educators in ivory towers are common and perfectly fine, but again that isn't specific to the 1960s. Finally, the government of Dulkis are shown to be duffers too, talking themselves into paralysis and focussed on the details of process and procedure, ill-equipt to deal with any violent action. Maybe this was an attempt to depict the logical extension of pacifist ideals, the sort of society that would grow out of the hippy movement, but the result is too varied and the targets too scattered for the satirical barbs to hit home.

Perhaps this muddle in the central theme came about through the rewriting, and the original script was more focussed. Even so, though, the satire wouldn't have worked because The Dominators was a product of 1968 not 1967. It is an endemic issue with classic Doctor Who that ideas take so long to reach the screen that any attempt at something contemporary will inevitably look out of date. Here, though, it's very problematic, as the youth movement had more or less abandoned pacifism and become much more revolutionary early in 1968. The Beatles song Revolution, released as the B-side of Hey Jude during the weeks of The Dominator's broadcast, sees John Lennon wrestling with his personal decisions about peace versus violence, and even he was behind the zeitgeist; protests in Paris were underway as early as May. The later Troughton story in this season The Krotons, which shows a student uprising, was much more in line with the times. Ultimately, and unfortunately, The Dominators ends up satirising something that barely existed anymore. It's probably best to just take those scenes as fun local colour specific to Dulkis, and not representative of anything wider; plus, any scene that gets away from the leaden bickering of the Dominators is to be welcomed. Overall then, the story wasn't as dull as its reputation, but is one of the less successful Troughton stories.

Connectivity: 

Both The Dominators and Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks are set on an island. Both feature monsters that are wholly or mainly metal, led by at least one biped wearing slightly ridiculous clothes. In both, the baddies are toying with making the locals into a slave labour force, and press-gang a few into immediate back-breaking toil.

Deeper Thoughts:

Chibnall era pre-retrospective. [Note: this has nothing to do with The Dominators as I had to port it over from its originally planned position in the last post's Deeper Thoughts section to make way for reactions to Ncuti Gatwa's casting (not that it has much to do with the Manhattan Dalek 2-parter either); I think I've said enough connected to the Dominators anyway.]

Maybe one reason that Legend of the Sea Devils didn't perform that well (see Deeper Thoughts section of two blog posts ago for more details) is that people already think Jodie Whittaker's era is over. She did farewell interviews when launching Flux in 2021, which seems such a long time ago now, and there was lots of publicity about her finishing filming and the wrap party. This is as well as lots of publicity earlier than that, then more again very recently, about the regime change with Russell T Davies returning to run the show. Is the average TV viewer, not an obsessive like me following every scrap of information, going to know that Jodie's still got tenure and her finale is not actually being broadcast until October 2022, a year on from her appearance on Graham Norton's chat show telling him she was finished with the role? I don't actually know any average TV viewers, so I can't canvass opinion on this. Because of a couple of accidents of timing, Chris Chibnall and Jodie will be in the Doctor Who equivalent of a lame duck presidency, as showrunner and Doctor retrospectively, for a very extended period. It's going to be a long goodbye, and there will be a fair few retrospectives, I'm sure, in the weeks and months to come, even as the next era's location shooting and publicity happens in parallel. The first big retrospective has already happened, it was published in the most recent (at time of writing) issue of Doctor Who Magazine. Chibnall gave a big interview covering his entire era to date. Like every article in Doctor Who Magazine in the Whittaker era it is so anodyne as to almost cause offense just because of its lack of offensiveness. I wouldn't have thought anybody could get worked up enough to have negative opinions about the piece, but I was wrong.

Boy, was I wrong. I had to mute a couple of people on twitter (damn twitter's algorithm deciding things I "might be interested in"; I'll decide that for myself thanks very much) as they just kept on moaning about certain things that Chibnall had said. These weren't the usual haters either, but people who are normally even-handed. One issue is that, in a somewhat uncharitable mischaracterisation of his words, people claim that he has no idea of where the 'fugitive Doctor' played by Jo Martin exactly fits in to continuity, and also that he has not ever worked out the exact origin story for the timeless child version of the Doctor, found by her adoptive mother all those years ago. He didn't say this; he did intimate that he wouldn't reveal it in the show, but that's not the same thing. It may be frustrating to people who expected to get all the answers, but it's been obvious from the beginning that part of the reason for introducing this plotline is to create an enduring mystery. In typical self-effacing manner, Chibnall stated that he expects returning showrunner Russell T Davies to ignore all of that backstory anyway. Some of the criticisms online were at such a fever pitch that even Chibnall's honesty around screwing up his first season finale - it was only a first draft as they ran out of time - led people to complain that other showrunners' hastily put-together scripts when things had fallen through were much better than Chibnall's. He can't win, I don't think; he's already yesterday's man, and nothing he can do is right anymore (at least for a small subsection of the fanbase).

It's not just Doctor Who that suffers from this. My middle child at 12 years old is finally exactly the right age for enjoying the Netflix series Stranger Things, and has recently binge-watched the three previous seasons of episodes in a short period of time, He is pretty obsessed, consuming every fan video he can find online, and eagerly anticipating the fourth series that is landing soon. When new episodes were last available, it was a big, popular show and there was a lot of positivity around it; in the lead-up to the new series, though, I'm seeing more evidence of a backlash. Nobody can know the quality of the new episodes, as they haven't been shown yet, I just think there's an automatic negative reaction in some quarters when something popular has the temerity to be off air for a while. Stranger Things has been away for a couple of years, Doctor Who's only been off screen for a month - what's it going to be like by the time the final Whittaker / Chibnall special airs in October? I hope the retrospectives and post-mortems can be held back until then, as it only amplifies the issue. Doctor Who with Jodie Whittaker starring is still a going concern, and her (90 minute long, if rumours are true) last blast is only a stepping stone to more Doctor Who after that. Unlike a show with an ageing child cast like Stranger Things, Doctor Who has revolutionary change built in. While we wait for Jodie's finale, episodes for 2023 are being shot on location, with all the hype that brings. Only our favourite time-shifting, regenerating show could bless us by being not one but two going concerns all at once.  

In Summary:

Nothing with Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines in it could ever be truly dull, but the script for The Dominators - whoever's to blame for its final version - comes closest to making it possible.

Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks

Chapter The 229th, where you can tell it in his accent when he talks, he's a Gallifreyan in New York - no, damn, I've used that already... Doctor Who in New York, so good they did it twice.

Plot:

The Doctor and Martha land in New York in the year 1930. The depression at its height, and lots of homeless people live in an encampment in Central Park nicknamed Hooverville. Hooverville residents are going missing, so the Doctor investigates. The Cult of Skaro, four experimenting Daleks, travelled to this time zone using an emergency temporal shift and are now stranded without power. They plan to use the aerial atop the newly built Empire State Building to channel energy from an imminent solar flare and create human-Dalek hybrids from the missing people, who are all stored in catatonic states in the Daleks' lair. A few humans have also been turned into half pig half human henchmen. Leader of the cult Dalek Sec experiments on himself and becomes a half-human hybrid, but the other Daleks start to distrust him as he acts more and more unpredictably. They depose Sec, and change things so that the missing people will be 100% Dalek. The Doctor - aided by Martha, a couple of Hooverville residents (one played by a future movie Spiderman), a Broadway chorus girl and her semi-pig boyfriend, Laszlo - sabotage the aerial. The Doctor mixes his DNA in by hugging the aerial at the crucial point (ssh... it's science!), and so the hybrid people do not follow orders blindly and eventually mutiny, destroying Sec and two of the other Daleks. Dalek Caan does another emergency temporal shift, which might well prove to be significant in future, who knows?! The Doctor stabilises Laszlo so he can live a presumably miserable freakshow Nightmare Alley existence for the rest of his life, happily ever after. 

Context:

Watched on two consecutive Sunday afternoons at the end of April / start of May 2022, from the disc in the Complete Third Series DVD box set, with a week in between the cliffhanger and the second episode, as nature intended. I was accompanied by all the children (boys of 15 and 12, girl of 9). I didn't realise until after we'd watched them that we'd just missed the dates, both weeks, when it would have been the 15th anniversary to the day of the debut BBC1 broadcasts in 2007; close enough, though. I was able to add a game-playing layer of engagement to the first episode. All three of the children have recently watched a Spiderman movie featuring Andrew Garfield, who features in this Dalek 2-parter. Before pressing play, I told them all that they'd recognise a big star who appears in the story, so they were on tenterhooks each wanting to be the first to spot whoever it was, and there was a chorus of excitement when Garfield finally popped up as Frank partway through; "Is that the Amazing Spiderman?" asked the middle child, who's nothing if not exact. All three children were miffed when Frank appeared to die when grabbed by the pig people, and elated when he showed up again later not killed.

First Time Round:

There's one clear memory I have of just over 15 years ago when this story was first shown, and it isn't from either of the episodes themselves, nor from my experience of watching them. It's of a picture on the front cover of a magazine and it sticks in the mind because it was a massive spoiler. The Radio Times UK listing magazine gave Doctor Who its front cover for the week of 21st to 27th April 2007, and it was available to buy in the shops the preceding Tuesday, the 19th April. The photo they used for the cover was a medium close-up shot of the Dalek Sec humanised Dalek; in other words it was an image of the final reveal of the episode yet to air, the cliffhanger moment. Russell T Davies signed off on it, reportedly; I think it was a rare black mark on his record of making and marketing the show in those days. I can remember exactly where I was when I first saw it; I was in reception of the BBC Television Centre. A few of the magazines were on a coffee table next to the sofa where I was waiting, and - after wincing at what was being given away - I turned them all face side down. In early 2007, I was on a career break from the day job to concentrate on the side hustle I had at the time, screenwriting. I had a lot of meetings in that period, but I was in Wood Lane that Tuesday for something a little less work-related. They ran guided tours in those days, and I wanted to see the centre before it closed and was turned into luxury flats (which seemed like it would be imminent at that point, but in the end it didn't happen until 2013). It was an enjoyable experience. A couple of days later I was in London again, in King's Cross for a Writers Guild of Great Britain panel discussion on use of the web. This prompted me the following day (the day before the first episode of the Dalek story aired) to create a screenwriting blog. That screenwriting blog then led indirectly to the creation of this Doctor Who blog. So, I've been spewing out nonsense online for 15 years now - cheers!!!

Reaction:

For the third season of the return of Doctor Who in the 21st century, of which this story is part, once and future showrunner Russell T Davies was for the first time planning a big finale that didn't include the Daleks. This left an opportunity to have a mid season tentpole story featuring the metal meanies, which had been done once before with much success with the story Dalek in 2005. That story was a single-parter but packed with sufficient twists and turns to have stretched to two. Alas, this Manhattan-set double number is the opposite - it's one episode's plot (and that's being charitable) padded out to fit into twice the space in the schedules. It must have seemed impossible at that stage in the show's development, with Skaro's finest being a big presence every year, not to give the mid-season two-parter over to a Dalek plot, but a focussed single episode story would have ultimately been much better. What happens in the story? A small group of isolated Daleks attempt to covert people into foot soldiers to take over the planet. That's about it. The first episode is mostly introducing characters that don't need to be there: Solomon, Frank, Tallulah and Laszlo, and their environs - the theatre, and Hooverville - add colour but could be excised and leave the plot unchanged. Even Mister Diagoras being merged with Dalek Sec to create a hybrid creature, a big subplot that makes up the remainder of the first part leading up to the cliffhanger, doesn't move things forward at all. It's obvious how it's going play out; a Dalek polluted with human will stop acting as a Dalek, and will eventually and inevitably cease to be an antagonist. This is, of course, exactly the same as what happened in that previously mentioned 2005 story, Dalek.

The second episode runs out of steam as, even with the paucity of plot movement in part one, there isn't enough material to keep things moving for 45 more minutes. The Dalek Sec subplot ends up exactly where expected. What looks like the climactic event - the rag tag band of heroes work to prevent the energy strike to the antenna at the top of the newly built Empire State building, as it's going to waken all the catatonic humans and convert them into Dalek-controlled foot soldiers (clearly a homage to James Whale's movie version of Frankenstein, which was roughly contemporary to the early 1930s setting of the story) - actually happens only three quarters of the way through the second episode, and there's still a number of scenes after that that limp along to the conclusion. The Daleks and the converted humans are lured to the abandoned theatre, and it's resolved in exactly the same way as the Dalek Sec subplot - the converts still have too much humanity, turn on the Daleks, and a brief battle ensues. This has been brought about by the Doctor introducing Time Lord DNA by hugging the aerial at the point of contact, which is scientifically dodgy even within the fantastic context of the story, but might have been easier to forgive if things had been wrapped up two minutes later, but alas instead we have scene after scene to dwell on why exactly hugging the aerial would do anything meaningful. During this, the Doctor resolves a subplot stabilising Laszlo's faltering hybrid body so he can live in Hooverville, Beauty and the Beast style, with Tallulah. This might be touching if it weren't for his pig-face prosthetics, which just aren't quite good enough to convince in well-lit scenes.

The story does come in for a lot of criticism for its visuals, but this is mostly unfair. The pig slaves are fine when kept in shadow; yes, the humanised Dalek Sec is a bit outré (he wears spats, and the Daleks keep him on a dog collar and chain!), but it's nonetheless effective. The gaps that need to be filled where there isn't plot leave room for some fun set pieces; this is most obvious when action comes to a halt and one of the cast belts out a specially written show tune, but it is a pretty good song, and the sequence is well shot. Introducing the history of Hoovervilles (plural, they had them all over the states, not just in Central Park) meets Who's remit to educate as well as entertain. Having introduced the place and introduced the Daleks, it becomes inevitable that the latter will attack the former, and the set piece depicting this in episode two is good. I'm not sure it makes a whole heap of sense, though: the Daleks are still operating in secret and haven't yet activated the human soldiers, so why do an all-out attack where they hover over a populous city? The performances are very strong throughout, even those where the actor is fighting against the somewhat risible mask they are encased within. Andrew Garfield is magnetically watchable in a quite small role, so it was no surprise to see him go on to bigger things. Hugh Quarshie does the - pretty thankless - sensible leader character very well. Miranda Raison has fun with her broad New Yoiker broad. It's just a bit of a shame that there isn't really very much for any of them to do. In the end, the story's not a total disaster - it's probably the least successful Dalek story from the era, but it's a hell of an era - but feels like a major missed opportunity.

Connectivity: 

Both Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks and The Angels Take Manhattan, obviously, see the TARDIS land on the same island in the same city (the clues in the titles), and action takes place in the same decade, the 1930s, in both too. Filming for both actually took place in the Big Apple, though for the Tennant story it was confined to shooting background plates with the main action all being shot in Wales.

Deeper Thoughts:

Ncuti Doc Thing. I had planned, and indeed was a few paragraphs into, a different subject for this Deeper Thoughts section, but then events come along and surprise me (and everyone). On Sunday 8th May 2022, we all found out the name of the newly appointed actor to play the lead role of the Doctor, Ncuti Gatma. Gatma will appear in the series from 2023 (it's not been confirmed whether he will cameo at the end of Jodie Whittaker's final special yet, when she regenerates, but it's got to be a good bet), when Russell T Davies resumes his showrunner role. Like another appointee to this role during a period when RTD was running the show, the star of Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks no less, Ncuti is a proud Scot, but he's also Rwandan and a former refugee. For the first time, the Doctor is going to be played by a BAME man, and for the first time the lead actor in the series is an actor of colour. It's not - as many online comments mistakenly averred, and even more others righteously corrected - the first time the Doctor has been portrayed by a person of colour. Jo Martin's recurring role as an earlier version of the Doctor during Whittaker's tenure paved the way for this, as indeed did the casting of Whittaker herself, and the other Time Lord characters cast or shown to change gender or ethnicity when regenerating in recent years since Doctor Who returned in 2005, demolishing the established pattern that the Doctor - and any Time Lord - had to be pale, male or stale. Inevitably, some people will need time to adjust to this; any Doctor Who fan knows it's sad for a while, but ultimately happy, to say goodbye to one Doctor and hello to another.

The cryptic Instagram image of emojis that preceded the announcement

Sadly - but I don't believe inevitably by any means - there were also negative online comments about the 'wokeness' of this production decision. (Pause, while I throw up in my mouth just a little at having to type the word in the inverted commas - I was going to say the politics of the decision, but it isn't really a political decision, and I think that word is too grand to describe the naysayers' bile.) After Jodie Whittaker's casting announcement in 2017 (see Deeper Thoughts of this blog post from then), there was apparently a backlash, but I didn't see it, just the wave of defensive responses against the initial backlash. I don't know if I'm just more engaged with social media or if the algorithm has changed, but this time I did see the first wave. The most infamous comment was made by a - here come the inverted commas again - 'journalist' on a right-wing UK news channel; he tweeted then hastily deleted a comment that suggested that Ncuti's casting was a box-ticking exercise, as if someone who isn't white could not be cast on merit. There were many other similar comments from non-famous tweeters, who apparently think of themselves as Doctor Who fans but I can't help but think that they've missed the point of the show. Balanced against this were tweets with people suddenly interested in the show because of Ncuti's casting who hadn't watched before. An article in the Telegraph by Michael Hogan on this appeal to new, perhaps younger people had the headline "The choice of Ncuti Gatwa proves the BBC has given up trying to please 'legacy' Doctor Who fans" and put a few older fans noses out of joint. I glanced at the twitter response to the article but after two comments the discourse degenerated into anti-licence fee rants so I ducked out of that. One other seam of online comments I saw centred around people celebrating a non-hetero actor being the Doctor, only to then be corrected by people who rightly stated that Gatma has never made any public comments on his sexuality.

Gatwa with RTD at the Baftas on 8th May 2022

He is still an LGBT+ hero whatever because of his award-winning and multiple Bafta nominated portrayal of Eric Effiong in Netflix's Sex Education. I've not seen it, not because I'm put off by younger actors despite being increasingly 'legacy' - thank you headline-writing Telegraph editor - but because there's simply too many shows and not enough time. This is interesting on a personal level, though, as it marks the first time since I became a fan in the early 1980s that I have no experience at all of a newly announced Doctor's performances. Peter Davison I'd seen as Tristan in All Creatures Great and Small, and also in some sitcoms; Colin Baker had of course already had a role in Doctor Who before he was cast as the Doctor; Sylvester McCoy was a big part of my childhood as he appeared in 1980s CBBC programmes I loved like Jigsaw and Eureka. Paul McGann I had seen in Withnail and I and a few TV things over the years before he became our favourite Time Lord for one night only. I differ from Tom Baker, who was quoted before Doctor Who came back in 2005 to say he'd never heard of Christopher Eccleston, in that I was very familiar with Eccleston from Jimmy McGovern's work, and Michael Winterbottom's, and Danny Boyle's, and... seriously, lots of fans online at the time said they hadn't seen him in anything either, and I just can't believe they'd missed out on all that great stuff. Tennant I'd seen in Casanova, which is basically his audition for the Doctor role; Smith I had seen in the two BBC Sally Lockhart adaptations starring Billie Piper; Capaldi, in so many things from Local Hero onwards. I saw Whittaker in many things before she became the Doctor, but had no conception of how she'd play the role, as it was different from the sort of roles she had tended to do up to that point. For that reason, I may well hold off on that Sex Education binge watch. It might be nice to go in completely unburdened by preconceptions, and see something fresh, exciting and new.

In Summary:

The script's a bit of a mess, some of the visuals are edging towards being risible, but there are some nice characters and set pieces.

The Angels Take Manhattan

Chapter The 228th, where you can tell it in his accent when he talks, he's a Gallifreyan in New York.

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are enjoying a trip to present day Manhattan, when Rory disappears. Strangely, the events of his disappearance seem to follow the text of a book the Doctor is reading, which turned up from nowhere, a hard-boiled detective story featuring a character called Melody Malone (the character is a proxy for, and the novel has been written by, River Song). A weeping angel has zapped Rory back to 1938 where he meets with River. She has been able to travel there with her vortex manipulator, but the TARDIS won't easily be able to land because of time distortion. River and Rory are held up by gunmen, who put them in a limo and drive them to the house of a rich mobster, Grayle. He's a collector who has a captive weeping angel, and he wants information about it from River. His goons throw Rory into a dark basement which contains cherubic baby angels. The Doctor, with Amy who's trying not to fix events by reading too far ahead in the book, arranges some convoluted gubbins to allow the TARDIS to land, knocks out Grayle and rescues River. They find that the baby angels have zapped Rory in space, not in time, and follow him to a place called Winter Quay, an apartment block near Battery Park.

The building is being used as a temporal energy farm by the many angels living in New York; they tempt people to the location, then zap them back decades to live the whole of their lives trapped in an apartment room. The others catch up with Rory as he sees his older self in a bed in such a room: an angel therefore will get him imminently. Refusing to accept this fate, Rory goes to the roof of the building with Amy, intending to jump off and kill himself, preventing that future; Amy is going to jump with him. This will create a paradox, and hopefully they will come back to life. The angels close in on them, including a moving Statue of Liberty, which turns out to be a giant angel. They jump, and time is erased. Along with the Doctor and River, they find themselves in a graveyard near the TARDIS in present day New York. The TARDIS can now definitely not ever go back to the 1938 time zone as it is too screwy. Rory spots a gravestone with his name on it, and a lone angel behind him zaps him back to 1938. Amy chooses to let the angel get her too, and they live their lives together back in that time, her name appearing alongside his on the gravestone. River leaves the Doctor saying that she'll write up the book and give it to Amy in the past to get published, but will also ask Amy to write an afterword. Alone, the Doctor reads this; Amy tells him to go back and tell the waiting Amelia on the first night they met of all the adventures that she will have in the future. He does this.

Context:

Watched on my own one evening, late, from the disc in the series 7 Blu-ray box set; even though the story is presumably available on the BBC iplayer, my first instinct wasn't to go there, but was instead to go to the bother of reaching up to a high self, fetching down a reasonably well-designed box, extracting - fiddly, this - a disc, and putting this disc into the Blu-ray player. I'm old school, I suppose (more on that in the next section below). If I put on a Doctor Who story earlier in the day and invite the children to watch, they tend not to be interested; this time, when they should have been sleeping, it attracted them like moths. Both the youngest (girl of 9) and the eldest (boy of 15) snuck in and watched for a bit, before I insisted they get back to bed.

First Time Round:

It know it does very much sound like I'm talking about dusty, dated concepts such as corsets and penny-farthings, but my chief memory of seeing this story first time round in 2012 is that - for whatever reason - the recording of the BBC1 broadcast onto my PVR didn't work, and I had to wait for the traditionally scheduled BBC3 repeat of the story that week, to add it to my hard drive. I was miffed about this, as in those days BBC3 in my area wasn't available in HD on Freeview, so the picture quality was inferior to the rest of the episodes of this half-season that I'd digitally recorded the previous weeks. It was a bit fuzzy, and it had an intrusive station ident (or DOG, or Digitally Originated Graphic) spoiling one corner of the picture. Ugh. BBC iplayer was a thing even in those days, but maybe I could only watch that on my computer rather than the TV. Or maybe I was just set in my ways. I finally saw the story in HD when the aforementioned Complete Seventh Series Blu-ray box set came out in autumn 2013. I still record every Doctor Who story on first broadcast, then delete them once they've come out on Blu-ray and I've purchased them. Currently, my hard drive just contains the most recent Eve of the Daleks and Legend of the Sea Devils, even though I don't really need to keep them as they are constantly available to stream. I'm keeping alive the tradition of watching and recording Doctor Who onto video tape from the earlier days of my fandom in the 1980s.

A couple of weeks after the broadcast of the story, a web 'minisode' that provided a coda to Amy and Rory's story aired called P.S. I raved about this 5-minute long storyboard and narration creation way back in an early blog post published in August 2015. It was written by the current showrunner Chris Chibnall, and his writing for the Ponds there, as well as that in the two episodes he wrote for the first half of series 7, and other online minisodes, was great - the best I think that they'd been depicted in the show up to that point. There's definitely been as good character work in the stories of his own era, but perhaps not quite as consistently done as in 2012.

Reaction:

I was reminded while watching The Angels Take Manhattan of an interview that 1960s companion actor Frazer Hines (who played Jamie) once gave. I can't remember exactly when and how I experienced it, but I think I can recall enough to reflect the spirit. He was talking of his disappointment at the long-running role he played in the soap Emmerdale Farm, Joe Sugden, being killed off, and said that he'd have always been prepared to come back and make cameo appearances when there were family weddings and such, which he thought important to keep up the verisimilitude of such a fictional landscape. I agree with him that that's important, and I believe he would have been good to his word (he returned to his role on Doctor Who a couple of times many years after originally appearing, for example). There isn't much plot in this Angels story. Bags of atmosphere, some clever ideas, some nice-one liners and moments of emotion, all are present; but, what actually happens? Rory gets zapped back into the past and Amy choses to follow him, and they live happily ever after. That's it. Everything else surrounding that is a complicated construction built specifically to avoid having the risk that Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill (as Amy and Rory) might not want to come back in future for the Doctor Who equivalent of a wedding episode. A ridiculous amount of heavy-lifting in the script arranges things so that they are stranded in a time zone that the Doctor can't again visit. The lifting is so heavy, in fact, that you can see the writer straining at various points. Was it worth all the effort?

To be fair, it's not something of which just this story is guilty, it's endemic from 2005 onwards; the final stories of companions tend to have to be final with a capital F, allowing for no chance of return; they also, though, don't include anyone being killed off completely. (Yes, writer Steven Moffat did kill a few people off during his tenure, but only for them to be brought back to life, sometimes multiple times, so that doesn't count; The Angels Take Manhattan even makes a joke about the many previous times Rory's been resurrected.) I'm guessing it's a search for drama and novelty that produced this trend, rather than narrative plausibility - it's not like Doctor Who is set in a farming village, the whole of time and space is big enough that you might not run into the same people often. It gets progressively harder to achieve the operatic level of finality that is felt to be required, though, and the amount of screen time devoted to that rather than any actual story is quite marked with respect to this story particularly. It also seems unnecessary, as a lot of the previous few stories (the first half of series 7) had been building up to the Ponds choosing to leave anyway. Time travelling is increasingly impacting their day-to-day lives, and they're getting older (though the scene where the Doctor and Rory diplomatically avoid the subject of Amy's wrinkles doesn't work because she has no bloody wrinkles, she's a twenty-bloody-five year old actress and former model ferchrissakes). It wouldn't have been beyond writer Steven Moffat to make an exciting and moving departure without forcing a wedge of time-distorted decades between the members of his first TARDIS team, but he obviously felt it was necessary.

It's mostly just window dressing without much story, then; but, it's pretty superior window dressing for all that. Creating a detective story in the Raymond Chandler style is in itself a first for the show, and a good fit for the River Song character; Alex Kingston is giving her usual 5-star performance, having fun playing the detective and the femme fatale rolled into one. Moffat's integration of this heightened narrative, by making it a story within a story, is very clever. There's lots of energy in the sequence of intercut scenes with events playing out in the 1930s time zone, and other characters reading of the events in the book in the 2010s; Moffat then takes it an extra step by making this a timey-wimey conceit: it the characters read too far ahead they'll be powerless to change things. Sequences with weeping angels stalking people as those people blink were probably already overused even in 2012, but Moffat still innovates by adding the baby angel cherubs. There's the wonderful moment where one blows out the match that Rory is using to keep it observed in the dark cellar; this and almost every scary scene is expertly shot by director Nick Hurran and crew. The one big thing that doesn't work in the script, and no amount of direction can make work, and which I suspect was one of those things that occasionally come up where the author's enthusiasm just runs away and they can't resist, is the angel Statue of Liberty. The concept of the angels is that they can only move when not being observed. How is it even remotely possible that something as large as the statue of liberty could be unobserved long enough to travel an inch, let alone get from Liberty Island to Battery Park and back without masses of people noticing? It's very silly.

A couple of other points bothered me on this watch that I didn't notice on previous watches. The Doctor hints that New York is a great place for the angels as it's "the city that never sleeps", but that's the exact opposite of an environment they could flourish in. They'd surely be better off in some sleepy village where they can creep around undetected (ooh, now there's an idea!). The concept of the battery farm in Battery park (silly, but Moffat presumably couldn't resist again) took me a while to get my head round. When the angels zap people back in time it releases a burst of temporal energy that it's been established they feed on, but presumably they'd be able to absorb more if they kept in close proximity to their victim over a longer period? So, they zap people only in a limited area they can control - and presumably only back within a limited sweep of years -  and then keep their victim in one place, so any angels in the vicinity can get the benefit. I think that's what's being suggested. What a palaver! May as well just say they stay in the area because they're fans of Broadway shows, and ignore all of that nonsense. The other head-scratcher for me is what exactly happens at the end: in Amy / Amelia's original timeline did the future Doctor come back to her on the first night and tell her all about her adventures to come (and she's forgotten about this, or assumed it was a dream), or does he by going back there at the end of the Angels in Manhattan story change her past? Either way, it undermines some of the drama of their very first story The Eleventh Hour for me, without adding much in the way of emotion. The emotion had peaked anyway at the wonderful "Together or not at all" moment where Amy and Rory take a leap into the unknown. The rest - the excellent and the silly - doesn't matter much compared to that.

Connectivity: 

Both The Angels Take Manhattan and Legend of the Sea Devils see the Doctor accompanied by two companions, one male one female; in both stories, the adventure takes place outside the British Isles, with trips to the same places in two different time periods.

Deeper Thoughts:

Nobody Knows Anything. My day job for pretty much my entire working life to date has seen me in various roles on various teams, all of whose aim was to deliver something digital, a web application or phone app, that users might like, or at the very least might use. My favourite quote about the complexities of that day job, though, links to another career I had for a few years, as a screenwriter. It is William Goldman's "Nobody Knows Anything" first put out into the world in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade. He follows up the initial three word soundbite with a short explanation: "Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess—and, if you're lucky, an educated one". Without this additional explanation, people can misunderstand it as something anti-intellectual or even anarchic. But Goldman was a Hollywood man, though he might not have liked that description particularly, and he respected the craft of all the cast and crew of Tinseltown. Even with all that knowledge and graft, he thought that you could get no better than an educated guess of the reaction when you present something to an audience. I think his words can be applied to any complex endeavour, and not just films. You can do all the market research you can afford, and arguably you should, but nothing beats putting something out there and seeing what people think of it. In my day job, of course, you can still change it once people start using it, and you've seen how they're using it, and what aspects of it they think are useful or not. Unless you're someone who tinkers like George Lucas with his various versions of the Star Wars films over the years, you can't do this for a movie or a TV show.

It's an exposing business to be in; the figures will tell you if something's a hit or a miss, but by then there's not much more you can do about it. Based on ratings, the most recent Doctor Who story Legend of the Sea Devils has been a miss, not a hit. It has achieved the lowest overnight (2.2 million) and consolidated weekly (3.4 million) viewers since the series returned in 2005. Fans and commentators have had their say about why this might be. Not enough marketing, wrong time of year, inferior scripting, being up against a live ITV show (Britain's Got Talent), not enough special elements to draw in a crowd. People have also said that these figures don't have any meaning in the modern context of streaming and constant availability, though some others have said that those making Doctor Who should be aiming for a large audience that want to watch it live (though that could be because, like me and my unnecessary recordings as described in the First Time Round section above, they are living in the past). Many people have speculated on what the incoming showrunner (Russell T Davies, returning to the role) might do to make things better. Of course, according to Goldman, none of these people really know what to change to make the next story a hit, because nobody knows anything. Me neither, but I have something of a theory; to illustrate this theory, I need to bring in something I have learnt about over the years as part of the day job, but which also has some relevance to films and TV: the Cynefin framework. Cynefin (named after the Welsh word for habitat) was invented in 1999 by the very clever Dave Snowden, and is a model to help understand problems and their possible solutions.

Snowden - who is as much a tinkerer as George Lucas, and has continued to enhance and amend Cynefin over the years - would no doubt hate me over-simplifying it thus, but at heart it comprises four main domains (there is a fifth, but I won't go into it here) in which any situation might fall: Clear, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic. In clear situations, the course of action to take is obvious to any reasonable person, with little room for different approaches. In complicated situations, you need specialist knowledge or up-front analysis to a lesser or greater degree; with that, you should be able to get the same basic result each time you apply the approach that is indicated. Complex situations are different to complicated ones, because no matter how expert you are, or how much advance work you put in, you might not get the same result between one try and another; cause and effect appear to be more loosely coupled because there are so many variables at play. Finally, chaotic situations are where cause and effect seem completely uncoupled, and the course of action to take is going to have to involve more gamble and risk. To help grasp this, consider different ways of making a film or video recording. Making a short home movie using a smartphone is in the Clear domain; any reasonable person can point and click and create something watchable. This has not always been the case; making a home movie 40 years ago was most definitely a complicated affair, involving equipment not everyone could afford, and relying on a company to print the film from the captured negative. It required practice and expertise and planning; the refinement of technology platforms over the years has helped move the basic act from complicated to clear. Seeing movement between the domains is one interesting aspect of using this model.

An example of a similar situation in the Complicated domain is one that is familiar to Doctor Who fans, the making of a multi-camera video in a studio. This was how the show's early episodes were made. Expertise was definitely required, and much forward planning by the director creating the camera script, so the cameramen on the floor knew where to go to get their next shot, and the vision mixers in the studio gallery would know when to switch between cameras, and so on. It was a craft that could be taught, though; generally, if a director had done his or her preparation, any piece could be created consistently, reflecting the writer's screenplay, as many had before. In the height of the popularity of this method of making television, every day in multiple studios of BBC's television centre, multiple programmes were being made this way. The programmes were recorded before broadcast, but the approach grew out of live performances captured in the same way in previous decades; it being live meant a few more variables, but still we're in the Complicated domain unless there's a radical change in one of those variables. A good example of such a shoot falling into the Chaotic domain is the infamous story of Underground, a 1958 TV play going out live on ITV in the UK, where one of the actors died (off camera) midway through the performance. In the sprit of "the show must go on", the cast ad-libbed around the lack of an important character, the director tore up his camera script and shot the remainder of the play "like a football match", following the action, and frantically, rewrote lines on the fly supplying them to the cast when they were off screen. They got through it, by roughly following Snowden's recommended approach in that domain: act to stabilise the situation as much as you can, sense what is happening, and respond to what you sense.

So, in the world of making films and TV, what's an example of something from the Complex domain? That would be creating the screenplay in the first place. Putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, to create something that one hopes will engage an audience. Remember, that in the Complex domain, putting in the same basic efforts does not necessarily mean the same result, and for a show like Doctor Who it needs to be done over and over again, week on week; the writers have to come up with interesting and new scenarios each time, and no guarantee that any of them won't bomb. So, what advice does the Cynefin framework give for a problem in the Complex domain? In a word, experimentation. Ideally, you try lots of different approaches (Snowden refers to them as probes, and would suggest you do them concurrently), see what works and what doesn't, amplify the former, dampen the latter. A writer can do this within the process of creating the text, trying things out and reworking them, but as per Goldman's guidance, you can't truly know until something is made and broadcast. Interestingly, Doctor Who has more scope to do this than a lot of other shows - it can sample different settings and genres every story. So, for those that didn't like recent Chris Chibnall episodes of Doctor Who, I say: one answer might have been to have more of them. Because of Covid, and because a handover is required to a new team taking over making the show, 2021 and 2022 will only see nine episodes of Doctor Who broadcast. The scope for trying different things has been restricted. Whether - had it been possible - the creation of a wider range of stories in that time might have meant more audience engagement and enjoyment, we can never know for sure (because - all together now - nobody knows anything), but it couldn't have hurt. Here's to more episodes per year in future!

In Summary:

Window dressing, but for a superior window, like one on 5th Avenue or somewhere like that.