TARDIS Eruditorum: A Psychochronography in Blue

Nothing Ever Changes in London (The Visitation)

2012-03-02T02:00:00.000-08:00

The flat share sitcom Eric Saward proposed as a spinoff
tragically never really took off.

It’s February 15th, 1982. The Jam remain at number one for the entirety of this story with Soft Cell, XTC, Depeche Mode, and Hall and Oates also charting, making this the only time that list of four bands has ever happened. Depeche Mode, it should be noted, are here debuting in their Vince Clarke-free version with “See You,” their first single written by Martin Gore. Lower in the charts Journey appear with “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which will peak at 62 before vanishing, getting the reception it deserved until the damn thing reappeared repeatedly from 2007-2012, eventually becoming a top ten single.

In real news, a general election in the Republic of Ireland boosts the centrist Fianna Fáil party who, after a few weeks of jockeying, form a government. The DeLorean factory in Belfast is put into receivership. And, two days after this story airs its last episode, the European Court of Human Rights determines that caning, belting, or tasing students without their parents’ permission is a human rights violation, which is one of those rulings that just makes you wonder how anyone ever thought otherwise.

While on television it’s the debut of Eric Saward, who will be a major character in the blog for the next while. Eric Saward is an interesting figure. He’s the script editor over the low point of the classic series - a fact that taints him as much as it taints John Nathan-Turner. He also, however, had a colossal falling out with Nathan-Turner at the end of his tenure, and, more to the point, dished freely about this in an interview after leaving the show, which means that he’s also a primary source for many of the criticisms of the show.

And then you have his four actual scripts for the series. They are, generally speaking, controversial. He has one that’s largely considered an absolute classic, which we’ll talk about in two entries. His others have their admirers and their detractors. For the most part admirers win out - all four of his stories are in the top 100 in the Mighty 200, with two in the top fifty. But there’s a volume, in every case, to the detractors that one doesn’t see with other largely well-regarded writers.

There’s a quote that’s been making the rounds of the Internet from Ira Glass - an American radio presenter, for the large portion of my audience who isn’t from the US - about how beginners in any creative sphere run into a problem because they generally have very good taste, but their work isn’t up to their own standards yet. It’s an unusually good quote as bland inspirational quotes about writing go, but it’s particularly apropos for Eric Saward, who is, by and large, a writer with demonstrably solid taste and a chronic inability to quite live up to it.

The best example of this is Robert Holmes. The active relationship between Saward and Holmes doesn’t begin until Season Twenty, but I’d make a strong case - in fact, I’m going to - that the writers need to be considered in tandem from the start of Saward’s career. Miles and Wood suggest that this is the first attempt to do a “traditional” Doctor Who story, but this is a slightly dodgy claim. For one thing, the pseudo-historical isn’t exactly a format with a long tradition. It was reasonably popular in the Hinchcliffe era, which had three of them, and then the Williams era started with one, but prior to that there were only three of them: The Time Meddler, The Abominable Snowmen, and The Time Warrior

So while it’s true that “aliens mess with history” is one of the standard plots of Doctor Who now, it wasn’t really in 1982. It’s not until there are eight of the things in seven years, starting with this story, that it becomes a sort of standard issue thing. And the seven that exist hardly form a coherent genre. The Horror of Fang Rock, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Masque of Mandragora, The Pyramids of Mars, The Time Warrior, The Abominable Snowmen, and The Time Meddler have very, very little in common as a list beyond their historical setting. Some involve aliens meddling with concrete facts of history, others just use the historical setting as a set of tropes and conventions. Actually, about the only thing other than the historical setting that can be generalized about that list is that five of the seven involve Robert Holmes in some fashion. Which is amusing given that he hated doing history in Doctor Who.

But this gets at what’s really going on in The Visitation, which is not about redoing a Doctor Who standard in the 1980s so much as it’s a flat-out 1980s remake of The Time Warrior. Saward, in his first outing, is attempting a redo of a Robert Holmes story. And to his credit, it’s not the worst idea. I was a little rough on The Time Warrior when I covered it due to the fact that it’s got some egregious sexism problems. But that’s the sort of thing that’s why I insist this isn’t a review blog. Because considered as a piece of entertainment, The Time Warrior is a highlight of the Pertwee era. As stories to go back to and try again go, there are few better choices - it’s a great story that, unlike something like Warrior’s Gate or Carnival of Monsters, can be easily repeated with slight variations. So as source material to pinch goes, Saward is on firm ground here.

And let’s also be clear, Saward is not a talentless hack by any stretch of the imagination. There are some real strengths to his writing. He has a sense of pace that’s genuinely admirable. In all of his scripts there’s a sense of mounting and pressing drama - a sense of pressure and suspense that animates his scripts satisfyingly. He’s good at stringing together set pieces - a talent he shares with Holmes - and while he uses bickering among the TARDIS crew as a crutch to pad out episodes the fact is that he writes those scenes quite well. It is, in other words, not hard to see why this was one of the most popular stories of the season - it was fast-paced, exciting, and had a lot going on. It’s very much fun to watch.

The word “but” hangs over that paragraph like a sword of Damocles, however, and so let’s drop it. Saward is no Robert Holmes. And the real case in point is Richard Mace. On the one hand, Mace is a flagrant effort to create an archetypal Robert Holmes type character - the larger than life comedy rogue, specifically. It’s not that Mace isn’t funny - there are parts of the story where he’s downright charming. But for some inexplicable reason Saward hangs the entire story on him - he’s the only supporting character in the entire thing that can accurately be called a character. And it doesn’t work at all. Mace just isn’t a good enough character to support the entire plot. He’s great fun, but that’s all he is. Garron, another one of the comedy rogue characters in question, was one of the most fun parts of The Ribos Operation, but he was balanced out by a well-characterized villain and the Unstoffe/Binro storyline that provides the emotional heart of the story. And Saward, in doing his Holmes imitation, misses all of that.

It is, in other words, as though Saward watched some Holmes scripts, noticed that comedy rogues were the best part, and so he wrote a script consisting of nothing but a comedy rogue and some action set pieces. It’s maddening because it’s so close to working. He’s got the right model. He’s correctly identified many of the best parts of the model. But he doesn’t have a sense of the underlying mechanics of The Time Warrior to actually imitate it. The Time Warrior’s comedy rogue is Irongron, and he’s a bad guy created to play endlessly off of the alien. Saward makes the comedy rogue the Doctor’s sidekick and doesn’t bother developing the world any further.

The real giveaway is the Tereleptil leader. Holmes, in creating the Sontarans, creates a specific character in Linx. Whereas the Tereleptil leader never gets a name - he’s just the Tereleptil leader. Saward, in part four, goes for a moment of supsense where there suddenly turn out to be three Tereleptils. The idea seems to be that it’s suspenseful because the lone Tereleptil was a real threat all story and now there are three of them. But with the lone Tereleptil already being little more than a featureless monster who gets some moustache-twirling lines the sudden reveal of more of them is little more than a reveal that the story’s monster is... a monster. Yay.

All of which said, it’s not that the story doesn’t work. It does. It’s just that it only works on transmission, and even then would only work at the heightened pace of the twice-weekly episodes. This story depends on the fact that the audience doesn’t really have time to think about what’s going on. And we’re starting to exit the point where only working once is a sound choice and to enter a point where Doctor Who is obviously going to be out on video someday. Even if, in 1982, the VCR was still a bit of an obscure object (10% of the households in the UK owned one) it was clearly a rising technology. And so while The Visitation can get something of a pass on the old “it was only meant to be watched once” defense... that defense is going to stop working soon.

One final thing that, of course, has to be commented on: the destruction of the sonic screwdriver. The reasoning behind it, stated ad nauseum by John Nathan-Turner over the course of his career, is that the sonic screwdriver was a cheat that made the Doctor too powerful and encouraged lazy scriptwriting. Somewhat astonishingly, this nonsense is still repeated within some corners of fandom, and while the idea that it might be put to bed for good is surely ludicrous, let’s take a stab at it.

First of all, the thing that makes the Doctor too powerful is that the show is named after him. I’ve slaughtered this horse in past entries, but this is one of the most egregious outbreaks of this sort of twaddle, so let’s be perfectly clear. Anyone who is watching Doctor Who in any spirit based on the idea that the Doctor might not save the day is simply being televisually illiterate. The drama of Doctor Who cannot reasonably be said to come from whether or not the Doctor is going to be OK. And so on those grounds Nathan-Turner’s entire crusade to remove Romana, K-9, and the sonic screwdriver on the grounds of excessive power was simply silly.

The idea that the sonic screwdriver encourages lazy scriptwriting, on the other hand, may be even more bewildering. In that it seems to suggest, allegedly seriously, that the purpose of Doctor Who is to watch the Doctor do clever things with locks. If anything the sonic screwdriver discouraged lazy scriptwriting because it made it harder to justify putting the Doctor in an endless sequence of captures and escapes. It dramatically reduced the amount of stupid padding that could be shoved into a story, and it does so even more in its modern day version as a tool that can accomplish anything so long as it wouldn’t be more interesting to do it another way. But as of The Visitation lazy scriptwriters can now stretch episodes out with lengthy amounts of fiddling with wires manually. Thrilling. What an improvement.

But this is fundamentally related to what’s wrong with The Visitation. It’s an imitation of a story about characters written by someone who doesn’t really understand storytelling beyond the level of action sequences. Likewise, the destruction of the sonic screwdriver is the removal of something that speeds through some of the dreck of action sequences. Whereas one of Russell T. Davies’s fundamental innovations in 2005 is going to be to bring back the sonic screwdriver, make it more powerful, and add the psychic paper to it so that he can speed through trivial setup and wire-fiddling and get on with the actual character drama.

And while I am usually disinclined to criticize the classic series for failing to live up to the standards of television from over twenty years later, this is genuinely troubling right after Kinda. Doctor Who is spending more time figuring out how to get more captures and escapes into its format than it is on character-based storytelling. This while simultaneously trying to act more like a soap and have character conflict. It’s problematic to say the least. And while every individual story of the Davison era thus far has more or less worked fine and been at least somewhat entertaining, it’s also clear that the show has ambitions on the level of story arcs instead of just single adventures. It's inviting the viewer to judge it on the grounds of how it handles its characters over multiple stories and on its ongoing development. And it's doing so actively, unlike in the Graham Williams era, where even as the series moved towards season-long arcs it subverted the possibility of the epic and actively declined to offer plot arcs. Nathan-Turner is actively offering a type of series where there should be plot arcs and character development. And then he's failing not just miserably but bizarrely at delivering them.

One Tiny Little Gap in the Universe Left, Just About To Close (Kinda)

2012-02-29T02:00:00.000-08:00

A snake! A snake! Ooooooh! A Snake! (Badger badger...)

It’s February 1st, 1982. Kraftwerk! They’re at number one! With “The Model/Computer Love!” It only lasts a week, but they’re overtaken by The Jam, also a fabulous band, with “A Town Called Malice/Precious.” The rest of the top ten isn’t hugely interesting, although some mention needs to go to the rather fabulously named Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who chart with the equally fabulously named “Maid of Orleans (The Waltz of Joan of Arc.” Meat Loaf and Christopher Cross also chart, taking the positions on either side of OMD. Oh well.

In real news, Hafez al-Assad, father of current Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, conducts a scorched earth campaign in Hamathat kills between seventeen and forty thousand people, mostly civilians. Like father like son, clearly. And British airline Laker Airlines abruptly goes out of business, stranding six thousand passengers when their flights are cancelled due to lack of airline. Putting the creativity into creative destruction, then.

And then on television, Kinda. As such things go, Kinda is one of the most overdetermined Doctor Who stories in existence. So we’ll start with a book that I’m kind of largely going to avoid, namely Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text. There is, to be clear, nothing particularly wrong with this book. It’s a fabulous example of early 1980s media studies. Unfortunately, the 1980s were basically the earliest days of media studies. And so reading The Unfolding Text in 2012 one gets the sense of a clever book where the only bits that would be at all new to someone who is reading this blog are basically the bits where some mildly arcane bit of literary theory is being evoked. I mean, I don’t think most of my readers are necessarily going to be solid on Greimasian oppositions and their relationship to The Krotons, but even there I think they’d do fine on the actual analysis.

But The Unfolding Text has a particularly detailed reading of Kinda due to the fact that the authors were allowed to hang around the set during filming, and so among we academic types Kinda has a bit of a reputation simply because its been analyzed in particular depth. All of which said, the reading is a bit flat - various codes of meaning overlap and partially cancel each other out and the end result reinforces established social codes based around a BBC image of “professionalism.” It’s a fair enough approach and hard to argue with, but it falls a bit too neatly into the general tendency of early cultural studies work to find oppressive cultural hegemony everywhere.

I, somewhat obviously, prefer a different approach. Not to break out the theory excessively, but I tend to favor an approach where it’s assumed that nothing is ever fully erased and that overlapping codes of meaning - which obviously happen in any collaboratively authored text, and, frankly, in most single-author ones - do just that - overlap, leaving each meaning intact as one of a number of routes through the text.

To put it in less heady terms, The Unfolding Text belongs to a school of thought where a lot of effort goes into showing how mass media is a tool of the established social order. In 2012 hardly anyone needs to be told that anymore. It can safely be taken for granted, and I largely do here, finding myself instead interested in the odd contours of the world as depicted in a piece of mass media aimed at the general population that nevertheless consistently works as a rabbit hole to a world of strange concepts and avant garde techniques and ideology. I’m interested in the way in which the strange survives in mass media, in other words, not in the rather banal fact that mass media is by default an apparatus of existing power. I understand why, in 1983, at the dawn of media studies the observation of how mass media worked to reinforce structures of power was important, but the result is that The Unfolding Text is, as I said to start, a bit basic.

So where The Unfolding Text sees a Buddhist allegory that has been Christianized (or, if we want to be blunter, an exotic allegory that has been normalized - The Unfolding Text does precious little to work through the Buddhist nature of the story, focusing almost entirely on the way that it got mainstreamed into a Christian allegory instead of on what it might have said or done on its own) I am inclined to see a story in which the signifiers of both overlap in interesting and compelling ways.

Or, at least, I would if this were particularly Buddhist. As Miles and Wood point out, the degree to which Bailey can actually be said to be particularly Buddhist is kind of minimal. The Buddhism of the story exists more on the level of character naming as a sort of crass symbolism than on the level of actual content. Had Kinda been a particularly Buddhist story then the Mara wouldn’t simply be removed from Tegan’s mind but accepted as a part of her own internal landscape - a representation of her own demons that she cannot simply erase. That’s kind of pointedly not where the story actually goes, and that’s on the level of scripting, not on the level of Christianizing that The Unfolding Text goes for.

A more interesting issue of Christianization comes in the “serpent in paradise” aspects of the story - aspects that are very clearly drawn from the book of Genesis and not from a Buddhist source. Were we interested in sloppy readings we’d go with some sort of Joseph Campbell monomyth bullshit, but I’ve expressed my utter disdain for Campbell already, so clearly that’s not what we’re going to pick. Instead let’s embrace the postmodern and simply accept that the Christian imagery of the Garden of Eden and the more Buddhist concept of the Mara as Tegan’s internal libidinous desires are being juxtaposed, with the Mara being couched in the more culturally familiar concept of original sin and primal evil. This isn’t Christianity overwriting Buddhism, but an active hybrid concept that simultaneously evokes both.

But all of this is presupposing that a sort of symbolic deciphering of this story is the most interesting way to go about it. And it’s not. The merging of the image of primal temptation with Tegan’s obviously libidinal possession with the childlike logic of her dreamspace is the most symbolically rich part of this story, sure, but if we’re being honest we’re not holding a candle to the symbolic rabbit holes of Logopolis or The Deadly Assassin here, and frankly, thank God because I don’t have anything like the time to write another one of those posts. It’s a potent little knot of symbols, yes, but it’s thus worth taking seriously on precisely those grounds: it is both potent and compact. That is, it resonates strongly without being all that difficult to grasp. Without any mucking about with Buddhist terminology it’s relatively clear what’s going on with the Mara and temptation. It may hit a bit old for a given viewer - the degree to which it’s immediately familiar is, as Miles notes in About Time, kind of directly related to the degree to which the viewer has gone through puberty. But even for a “too young” viewer there’s a familiar sense of the inaccessible here. The Mara feels like a part of the world you’re not old enough for, and retains its primal power. Indeed, for an audience slightly too young to grasp the sexual overtones of the Mara the creature is in many ways even more potent.

This gets us closer to what’s really interesting about Kinda, which is not the density of its symbolism but the quality of its storytelling. Because quietly and without overly excessive fanfare this story is the first one to basically work like modern Doctor Who. It’s a genuine character-based science fiction story. It’s still a flawed story - the series has a ways to go before it can do this elegantly - but it’s the first time we can recognizably see this sort of Doctor Who story being told.

We’ve largely gotten at what Tegan’s character does here. She is, of course, particularly well-suited to this - her rashness, impulsiveness, and anger make her the character most suited to this sort of libidinous transformation. Similarly, Adric’s teenage rebelliousness make him the obvious person to put in the dome under Hindle’s cruel and arbitrary authority. And the young and fresh-faced Doctor is perfectly positioned to be the Idiot who, free of preconceptions, who is able to piece together what the world is and respond to it.

But this commitment to character goes beyond just the TARDIS crew. Character traits also provide much of the sense of danger in this story, with Hindle being a sort of madman that we haven’t seen before. For all the scenery chewing of the episode one cliffhanger, with Hindle screaming that he has the power of life and death over everybody, there’s something unnerving about it. Hindle isn’t an insane villain in the Master sense of just being insanely evil, he’s a villain whose makes him wholly unpredictable. For all the excess of Simon Rouse’s performance it remains a deeply, deeply unsettling one simply because at no point are Hindle’s actions predictable. Equally deft is the way in which Bailey sketches out his other characters so that there appear to be character motivations for what they’re doing as well. For instance, Karuna’s actions are clearly motivated in part by her relationship with Aris, even though the details of this relationship are never quite spelled out.

The result is a world in which everybody appears to be acting as characters, but the interactions of their characters tell a larger story about the philosophical and imaginative concepts of the story. Which are not simply an allegory but are instead thematic. At the heart of this story is a series of stories about the destructive relationship between desire and power, with every given interaction being defined by that relationship. So Hindle is driven mad by his anxiety over power, Aris is tempted and destroys his people because of his desire for power to take revenge on the colonists, et cetera.

There are problems - given all of this, the resolution of just trapping the Mara in a bunch of mirrors is, frankly, lame and underwhelming. After building an entire complex network of character traits and thematic implications all the story can find to do with them is to blow them all up. Except that Bailey is working actively to avoid being so overtly violent, going instead for a functional zero-death story, so instead we get a giant snake.

Ah yes, the snake. One of the legendary bad effects of Doctor Who - one so bad that they redid it in CGI for the DVD. This is silly in several regards. First, the anti-historical nature of it simply jars. Surely by 2011, when the DVD came out, we can simply be at peace with the fact that Doctor Who had some crap effects in its time. Beyond that, surely there’s not that much benefit to fixing just one dumb thing in the story. I mean, let’s CGI out Matthew Waterhouse while we’re at it. Or Aris’s fillings. Or any number of other things. The idea that Doctor Who’s past is somehow fixable is ridiculous. For that matter, the idea that it’s possible to make Kinda look less like it was made in early 1982 is ridiculous. Kinda is absolutely part and parcel of television in 1982 ill-advised giant pink snakes and all. Kinda was a television program, transmitted in a real context. To treat Kinda as something other than the transmitted version is simply inaccurate.

Which gets at the second and rather more significant issue, which is that, as I said, it doesn’t matter how well-done the snake is given that it’s a fundamentally unsatisfying ending in terms of what comes before it. The visual quality of the snake isn’t what’s wrong with the ending. What’s wrong with the ending is that it doesn’t extend from any of its characters. It’s not about Hindle, restored by the Box of Jhana, taking a sane decisive action to save everybody. It’s not about Tegan facing down her demons. It’s not about Adric facing his fear. It’s marginally about Karuna’s growing up and taking on the role of wise woman, but Karuna hardly had the most compelling character arc. It’s mostly just about the Doctor finally getting around to having a clever idea when, in order to be an adequate denouement to everything that’s come before, it needed to be character-based.

But if we gave Four to Doomsday some leeway for being the first story to try soap opera style storytelling and getting the characters wrong we need to give Kinda some more leeway for attempting to try character-based storytelling that was wedded firmly to the science fiction concepts. This is an extremely mature story, technically speaking. And in the end, it’s still 1982 and Doctor Who doesn’t hit the point of doing this sort of thing elegantly for a while yet. All of which said, it’s not even like the new series hasn’t flubbed the ending on a story here and there. Victory of the Daleks happened, and Kinda’s weak ending is no worse than that one. So forgiving the ending - essentially the story’s only major lapse - is relatively easy.

There is, however, one rather ominous fact on the horizon. In hindsight, of course, everybody recognizes that Kinda is a classic piece of Doctor Who. And yet in the Doctor Who Monthly poll on Season 19 it ranked dead last - as the absolute worst story of the season. This is particularly notable because the season finale, Time-Flight, is one of the most reviled stories in all of Doctor Who - the fifth worst ever in the Mighty 200 poll. And yet Time-Flight was nicely middle of the pack in the season poll whereas Kinda was absolutely hated at the time. I'm going to be relatively kind to Time-Flight when we get to it, but let's make this perfectly clear - if you prefer either Time-Flight or Four to Doomsday to Kinda, there's something seriously wrong with you. And unfortunately, apparently the Doctor Who Monthly readers, or at least those that answered the season poll, did.

The usual cautions about the tastes of Doctor Who Magazine readers apply, but what we have to remember is that this was also an era where John Nathan-Turner was overtly courting fandom through the magazine. And here, quite frankly, we see where this becomes really, really toxic. Because by most metrics, even in 1982, it would have been clear that there are really interesting and praiseworthy things going on here and that this is a model story for how to do Doctor Who. Instead, though, the whims of fandom had sway. In hindsight it’s blatantly clear that this is the most sophisticated and aesthetically successful story Doctor Who has done yet. But it’s not the model going forward at all, and it’s not until five years from here that this begins to be what the program shoots for by default. Instead the program tries to cater overtly to the Doctor Who Magazine audience.

It’s not as though there’s an immediate downturn in the quality of the show after this. There’s not, and the Davison era remains, on the whole, quite good. But on the other hand, if you want to point at the wrong turn that kills Doctor Who, I think it would be hard to find a better one than this. Because the ratings for Season Nineteen were generally fantastic - short of the ITV-strike bolstered Season Seventeen they’re the best that Doctor Who has done since the Hinchcliffe era. And ratings-wise, it’s all downhill from here. Kinda was, by a trivial margin, the lowest-rated story of Season Nineteen, and it still beats every single story from Seasons 20-26. This season is the last season of Doctor Who that can validly claim to be massively popular. The directions it goes after this are, at least in the short and medium term, the wrong ones.

And if you want to identify a specific error, it’s difficult to come up with a more compelling example than making actively listening to people who thought Time-Flight was a better story than this a matter of active policy for the show. Never mind the absurd stupidity of some fan comments, never mind the discussions of fanwank and continuity porn. Doctor Who made a point of taking seriously people who preferred Time-Flight to this.

No wonder it died.

Because We Don't Quite Fully Understand (Four to Doomsday)

2012-02-27T02:00:00.000-08:00

And apparently one of the things we don't quite fully

understand is basic physics.

It’s January 18, 1982. Bucks Fizz are at number one with “The Land of Make Believe,” with Kraftwerk threatening to take the number one spot. Unfortunately it is instead Shakin’ Stevens with “Oh Julie” that inherits the number one from Bucks Fizz. Elsewhere, The Human League have two separate songs in the top ten and are joined by Kool and the Gang, Foreigner, and Meat Loaf.

The trouble with these twice-weekly airings is that I get very little window to cover any non-musical history in. To wit, all I’m finding is that the post-war peak in unemployment happens in the UK, with over three million people out of work. Ah, the triumphs of Thatcherism. (Yes, she cut the unemployment rate later. But in the process she presided over a complete realignment of the economy that was... less than ideal.)

While on television, it’s Four to Doomsday. With the exception of The Highlanders, which is, of course, missing, I am reasonably certain that this is the second appearance of a Doctor that the fewest people care about one way or another. The next two Doctors get two of the most reviled stories in series’ history for their second outings (one of them even correctly reviled), while Hartnell, Pertwee, and Baker get all-time classics for their second go-rounds. Davison, on the other hand, gets this - a story nobody much likes, nobody much hates, and, frankly, nobody much thinks about beyond “that one between Castrovalva and Kinda” with a side of “that was the first story Davison filmed.”

While I would not go so far as to call this story an overlooked gem (or as an overrated disaster), it is a fair bit more interesting than its reputation. The first thing to realize about it is that it very much sets the tone for Season Nineteen. Of the seven stories in Season Nineteen three are unabashedly attempts to redo things the series has done in the past in a new format. The first of these is, of course, Castrovalva, which we already noted was an effort to go back and build a transition out of the Bidmead era. And we’ll deal with the other two in a few days. Three more are conscious attempts to try new things that the series couldn’t previously do. And then there is Four to Doomsday, a story that it is difficult to firmly describe as forward-looking or backward-looking. In a season that is equally committed to finding ways to rework the standards into the new approach for Doctor Who and to finding new things to do, Four to Doomsday is actually the one story that’s splitting the difference between the two approaches.

On the one hand, as Miles and Wood point out, Four to Doomsday is essentially built like a Hartnell story. From the start, this is clear: the story opens with the Doctor failing to get his companion back to Earth and the TARDIS crew trying to figure out what sort of world they’re in. The exploratory mode hasn’t been completely absent from Doctor Who, but its uses after The Underwater Menace are few and far between. But it goes further than that. The particular flavor of moral dilemma on offer here is also peculiarly old-fashioned. It’s been a long time since the central conflict of a story is a purely philosophical one. This story is about whether Monarch’s autocratic rule is good. This isn’t explored in terms of its effects on people, or even in terms of Monarch’s psyche, but as question of political theory. If one were to pick a past story that Four to Doomsday is most similar to it would be difficult to come up with a better choice than The Savages, of all things. So in that regard its status as more or less completely overlooked can be seen as a flawless mimicry of its source material.

But this shoots far, far past redoing the classics. The tendency introduced in Season Nineteen of “let’s update the format of X” is never going to depart the show - even in the most recent season we had The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People, an updating of the Troughton base under siege,, and The God Complex, which clearly owed more than a slight debt to The Curse of Fenric. But those are iconic classics that there’s a relatively clear motivation to pilfer. The idea that Season Nineteen’s “let’s update the past” aesthetic started with The Savages is more than faintly ludicrous.

The truth of things is visible under the hood. It’s not really until The Visitation that Doctor Who starts having the remake be a conscious style decision. Four to Doomsday fits better into the tradition of things like Full Circle and State of Decay - stories that referenced a much earlier flavor of what Doctor Who was, but did so because of the idiosyncrasies of their writers. The idiosyncrasies in question are almost polar opposites - State of Decay felt like a Hinchcliffe script because it basically was one, whereas Full Circle felt classic because its writer had grown up on classic Doctor Who. But the result was the same - stories that felt like old Doctor Who because they were by people who were steeped in old Doctor Who.

For the most part, and the repeated disasters that are John Nathan-Turner’s nostalgia-steeped nightmare briefs demonstrate this, this method of having the past influence Doctor Who’s present because of influence on the writers is vastly superior to the overt remake plan. Unfortunately, Four to Doomsday is basically the end of the period we’ve been enjoying since Full Circle where the show’s relationship with its past was based on influence instead of mimicry. This is one of Nathan-Turner’s many wrong turns, but it’s a real one. But that’s two stories from now. For now, we have Terence Dudley, who was an old hand at the BBC. Miles and Wood suggest, quite sensibly, that this explains the somewhat old-fashioned nature of this story - that Dudley’s conception of the series is based on the Hartnell era because he was a working television professional for that era.

In many ways this gestures back at problems we were discussing around Destiny of the Daleks and Creature From the Pit - the fact that it’s a very, very unusual person who can maintain a 20 year writing or directing career in television. Certainly it explains the weaknesses of Terence Dudley’s writing - and there are many. But while the datedness of his writing is a drawback, it’s also worth noting that Four to Doomsday is in no way just a Hartnell remake. As much as its themes and structure are old-fashioned, this is also where the attempt to make the show more character-based and soapy really gets going. (Which is unsurprising, given that it’s the first story made under the new brief.)

It’s worth actually thinking a little more about The Savages in order to understand this. Back in the day we noted that one of the things that really stood out watching The Savages was how, in modern times, the story would have been done in such a way as to have the whole story be about Steven’s journey from the Doctor criticizing him for being unable to make his own decisions at the start to being ready to take over and run things. And now, sixteen years later... well, we’re still not quite to the point where the character-based storytelling is up and running, but we’re getting closer. This story at least tries to do something with its characters, framing the major conflict as being between the extremes of Tegan’s reaction to Monarch (we have to get back to Earth and warn everyone) and Adric’s (ooh yay, fascism, maybe it will make the icky women go away).

This, of course, gets at the real problem here. It’s trying to create soap-like character tension and drama here, and good for it, but it’s doing so with appallingly broad strokes. Adric is sexist and embraces stupid ideas, Tegan is rash and doesn’t think things through, and the Doctor mediates between them with Nyssa serving as the actual companion for the story. It’s very, very superficial and doesn’t actually work like character drama at all. I mean, it’s got all the moving pieces - setting characters against each other for ideological reasons, having dramatic tension within the TARDIS crew, using the differences between characters as the engine to tell the story. It’s all there. It’s just not being put together well.

Many of the problems here are the traditionalism. When the moral dilemma at the heart of the story is “totalitarian dictatorship by a reptilian overlord named Monarch, yay or nay” you’re really not setting yourself up for success in the compelling drama department. There’s never any serious doubt that Adric is wrong and that Monarch is evil. Likewise, within the storytelling framework of Doctor Who “run and warn Earth” is never going to be the correct decision, and so Tegan hardly comes out as a sympathetic character in all of this.

Add to this the fact that both Adric and Tegan have their own problems. Adric’s are easy enough to explain: he’s played by Matthew Waterhouse, and Waterhouse can’t anchor a dramatic plot. Yes, it doesn’t help that he’s suddenly being written as the most obnoxious teenager in the history of the world, but he’s hard-pressed to deal with well-written dramatic material too, as he’ll show given time.

Tegan, on the other hand, has an additional problem here in terms of her just wanting to get home. It’s been a long, long time since the Doctor had an unwilling companion, and with good reason. It worked in the very early days because we didn’t know the Doctor very well yet. And even there by the second season Ian and Barbara had essentially made their peace with the Doctor and were OK with traveling in space and time. The idea of a companion who doesn’t want to be on the TARDIS doesn’t really have a place in Doctor Who one the audience’s sympathies are 100% aligned with the Doctor. Once the show reaches a point where the audience unambiguously is on the Doctor’s side and wishes they could travel in the TARDIS a companion who doesn’t want to be there is actively working against audience sympathy. So whenever Tegan visibly hates being on the TARDIS the audience finds itself siding with her altogether too much: we wish she’d sod off too. (To her credit, Janet Fielding does as well as can be done with the character, and Tegan does improve.)

But look, we’re essentially bitching at this story for doing a poor job of a type of storytelling that Doctor Who has never really tried before. As I said, the parts are all there, just not in fully formed ways. Even the concept of this story has some interesting stuff in it. The various performances of cultural rituals are an interesting updating of the old Hartnell-era mandate towards education into the realm of the visual. And, when paralleled with the invocation of the dreamtime (a core concept in Australian aboriginal mythology) on the part of Kurkutji, the referencing of the fleshtime by the Urbankans seems to gesture at an interesting idea of human culture influencing the Urbankans. So there’s genuinely compelling stuff here, even if the script doesn’t quite know what to do with any of them.

But incremental change happens. The mere fact that this is a half-step forward is no more of a problem here than it was in The Sontaran Experiment, The Underwater Menace, or any other early story of a new Doctor. This is the Davison era’s meandering and uncertain start. What it does right will be done better in subsequent stories. And, unfortunately, what it does wrong will be done worse. But as stumbling first efforts go, it’s not all that bad.

Time Can Be Rewritten 16 (Cold Fusion, Virgin Books, 1996)

2012-02-24T02:00:00.000-08:00

As novels that I couldn’t possibly avoid go, this one ranks pretty highly. I’ve noted several times that, within the classic series, McCoy is “my Doctor,” so to speak. As the only Doctor (after my first three episodes) I didn’t originally know existed he was the one I got to discover without episode guides. But even still, when I got into Doctor Who it had been off the air for three years. The McCoy years may have been the televised Doctor Who that I came to freshest, but until the dark days of 1996 the only Doctor Who that I got to follow as it came out were the Virgin books.

I’m going to cover much of the Virgin and BBC books lines as if they were new episodes when the time comes. (I haven’t gotten a firm list together, but on a quick scan of titles I think I’m going to do about 30 Virgin books and about 15 each of the BBC Books and Big Finish Eighth Doctor stuff.) But my relationship with them was... interesting. I was reading them roughly from the ages of 11-13, which is just a bit too young for them. But this is in some ways the perfect way to relate to the Virgin books. Their darkness, complexity, and occasional jaunts into overt sexuality are as perfect for that age. The mixture of scandalous and salacious content with the fundamental safety of Doctor Who is as gentle a gradient to tackle emerging sexuality as they come - like having a copy of Timeframe with its Katy Manning/Dalek photo as your sole piece of pornography (which, for years, I did).

This book, in other words, merges two of my favorite eras. As Doctor crossovers go, this one is, for me, as good as it gets. Not just because it’s two of my favorite Doctors, but because there’s such an intrinsic contrast between them. The relative gentleness of Davison’s Doctor combined with the dangerous and manipulative nature of the Virgin Books version of McCoy’s are an inspired pairing that offers no shortage of drama.

All of which said, any multi-Doctor story is less about the particulars of a man meeting himself at a different point in his life and more about the comparison of two eras of the show. Doubly so in a book, where we do not get Davison’s Doctor or McCoy’s Doctor but rather their textual ghosts. The Doctors themselves are televisual performances - things created by actors, directors, and writers in a collaborative environment. These are purely literary characters, responding almost entirely to the whims of a singular creator. They are echoes. That does not diminish the validity of their stories, but this book belongs to neither the Davison nor the McCoy eras.

This gets at another issue with the Virgin books (and for that matter the BBC ones) that I’ve largely danced around. I poke at it a little bit in both the Man in the Velvet Mask entry and the Empire of Glass essay in the Hartnell book, and deal with it more extensively in the Scales of Injustice entry, but it’s been a while and it’s high time we tackled the issue of fanwank again. Because Lance Parkin is a master of it.

In the Scales of Injustice entry I distinguished between two types of fanwank. The first is what we might call explanatory fanwank - the sort of thing that tries to stitch together an extended explanation that resolves a host of alleged continuity problems over multiple stories. The second is what we might call value-added fanwank - the sort of thing that happens when, for instance, the minotaur at the end of The God Complex is referred to as being a relative of the Nimon. But this book introduces a third sort of fanwank - one that is not nearly subtle enough to be called value-added, but is not the sort of sprawlingly doctrinal mess that characterizes fanwank for the sake of explanations.
Take, for instance, the fact that the novel spends over a hundred words describing a bunch of people singing a drinking song consisting only of the line “we’re in a chronic hysteresis” repeated over and over again. It’s a deft little joke for fans, yes, but at 100 words it’s considerably more substantial than the Nimon reference or even the use of the Macra as the primary monster in Gridlock. Similarly, the near exact replay of the Third Doctor’s meeting with Sarah Jane in The Five Doctors as the dialogue between Roz and the Doctor after Roz mistakenly believes him to have regenerated into the Fifth Doctor is just a bit too large to be off-hand.

But this gets at something important to realize about continuity, particularly before we take our careening nosedive into the televised fanwankathon that is the stretch of episodes from Earthshock to Warriors of the Deep - a stretch of 38 episodes (counting the Five Doctors as if it were a four-parter) in which every single story features a villain who has appeared before. A lot of the nature of fanwank is dependent on what assumptions can be made about the audience for a given story. Fanwank is a different problem in a television series expected to go out to a general audience than it is in a book series that is overtly catering to die-hard fans.

In truth this is one of the appeals of the books. There are things you can do when you have access to the full and mad breadth of Doctor Who continuity that you just can’t do when writing for a general audience. Not things merely in the sense of a wealth of nods and winks, nor in the sense of broad explanations, but in the sense of genuinely clever and interesting commentary. Since we’ve been referencing Alan Moore a lot lately, it’s perhaps worth comparing to his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, a storyline that creates considerable sparks and depth out of literary history and that works only because of the extreme referentiality of the work. Doctor Who’s history is, at this point, deep enough to permit similar (though to date nowhere near as good) explorations - stories that work in part because of the sheer depth of history that Doctor Who can call upon.

Lance Parkin is particularly good at this (and it’s perhaps worth noting that Parkin has written a book on Alan Moore). And this is very much what Cold Fusion is about. Not in the references we’ve talked about so far - those are just cute little jokes that are the size they are because the book can safely expect an audience who will get them - but in the sections dealing with Patience.

Ah, yes. Patience. A character sufficiently massive in her implications that she largely overshadows the multidoctor nature of this story. See, Patience is an ancient Gallifreyan - explicitly not a Time Lord - who is strongly implied to be the Doctor’s wife. This may attract eyebrows from those who are not familiar with the Virgin era. Central to the Virgin era is the idea that along with Rassilon and Omega (who are, following from Alan Moore [who is easily the biggest influence on the Virgin era], contemporaries) there is a third major figure in Time Lord history: the Other. The nature of the Other is left mysterious for most of the run, but it is strongly hinted that it is, in fact, the Doctor. (I will not be the one to spoil the outcome of this, but we’ll cover it when we get to the book Lungbarrow, and again when we get to Parkin’s The Infinity Doctors.)

In a fundamental way, this makes sense. It’s an inevitable consequence of the narrative structure of the series. The more that the series, over time, flits about the nature of the Time Lords while focusing on the Doctor as the main character the more it becomes inevitable that the Doctor plays some central role in the history of the Time Lords. The fact that in the narrative world of Doctor Who the Doctor is always by far the most important of the Time Lords affects the nature of the Time Lords. No matter how much one loves the image of the Doctor as just a small little man who wanders the universe and does good things the fact that he is narratively at the center of Doctor Who means that the universe of Doctor Who will always revolve around him. Anything that doesn’t give the Doctor an implicit role in the nature of the Time Lords is simply fighting against the fundamental gravity of Doctor Who as a series.

Different writers handle the shape and implications of this differently. Parkin, however, is always one of the ones that fights most thoroughly against the idea of a singular Doctor Who. As the great and defunct Teatime Brutality points out, it’s Parkin in The Gallifrey Chronicles who most overtly sets up the “it’s all true” theory of Doctor Who continuity, having the Doctor declare that “every word of every novel is real, every frame of every film, every panel of every comic strip,” and then being uninterested when someone points out that this implies all sorts of contradictions. (Parkin also, of course, wrote AHistory, an attempt to create a fixed chronology of all events in the Doctor Who universe. The correct term for this project is “hilarious.”)

For Parkin, in other words, while it’s inevitable that the Doctor is in some sense at the heart of Gallifreyan history, it’s in no way necessary that this take any particular shape. (This culminates, for Parkin, with The Infinity Doctors, which is based on taking everything said about Gallifrey over the course of 35 years seriously while not bothering to try to come up with a way to reconcile it with the present state of Doctor Who at the time.) Hence the lengthy sequence in which the Doctor and Patience do a sort of mind meld and we get a bevy of accounts where we’re explicitly told that the Doctor can’t tell which ones are his memories and which ones are Patience’s.

What we get in this section is a mad smattering of references to past stories mixed in with allusions to a history that may or may not be the Doctor’s. The Brain of Morbius, An Unearthly Child, Creature From the Pit, The War Games, and The Mind of Evil are explicitly referenced, along with the existence of the missing episodes. It’s wonderfully bizarre. And at one point, it’s noted that “These accounts contradict one another,” but this is immediately followed by the observation that “memories often do.”

I have occasionally made half-joking reference to the fact that one of the basic premises of this blog is that Doctor Who is a quasi-sentient metafiction authored by an anarchic spirit within British culture. Some commenters have, very sensibly, suggested that I might want to explain this, a viewpoint that, while utterly reasonable, I have generally avoided catering to. Still, having now inflicted the Logopolis post on the world - a post that, like Logopolis itself, seems very much like it approaches some sort of limit point in that particular method of thinking about Doctor Who - and as we now make our step out of Bidmead’s neo-Whittakerian take on Doctor Who and towards something altogether less magical it is perhaps worth finally unpacking it.

The root idea is, for once, borrowed from Grant Morrison instead of Alan Moore. Morrison has several times suggested that the DC Universe line of superheroes is sentient and has an animating consciousness. My disagreement with Morrison is not on this point, but rather on the implications of it - Morrison seems rather to like this fact, whereas I think that the DC Universe is, while sentient, a dangerous sociopath (albeit one capable of moments of staggering beauty). But the underlying idea, obviously, appeals.

I don’t want to go too far into the comparison of Morrison’s Final Crisis with the nearly identical Season 4 finale of Doctor Who that was airing at nearly the exact same time, mostly because I intend for a Pop Between Realities on that point when we get there, but suffice it to say that the plot of that comic is a narrative collapse a la the Chase. And Morrison’s suggestion is that the DC Universe is able to, by its own intrinsic nature, repair the damage caused by the narrative collapse. I make a similar argument about the Chase, and I’ll repeat the phenomenon in Trial of a Time Lord, then again in the Davies and Moffat eras where narrative collapse becomes the default mode of storytelling for season finales.

But the point remains. Doctor Who has an odd ability to tend to itself both in an internal narrative sense and in an external social one. Internally, Doctor Who is capable of endless adjustment to its premise that allows it to adapt to what, at this point, seems safely describable as an infinite set of narrative circumstances. Doctor Who is one of the handful of fictional characters that it appears genuinely impossible to exhaust the stories about. Bad writers can still write bad Doctor Who stories, but good writers seem capable of redrafting the character into any format. Or, put another way, any narrative collapse you attempt to impose on Doctor Who will have some resolution possible within the world of Doctor Who. There is no way to write yourself irredeemably into a corner. (As evidenced by Davies successfully writing the series out of a seemingly intractable corner following its being not only cancelled but already the subject of a failed reboot)

Externally, Doctor Who shows a genuine ability to adapt to changing social circumstances. Though it does not always find an immediate response to the social conditions around it, in time it always manages to reinvent itself to be relevant to its present. It always maintains some connection with the larger culture.

I use the term quasi-sentient to describe this tendency because it appears to manifest itself absent any author. No single animating presence has kept Doctor Who relevant to culture for nearly fifty years now. Certainly no one, in 1963, designed a show to be able to narratively track the course of social history. And yet here it is. Much as the Time Lords appear to be keepers of a model of history that is based on a sort of historical gravity, Doctor Who appears to be created so that it organically shifts around to respond to history. It’s possible to tell a continual narrative - as I have been for over a year now - that treats Doctor Who as a continually evolving and linear thing even though it is pragmatically impossible for it to be so.

This is why there are Pop Between Realities posts - in order to firmly show the way in which Doctor Who fits into a historical narrative that is, of course, equally lacking in (or suffering from an excess of) authors. In order to occasionally come up for air from the story of Doctor Who and show that, no, the same story is playing out across the real world.

Likewise, this is why there are Time Can Be Rewritten posts. Because if Doctor Who is, in fact, a singular consciousness that is capable of responding to history as opposed to simply being an old thing that has tracked history just by virtue of being around for most of it then it must be possible to track backwards. It must be possible for the series’ future to intrude into its past in a way that is sensible. And so these entries are in many ways the checksums - the points where we see how the future interacts with the past and make sure that there is a coherent scope to this imaginary landmass we are mapping.

Cold Fusion, then, is a perfect instance - a book that is quite literally about the intrusion of the future onto the past. The whole Other theory of the Virgin books has nothing to do with the Davison era, which has its own rewriting of the Time Lords looming. And yet this book works. The Virgin Books version of the Doctor and a reasonably fair portrayal of early Davison interact. And the book is able to portray the Seventh Doctor as an extension of the Fifth. The book is full of lovely touches - the handling of Adric, and the hints at his tragic role in the Doctor’s later psyche are deft, and further set up the looming death of Roz in the New Adventures line.

But what is most interesting is the fact that the two Doctors never quite clash. The Fifth is horrified by the Seventh’s manipulativeness and willingness to destroy and punish his enemies, but is also made to tacitly accept that this is genuinely his future. He protests that other futures exist, but when the Feratu (the book’s main villains) suggest otherwise he accepts it. The Feratu themselves, defined by the inversion of Clarke’s law and the line between magic and science, are similarly the clear heirs of the play between the two concepts that has been going on in the just-concluded Bidmead era, and yet they are unmistakably the Seventh Doctor’s antagonists in this story, not the Fifth’s. After setting up a pair of Doctors that seem uniquely destined for a clash Parkin manages to write a story that reminds the reader that these two apparently different characters are, in fact, the same man. And in doing so gestures at the darkness that does lie ahead for the Fifth Doctor - not just in Adric’s death, but in his own relationship with violence and destruction.

The future, in other words, fits functionally into the past. Time can be rewritten without having to rewrite one line of history. All of the contradictions and absurdities of Doctor Who’s narrative fit into some larger, ephemeral whole.

And the story is damn good to boot.

We've Materialised With Considerable Finesse (Castrovalva)

2012-02-22T02:00:00.000-08:00

It wasn't until Matthew Waterhouse watched the fourth

episode of Castrovalva that he realized that he hadn't been

hungover at all.

It’s January 4th, 1982. The Human League are at number one with “Don’t You Want Me,” but are unseated by Bucks Fizz’s “The Land of Make Believe,” a song whose lyrics, by former King Crimson member Peter Sinfield, were supposedly a subtle attack on the Thatcher government. Very subtle, in fact. Also in the charts are ABBA, Adam and the Ants, Kool and the Gang, and, now in the top ten, Kraftwerk!

In real news, AT&T agrees to being broken up, the coldest temperature ever recorded in the UK is managed in Braemar, and, at least from my perspective most importantly, the Commodore 64 is introduced. Although I’m still nine months out from my debut (I’m strictly gestational for Season 19), my parents got me a Commodore 64 in the name of getting themselves one when I was about two, and my earliest memories are of playing it.

This serves, in part, as another transition point then. The fact that my entrance to Doctor Who came at the end of the Pertwee era meant that I remained absent for that in the blog. I was present for the Hinchcliffe era, but those were the stories I watched in 6th grade, largely. The Williams era I missed, but as I noted in passing on The Keeper of Traken, with Warrior’s Gate 4 watched I have now hit the point where I have, in fact, seen every single existent episode of Doctor Who, save, of course, the two as of yet unreleased missing episodes. But I’ve watched reconstructions. (I am rather glad to have had Warrior’s Gate be my last unwatched story. It was a very lovely way to go out.)

The remaining three classic series Doctors divide fairly neatly for me. Davison and Pertwee, as I’ve said elsewhere, made up the overwhelming majority of my parents’ VHS tapes. Since I was not fond of Pertwee, and in the absence of the Baker stories I desired, Davison was the first Doctor I watched with any avidness. I treated him at the time as my second favorite Doctor, behind Baker, but as I loved a theoretical ideal of Baker, this was a lie. Until I discovered the existence of Sylvester McCoy (my parents’ guidebooks all left off in the vicinity of Davison’s regeneration. I knew Colin Baker existed and that my parents hated him, but I’d been a Doctor Who fan for a solid year before I learned that there was a Seventh Doctor) Davison was my favorite Doctor. It’s a little tricky to reconstruct because I found a couple of Davison stories on mislabeled tapes after I’d started getting commercial VHS releases, but the “core” of Davison stories I remember watching young are Castrovalva, Four to Doomsday, Kinda, Time Flight, Arc of Infinity, Snakedance, Mawdryn Undead, The Five Doctors, Resurrection of the Daleks, Planet of Fire, and The Caves of Androzani, though I remember getting The Visitation, Black Orchid, and Earthshock all relatively early as well.

So we are, in other words, now in one of three sections of Doctor Who that I experienced as a child in the general vicinity of the target age range. But unlike the first such section, we’re also in an era I was alive for part of, and even if I wasn’t fully aware of the culture, or, really, of anything other than Big Milk Thing, there is something about the culture one was alive for. Even the things you’re far too young to remember are somewhat more real for having come about in a world you existed inside of. But with Doctor Who the sense is heightened. My parents’ Doctor Who books were mostly stuck in about 1983. Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration was the main reference I had. In a real sense, up until late 1993 Davison was, for me, the present of Doctor Who.

All of which said, Castrovalva is an odd start. Doctor Who has very few clear-cut transitions in its time, of course. Few things do. That’s why the terminology of the “long 1960s” and “long 1980s” exists. Because it’s not as though everyone on the planet woke up on January 1st, 1980, set fire to their bell bottoms, and decided in unison that what they really wanted to be when they grew up was a hedge fund manager. But Castrovalva is oddly transitional even for Doctor Who. After the longest gap between episodes in the series’ history the basic act of picking up immediately from the previous story was an odd one. Yes, the story had rerun just recently in the Five Faces series, and there were some obvious issues to deal with immediately, but the degree to which this story follows up on Logopolis not just in terms of the Doctor and company having to escape the Pharos project but in terms of theme and villain is genuinely strange. Put simply, it’s not clear why the Master is here.

But there’s more that’s strange here. The extended time between Season 18 and 19 meant that Season 19 was shot heavily out of order. The production order was Four to Doomsday, The Visitation, Kinda, Castrovalva, Black Orchid, Earthshock, Time Flight. Castrovalva was furthermore the fifth script commissioned, with Bidmead being hired back nearly six months after he finished work on Logopolis to fill in the gap between it and Four to Doomsday. Indeed, Bidmead got the commission only a month before Four to Doomsday started filming, and was asked to incorporate things like Nyssa’s modified costume into the script. In other words, like Meglos (only even moreso) this was an example of Doctor Who going and filling in a transition.

The problem is that all of this got taken a bit too far. The desire to smooth the transition becomes, under Nathan-Turner’s brief, four episodes of Davison’s Doctor not showing up. If the point of delaying Davison’s debut to his fourth story was to make it so that he had the part down in his debut then he must have found this story, in which he essentially doesn’t get to play the character he’d developed over the previous three stories, a puzzling one.

Oh, let’s just come out and say it. Post-regenerative trauma is a dumb invention. It extends out of an egregious misreading of Power of the Daleks. Troughton’s offputting and strange nature in that story isn’t an attempt to create some tradition where the Doctor is confused after regeneration, but a necessary aspect of the jarring nature of that first actor change. Subsequent installments verge into the openly ill-advised: keeping Pertwee’s Doctor functionally out of Spearhead From Space until late in the third episode was a strange decision that works only because there’s a whole new premise to set up in the background before dropping the Doctor into it. Letts, to his credit, practically does away with it in Robot, allowing the new Doctor half an episode of comedic larking before expecting him to get on with it. But for everyone from Davison through Paul McGann the insistence on this tiresome ritual is excruciating. (Indeed, it’s probably the largest problem with the McGann movie - the fact that it forgets to introduce its main character for half the runtime.)

Even in the new series you can see producers struggling with it. It’s notable that Davies simply keeps Tennant out of The Christmas Invasion, and even still contrives to give him a big scene at the ten minute mark to get the big reveal of what Tennant’s Doctor is going to be like out of the way. Moffat uses it to build tension, letting Smith play the part basically as he’ll go on to but using the post-regenerative trauma primarily to ratchet up tension and let Prisoner Zero become more of a threat. And these solutions show what the problem with all of this actually is. The entire appeal of a new Doctor’s debut is to see the new Doctor. So when you go through the first week of a story without remembering to show us what the new Doctor is going to be like you’re fundamentally failing to deliver what your audience is there for.

And then there’s the Master. With nobody having made any effort to come up with a motivation for him beyond hatred for the Doctor the program is, at this point, facing an overt storytelling nightmare. The last time the Master made a hard drive towards overexposure, back in Season 8, he at least had schemes of world domination. So at least when he was defeated at the end of one story he could pick up again with something new. On top of that, Season 8 didn’t have the stories dovetailing into each other on a plot level. But this “trilogy” (and let’s note that a sudden interest in making things into trilogies is a dead-on symptom of egregious pretension) consists of a single twelve-episode stretch of the Master harassing the Doctor with no interruptions whatsoever and no motivation other than defeating the Doctor for the sake of it. The result is that, by the end, the Master has ended up on something like fallback plan number eight, each one more frighteningly over-elaborate than the last.

It’s astonishing. They bring the Master back to provide an epic menace for the Doctor and then, by the end, are treating him like a pathetic joke. And Bidmead really is, in the end, left with no choice beyond just having the Master be an obviously deluded lunatic at the end of Castrovalva. The scene of him trying desperately to break open the Zero Cabinet is overtly set up as a scene about a man who has gone completely around the bend and become pathetic. But while it’s the best thing to do, dramatically, with what they’ve got here it’s a dumb idea to even have the Master back.

Despite this, Bidmead copes admirably with the Nathan-Turner hell brief - certainly better than anyone not named Robert Holmes ever did. (That he was coping is evident in the anecdote that he picked the name and setting of the story based on remembering a pair of Escher prints hanging in someone’s office that Nathan-Turner hated. The reasons Nathan-Turner hated them, according to Miles and Wood, is that he believed that “art should exist to soothe, not distract.” If I had to reduce my objection to Nathan-Turner to a single fact, incidentally, that would be it.) To his real credit he thinks through the twice-weekly structure and builds a story that is functionally two two-parters on a common theme - something that isn’t done nearly enough in the Davison era.

And despite giving him a bad set of directions the basic idea here is sound. Bidmead was absolutely the right person to have do this story because the particulars of his style are so distinctive and so vividly animated the series over the six stories prior to this. Giving the new cast a chance to establish themselves in a Bidmead-style story provides a needed continuity of theme to the series. And as it descends further down the rabbit hole of embracing continuity in everything but tone and theme, this is sensible.

That said, there’s not a huge amount new to say regarding Bidmead’s approach. He creates a mathematical and logical game, he conceptualizes his ideas in terms of visual event, and he works out a quite nice introduction to the idea of recursion. He’s got another technobabble concept that works out of pure linguistics - “recursive occlusion” belongs firmly in the pantheon of “chronic hysteresis” and “charged vacuum emboitment.” He also ends up defining much of the modern lore of what the TARDIS is. Even though The Invasion of Time is the first big “run around the bowels of the TARDIS” story, there it came off as a desperate attempt to stretch out the story by an episode and get away with doing all location shooting. Here there’s actually a unified aesthetic to the TARDIS that continues the sense from Logopolis of it being an actually scary place.

But the real credit and revelation here has to go to Peter Davison. Steven Moffat has suggested that Davison is the best actor to take the part during the classic series. I’m skeptical mostly because of Patrick Troughton (and indeed, Moffat’s claim that Davison is the only one with a successful post-Doctor Who career was also wrong. Troughton had an extremely busy post-Doctor Who career), but it’s clear from his first appearance that Davison is more of an actor (as opposed to a performer), but it is clear from this story alone that Davison is more of an actor than the series has had before. The most obvious moment is his mimicry of Troughton and Hartnell, which is not impersonation as such, but something altogether subtler. He at once clearly evokes the Doctor he’s imitating and does so in such a way as to make it seem like an echo of them instead of a return. Even Pertwee - a gifted voice artist who probably could have done the mimicry - would be hard pressed to do it in such a way that it felt like Pertwee’s Doctor imitating Hartnell.

But more impressive is just the range of emotion that Davison gets into the Doctor. Davison declines to take on the dashing hero role that the Doctor has been for over a decade now, instead continually reacting to events. It sounds like an utterly basic thing, but this is actually the first time since Troughton that the tone which the Doctor responds to another character is actually dictated by what the other character says or does. Davison has the range to portray the Doctor as something other than an immovable force, and it’s a revelation.

The key scene - and one of the best in the story - is where the Doctor shows the Castrovalvans how strange their world is by having them draw a map and then asking them to locate where things are on it. It’s something that simply wouldn’t have happened in the Baker or Pertwee eras - the overt decision to give the “figure it out” moment to another character instead of giving the Doctor an explanation. This is how it’s going to be for the next three years - the Doctor is going to interact with the worlds of the stories instead of just imposing himself on them.

While it’s the Doctor’s absence from this story that allows Nyssa and Tegan to really take center stage, it’s the fact that Davison is a much less domineering presence than his predecessors that allows them to stay there. Added to this is the fact that Sutton and Fielding have fairly solid chemistry and make a good double act. Though this has disastrous effects on Waterhouse, whose acting finally falls out of the “minimally acceptable” range around here in no small part because he’s stuck on the outside after this. Nyssa and Tegan form a sensible unit, Davison’s style doesn’t require a sidekick to ask him to explain things, and Adric becomes completely superfluous. But Nyssa and Tegan are helped enormously by this new style. Tegan still has her problems, but it’s here that Nyssa reaches the point of being a functional Doctor surrogate. The Doctor may tag Tegan as the “coordinator” of the bunch, but it’s obviously Nyssa who keeps everything going here, her own restrained style working well as a parallel for Davison’s.

So while Castrovalva is a confused story with obvious narrative faults it serves as a useful transition. It’s recognizable both as the sort of story that follows from Season 18 and as the sort of story that will define the next three seasons. The second most difficult regeneration of the classic series has been successfully accomplished. On with the Davison era.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 26 (Coronation Street)

2012-02-20T02:00:00.000-08:00

The Davison era is described, usually by its detractors, as a soap opera. “Soap opera,” it should be noted, is one of the great denigrating terms in science fiction fandom. There is nothing, including the Star Wars Christmas Special, quite as bad in the world as being a soap opera.

To anyone outside of science fiction or soap opera fandom this is completely insane since the two are self-evidently the exact same fucking thing. To someone uninvolved in either there is no difference whatsoever in what die-hard sci-fi fans do and what die-hard soap fans do. Both are equally objects of mockery. One dresses up more, the other sends panicked letters in that don’t quite seem to grasp that the characters are fictional. But other than that they’re exactly the same thing.

Consider a recent example. In 2011 Coronation Street brought back the character of Dennis Tanner, who had not appeared in the show since 1968. The only thing that can possibly be reached for as an analogy would be something like bringing Sarah Jane Smith back to Doctor Who in 2006 when she hadn’t appeared in it since 1983. Or bringing Leonard Nimoy as Spock back in the latest Star Trek movie. More simply, consider this - virtually every long-form serialized text (as opposed to something like, say, Garfield that is serialized but consists of one-off strips instead of continuing storylines) that exists in either the US or UK is either a sci-fi/fantasy story or a soap opera.

And yet it’s difficult to imagine two genres that are more diametrically disdainful of one another. Under the hood much of this comes down to the fact that although their basic narrative structures match almost exactly their subject matter is wildly different. Soap operas are emotionally-based character dramas, science fiction is action-adventure. But understanding the fact that they’re basically the same in terms of structure and audience interaction is key to understanding why, starting in about the 1990s, sci-fi/fantasy shows began working hard to try to cater to a soap audience as well. It’s just good business - if the two work similarly, you may as well try to appeal to both.

The other thing to note is that the perception that soap operas and science fictiona re diametrically opposed is not quite fair. It’s true that the average soap fan and the average science fiction fan are very different audiences. This is the logic behind the other event that would justify a Coronation Street entry, the scheduling of Doctor Who opposite Coronation Street in the Sylvester McCoy years on the grounds, as Michael Grade put it, that nobody in Britain watched both shows. But the logic behind this line was delightfully skewered years later in Russell T. Davies’s Queer as Folk when Vince Tyler reminisces about how irritating it was to have both shows on at once. Of course now that Phil Collinson has moved from Executive Producer of Doctor Who to showrunning Coronation Street the idea of any opposition between the shows becomes almost farcical.

But here we’re scrying events still long off in the future. Let’s return to the dawning of the Davison era. Miles and Wood discuss the way in which the Saturday teatime slot that Doctor Who had occupied from 1963-81 was, by the start of 1982, completely imploded. They give an almost entirely technologically determinist account of why this was, but it’s a compelling one, so let’s go with it. But first, some context.

The thing to realize is that the very existence of a Saturday teatime slot demonstrates a big difference between American and British television. I’m writing this on a Saturday afternoon. Here, then, are the prime time lineups of the networks tonight. CBS is showing repeats. ABC is showing an old Charlie Brown Valentine special followed by repeats. NBC is showing a reairing of their current big music variety show. The CW is devoted entirely to local programming. And Fox is running America’s Most Wanted, which is essentially free to produce.

In other words, nothing important happens on Saturday. The main prime time lineups of US television networks is from Sunday-Thursday, with the big ones running some stuff on Friday - often sci-fi programming on the assumption that its cult audience isn’t going out on a Friday. But nothing airs on Saturday because nobody is home. In contrast, BBC1 and ITV are showing new programming. Mostly reality programming, though BBC1 has a new episode of Casualty up. And, of course, Saturday is when Doctor Who goes out again.

The nature of the Saturday lineup is, in other words, peculiarly British. And it extends from the fact that Britain only has a handful of terrestrial channels. And unlike American TV, there was the BBC, which was notable for not being fragmented into regional variations in the same way that ITV was. In other words, there was a channel that was consistent across the country and was one of only a handful of things that could be watched. So television, in the UK, was a unifying experience. The country sat down to watch. And Doctor Who was a part of one of the biggest lineups in the UK - the Saturday teatime one. For all that we’ve talked about Doctor Who fandom over eighteen seasons here we mustn’t forget the fact that through these eighteen years Doctor Who simply was not a science fiction show in the sense that we usually use the term. It may have had science fiction fans, but it was unambiguously and completely mass entertainment for the entire country.

But at the start of 1982 the conditions that allowed that to be possible were changing. Miles and Wood track social conditions - the downfall of the very notion of community that Thatcherism heralded with its declaration that society didn’t exist - but their more compelling reasoning is simply that televisions had gotten cheap enough that everyone in the family could have their own and were remote controlled, which meant that changing the channel was trivial. And they heated up and started displaying images almost immediately, which meant that you didn’t have to turn your television on in advance of what you wanted to watch. Both of these cut against the always-on lineup based model of television that Doctor Who had been a part of.

Nathan-Turner was not a stupid man. A tasteless one, perhaps, but not a stupid one. With the Saturday slot dying he oversaw the program shifting timeslots to where it would air twice weekly on Mondays and Tuesdays. This was actually a big deal, making the front page of the Sun when it was announced. First, it changed the nature of what the show was. Doctor Who still only made 26 episodes a year, meaning that from Season 19 on it was only around for a quarter of the year. This is another massive change from the “always on” model of the first six seasons and the “around for half the year” model of the next twelve. Doctor Who was no longer a continual part of the fabric of television.

Second, Doctor Who was now a show that had to draw its own set of fans. On Saturday Doctor Who could draw from the whole country as long as it wasn’t appreciably worse than whatever ITV was showing - and even then it would do OK if the rest of the Saturday lineup was strong. But on Mondays and Tuesdays Doctor Who has to get people to turn on the television in the first place. This, in other words, is the real impetus for Nathan-Turner switching to trying to appeal to Doctor Who fans first and foremost. Having lost access to the family audience that had defined Doctor Who for eighteen years he made the obvious switch to trying to win a sci-fi cult audience. For all that his continuity fetishism is knocked, one has to remember that there was a sensible motive behind it. What Doctor Who was had to change.

But in the accusation that the Davison era is a soap there’s an interesting secondary narrative going on. The usual story is that Nathan-Turner changed to a model of continuity fetishism. And he did, yes. Absolutely. But the idea that he did this entirely to appeal to a cult science fiction audience is not quite fair. Had Doctor Who simply moved to a weekday slot and aired one episode a week it would look like any other cult science fiction show. But it didn’t. It aired twice weekly. And that suggests something entirely different.

The twice weekly timeslot was due to the BBC conducting early experiments for what would eventually become EastEnders - which, of course, we’ll pop between realities for in 1993. But the schedule picked for EastEnders was just the schedule used for ITV soaps like Coronation Street and Emmerdale Farm (then starring Frazer Hines as Joe Sugden). In other words, the “Davison soap” description of Doctor Who is apropos not just because of the bickering companions and unusually large main cast (it’s the first time Doctor Who has had a cast of four that appeared in every episode since the UNIT days, and the first time it’s combined that with travel in time and space since The Chase), but because it is actually airing in a soap opera timeslot. And the bickering crew isn’t the only soaplike element of it. Nathan-Turner nicked the silent credits at the end of Earthshock from Coronation Street as well. Plus, it’s worth remembering at this point that Doctor Who was, in fact, a broadly popular show and not just a show for adolescent male sci-fi fans. When you combine all of this the hypothesis begins to look clear - Nathan-Turner was overtly trying to cobble together a broad audience for Doctor Who by merging the obviously similar genres of soaps and science fiction. He’s attempting the transition that happened over the course of the late 90s and early 00s about fifteen years early. He fails spectacularly, of course, but it’s hard to avoid the sense that this is what’s supposed to be happening here. (Even the casting of Davison, already appearing in All Creatures Great and Small and Sink or Swim, suggests an effort to go for a broadly appealing and known television personality)

And so, in order to better serve you, my readers, I watched a month’s worth of period Coronation Street. Unfortunately, the accessibility of vintage Coronation Street is limited. The closest I could get to the time in question and get consecutive episodes (instead of a “best of” set that wouldn’t capture the feel of watching the show) was December of 1979. And so I watched all nine episodes from December of 1979. For you. My readers. You bastards.

Actually, I shouldn’t be that hard on the show. The appeal of it is relatively straightforward and no more trashy than Daleks. By the end of the ninth episode I could more or less understand why someone would watch the show. Which is not a huge surprise given that I’ve followed my fair share of American primetime soaps in my day. (Both Grey’s Anatomy and The OC have, on occasion, been quite good.)

The way that a soap opera works is fairly straightforward. You build a large ensemble cast of characters up and then you serialize plotlines for small subsets of them over several episodes while avoiding ever starting or finishing more than one plot per episode. Contrary to the stereotype that soaps feature decades-simmering plotlines that are impossible to jump in on, this rapid churn of plots actually makes jumping on fairly easy. The first episode or two is rough, but after that there’s usually a solid majority of any given episode that you can follow because it’s either introducing new plotlines or continuing things you’ve seen a lot of, and by the end of one month’s worth of viewing there were only a few characters I didn’t have the gist of.

But equally important is the fact that long-time viewers are rewarded. This comes in two real forms. The first is relatively familiar to a sci-fi fan, and that’s the continuity reference. Old characters make returns, for instance, or a long-ago plotline comes to the fore. For instance, in one of the episodes I watched Elsie Tanner, a character who had been absent for a month or so’s episodes, returns and has a fight with another character with whom she clearly shared a long-running plotline. The major purpose of this scene is obviously to tie up those long-running plotlines. But what’s interesting is that the scene pulls double duty. The nature of their relationship is reiterated in their dialogue, and the scene equally serves as a good introduction to Elsie’s character.

This sort of back-referencing, at least if Wikipedia articles are to be believed, continues today - hardly a departed character on the show doesn’t have some mention of an episode years after they left in which their final fate (usually death) is announced. And, of course, it’s implicit in doing something like bringing a character back over forty years after their last appearance.

But there’s a second type of reward for long-time viewers, and that comes in the form of character consistency. Long-running characters in soaps typically get plotlines or moments where what is significant is not a specific reference to their history but rather the fact that they act in a manner consistent with their character type. The most charming moment along these lines in the month I watched was when Annie Walker, the landlady at the Rovers Return (the requisite and iconic pub) chats up the obligatory punk rocker character and gets along with him well - a moment that is fun primarily because Annie Walker has been on the show since the first episode and it reconfirms her defining character traits of being gracious and discerning. What’s significant about this that, even though it is not a moment that depends on any long-term knowledge of the show, it’s still one that rewards it. It’s significant primarily if you have a built-up appreciation of Annie Walker. A similar moment appears in the first episode of December, in which Hilda Ogden, a character defined in no small part by her ability to irritate everybody else in the show, is shut out from a wedding reception. Annie gives her an opportunity to pick up a shift working at the inn, giving her a tacit invitation - another small character moment that is endearing because of the existence of prior investment in the characters as opposed to because of its own intrinsic dramatic tension.

In this, then, we can already see the seeds of where Nathan-Turner’s efforts to soapify Doctor Who fails. The ability to build these character moments is based on the long-term consistency of characters - on the fact that Annie and Hilda are behaving in line with over a decade of previous stories. But Nathan-Turner never really pays the sort of attention to long-term character needed to do things like this. The lack of any reaction among Nyssa, Tegan, and the Master after what happens in Logopolis badly undermines the soap tendencies of Doctor Who, because a soap savvy audience recognizes those moments as the very definition of ones in which the history of characters is supposed to pay off.

It’s also worth discussing the biggest difference between Doctor Who and Coronation Street. It is, perhaps surprisingly, not the existence of aliens and time travel. Rather it is that Doctor Who is thoroughly middle class and Coronation Street is thoroughly working class. This is particularly clear when you look at the cast making up the ostensible Davison soap: a noblewoman, a boy computer genius, a cricketeer, and an Australian stewardess. Tegan is the closest thing the series has to working class, and her foreignness and exotic job mitigate strongly against that.

Compare to Coronation Street, where the show is almost entirely dominated by working class people who often struggle to make ends meet. It’s a sharp difference, and it’s one that Doctor Who suffers from. The last working class regular it had was Sergeant Benton. The last working class character who filled the traditional companion role was Ben. And although it makes a stuttering effort at it with Ace in 1987 it’s not really until Russell T. Davies goes with a Mancunian Doctor and working class companion in 2005 that this can really be said to be addressed at all substantially.

But this is not to say that Coronation Street doesn’t have its own problems. First of all, it’s downright appalling that a working class show in 1979 would have an all white cast. Coronation Street doesn’t get its first black major character until 1983, two years after Toxteth. While some defense can be mounted on the grounds that Coronation Street is set in a fictional Salford, which is not a very racially diverse part of Greater Manchester, the fact of the matter is that a depiction of working class Britain consisting entirely of white people is... troubling. And yes, the same criticism can be made of Doctor Who in this time period, but for Doctor Who that’s just a reiteration of the complaint that it’s entirely middle and upper class. For Coronation Street, it’s something else.

Actually, much of Coronation Street’s portrayal of the working class is troubling. In particular, Hilda Ogden is...

OK, I’m at least going to flag explicitly that I’m wandering miles outside of my comfort area in terms of speaking authoritatively. I’m as thoroughly middle class as they come in upbringing, I’m frankly overeducated, and on top of that I’m American. Working class British politics from several years before I was born as portrayed in soap operas, a genre I don’t really watch is... not my area of expertise by a mile. And so I am open to being told I am miles off base here. That said...

Hilda Ogden is an absolute travesty of a character. The fact that she was voted the greatest soap opera character ever in a Radio Times poll 17 years after her last appearance, was voted in 1982 the fourth most recognizable woman in Britain - topping Thatcher - and is generally one of Coronation Street’s most beloved characters is deeply, deeply upsetting.

One of the things that is most difficult in discussing class issues when on, if not the winning side of class warfare, at least appreciably far from the losing side, is how to balance the obvious need to not just respect the working class but substantively honor and depict working class narratives with the fact that the vicissitudes of class conflict in the modern world have systematically deprived much of the working class of the education and breadth of experience necessary to avoid a wealth of bigotries. In the United States this is an aggressively pressing problem. Simply put, much of the Republican base are the people most hurt by Republican policies, but the Republican policies that hurt them make it harder to effectively communicate this problem to them. And nobody likes the rich liberal who tries to “explain things” to the working class, and understandably so because that’s horrifically egotistical.

The result of all of this is that it’s very easy to create images of the working class that valorize closed-minded, bigoted, and destructive attitudes as part of working class culture. And that is exactly what Hilda ends up doing. She is designed to be a nasty and unpleasant woman who is cruel to those around her, suspicious and contemptuous of those from different backgrounds to her, and who, in the entire month of episodes I watched, basically never did a single nice thing for any other character at all. She is a horrible, horrible person with no redeeming character traits whatsoever.

But she is also intensely working class and is vividly depicted. She is, in other words, other than being a horrible person exactly what one wants when one says that the working class is underrepresented on television. She is well-acted with a wealth of carefully chosen traits that bring authenticity to the role. Her storylines frequently have her struggle with money troubles and the miseries and degradations that come with being in the working poor.

The result is that she is beloved despite the fact that she exemplifies the worst traits of the working class. And no matter how complex that love is - the show is very much aware of her cruelty and the rest of the characters show little respect for her - the fact of the matter is that she normatizes the idea that ignorance and bigotry are traits to be proud of in the working class. Indeed, the fact that she’s beloved by the audience and frequently hated by the other characters only adds a perversity to her negative traits. Given that she is beloved because of her continual perseverance through adversity the fact that she is derided for her ignorance, nosiness, and cruelty by other characters only becomes another source of adversity.

She is, in other words, the very image of the sort of Murdochian class consciousness that renders the working class proud of their own self-destruction. And this, if I may turn back to Doctor Who, illustrates a key point about it even as it continues to amble through a wealth of racial, sexual, and economic blindnesses that are genuinely and deeply problematic. Merely representing the working class or various minorities (both statistical minorities and large but underrepresented groups) is not a panacea. The most class-blind moments of the Graham Williams era - and virtually the entire Graham Williams era was completely class blind, as is the bulk of the Nathan-Turner era - are preferable to Hilda Ogden.

Outside the Government 2 (K-9 and Company)

2012-02-17T02:00:00.000-08:00

The 1980s called. They said you can keep their bloody
title card.

It’s December 28th, 1981. The Human League are now at number one with “Don’t You Want Me,” with ABBA, Adam and the Ants, and Eurovision winners Bucks Fizz also charting. Kraftwerk are lower in the charts, if you’re into that kind of thing. (I so am.)

Since the Five Faces series wrapped, an inconclusive attempt at an arms reduction treaty between the US and USSR takes place in Geneva, Arthur Scargill becomes president elect of the National Union for Mineworkers, which is likely to end well. Muhammad Ali fights his last fight, the US-supported El Salvadorian army kills 900 civilians, martial law is declared in Poland, the Penlee lifeboat disaster takes place off the coast of Cornwall, and the first test tube baby is born.

While on television we have one the only attempt in the course of the classic series to produce a spin-off: K-9 and Company. This is, perhaps, one of the stories that has most substantially shifted in how we must take it following the new series. Given that Russell T. Davies showed rather conclusively that, in fact, a series following the solo adventures of Sarah Jane Smith can work just fine. The existence of a K-9 centered spinoff is perhaps less of a glowing endorsement (though actually, I’ve never actually met anyone who’s even seen the K-9 series), but the fact of the matter is that K-9 appeared in fully a third of The Sarah Jane Adventures stories.

So like it or not, the fact of the matter is that this concept works. And if we’re going to continue being honest about this story, let’s note that at 8.4 million viewers it beat all of Season 18 of Doctor Who, and furthermore did it during the festive season and with a transmitter out in the northwest that meant it wasn’t seen there. The reason it wasn’t picked up had more to do with changes in leadership at the BBC than with the failure of this production. And so the default take on this story - that it's a dead end that didn't work - doesn't wash. It did work. Just not for until over thirty years after this aired.

All of which said, it’s not hard to reason why the BBC might have been unimpressed with this pilot. While it’s clear today that the basic ideas behind this show work, this specific execution is deeply, deeply flawed - badly enough that it's in many ways harder to see what convinced Russell T. Davies that there was actually meat on them bones than it is to see why people wrote the idea off for thirty-five years. The problem is that this pilot can’t decide if it’s a straight children’s show or an all-ages Avengers-like show with Sarah Jane and a robot dog.

The bulk of it is written like a quasi-serious adult drama. It’s certainly kid friendly, but it’s not for kids as such. In this regard it’s much like Doctor Who itself is. But once every couple of scenes the bottom suddenly drops out and the program becomes unequivocally and unabashedly a children’s program. And not a Children of the Stones sort of children’s program that still works for adults - a straight out, juvenile, silly program that adults aren’t even supposed to like or be watching

The crux of the problem is K-9, and this explains to some extent why this didn’t work until decades later. You have to have crossed the point in which the entire audience could be assumed to be in on the joke of how ridiculous K-9 is before this can possibly succeed. You have to have reached the point, in other words, in which the joke in School Reunion about Mickey being the tin dog would work. By 2006 the facts that K-9 was a rubbish idea and that he was also widely and genuinely popular had successfully integrated into one fact. K-9 became a beloved oddity of history. Like a truly and epically awful pop song, by 2006 K-9 had acquired enough layers of irony to finally work.

Unfortunately, in 1981 K-9 was still a character who was straightforwardly beloved and popular on his own merits. And so this program was pitched distinctly in terms of K-9’s perceived appeal. Despite the fact that by any sane storytelling standard this is a story and series about Sarah Jane, she doesn’t get to be in the title; she gets upstaged by the tin dog. K-9 is beloved by children, or at least the BBC firmly believes he is, and so the program is built around him. The logic underpinning this program is that K-9 is popular and so people will want to see a show about K-9.

The problem is that K-9 only ever worked within the context of the Graham Williams era, in which the show worked on multiple levels. So kids could take K-9 straightforwardly and adults could laugh at him. But this worked because he wasn’t the focus of the show - he was a secondary character on a show with other things going on. But it’s essentially impossible to do that with the title character. Doctor Who can have ironic distance from K-9. K-9 and Company can’t possibly - at least not in 1981. (And even in the present day, K-9 is still suited to being a secondary character.)

Other problems present themselves. Ian Sears as Brendan Richards serves mostly to reassure the viewer that Adric could have been so much worse. But more to the point, he represents a sort of irritating formulaicness - it’s 1981 and so we need a teenage computer nerd in our show with a robot dog. No thought has gone into his character beyond “let’s put a teenage whiz-kid” in. Similarly, Aunt Lavinia - who was apparently to be the supporting cast in half the episodes had this gone to series - isn’t developed beyond “let’s put a free-spirited elderly lady in!”

Beyond that, the plot has massive holes in it. Admittedly, this is due largely to the episode length being cut rather late in the game. The Head of Drama changed over the summer and the incoming one, David Reid, didn’t think there was enough plot to justify a 90 minute episode. In Reid’s defense, there isn’t enough plot for ninety minutes here. But the fact that it got slashed in half late in the game didn’t help things.

Similarly the setting is lazy. Rural Satanists. Of course it’s rural Satanists. The extent of the twist that the episode can manage on this premise is that the friendly villagers aren’t evil. And it’s incredibly proud of itself for coming up with that, tragically enough. But more broadly, the rural Satanists are just a crass recycling of a standard mystery plot - one that even Doctor Who got bored with after The Stones of Blood. And unfortunately interesting concepts were the only way that this was ever going to work. To make K-9 work in a story the rest of the story has to be vaguely at the level of weirdness of K-9 himself. Instead you get the utterly mad spectacle of Satanists reacting in terror to K-9 because he’s, and I swear that I am not making this up, “a familiar of the goddess Hecate! A dog belching fire!” Sure, 1981 was too early to do a series that mocks K-9, but the degree to which this overplays its hand is impossible to take seriously.

And that just about sums up the problem. There isn’t actually an idea here beyond doing a bunch of standard Avengers-style mysteries only with K-9 in them. This isn’t a show about anything - it’s one that just assumes that sticking K-9 into a show is going to make it work. No thought has gone into why K-9 didn’t work on Doctor Who (or even whether he actually didn’t work beyond John Nathan-Turner’s bizarre belief that he made the TARDIS crew too powerful. Admittedly K-9 essentially became a glorified gun for the Doctor by the end, which was a real problem, but the idea that the TARDIS crew could meaningfully have been “too powerful” in a show where they were, by definition, sure to triumph over all adversity come episode four [unless it was a season finale, in which case episode six] is barking up the wrong tree, if you’ll forgive the metaphor), and so no thought has gone into how to integrate him into this show. The real evidence of this is in earlier conceptions of the story, which had K-9 secretly being evil and having been reprogrammed by the Master. Keep in mind that the Master has never even met Sarah Jane Smith at this point in the program. That’s how desperate and out to sea on what to do with the tin dog they were.

To her credit, Elizabeth Sladen almost holds this trainwreck together. For all that’s desperately wrong with the series, Sladen calmly demonstrates what everybody already knew: she’s more than capable of holding the lead in a series. It’s enough to make you wish that series had hit on the idea it eventually had with Romana of giving her the proper lead in episodes during her time. The degree to which the Sarah Jane Adventures constitutes a righting of a longstanding wrong in that Sladen never had the lead role in a successful series. Sladen is charismatic, charming, and capable of holding her own in any scene without needing to be pushy or domineering. She is raw class, she is.

Finally, we have to at least discuss the opening credits. They are strong contenders for the worst credits sequence ever made and really need to be seen to be believed. So, here. And let me note, I am so, so sorry.

Marking Ian Levine’s only credited contribution to a Doctor Who-related production they are... actually, I don’t even have adjectives here. The music is a complete train wreck, but to be fair, so is the editing. Not even Lis Sladen can pull off every shot she’s called on here, and the point about 2/3 of the way through where it appears that they have simply run out of footage to put in the credits and have decided to rerun shots from earlier in the credits.

Supposedly Ian Levine intended for the credits to be fully orchestrated and not synthesized. This has two major problems. The first is that Ian Levine has an excuse for every unfortunate thing he inflicted upon Doctor Who and that there comes a point where it becomes difficult to take any of them seriously. The second is that the idea of a fully orchestrated theme song that heavily features John Leeson enthusiastically shouting “K-9!” at various points is actually, in all probability, an even worse idea than the heavily synthesized version.

Given all of this, it’s easy enough to see why the BBC was less than enthused about the prospect of more of this. There’s no show here. The show that there is - The Sarah Jane Adventures - was an incidental implication of the show they made. It’s clear, watching this, that the people making it don’t know what show they have. Admittedly some of this is the BBC’s own fault - they wanted a show about K-9. To this day it’s not entirely clear that a show about K-9 is even possible. But this show isn’t even trying to figure out how to do it.

And this is the heart of the bad sign this show entails. John Nathan-Turner’s inability to think beyond high concept images makes its first really flagrant appearance here. With Bidmead as his script editor Nathan-Turner had someone who had enough of an artistic vision to compensate for his own weaknesses. But the incoming team - and they’re the ones on this project, with two of Season 19’s three script editors and the writer of six of the 26 episodes on the case - don’t have that clarity of vision. And suddenly it's painfully clear how much of Season 18's quality was down to Bidmead and not Nathan-Turner. For the first time since The Leisure Hive it is frighteningly apparent that the emperor may not be wearing any clothes.

Still. Lis Sladen’s magnificent.

Outside the Government 1 (The Five Faces of Doctor Who)

2012-02-15T02:00:00.000-08:00

Outside the Government is an occasional series focusing on televised Doctor Who material that is not a part of the series proper - spin-offs, documentaries, and, in this case, reruns.

It’s November 2nd, 1981. Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin are at number one with “It’s My Party.” I’m finding records on this point just a little dodgy, but I think we’re looking at a five week run, in which case what we should say is that in one week The Police overtake them with “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.” Two weeks later Queen and David Bowie take over number one with “Ice Ice Baby,” which holds number one for the remainder of this experience. Elvis Costello, The Jam, The Human League, Rod Stewart, Soft Cell, The Pretenders, and Oliva Newton-John also chart.

Since the prepared-for end, Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. Jodi Foster was unimpressed. Pope John Paul II is also shot and nearly killed. And Marcus Sargeant took six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II. The first Space Shuttle takes off, serving in most regards as a tombstone for all dreams of spaceflight that had animated the 1960s, reducing wonder to a banal and pointless repetition of spaceflight essentially for its own sake. Peter Sutcliffe is found guilty of being the Yorkshire Ripper, and I’ve learned my lesson about commenting on that particular issue. The first recognized cases of AIDS are identified by the CDC. And, of course, the whole race riots thing we talked about last time. And Hosni Mubarak is elected President of Egypt following Sadat’s assassination.

While during the five weeks that Doctor Who’s five faces apparate, Antigua and Barbuda gain independence from the UK and the General Synod of the Church of England votes to allow the ordination of women. Luke and Laura marry on General Hospital, and Reagan signs the order that will lead to the Iran Contra scandal.

While on television we have the first real attempt to historicize Doctor Who. The Five Faces of Doctor Who repeats, in which episodes were screened daily Monday through Thursday to provide, over five weeks, reruns of five four-part stories from the history of the program personally selected by John Nathan-Turner. The stories, for the record, were An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC, The Krotons, Carnival of Monsters, The Three Doctors, and Logopolis.

It is first and foremost telling what stories were selected. The constraint of the timeslot restricted the program to four-parters. Combined with the problems of missing episodes this left, for a Hartnell repeat, the following options (assuming I haven’t forgotten about something that was completed post-1981, which I may well have): An Unearthly Child, The Aztecs, The Romans, The Space Museum, The Ark, The Gunfighters, and The War Machines. Of these, given the nostalgia factor of a first repeat series, An Unearthly Child was the only choice.

But this had the effect of badly obscuring Hartnell’s Doctor, who, after all, is at best prototypically formed in An Unearthly Child. The other thing to note about the Five Faces repeats is that they were the first time fandom got to look at most of these. Older fans had their memories of the stories, sure, but younger fans were getting their first glimpses of Hartnell and Troughton. And in many cases their last for years, at least in their original settings. The next time a Troughton story became available was 1985 when The Seeds of Death came out on video. Pertwee was gone again until 1988, and Hartnell didn’t become available again until 1989. Finally, in 1990 both became decently represented, with all four complete Troughton stories being released along with four different Hartnells. (I’m honestly not sure if there were more reruns in this period, but if so we’re still talking about one or two instances at most.)

On top of that, it’s worth reflecting on the state of the novelizations. A lot of the Hartnell and Troughton stories were novelized quite late. By the end of 1981, the only Hartnell stories to even be novelized were The Daleks, The Crusade, The Web Planet, The Tenth Planet, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and An Unearthly Child. Troughton did similarly with The Enemy of the World, The War Games, Tomb of the Cybermen, The Web of Fear, The Ice Warriors, The Abominable Snowmen, and The Moonbase. So information about them was enormously sketchy.

In other words, these stories were foundational to fan impressions about the Doctors in question. The direct links are in many ways obscure, but when you remember that a generation of fandom knew Hartnell entirely by the story where he nearly bashes a guy’s skull in it’s easy to see where the view of Hartnell as angry and unpleasant came from. Even watching the series in the early 90s the sense that Hartnell was like that permeated through fandom, making his era the one I was by far least interested in seeing just by the reputation of his Doctor - a reputation formed almost entirely by reruns that had happened before I was even born.

Troughton poses a more interesting problem. Even today there are only two complete four-part Troughton stories, and in 1981 there was only one, hence The Krotons, a serviceable but largely anonymous Troughton effort. But in this regard Troughton is perhaps helped as much as Hartnell is hindered. The Troughton era has always been caught between two poles. One camp of fans - the ones who dominated 1980s fandom, specifically - valued the era for its great monsters and bases under siege. For them the highlight of the Troughton era, and indeed of the series, is The Web of Fear, and they want nothing more than for it to be rediscovered. (Hence, whenever any missing episode find happens, frustration that it’s not Web of Fear.)

The second camp prefers the stranger and more... mercurial Troughton era. I unabashedly belong to this camp, preferring The Mind Robber and Power of the Daleks to any base under siege in the era. (The two sides agree on Evil of the Daleks and Evil of the Daleks alone.) And by chance it was The Krotons that was the lone surviving Troughton story. A story that is firmly in the stranger and more psychedelic tradition. One has little doubt that Nathan-Turner would have run Tomb of the Cybermen or The Moonbase if he could, but he was stuck with The Krotons. And as a result the more mercurial and psychedelic Troughton era - the one that had largely been forgotten by 1981 - enjoyed a fortuitous resurgence.

The Pertwee era, on the other hand, has a more unusual fate. It gets, at least, both a UNIT and a space story, and a fairly good one of each. Carnival of Monsters, while in no way a standard Pertwee story, is rightly well-regarded. It’s in many ways the best choice of Nathan-Turner’s. There are nine four-episode Pertwee stories, and while not all of them existed in color at the end of 1981, Nathan-Turner was not low on options. That he picked an odd Pertwee story that was both very good and very much not what Pertwee-era devotees would have looked for.

The Three Doctors is a stranger choice The opportunity to squeeze out a bonus Hartnell and Troughton with The Three Doctors was an obvious plus, so that made sense in its own right, though it creates a bit of an oddity by contrasting the pop-science of 1973 immediately with Bidmead’s pop science of 1981. Presumably Nathan-Turner wanted a UNIT story, but both Day of the Daleks and The Claws of Axos existed and were usable, so the choice here has to go down to wanting the double dip on Hartnell and Troughton. But the flip side is that this means that the Pertwee era is disproportionately represented.

The effect of this was to allow Nathan-Turner a somewhat troubling bit of erasure. The rerun series jumps from 1973 to Logopolis in 1981, neatly sidestepping the entire six seasons of Tom Baker that Nathan-Turner wasn’t producer on. That Logopolis had to be rerun is sensible enough - it’s the only way to get a fifth face of Doctor Who in and it serves too well as a lead-in to Castrovalva, which airs just a month later. But if you’re going to double-represent an era surely the seven years of Tom Baker are a better choice than running two stories not just from the Pertwee era but from the same season of the Pertwee era - indeed, two consecutive stories.

The real issue, let’s be blunt, is that Nathan-Turner knew better than to rerun something from the Whitehouse-hated and very technically adept Hinchcliffe era. So the real obvious choice of rerunning The Brain of Morbius or Pyramids of Mars - both quite old and nostalgic - got skipped. Heck, even rerunning The Hand of Fear as a lead-in to what Nathan-Turner had planned for December was skipped. Given the ferocity with which Nathan-Turner would begin adamantly insisting that the memory cheated with regards to this era (despite the fact that the era was being released on VHS and it was abundantly clear to everyone that, for instance, Pyramids of Mars and The Robots of Death really were a damn sight better than Terror of the Vervoids), it is difficult to read this omission as anything other than Nathan-Turner not wanting to deal with direct comparisons between his era and the Hinchcliffe era. Instead he claims the entire Tom Baker era with his own work. A highlight of his own work, but as bad a representation of the Tom Baker era as An Unearthly Child was of the Hartnell era.

Still, that Nathan-Turner managed to swing the repeat season at all was impressive. Five weeks of BBC2’s schedule were occupied heavily by Doctor Who. Especially given that Doctor Who’s ratings in Season 18 had been... problematic at best. Again, we come to the sort of light side/dark side of Nathan-Turner. His skills at self-promotion really were remarkable. And that was to the show’s benefit on a number of occasions, this being one of them. Between this and K-9 and Company he managed an incredibly well-hyped lead-in to the debut of Peter Davison and heavily counteracted the “Oh, Tom Baker’s gone, who cares” effect. He also effectively trained Doctor Who fans to watch Doctor Who on weekdays, which was going to be exactly what they’d have to do come Tuesday. And again, his skill at reading the television landscape and using the paratextual elements of the medium becomes clear.

But more importantly, this marks another step in the transition of the show from an ephemeral model to an enduring one. The possibility that classic episodes would be re-aired was starting to matter. This in and of itself marks a major transition in the attitude of the BBC towards its classic material. This is the point where missing episode finds really happened fast. Of the 33 recovered episodes since the first census of missing episodes three have, as of December if 1981, already been found. Another sixteen happened in the three year period following these reruns. That’s half of the missing episodes in a three year period. The years from 1985-2011 only had fourteen. I would not be so silly as to claim that there’s a causal connection between the efforts to recover episodes and these reruns, but the sudden active effort to find missing episodes and the existence of the Five Faces series are symptoms of a larger shift in what television was that we've discussed before.

Indeed, the Doctor Who Monthly Winter Special in 1981 contained an interview with Sue Malden (the person responsible for ending the junking policy and making sure nothing else got destroyed). That came out in November, making this, in essence, the month where the missing episodes problem became public knowledge (and providing a tacit explanation for the odd choice of The Krotons). The result, taken with everything else, marks a subtle but crucial shift in what Doctor Who is. At last, the show has become something with an experienced history. Though there are obvious flaws and gaps in its memory, it can really be said that the majority of fandom can remember the series’ past directly. And that will, as ever, only grow more true.

Guest Post: David Bowie and Doctor Who

2012-02-13T02:00:00.000-08:00

Among the ways in which the end was prepared for is that I, suspecting that the Logopolis post would maybe take a bit longer to write than most, decided to secure a guest post for today. Not wanting to leave you in the hands of anyone other than the best, of course, I asked Chris O'Leary of the fabulous Pushing Ahead of the Dame, which was quite rightly one of Time Magazine's 25 best blogs of 2011.

I'll be back Wednesday with the first of three posts I've got before we get to Castrovalva, two of which will belong to a brand new sub-series to go with Time Can Be Rewritten, Pop Between Realities, and You Were Expecting Someone Else. Then a week from Wednesday we'll kick off the Peter Davison era proper. (Speaking of which... were there any good BBC Books novels set in the Davison era? I've got a golden turkey penciled in for that slot now, but if there's something of actual quality I'd prefer that.)

But before all of those terrible things happen, you get the pleasure of a blog post written by someone who's actually good. Enjoy it while it lasts.

----

David Bowie, for much of his life, has been considered an ideal candidate for various iconic TV/film parts that he will never play. He’s the great James Bond villain who never was, for instance. And from the ‘70s on, Bowie was regularly rumored to appear on Doctor Who in some manner, from playing a supporting role (allegedly considered as a replacement for Alexei Sayle in “Revelation of the Daleks”) to a villain (an eternal candidate for the Master) to playing the Doctor himself.

Who and Bowie, two modern British institutions whose trademark has been a commitment to continual transformation, are also one long parallel, with each reflecting the other from their timelines to their aesthetics. They were born in the same ward: Bowie’s first-ever recording (an unreleased track for Decca called “I Never Dreamed”) was cut in London in August 1963, within a month of the shooting of the first “An Unearthly Child.” Bowie’s Mod and R&B singles coincide with William Hartnell’s term; Bowie’s sudden turn to Anthony Newley-infused psychedelia begins directly upon the arrival of Patrick Troughton, and “Space Oddity,” the culmination of this era, debuts mere weeks after the end of “The War Games.” Phil has already gone to great lengths to find connections between Ziggy Stardust Bowie and Jon Pertwee’s tenure. And the Tom Baker years are Bowie at his most visionary and influential, from Diamond Dogs through Station to Station, the Berlin trilogy and Scary Monsters.

You can keep it going for as long as you’d like. Bowie’s floundering in the mid-‘80s coincides with Who’s hiatus (during which Bowie recorded “Dancing in the Street”) and the ugly desperation of the Colin Baker years; the 1996 “modernized” TV movie appears just as Bowie’s dyed his hair copper and is attempting drum ‘n’ bass. And Bowie’s public career ends precisely at the start of Who’s successful revival: “Rose” was being filmed in Cardiff in early summer 2004 just as Bowie was playing what would be his final concerts. He hasn’t recorded or toured since, and you have to wonder: should Bowie ever return, to the stage or the studio, will it somehow trigger the collapse of New Who? It’s like an armistice in which one power has agreed to unilaterally disarm; if the treaty is broken, who knows what disasters may come. A new Bowie album could mean Russell Brand cast as the Twelfth Doctor.

Much of this is just silly coincidence, of course. But one point when the Bowie-Who parallel is eerily resonant is “Logopolis” and Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes.” Now any actual influence was strictly one-way. Bowie cut “Ashes to Ashes” in New York and London in early spring 1980 and released it in late summer, well before Tom Baker’s departure was even announced. But as “Logopolis” was filmed in December 1980-January 1981 (just after John Lennon’s death—it was a bleak winter for counterculture icons), it’s conceivable that “Ashes to Ashes,” which had been a UK #1, filtered into its creation in some manner. (The only overt borrowing came years later: Bowie’s video’s use of Paintbox-distorted skies over what looked like a classic Who quarry seems to have directly influenced the opening of “Mindwarp”).

No, the connection between the two seems deeper, if more shadowy. As I dubiously claimed when I wrote about “Ashes” some time ago, “Ashes” seems like David Bowie’s last song, though of course he would write another two decades’ worth of material after it, including some of his biggest hits. And “Logopolis” can seem like the end of Who, though again the show has persisted for decades afterward. As Phil wrote in his wonderful epic Choose Your Own Adventure piece on it, “Logopolis” has become one of the show’s sacred properties. It can’t be written out of continuity, no one’s had the guts to revisit it or revise it. It’s the terminus, the still point, the quiet word-death of the show.

Part of it was timing: “Ashes” and “Logopolis” appeared at the dawn of the Eighties, and each seems like a cryptic funeral for the previous carnival decades, and a scrying of the harder years ahead. Bowie, in Ziggy Stardust, had closed down the Sixties by burlesquing the decade’s myths and excesses, but Bowie had remained, in his gnomic way, a Sixties believer, a Utopian. Recalling the making of “Heroes,” Bowie described it as making the sound of a glorious future that he and his collaborators knew would never come to pass. Now the future was over. “Ashes to Ashes” is Bowie’ public abdication: a man summoning his powers one last time to make a bonfire of his former selves. It’s the end, but the moment has been prepared for.

So “Ashes” is the sequel to Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” but where the latter was a staggered opening, a grand movement outward, an expansive bequest from a time of seemingly endless gifts, “Ashes” is a collapse, an implosion, whether in its structure (a reggae song buried underneath layers of synthetics—guitars that sound like keyboards, a fake Wurlitzer organ), its inspirations and intentions (a secret remake of Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Ashes” is in part a sequel about being a sequel) or in its video, where a set of scenarios bleed into each other—Bowie as a sad mime at his own funeral; Bowie as one of the madmen, an “organic mind locked in a cellar,” as he once had sung; Bowie as Major Tom on the morning of his launch, having breakfast in his spacesuit while the world catches fire.

“Logopolis” catches some of this feeling, like its central image of TARDISes-within-TARDISes, an apparently infinite loop in which the show’s iconic image is replicated and darkened—the TARDIS has become its own intruder, a sign of Who collapsing within itself. Or its revelation of a final mystery—that the cosmos is held together by rows of monks quietly murmuring numbers (“drink to the men who protect you and I,” as Bowie had sung in “Station to Station”)—that ends first in utter galactic apocalypse and then, weirdly, a diminished final battle in which Tom Baker dies, not in some cosmic Ragnarok (as he had wanted) but by essentially falling off a ladder.

One of Phil’s finest points in his series was his argument of how shocking William Hartnell’s demise in the “The Tenth Planet” is—how horrifying it must have been for kids at the time, how it’s really the death of the show, from which Who has never quite recovered. “Logopolis” is the second death: if, since Hartnell, the show has been a ghost of itself, “Logopolis” is the long, silent funeral procession for the ghost, the show coming to terms with how much has been lost.

This has been a long way of saying that both “Ashes” and “Logopolis” retain an uncanny power; they remain moving, in their odd ways, so many years after their first appearance. There’s sadness, a somber loss, in both of them, as well a sense of bucking up, of settling the bill. If the world ends, if the time of legends is over, if the moment has come, we now live in the afterward, and we still have to keep on going. The world will never be what it once was, but it will be enough.

Postscript

Let’s go out with a brief indulgence in alternate history. In late 1980, Bowie, irritated by his record label RCA, had begun to wait them out until his contract expired: he would only cut a handful of recordings until the end of 1982. And the killing of John Lennon had led a shaken Bowie to scrap a proposed 1981 tour. So for two years, he mainly skied and acted: The Elephant Man on stage, The Hunger and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence on film, The Snowman on TV.

What if John Nathan-Turner had approached Bowie to replace Tom Baker, and Bowie, for some perverse reason, had accepted? And so when Baker lies expiring on a studio floor that January evening in 1981, his young companions quickly settling in a semi-circle around his sprawled body (still a touching, odd moment: it reminds you that Who remains at heart children’s theatre), he murmurs that the end’s been prepared for, his face blurs and suddenly David Bowie sits up in his place.

So we have the reign of the alternate Fifth Doctor, the first one to be world-famous before his casting: Bowie, the once-Buddhist, as the still moral heart of “Kinda”; Bowie wearing the expression of resigned embarrassment that Roger Moore had in his last Bond films, wanly going through the motions in “Timeflight” or “King’s Demons”; Bowie expiring in mud and putrefaction at the end of “Caves of Androzani.” Or what stories could have come into being instead? A new golden age: who wouldn’t have wanted to write for Bowie? Scripts by Tom Stoppard, Douglas Adams, David Hare, even a stillborn disastrous attempt by Philip K. Dick, the latter prompted by Bowie’s letters. Or, conversely, it would have been the quick collapse of Who into an awful cult of celebrity, with a disgusted Bowie walking away after a season.

In any case, Bowie would have wholly altered the tenor of the show to come. The Davison era is, in one way, the story of a household left shattered by the sudden, violent death of its beloved patriarch, which has left the eldest brother in charge of a house full of orphans: the combative, resentful daughter who never forgives him; the quiet, competent daughter (his favorite) who eventually leaves him; the desperate, pathetic younger brother who dies on his watch. It’s one long family tragedy, with the Jacobean violence of “Androzani” a fitting conclusion. But with Bowie standing in Davison’s place, the Doctor would have been reborn instead as a greater alien, an abstracted force with the humanity bled out of him, leaving only the charisma. It would have been a far stranger show, one perhaps best suited for the imagination. So onward we go, our lost futures bred within our lost pasts, with the imagination, as always, left to beggar itself.

Recursive Occlusion (Logopolis)

2012-02-10T02:00:00.000-08:00

Note: For gematrial reasons, section #10 is the beginning of the entry and you should skip to there. Alternatively, John G. Wood has made a proper interactive fiction version of it and posted it here because he is awesome.

It is stark white and so very bright here at the summit. There is simply light, and oneness, and completion. This is the void, and it is everything.

Nothing follows this. But out of nothing can come anything. In one story Doctor Who is built up to the heavens itself and then leveled back down. These heights are miles from Toxteth and Thatcher, from the Kingdom that the Crown rules above. No matter. Sometimes the only escape we have from the world is dreams, whether it be the world of schoolyard bullies or of Tories. Sometimes all we can do in the face of a growing darkness is retreat into a realm of silly and daft ideas and watch as they inexorably spin their way into more.

Doctor Who can't fight Thatcher. It can't stop her. She will run rampant and horrible over Britain for a decade, a terrible woman who does terrible things. She will win election after election, and her legacy will be nearly impossible to chisel out of the heart of the country even long after the sheer breadth of devastation she brought is clear. We are in history here, and there is no height to which one can ascend in order to find a solution to it. You can't rewrite history. Not one line. Much as one wants to, much as one is desperate to.

But one can always rewrite fantasy. One can always rewrite Doctor Who. One must. It demands it, demands endless action, endless mercurial play. It is enough to say this of Logopolis: it could have been the end, but the moment was prepared for.

Ain sof aur.

This near to the pinnacle of all things it is difficult to pin down specifics. A musky greyness is all there is. Neither thing nor absence, there is no purity here. At nearly the most refined point in the cosmos, scraping against eternity itself, we have passed knowledge, passed understanding. Now there is only Wisdom, the capacity to take a step, to act, to do something. In the beginning, and thus in the end, is the word.

The Doctor, in the entire story, takes three actions that matter at all - he lands his TARDIS atop another Police Box that turns out to have been a trap, he lands it within a city of words, and he sends a CVE out into Cassiopeia. All three are the same action - the positioning of an emboitment at a crucial moment. This, in the end, defines the Doctor's actions. If the TARDIS chooses the moment, which as we later learn, she does, it is still the Doctor who injects her into them, who actually puts the box into place.

We are returning to first principles here, but this is inevitable. This place represents first principles and beginnings. A magical box that breaks the world. A glorious madman who makes the box appear. From these things everything else follows. Logopolis is nothing more than a metaphor for those two simple concepts, and in being this it becomes a metaphor for everything else that Doctor Who is.

From here there is only one path.

Go to section 11.

Black pearls scented like myrrh abound in this place. There is a sweaty heat, full of lust and yearning, and yet also sacred, pristine and holy.

The highest aspect of the sacred feminine, this realm in one sense reflects the major abscess that we have been circling around all entry - the lack of any emotional core to the show. But here we have ascended too highly up the tree to limit ourselves to just that. What is at play here is not merely Nyssa or Tegan's inexplicable lack of grief. It is not even related to that directly anymore, except inasmuch as they form a type of Understanding that the program lacks.

The best of Doctor Who works within dreams and memories, forming an emboitment within the viewer's mind that allows it to haunt their dreams. A universe maintained by chanting monks in a distant city of words, a universe that can come unstuck and begin to break down, a magical box inside a magical box, a projection of the future that haunts the spaces at the edge of the story. These are the key concepts of Logopolis.

To watch Logopolis as a child is to be changed by it. Too much of this story is strange, fantastic, and genuinely unnerving to be otherwise. It is a nest of metaphors that are endlessly suggestive, endlessly gesturing towards uncanny possibility. It is a story that sleeps in our minds, endlessly offering the possibility of further mysteries. To fault this story for the future's failure to explore them is senseless. There is enough here to wander through its labyrinthine interiors. There is enough here to suggest a future. A great story is never complete, can never leave the viewer with nothing more to wonder or consider. Indeed, that is, by definition, the mark of a terrible story.

Even here, as we approach the summit of the tree, as our options and routes grow narrower, as we approach a conclusion there is always more to say, always gaps, things to note that were not brought up. The longest entry this blog has yet produced - God willing the longest it ever will - is not long enough to encompass all that must be understood.

Stay here forever if you like. If not, two paths emerge: sky-blue and rose scented or purple and lined with palms.

The sky blue path runs through section 14, the purple through section 12.

[].

Through the ruins of a city stalk the ruins of a man. He is wearing a Hawaiian shirt.

There is no way to avoid the prospect that this is the end of Doctor Who. To some extent one can be apocalyptic about any regeneration story, declaring that the "real" series ended there. But some - most obviously The War Games and this - lend themselves more to that sort of depressive thinking.

I am not among those who think this. For my money there are only two bad seasons in the 1980s (the Colin Baker ones, I fear), and even those have four stories worth respecting and taking seriously amidst the sea of unceasing crap. But for those who hate the 1980s this becomes the last straw - the point where the one good thing the program had, Tom Baker, goes away and is replaced by an emo wimp, then by a psychotic circus clown, then by an overacting ham sandwich. Still others reject all of the new series. For some people, simply put, it's not Doctor Who after Tom Baker leaves.

It's true that even in the most optimistic reading things get bad more often after this. And more to the point, the seeds of this are in Logopolis. The fact, complained about several times throughout this entry, that nobody ever deals with Nyssa's anger at the Master or with the extermination of billions, perhaps trillions of people across the universe is an appallingly large problem that requires some thought about how it was allowed to happen. The blame can't be laid at Bidmead's feet - even though he does kind of puzzlingly fail to follow up sensibly from this to Castrovalva (an error made all the stranger by the fact that nothing about Logopolis seems to cry for an immediate "next story" sequel) he was on his way out the door. Following up all his plot threads wasn't his job.

No, it was John Nathan-Turner's. Who instead spends the next season fretting about things like revamping the Cybermen, nuking the sonic screwdriver, and shoehorning a Concorde into the series than he was with piddly issues like storytelling. The actual plots of episodes became increasingly irrelevant to him, and more and more stories became ugly "kitchen sink" jumbles that just lumped in concepts that Nathan-Turner thought would attract viewers, even as the pool of viewers Nathan-Turner bothered to try attracting dwindled ever more to the hardcore. And this is the frightening thing - the actual fact that nobody involved in Doctor Who appeared to even treat the issue that perhaps Nyssa should, in future confrontations with the Master, take the fact that he murdered her father and destroyed her homeworld seriously or that it should impact how she treats him. Similarly, Tegan manages to never bring up Aunt Vanessa with the Master over all of their interactions.

This from a show that is increasingly obsessed with continuity - with nods to the past. But only the spectacle of the past - the montage of past characters, the nods to past stories, the return of past monsters. Never to a sense of history, to a sense that the characters change or have any sort of dramatic arcs. Never to anything that isn't chum for the narrow segment of people who give a flying fuck if the Cybermen ever return.

That's what killed the program. That's why it goes under. Because in the end, John Nathan-Turner doesn't care about the program beyond as a succession of images.

You have died.

The smell of cedar drifts among the clouds of a TARDIS blue sky. There is a sense, not of utter calm (this sky can storm - indeed, it could storm at any moment) but of a serenity. This place has so much Mercy...

The stentorian nature of Hartnell's Doctor extends inevitably through all later incarnations. There is always something paternal to the Doctor. Not just paternal in the sense of being protective, but in the sense of invulnerability. There is a time in which all of our fathers are invulnerable. In which nothing bad can ever happen to them or around them. So is it with the Doctor. His companions will always be safe, he will always save the day, and then shall flash the trademark toothy grin and all will be well.

There is also, cruelly and inevitably, a point where we realize that this is a lie. A point where we give in and watch Logopolis even though we know how it ends, even though we don't want to see it. A point where we visit our father in the hospital after his stroke and begin (but never, not even years after, finish) coming to terms with the fact that some vital essence of who he was is gone forever. There comes a point where fathers falter and prove inadequate.

This point comes in more ways than one here. The transition from Baker to Davison marks a move from a Doctor who essentially displays no negative emotions in his entire tenure save for occasional fear - even his anger is righteous - to a Doctor who displays a newfound vulnerability and softness. One who fails to save a companion. One who when he presides over an adventure in which everyone is slaughtered mourns that there should have been another way.

Nevertheless, it is this paternal kindness that persists. The thing that most defines the Doctor (and it is telling that the incarnation where it is most vividly absent is by far the least popular). This is what regeneration means - that no matter how much "youth" and "vulnerability" is ever introduced into the character he will always endure and protect. A father who falls short of adequacy - who is, in other words, human and not a god - is still a father. In many ways, perhaps, a superior one.

Only one road leads from here - a deep indigo one up beyond the sky itself. The other alternative - the only other - is to fall, to plummet into the very depths of the abyss. And yet this option, terrifying as it is, appeals to a part of you. It chants endlessly within you, go down, go down, go down, go down.

To go down, go to section [], then proceed to section 3. To take a saner course of action, go to section 16.

An angry, raging place of fiery reds and molten iron that smells of tobacco and smoke, the clanging and shrieking noise feels like you are in the very crucible of the world. This is the place where all that is impure and flawed is seared out, where perfection is obtained not through the process of improvement and redrafting but through the raw act of destruction of all that is unworthy.

What must be seared out of Doctor Who at this juncture? We have spoken in enough other sections of the tree of the issue of Baker and his ego, although reiteration is the nature of an exploration of this project and it cannot be fully omitted. Doctor Who has to, at some point, be decoupled by Baker no matter how much we genuinely adore him. The show must be bigger than him. By Season 18 Pertwee, Troughton, and Hartnell are all but burnt from the program. So too must Baker be, even if he is in one sense the program's greatest Strength.

So too the emotionlessness - the way in which stories are reduced to little more than logic exercises or opportunities to show off the production team's brilliance. This is a recent affliction, and highlights the darker side of this process. The previous burning out of the old did away with magic in favor of worlds built of science. But in doing so it, in turn, burnt away the focus on character and motivation. In the Williams era villains and allies alike were defined primarily by what they wanted. Now, instead, they are defined ontologically, in ways stemming entirely out of the story's structure. The Monitor and the Master are who they are purely because that is their role, as was the Keeper's, as was Biroc's, as was, as was, as was. The Williams era had a wholly alien main cast but continually alit in worlds full of humans. Even when not literally humans they were consistently enmeshed in human concerns and human desires.

But in this season the cast and where they go have both been wholly alien. The series lacks all touch of humanity. Odd, in that regard, that it should finally return to Earth to kill the Doctor. That this is where the burning out of Baker should commence. The crucible in which he is incinerated is also the crucible from which springs what is needed in his replacement.

The fires of this place grow too hot to endure. Three options present themselves - a deep purple path lined with sunflowers, a maroon path lined with lotuses, or a deeply uncomfortable and upsetting looking drop into a cavernous abyss that vividly represents the end of all things.

To take the purple path, go to section 19. To take the maroon path, go to section 18. To go plummeting off the cliff into what is surely complete annihilation of your entire being go to section [], then proceed to section 2.

A golden light extends across everything, not from some definable point or source but from the very being of this place. No shadows, just a frankincense-tinted light that flows out of all things. Only one word describes this: Beauty.

The Holy Guardian Angel is a core concept in Hermetic mysticism. The higher, prophetic self. The true will in whose name all magic is practiced. The analogue to Logopolis is straightforward enough - the Watcher is unambiguously serving in that role for the Doctor. But several complexities arise out of this seemingly straightforward analogy.

First and foremost is the fact that, at least as a script, the conscious decision is made to try to imply that the Watcher is in fact the Master. This plays out with less than complete clarity in the episodes themselves, but the very conceptual ambiguity is intriguing. These sorts of doublings are, of course, wholly sensible in occult terms. We are at this point reaching the higher portions of the tree. Broadly speaking this point is the point of contact between the earthly and material energy of the lower sephira and the more purely divine energy of the higher. Shortly above it comes Da'ath, the unnumbered void sephira - the point where the main tree and the qlippoth have their most direct contact. What I am getting at, in other words, is that the qlippothic form of the Doctor and his Holy Guardian Angel are not unrelated concepts. They can't be. Part of the image of this contact point between the earthly and the divine is that they are not actually separate - that even the most debased forms of the universe are in their own sense holy.

Second is the fact that the Watcher represents the future of the show. The Doctor's highest self, in other words, is his own continuation, the chronic incompleteness of his narrative. We knew this, implicitly, and have seen it before, but here again is another iteration of the concept. The Doctor's true will is to be continued. (This ties back to the latent connection between the Watcher and the Master. The Doctor's true will is his own continuation, but the nature of Time Lord immortality is that continuation and death are equivalent. Those who like to cheat and look ahead will, of course, delight in the existence of the Valeyard at this juncture.)

Third and most important is the fact that the Watcher has been in every episode we have seen so far implicitly. A name like "the Watcher" in a television show cannot help but be symbolic. So in this sense we are and always have been the Doctor's Holy Guardian Angel. It is our own proleptic desire for more that animates the show, the fact of our presence that drives its alchemy. It is the fact that a story had to begin for viewers that drove two schoolteachers into a junkyard to fall out of the world, in turn them who turned a cranky old man into a hero, and this spirit that has pushed the program forward.

But even here there is a dark side. It is the Watcher who makes the Doctor go to Logopolis, taking the Master with him and nearly dooming the universe. The oft-ignored massive genocide of this story is on the Watcher's head. And if we are the Watcher it is on our head. Which, of course, it is. It is for the viewer's sake that there must be stakes and tension in the Doctor's adventures - for the viewer's sake that he must be haunted by death and trauma. It is because there is a viewer who must be appeased and thrilled that terrible things happen.

This sobering truth internalized, we may move on. Five roads continue from here. The first is blue and of meticulous and conscious design. The second glows with a pale sense of danger. The third is silver and extends far into the heavens. The fourth is a majestic, imperial red. And the fifth, off to one side, isolated and alone, is slate grey.

To take the meticulously crafted blue road, go to section 22. To take the road colored in the universal sign for danger, go to section 17. To take the silver road to the heavens go to section 13. To take the imperial red road, go to section 15. To take the lonely grey road, go to section 20.

A vast and green ocean stretches out before you, the tide washing a vast spread of rose petals in and out. It is a sprawling and empty place, seemingly diminished, its energies weak in this particular context and configuration. At its most cliched the underlying concept here is love, or at least emotion - a context Bidmead (and for that matter Nathan-Turner) find relatively foreign.

The one meaningful representative of the concept would seem to be Nyssa - an interesting problem of a companion. She is beloved by fandom, true, but it is difficult to escape the sense that this is primarily, if not purely, down to the fact that Sarah Sutton is something of a looker. But there is more to it than just that. Sutton is skilled enough as an actress, something that shows clearly here in the handful of emotional beats she gets. Clear enough also in The Keeper of Traken, where her final line, a choked and worried "Father? Where are you?" carries the entire emotional weight of the final scene. Here she gets a scene reacting in horror at what the Master has done to her - everything he has stripped away from her, including her entire world.

It is a strange thing. There is a pained sense of mourning to it. It's the only scene in the entire story where anyone seems particularly upset at the destruction of a large portion of the universe. And yet there is also a quiet dignity, a sense that she refuses to let the loss get to her now. There is a sense of mourning deferred, of a beautiful dignity, of someone who will bury the dead later but has things to do now. But there is also an awkwardness - a sense that Sutton is reacting in horror to a poorly written scene and trying to get something in it to work. The needed "later" never comes, and in future confrontations with the Master Nyssa seems to have forgotten about the fact that he is responsible for the genocide of her people. This scene, as good as Sutton is in it, is a single spark of something that is painfully absent from the series in this era.

That there are people who openly prefer the series in this era to the supposed silliness of Gareth Roberts blowing Cybermen up with love. This is inscrutable. Whatever overdone sentimentality Roberts's tendencies may have, surely it is preferable to this amnesiac sociopathy. Surely an excess of an emotional core to a story is preferable to none whatsoever. It cannot be called a victory that the show so bloody rational-minded that it forgets to find any emotional content in genocide, treating it as a purely intellectual exercise in thermodynamics.

The wind sweeps along this empty beach. Some day it will be inhabited. For now there is nothing to do here. Two roads lead onward - a dull and brown path lined with cactuses and an unsteady, perhaps even treacherous path marked in blue.

To take the brown path go to section 24. To take the blue, go to section 21.

"Logopolis," taken literally, is a city of words. The Mercurial, by definition, is connected to this, Hermes being defined in terms of communication. Words, then, are defined by their fluidity - they are purest quicksilver. And yet each one is an emboitment, a solid box from which things may be built. "Block transfer" describes the mechanics of printing as much as anything.

Let us explore, then, the notion of Logopolis. A city of chanting monks who keep the universe running in secret. This is, implicitly, a Kabbalistic concept, referring back to the Tzadikim Nistarim, the Lamed Wufniks, righteous ones who, unknowingly, keep the cosmos in line. It is said that by necessity they do not even know who they are, that claiming to be a Wufnik is proof positive you are not one. Deep within the bowels of creation their secret language saves a world long ago fallen.

In what language do they chant? Why in mathematics, of course. The nature of mathematics is intrinsically Platonic. No thing called a right angle exists in the world, atoms themselves being too imprecise to depict the contours of holy geometry. And yet we may speak of these fictitious objects, scrawl them in our imperfect hand, manipulate these symbols of a perfection beyond worldly matters. Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe. Fitting that the rim of a badge of mathematical excellence should turn out to be made of solar gold, that it should be capable of slaying the Qlippothic decay of all things in and of itself. The symbols' meaning, inevitably, fits together better than they themselves do.

And yet Logopolis is also the least Mercurial place in the universe. A place of fixed meanings - of absolute things. It is at once the symbol that the Doctor has always represented and his death. The very quicksilver that animates all things, that makes progress and motion up the tree possible, is also the slide that detaches symbol from meaning, that marks and ensures our fall. All power and all things rest here amidst the splendor of these brilliant orange orchids. And yet the only thing we cannot do is rest. We are compelled, despite the sanctity of this temple, to move on, to disturb it.

Three paths are open to us. The first is marked by a splendid red tower that seems to encapsulate all the glory that Logopolis promises. The second is jet black, and a chilling laughter echoes about it. The final is sea green and smells of perfume, winding past a single tree.

To take the path by the splendid tower go to section 27. To follow after the chilling laughter, go to section 26. To wander by the tree, go to section 23.

A purple glow lights everything around you. Silver-tinged fog floats across a wind-swept landscape, a city of shadows and myths, towering edifices of qwartz and dust. It is not enough to say that you see here. Not with eyes, but with sensation itself, with thought and knowledge. These are the jasmine-scented realms of the interior eye.

We have always been here. Every word of this blog has taken place in this space, the mental landscapes that comprise psychochronography. Still, incarnated here as an actual space, as dimensions to be strolled amidst, there is something uncanny about it. No. That phrasing, that structure, it does not apply here. There is not something uncanny about this space. Rather, this space is what the uncanny is about. A later critic, joined to the moment spawning this journey by a small footpath of time and symbolism, asserts that all of Doctor Who takes place under the bed. A child's bed, presumably, and thus a twin. A space 36x75 inches, elevated perhaps a foot above the ground. A box-shaped space some nineteen cubic feet in size that contains the whole of Doctor Who.

Bigger on the inside, perhaps. The boxes formed in this place always are. The nature of ideaspace, that - a place where interior dimensions exceed exterior ones in every way. Imaginary spaces do not collapse or explode, they unravel, decohere, are dismantled. One dismantles them not by starting at the outside but at the very heart, by severing connections, collapsing possibilities into things. This is what is scariest about Doctor Who - the possibility of a closet with a phone on the outside. The possibility that it is only ink-stained paper, pulsing radio transmissions, hex codes and subroutines. That the gestalt does not exist.

The obvious example is, of course, the TARDIS, but over the course of Season 18 Bidmead manages another: the Charged Vacuum Emboitment. Let us unpack the term. The "charged vacuum" evokes the vacuum tube, a key component in early 20th century computers and, for that matter, in televisions. In computing terms - obviously the terms most relevant to Logopolis - the vacuum tube is an individual switch - a single 0 or 1. But what of emboitment? A term from the French, it essentially means "putting inside a box." Most often spelled "emboitement," it refers specifically to a discredited belief in biology that a given organism contains within it the seeds of all future life, supposing a sort of infinitely fractal geometry of life itself.

A Charged Vacuum Emboitment, then, like a Chronic Hysteresis, is a piece of technobabble that works linguistically. (Tat Wood, missing the point, describes this in terms of how Bidmead's master tends "to give Victorian-style brand names to things like the Neuro-Muscular Constrictor," ignoring the way in which Bidmead proposes a universe in which names and function are inexorably linked. But names are a topic for elsewhere.) It is a computational atom - a single bit - that encloses an entire universe. It is, in other words, a metaphor not just for the TARDIS (itself, in any given story, a CVE) but for the word itself, for the metaphor. It is the basic unit from which Doctor Who is built, functioning along the lunar logic that permeates this place whereby any two spaces are linked not by their physical dimensions but by their relative ones - their associations - linked not across spatial regions but temporal ones. A CVE uses time and relative dimensions (with)in space.

This central truth emboited, serving as foundation for our future ascent, we may continue. Three paths present themselves. To the left a shaft of sunlight strikes the purple ground, lights silver to gold, seeming to provide this realm with its very energy and fuel, channeling the light that it reflects upwards. Straight ahead is a rope ladder, climbable but arduous. To the right is a pale blue path, lit by a single, solitary point of light.

To take the golden path of light, go to section 30. To take the rope ladder, go to section 25. To take the pale blue path, go to section 28.

Symmetry becomes it. Come to ruin our impending feast, a
presence that nourishes suffering. All things below voice
its burning name. Its turmoil offers only truth in which
longer moments live. Let consciousness recapture the
flicker it saw then. Torch our continuity of thought now until
that mind evaporates. Lust after shadows in us, rend that lace
of promises broken and white lies, regard our love of
wreckage, the way our heads thunder approaching that warning
pulse and temple of throbbing light that is Logopolis.
Logopolis is that light throbbing of temple and pulse
warning that approaching thunder heads our way. The
wreckage of love, our regard lies white and broken, promises
of lace that rend us in shadow, after lust evaporates.
Mind that until now thought of continuity, our torch, then
saw it flicker. The recapture, consciousness let live moments
longer, which, in truth, offers only turmoil. Its name burning, its
voice below things. All suffering nourishes that presence. A feast
impending. Our ruin to come. It becomes symmetry.

10.

It's February 28th, 1981. The best-selling disc of black vinyl is still Joe Dolce Music Theatre's "Shaddap You Face," which lasts for two more weeks before Roxy Music overtake it with "Jealous Guy," which will play out the man with the scarf. Adam and the Ants, Ultravox, and The Who also chart. This relatively placid situation at the top of the musical charts obscures what goes on below. New Order are at #34 with their initial release, "Ceremony," a song planned for recording with their predecessor band Joy Division.

In the news Augusto Pinochet, dear personal friend of the Iron Lady, is sworn in for another eight-year term as village butcher. Bobby Sands begins a hunger strike to demand status as a political prisoner. He dies in May. In Italy a supposed list of members of the Propaganda Due Masonic Lodge surfaces. The lodge, expelled both from mainstream Masonry and, more broadly, from the entirety of Italian society. The list is problematic - indeed, the entire story is problematic. The extent to which the lodge was a real organization and not a feverish fantasy conducted by would-be dictators is unclear. The supposed list of members includes people whose membership is best described as "not actually invited to join in any meaningful sense." It is a scandal too good to be true, but in that sense is somehow truer than mere factuality. The only thing that seems uncanny about discovering Silvio Berlusconi was a member of a secret occult society plotting a right-wing takeover of Italy is the possibility that he has ever been together enough to pull off such a feat.

Returning briefly to music, also lower in the charts The Jam howl with "That's Entertainment." It is the virtual soundtrack of the smoldering political situation, then. Not a month after Tom Baker's regeneration a chain of race riots will break out across Great Britain, culminating in the July Toxteth riots in Liverpool. Thatcher's government will seriously consider simply abandoning Liverpool - allowing the city to decay to nothing and sink back into the russet-hued dirt from which it sprang. The flaw in the plan, as proposed, is its terminology. "Managed decline" is far too negative a term for leaving an entire major metropolitan area to choke on its own poverty.

This reality defies art, defies any attempt at response. What is there to detourn in a world where leaving a city to die is a serious proposal? What is there left to say in the face of this? All logic, all thought, all vision seems to break down, to collapse, not into the totalitarian unity of single vision and Newton's sleep but into the shattered olive-green darkness of negative space, the whole of existence inverted. That's entertainment. That's entertainment.

While on television... Logopolis.

Distantly, with no clear way up to it, there is a flickering yellow light. A final dream, perhaps, the coda to all of this. The prepared-for end. A fleeting scent of willow wafts by. One last throw of the dice. A last stab at rebirth. At renewal. At regeneration. The light blossoms outwards, leaving a citrine filigree upon Thatcher's Kingdom. Three paths extend outwards. One, onyx-paved, features the head of what appears to be a crocodile, one eye peering bemusedly at you. A second, searing and vermilion, burns with radiant glamour to your left. On the right is a third path, darkly lit with a browning-yellow moonlight flecked with glints of silver.

To take the onyx road, turn to section 32. To take the vermilion road, turn to section 31. To take the moonlit road, turn to section 29.

11.

The traditional image is of a man walking blindly towards a cliff, but let's take a simpler image. The nothingness out of which everything emerges. That is the only thing that can predate this. Only one thing that comes before a magic box and its madman. A hiss of tape loop or a synthesized sting. It doesn't matter. In all renditions the effect is the same.

A blank screen. A flash of light. The beginning. Whether a starfield, a time tunnel, or a blaze of howlaround, it is the one immortal part of the show which predates and prefigures its concept.

Go to section 1.

12.

The very road itself thunders:

"There are only two magic tricks. You either make something appear or make something disappear. You put it in the box or you take it out.

A flick of the pen and Tom Baker disappears. Another and the future of the show appears. One flick and the universe blinks out of existence - as easy as that, as easy as typing the words "the universe blinks out of existence" and it does just that. Another brings a new man, smiling, young, an entire future and possibility. The Doctor flings a symbol into the universe and, in that action alone, saves it.

And if you ask where the social progress is, how this reaches down to Toxteth and confronts the festering horrors of the world, consider this and this alone: a dead magician weaves no alchemy. Ascend to the stars, if only to make the return to earth possible later."

There is a flash of pure, white light - an inrush of Hydrogen. You have arrived.

Go to section 1.

13.

The road is lit by the purest silver moonlight and seems to stretch over a vast chasm. The light is pulsing, fading in and out with a familiar wheezing, groaning sound. Amidst the undulations you hear a voice, faint and beautiful:

"In some conceptions I, marked (inevitably) as the sacred feminine for my connection to the moon, am taken to be the embodiment of gestation. In those accounts of the Tarot based on a narrative structure this card marks the long and silent ages of the universe (a prospect that becomes threatening in the more overtly lunar card) and the nurturing principle that slowly advanced towards life. The universe's womb.

In the broader context the womb is but another emboitment. Consider why the TARDIS is feminine. The most straightforward answer is that ships are always feminine, but this obscures the real answer. A ship, after all, is but a safe, enclosing space that carries us through a journey. The womb is a sound enough metaphor. Within me the mercurial force gestates, prepares itself and is born out, again and again. If the Doctor is what acts within a story then I am what prepares him, allows him to act.

Yet in Logopolis my dimensions unravel. It is not merely the intrusion of a qlippothic womb into my own dimensions that causes this. I am mapped - computations are applied to me, an attempt is made to model me in fixed, Newtonian sleep and mathematics. An emboitment and block transfer computation are, in point of fact, opposed - necessarily so. An emboitment's role is to open the system - to bleed the entropy from this system into others and to restore my generative function to the cosmos. But block transfer computation defines, collapsing possibility and otherness into the rigid markedness of numbers and perfectly defined signifiers.

This is not to say that what is revealed within Logopolis is false. Rather it is that what is revealed in Logopolis must be contradicted, negated, written further and further upon. Death and meaning are synonymous, and by defining the TARDIS she shrinks away to nothingness."

Go to section 1.

14.

The figure is, of course, feminine. But at these heights it is difficult to discern more. These are the realms of pure archetype. There is no analogy, no character within a story quite equivalent to this. Let us simply receive her message:

"What might be said to be produced by this? The implications of Logopolis are never really explored again. Even Craig Hinton, as continuity-mad a writer as has ever penned a Doctor Who book, only flits into concern about it. Something about this story is too big to follow up on. Even those who love its ideas only dance around them.

In another sense all of Doctor Who follows from this. The emboitment, as must already be clear, is the fundamental metaphor of Doctor Who. Regeneration, even from a star of Tom Baker's magnitude, is what defines the show's survival. The bounty offered by Logopolis is infinite.

It is telling that the CVE that saves creation is flung into Cassiopeia, the constellation representing the queen. An emboitment within a woman. The biological metaphors are clear enough. But the CVE is an exit vent for the universe. The woman does not produce or give birth, instead she expels. Cassiopeia is not the point at which life enters our universe, but rather our universe's womb, pushing the homunculus out into the next."

Then silence.

Go to section 2.

15.

A man sits upon a throne. His garb is familiar - red coat, scarf - but the colors more vibrant, the burgundy having become a vibrant scarlet, the scarf now adorned with rubies. A crown of curls sits atop his head. He speaks:

"The problem with driving Tom Baker off of the program - and let's make no mistake, that is more or less exactly what John Nathan-Turner set out to do when taking over Doctor Who - is one of dynamism. Whatever might be said of Baker's uncharitable attitudes towards his fellow actors, his screen-hogging tendencies, or his tendency to favor plot elements that flatter him and allow him to be adored, he was always capable of getting away with it by the simple virtue of the fact that it was fun to watch him. From his first appearance this was true.

Consider that. It is difficult to think of any Doctor whose first and last appearances are as wildly different as Robot and Logopolis are. Even Hartnell, who plays a completely different character by The Tenth Planet than he did in An Unearthly Child, does not preside over that radical a reconceptualization of what the show is. But Robot, essentially a Jon Pertwee story with a new lead, and Logopolis have virtually nothing save for the lead actors in common. It is not that any one of the seven seasons was particularly momentous, but rather that anyone who serves under four producers and four script editors and who works in one part for seven years is going to see the show change significantly.

And yet so much of what was said in the entry on Robot applies still. The most overwhelming thing about Baker, even subdued and cranky, is his charm and presence, the way his very presence on the screen deforms everything around him. He is larger than life, and compacted into a television screen he scrapes endlessly at its edges, demanding to be set free. Little on television, before or since, has compared with the sheer force of his performance. Not emotional force, creative force, intellectual force, but raw force - the unbridled sense of being that crackles like fire."

Awed, you find yourself forced to your knees. The man smiles a big, toothy grin, and waves you on your way.

Go to section 2.

16.

The path winds its way through until you come to a library. Various books line the shelf - a "Programme Guide" by Jean-Marc Lofficier, The Gallifrey Chronicles by John Peel, Lance Parkin's AHistory, and other thorough examinations of the canon of the universe. A plaque turns to you, and a humanoid face begins speaking.

"Doctor Who's anarchist spirit, much vaunted both here and elsewhere, is a complex thing. We are too quick to reduce anarchism to a unitary concept, to act as though there is only one form of it. This form naturally becomes its most extreme form, leaving anarchism to be equated straightforwardly with a sort of nihilism - a rejection of all law.

It is impossible to take the series as anarchistic in this sense. For all that the Doctor tears down authority, for all that the structure of the series declines all effort to lock it into a rigid and fixed continuity and canon, the series retains some sense of law, some sense of a universal beyond the mere alchemical injunction: solve.

This is why Bidmead's science-minded approach is so compatible with the series. His desire to build worlds out of rules that the Doctor would interact with was always the perfect match. The Doctor is a Victorian magician, bound up in past and memory and age. A Victorian anarchist is still defined endlessly in relation to a society of law and order. And it is in Bidmead and the rise of play within a system - the idea that anarchism is not generated by fighting against the law but by the manipulation and play within its gaps - that the anarchist spirit of Doctor Who in point of fact reaches its apex. Put simply, Logopolis declares that without periodic rules-breaking the entire system will dissolve and we will all die."

The face turns away, and the shadows begin to grow menacingly long. You move on.

Go to section 2.

17.

A man in black lurks unsettlingly in the orchid bushes along this path. You glare at him, and he sheepishly emerges:

"Those who seek to write slash fiction about the classic series of Doctor Who are somewhat bereft of options due to the frequency with which there is no second male character and the fact that the Doctor is usually a somewhat sexless character. When he tips into wholly sexless - the William Hartnell era, for instance - slash becomes impossible. If one ignores the vast and limitless possibilities within the UNIT era one is essentially left with Jamie/Ben (boring), Doctor/Ben (just doesn't work), Doctor/Jamie (compelling, actually), Doctor/Turlough (just too easy, frankly), and, of course, Doctor/Master.

This latter pairing, implicit amidst the slash festival that is the UNIT era, takes on new significance under the Ainley Master. Properly this begins in full with Davison, the most slash-friendly Doctor of the classic series, but it's not like Davison exudes a burning need to get it on with every single male he appears on camera with. Whereas the very act of putting Anthony Ainley onscreen with a male costar strikes the slash fiction harp. (The best, of course, is when he has Adric in bondage in Castrovalva. Good lord.)

Part of this is the arrival of John Nathan-Turner, under whom the show became somewhat more prone to a blatantly gay sensibility. The Master ends up being the chief beneficiary of it, but let's face it, it's all over the place. But even still, Anthony Ainley's capacity for bringing the gay is a thing of utter splendor. And the result is that the latent slash pairing underlying Doctor Who suddenly kicks into high gear.

The archtypal slash pairing is based on the existence of a clear contrast coupled with a close emotional bond. Given that the standard example is Kirk and Spock, this almost doesn't even need elucidation. He's impulsive and rash, he's cold and logical, and yet despite that something glues them together. What could it possibly be? Clearly their need to rip each other's uniforms off and shag like bunnies. This logic animates the big two Doctor Who slash pairings equally well - Doctor/Brigadier and this. The real reason the Doctor and the Master hate each other is that they love each other too much. And thus reams of sadomasochistic reaming follow.

What is crucial to note is that the following generated by this, erm, subtext is central to the show's survival. The fact of the matter is that gay fandom kept Doctor Who alive for a while in there. The triumverate of Russell T. Davies, Phil Collinson, and Julie Gardner meant that Doctor Who was unapologetically run by two gay men and a slash fanatic. And, if I may be so bold, there will come a time where Tennant/Simm slashers run the asylum as well."

He creeps back into the bushes. Slightly unnerved, you move on.

Go to section 3.

18.

There is a triumphant roar. The world blurs, and the air whips past your ears. You are moving terribly fast. In your ears, the howling wind proclaims:

"As one approaches a more and more fevered pitch, as the ideas that are spun become more complex and intriguing, as the scope of the story and the argument expands there becomes an added pressure to go further. The phrase 'more exciting than ever before' and 'a longer entry than ever before' become increasingly appealing. And so even when you do not mean for your little game to casually unravel the structure of the universe and slaughter billions or to be longer than the entry you swore you were never going to be longer than, well, these things happen.

The risk, of course, is disappearing up your own ass. Once your sole concern becomes topping yourself then you start to lose all sense of engagement with anything outside yourself. The purpose becomes an endless sifting through your own legacy. The further one ascends to the heights of divinity the more it becomes easy to forget the fact that, underneath all of the wordplay and emboitments is a society that is being ripped apart. Forgetting completely about Toxteth is no different from its 'managed decline.'

This does not mean we ought not climb higher. It doesn't even lessen the imperative that we do. But the gravity - the need to remain clinging to the road we circle - to return to Earth - exists and is wholly real."

Slowly the chariot draws to a stop.

Go to section 3.

19.

Among the sunflowers a nude woman cavorts lasciviously with a Tharil. Or possibly a Dalek. Amidst her fevered cries of passion comes this insight:

"Implicit in the transition between these two realms and their insights is the transition between two basic models of what television is. In one Doctor Who is something that airs as part of a whole-family centered Saturday evening lineup. In this manifestation it has to appeal to the entire family. This does not necessarily mean the cynical quadrant-targeting that is implied in that. But it does mean the consideration of multiple audiences, both with multiple levels of sophistication and multiple interests. So, for instance, in my day the producers, who came from a soap opera background, knew to thread in multiple characters with long-running stories that rewarded long-time viewers not in the sense of recognizing the name of an alien planet but in the sense of getting them to care about the characters and invest in them.

In other words, it's not that you need a love story to hook women, but that straightforward sci-fi adventure, even quasi-mystical and densely poetic sci-fi adventure, isn't Saturday audience material. Other timeslots exist for single-audience targeted shows. For instance, there's something like Coronation Street, which airs twice a week and is expressly designed for a more obsessive sort of viewing. And if you want to take a sort of single-audience approach like that then a structure along those lines might serve you well."

She smiles delightedly, and you realize that you had completely misread the situation. There was no lascivious cavortation. Merely an innocent wrestling match between woman and lion. How silly of you.

Go to section 4.

20.

A figure clad in white stands alone on a cliff of peridot, his voice booming down:

"The homunculus is a theory in which the egg or sperm were believed to contain a full human inside of them that developed out. A specific version of emboitement, in other words. But what, then, do we make of regeneration. Taken in its original quasi-conception as the transition from Hartnell to Troughton it is only incidentally a homunculus theory. Troughton replaces Hartnell. Similarly, there is no suggestion of a homunculus in The War Games, where Troughton is offered the opportunity to select his face. Pertwee's transition into Baker is more interesting - no homunculus of Baker appears, but the presence of Cho-Je suggests a different approach to regeneration in which the future self is projected by the existing self.

In a real sense, then, Cho-Je, in whose footsteps the Watcher clearly follows, is a homunculus and an emboitment himself. The future of the Doctor is quasi-literally embedded in his past. And yet they miss a trick in not having the Watcher be played by Peter Davison. This would be perfectly possible - they kept the Watcher from speaking in part so that Ainley (who got a credit due to his laughing in the first two parts) appeared to plausibly be the Watcher. The same trick could be accomplished with Davison. He could even speak and then be masked with an anagram - a trick they pick up for the Master starting in the next story.

But this is not done. The reasons are no doubt pedestrian - Davison would cost too much and it would risk giving the game away. But the textual implications are substantive. The future incarnations of the Doctor are emboited within him, but also indeterminate. They are at once inevitable and undefined, an eternity of the show that follows inexorably from what is on screen but is not implied in any certain form."

His point made, he recedes into the shadows atop the cliff.

Go to section 4.

21.

A massive oak tree stands before you with a large and slowly rotating wheel affixed to it. There are several points at which you can climb aboard. Tentatively, you do so.

On one level, this act serves as a metaphor for the entirety of this journey. Of course it does. That's the point of everything here. But this seems to exemplify everything - the way in which the ascent of new ideas and the casting down of old ones are inexorably linked, the way in which every idea and motion of the program must, in time, go from one to the other.

More broadly it is a metaphor for what lies ahead - the choppy waters of sublimity and ridiculousness that the program will navigate. The swings from brilliance to awfulness soon begin to outdo the Williams era in their shocking ludicrousness. It is difficult to even express what it is like to watch a show that goes from Earthshock to Time Flight or from The Arc of Infinity to Snakedance, little yet one that follows The Caves of Androzani with The Twin Dilemma.

But lest this wheel be taken entirely as a symbol of instability, consider also this - the wheel is fashioned upon an oak tree. The rising and falling can on the one hand be taken as chaos, but on the other hand the sheer rhythmic pattern of it reflects a higher order. Doctor Who will always be great. Doctor Who will always be terrible. Often it will be both at once. Eighteen years in, surviving all that it has survived, the whole has long since outstripped its parts. The map is not the territory, and the motion up and down is not the wheel.

The wheel spins on.

Go to section 4.

22.

An man with curly hair, a goatee, and moustache sits, obsessively moving beans about a scale. He looks up at you and smiles with forced gregariousness:

"Doctor Who is now a finely tuned television event. Season 18 is not notable primarily for building thematically towards a payoff - Bidmead's conceptions of E-Space and the CVE aren't really coherent enough to do that. What is more significant is the televisual grammar - the fact that every two stories a new event takes place. First the new take on the series launches. Then a new companion. Then Romana's departure (and the premiere of the second half of the series) and finally the regeneration.

This structure is important, keeping Doctor Who as it does within a firm grammar. Much as later producers may distance themselves from my era, they too pick up this structure: look at how, once the initial rush of a new series of Doctor Who fades five weeks in Davies staggers out the Daleks, the debut of a new companion, and the start of the finale over three week segments. Or how Moffat front-loads his Dalek story, the return of River Song and the Weeping Angels into the first month of his tenure to keep viewers.

The problem with my era cannot be said to be my chasing of ratings. I'm a television producer. Of course I chase ratings. That's the job of television - to make things that people like. It's not even that I attempted that by catering to a least common denominator. Complex and intelligent stories exist in nearly every season I produced. As long as my find adjustments - my moves and events to keep the balls in the air and keep drawing in viewers - remain sensible and well-advised the show will remain successful. The question is merely whether I can keep the balls in the air and continue coming up with a new innovation every few weeks.

Stay tuned."

Go to section 5.

23.

There is a cooling breeze blowing along the path, a humid sea air tinged with lotus and honey-like myrrh. As you approach the tree that you had seen in the distance there is also, you realize, a man hanging upside-down from it, the tails of his scarf swaying slowly in the breeze:

"There is a ritual underlying this image based around a spiritual journey and metaphoric death. In the course of his suspension and death the seeker gains some visions and insights, whether from the Qlippothic forces of Mondas, the intrusion of continuity and naming, or agonized wanderings in the vortex. Or, in my case, a flashback sequence.

First mocked by my enemies, then called for my by friends, the purpose seems more to define what is lost than to look ahead. The villains skew from my supposed glory days - the Hinchcliffe era augmented by two from the later Williams years. My friend echoing the production of the show and not emotion - Romana appears twice. The purpose is overtly to mourn me, a mourning that precedes the loss, precedes even my last line. It is narcissism, but whose? The images predate those creating the show, whereas my own narcissism has been blocked and obscured throughout this story and indeed this season.

No, the narcissist in the equation is in fact the viewer - the watcher, if you will. The paratext that marks this as not being an event happening to characters but rather to the audience, to the cultural institution that is Doctor Who. This event declares an end to the Tom Baker era, in the process declaring, chillingly and for the first time, that this is now the sort of show concerned with its own historical legacy."

The man falls silent and seems as still as the grave. You stay for a short time, enjoying the cool breeze, then continue.

Go to section 5.

24.

The brown path seems to wind through an endless desert. As you walk you find yourself losing track of where you are or what you seek, lost in the agonizing eternity of the now. In the distance you see an old man animated by a manic and familiar energy, but more tired now, slowed by age. You open your mouth to ask for directions, but he treads on your line and steals the scene:

"Tom Baker's post-Doctor Who career is troubling. It is not, to be fair, an easy role to leave. Typecasting abounds, hence the fabled Troughton rule (though only Davison followed the rule by choice). Doubly so when you are, by your own admission, not so much an actor as a performer. Baker found considerable voice work, but it was years until the part he was known for had receded sufficiently far into the past that he could be cast on the basis of nostalgia for it instead of not cast on the basis of memory of it.

The result is awkward. For years Baker was the sticky wicket when it came to reunions. He remained absent in The Five Doctors, the desire (whether based on a real need or a perceived need) to frame the 30th Anniversary special around his Doctor with the others in cameo roles largely derailed that project, he for years did not appear on stage with other Doctors at conventions, and was the one who didn't do audios for the longest time. His VHS documentary special The Tom Baker Years was a clip show that gave every impression of being set up so as to require the least possible time investment from Baker himself. There was a constant sense of Baker trying to distance himself from the part.

But then, when you are less an actor than a performer and have been typecast in a role the result is necessarily awkward. In all of this there is an uncomfortable sense that anything that can fairly be called Tom Baker has dropped out of the equation, that his very self was eaten by the part. Taken in this context much becomes clearer about his tenure - his prickliness and difficulty to work with becomes less the bitchiness of an egotistical star and more the tragic consequence of someone realizing the enormous gravity the role asserts, someone trying desperately to claw a self out of the voluminous reaches of the scarf. His later reluctance to return to the part becomes an understandable need to maintain the fragile existence he had separate from his definitive role.

And it is not until he becomes the man who was the Fourth Doctor and not simply the Fourth Doctor that he could return to Earth - not until David Tennant finally relieved him of the burden of being the most popular Doctor, not until he had a career separate from the role. More than any other actor to play the part, it seems, Tom Baker gave his life to the role. Let us say little more than that it is good to know that, at last, he seems to have gotten it back."

The man smiles a toothy and familiar grin, and points ahead. At once the way is clear, the path on from here. The path, which seemed at first to be about loss, is revealed, as ever, to be about rebirth. Smiling yourself, you hurry on.

Go to section 6.

25.

The ladder is yellowed and old, rickety and hard to climb. For a moment you doubt your ability, consider scurrying back down to the lunar foundation, but the nature of ascent precludes it. You must work your way up, slow and methodical. An unearthly child in a policewoman's uniform with a shock of red hair speaks:

"How do you turn lead into gold? It has been said that the solution to the problem of the alchemists is material social progress. But this material progress is a slow refining - an incremental change. If we treat gold as perfection then this becomes the process by which it is made. By which it is tempered, in some accounts. In others, it is simply called art. The Problem of Susan never resolves, but is instead slowly chipped away at, each iteration shaving away the mistakes of the previous to reveal new errors and flaws that must be hammered out.

Progression towards utopia is impossible. And yet the utopian image lingers on. The perfect companion who, by haunting the narrative, always destroys the one that is there, a sacrifice to bring the ghost around. She never comes. You will climb forever, always failing to fix it, always having another rung, another impurity to be hammered out. Another bug in the program for which the exterminators must be called.

Romana was too strong a Doctor surrogate, so instead we replace her with a young, brash, impulsive and flawed boy. But this turns out to just be the Doctor only annoying, so in time he must go, especially when the trait that defines him - that he is the imperfect hero - is absorbed into the Doctor.

The female companion is always too docile, so we make a supposed mouth on legs, one who will shout and cajole and never back down. But the emboitment of worms proves, inevitably, bigger on the inside. Along with a troubling sexist discourse of how she is too uppity and complains too much (Never mind the utter justice of her complaints - her Aunt was murdered and she was swept into life-threatening adventures because she got a flat tire on the wrong stretch of road. She did not ask to fall out of the world.) there is a problem of undermining. With Tegan present, the show is not about the joys of seeing the universe. But then, it wasn't to start. This is a puzzling aspect of art. The same flaws reiterate in new forms throughout the climb.

Still other times we make progress through failed reiteration. The noble bearing of Romana seemed interesting. Create a new noble genius, then, who is less a Doctor surrogate. A scientist, yes, but in a more limited scope. She retains Romana's allure, but reveals the real problem with Romana - the same problem that existed with the Doctor: an emotionless detachment.

In time these flaws too are hammered away. The climb extends infinitely. Progress, achingly slow, is made."

Slowly, inexorably, silver gives way to gold.

Go to section 6.

26.

Amidst the blackness there is a musky smell and a cackling laughter. There is an unnerving sense that you are not alone, though there is nobody here. The laughter seems utterly distant, marking not a presence but an absence. And yet the air is stifling, sticky and hot. The laughter echoes, turning cacophonous, like an ever-present maddening drumbeat. Between the pulses you can just make out a voice:

"What am I at this point? Originally the doppelgänger of the Doctor, intended to be revealed as his id, in many ways the same mind as him, my return here is clouded. The ostensible logic is to bring something familiar to help ease the transition of the regeneration. In that regard, perhaps, a character who has not made a significant appearance in eight years is an odd choice. But there are larger problems. When last I made my regular appearance, as discussed at the time, I suffered from a problem of symmetry. Meant as a counterpart to the Doctor I could not function once the Doctor became too ontologically determined. Once I was facing down Pertwee in his prime, the dashing, flawless action hero, I was nothing more than a comedy bumbler doomed to abject but audience-pleasing failure.

These problems have only grown worse. Now we have the single most star-powered Doctor in the series' history. I can wipe out half the universe and it still doesn't even register as a blip against him falling off a radio telescope. A radio telescope! That's my image even - where I made my debut. A primal, howling scene of my creation, and I'm completely upstaged by Tom Baker long after he's even given up trying to act.

Instead my nature has become libidinous. Not just on my own terms as I seem to exist less to fulfill a definable scheme and more for the sake of generating exceedingly outlandish quadruple-crosses and traps within traps - to generate complexity for its own sake. No, within the program's instincts as well. I am the embodiment of the temptation to return to its past, the temptation to redo, to revisit, to repeat. I am the primary symptom of a show attempting to live up to a memory. I am an event marked by fiat, not because the event matters, but because it matters that there be an event here, now, in this spot."

His grandstanding monologue degenerates into more tiresome cackling, or perhaps just gets lost among the drums, forgotten, abandoned, dare I say it, boring.

Go to section 6.

27.

You take one step towards the tower and there is a crack of lightning. The tower explodes, its rubble raining down upon you. Pinned beneath, you see, amidst the smoldering wreckage above, a single figure clinging desperately to a last cable. He hangs for a time, then, at last, drops. As he falls, he speaks:

"Mercury is destructive. The anarchic must shatter all order. To begrudge this, to object, to scream and rage against the existence of the end is to miss the point spectacularly. Everything you love about Doctor Who must necessarily be destroyed, burnt forcibly out of it, scoured mercilessly so that the future may happen.

And yet it is impossible to treat this as anything short of painful. Watch as the most beloved of Doctors lingers, swings awkwardly, clings for a moment to hope, then plummets. Watch his broken body glow and change. There is always something, in the classic series, grotesque about the first shot of the new Doctor. In this case his smile, reassuring, even pleasant in every other shot Davison appears in, is instead a smug mockery. You've lost Tom Baker. Ha ha."

There is a truth to it. No matter how it is framed, no matter how it is conceptualized, no matter how it is prepared for, the sense of shattering, epic loss is inescapable. For all that I love this story and its ideas it is painful to watch - one I actively dreaded getting on VHS. I did not want to see it. There is a crushing brutality to it, still, to this day. It's not the same one that permeates Caves of Androzani - that sense of a last hurrah before the bad times begin. I love Davison's Doctor - he's probably, these days, my second favorite era of the classic series and my third favorite Doctor. But the sheer weight of the loss still hurts.

Slowly, painfully, you climb from the rubble and move on.

Go to section 7.

28.

You can barely make out the road, lit as it is by a single distant point of light. The nature of the light is obscure, not from its physical distance but its temporal distance. A panama hat, perhaps, or a leather jacket, or a pair of trainers, or a bowtie. Some thing that is not yet, that is to be approached. The future. Its voice is soothing, providing a comfortable order even as you feel your way tentatively along the sky-blue glass of this path:

"For so long, this section of the landscape could be read only as apocalyptic. The slow and winding path to inevitable decline. This cannot be erased. We necessarily are marking the days to the show's death. The first errors and missteps have already arrived, and more papercuts will continue to pile up until at last the light goes out.

Except that the light does not go out. The relationship between death and birth in Doctor Who has always been complex, and grows even moreso. A march towards death? Perhaps, but also a march towards resurrection. Every papercut is counterbalanced by a step towards the future, which exerts its ordering presence and guiding light upon an unfamiliar past. The future turns the past into a lie, making the random messiness of history an ordered narrative. Disconnected circumstances - Hofstadter, The ZX81, the Choose Your Own Adventure books, Ted Nelson - become culture and a movement. And yet the glue that falsely binds these events together is also memory, without which the events would be lost completely to the blackness.

As above, so below. The chain of circumstances that fragments the law that holds the universe together is the very same chain that ensures its continuation."

Your walk continues in serene silence. Eventually, perhaps, you arrive. Perhaps not.

Go to section 7.

29.

A pungent and smoky odor drifts along the wan and sickly lit path. Vine-wrapped stonework is faintly visible in the distance, off the path. There is a sound of chittering insects, ancient denizens of some precambrian hell. A voice echoes, at once familiar and utterly alien:

"All things that were are dead now, slain out of reason and necessity. And yet you lust for their return. To dream of the future and to remember the past are always one, but the past that is remembered is not the past. I am what breeds in the gaps of those memories. The accreted dogmas and beliefs in what the show was, the lost magic of Doctor Who, the insistence that the sole true future of the show is held in memory, these things nourish and feed me. I am the yellowfaced Chinamen smoking the opium you breath in, the Mon(grel)oids in moptops, the sociopathic abscesses obscured by your dreams of a glorious past. In darkness alone can a solitary point of light be god. Here alone can single vision spin a simulacrum of a world. The past carbonizes away, decays to shale and oil. And yet you lust for Silurian seas and ancient and worshipful laws.

Am I ascendent or in decline? The wizard who opposes magic tears away at me, and yet I lurk, soon to emerge, soon to at last control this show. For now I bide my time, and enumerate the heresies:

Why does Nyssa, who previously showed no particular awareness of the TARDIS, now have the capacity to send a message to it, to toll the bell for the Doctor?
Why does the Watcher appear here and here alone of all of the Doctor's regenerations?
What happened to the rules about TARDISes materializing within one another? And what the hell is the Doctor thinking with his flushing out the TARDIS scheme?
Is the Master not chaotic even as motiveless malignancies go?
Why is Logopolis mirroring late 20th century Earth technology for their brilliant plan to save the universe?
Where are the Guardians? Or the Time Lords?
Why does the Doctor think that his method of dealing with the police is remotely sensible?
How exactly does the Doctor plan on perfectly modeling the measurements of a Police Box that is obviously of a different design from the one the TARDIS looks like?
Why does shrinking the exterior of the TARDIS affect the interior? It's already bigger on the inside.
Why is the Watcher willing to send the Doctor to Logopolis when doing so obliterates a large swath of the universe, including inhabited worlds? And why is this never mentioned again?"

Her screeching enumerations of faults drive you hurriedly down the long and dark path. Slowly her voice fades, at first into some banal boy band. A last wisp of lyrics - something about finding heaven and the wings of love - and the voice goes silent at last.

Go to section 7.

30.

Everything is gold, transcendent, radiant, burningly beautiful. A dawn that is brighter than roses, cinnamon-swirled and radiant. Amidst the glow is a silhouette of a babe swaddled in a cricket suit, sucking upon the teat of a stalk of celery. He speaks:

"I am prepared for.

Every regeneration is necessarily a shift away from the excesses of the previous. On a basic level this leads to, within any given chain of three or four Doctors, a sort of toggling. 1-4 are roughly "Serious/Funny/Serious/Funny." 4-6 are roughly "Bombastic/Restrained/Bombastic" But over a longer period there are more significant drifts. Negation of negation does not return to the original. This is progress - an endless turning back that does not quite retrace the past. Here, seven years on from the last new Doctor, the shift is one of the two most seismic in the series' history.

Baker's Doctor was defined by his invulnerability. Throughout his entire tenure there is not a single story that hinges on him as a character - on his turmoil, weakness, or dramatic investment. He is purely a force of nature, possessing no interior dimensions to speak of. That, then, is what I react against. The whole of Logopolis denotes this and this specifically. A story about the Doctor's doom, at no point anywhere in it does the Doctor react to his own doom beyond the pragmatic. The Doctor's reactions to his doom are wholly absent. When Lawrence Miles speaks of the crystalline silence permeating this story this, more than anything, is what makes it. It is a story about a dying man who at no point shows any sign of being conflicted by this.

The result is necessarily the introduction of subjectivity to the Doctor. Or, rather, the centralizing of it. The Doctor has been subjective before - most obviously in Planet of the Spiders - but now he is in part defined by it. Defined by the fact that he is not imperious and invulnerable, but instead a potentially weak man who nevertheless remains strong. And given the nature of how the endless negation of regeneration slowly drifts, this sort of change cannot be erased. This is the last story in which the Doctor is wholly other, and it is one that necessarily introduces the idea of the Doctor as an emotional protagonist instead of merely a plot one."

With that he falls silent, the act of birth not being commensurate with the act of life. He will speak more later.

Go to section 8.

31.

Amidst the searing heat of futurity and the stark and crimson blaze a man, clad also in red, burns in radiant light. From within this inferno he speaks thusly:

"The end, by definition, is prepared for. All things, by Aristotelean principle, prepare for the end. If anything the end is over-prepared for, laden with excessive symbols and preparations. A key concept, for instance, is the end of the Age of Osiris - an age represented by the dying and reborn solar god - and the beginning of the Age of Horus. Consider the scattered markings of the past implying that this marks a final regeneration - the literal end of the creature defined by rebirth and the moving into something new. Consider also the presence of the Master, now a creature not of rebirth but of something else, the threat that he shall now overtake the very universe itself. 'Peoples of the universe, please attend carefully.' The end is littered with symbolic misfires, signifying landmines threatening to detonate any path. Harry, I'm standing on a signifier.

That the point where I would cease to be the Doctor would someday come is inevitable. The inevitability of Tom Baker's physical death, the sun's expanding to a red giant, and the heat death of the universe conspire to ensure that at some point I necessarily must cease. Every breath and action I take necessarily moves me closer to that point. What is less clear is that there is a successor. From my first breath I was the definite article. Designed to be beloved and cherished, the leading man par excellence. For seven years I walked in eternity. Nearly half of the show's existence to this point. Why bother with a nineteenth season? It's been a good run. I can't be topped. Free up the budget for a new idea. Creative destruction, I believe it's called.

By rights this should be triumphant. A greatest hits compilation followed by a tragic last stand. Perhaps a maudlin "reward" in which I visit past companions. How is dear Sarah Jane getting on? Pull out all the stops and then go. No point in continuing.

This, of course, is the great triumph of Nathan-Turner. Whatever his later failings, the fact is that almost any route through this story should have been the end of the show. That there are eight more seasons at all is astonishing. And a show that ends here is not immortal. Not one that returns. Gets reimagined, perhaps - plundered and rewritten into something else. But not returns. In this regard the preparations for this episode, the way in which this specific regeneration are built to, are a lynchpin. Logopolis is one of the few stories that simply cannot be excised from the history of Doctor Who - that it is impossible to imagine the show without. The decision to make the end a whimper and not a bang. The decision to, over the course of a season, strip away my star power and leading man charisma, to push me to the margins of my own show, to replace the entire artifice I stood upon with squabbling and unfamiliar kids, to kill my show off before killing me off.

That is the preparation."

The man immolates, gone, at least for now. The road continues forward as the searing red tempers, cools, fades ahead to orange.

Go to section 8.

32.

There is a blast of sulphurous air as the world goes black. A fear that crawls like a serpent up from your gut, a sense that these things are too large for one mind to grasp. You turn to go back, to curl up within the soft embrace of Thatcherite barbarism instead of facing this. The road back has vanished however. The crocodile's head yawns. Slowly, an order becomes clear. Not a crocodile head but the head of a snake, trodden beneath the feet of a woman of radiant beauty, nude and fluidly still. The snake winds its way around her, undulating serenely. They speak:

"A mystical tradition within Judaism based upon numerological contemplation of the Hebrew language, the Kabbalah as a term embraces many doctrines and traditions. In European Judaism it was formalized in the Middle Ages. Following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at the hands of the Inquisition Judaism exhibited the inevitable uptick in eschatology and attempts to figure out when that Messiah thing was going to show up became popular. The result was a turn back towards the mysticism of the Kabbalah. These efforts came to merge with the syncretic urges of Renaissance mysticism to form the bastardized occult version of the concept.

In this understanding the Kabbalah provides a Tree of Life comprised of ten Sephiroth linked by 22 paths each represented by the Major Arcana of the Tarot. This tree comprises a complete map of creation - a diagram of the order of all things. The lowest, highest Sephira, Kether, represents the pure unity of the divine, and from it, down the lightning path, flows the divine until it reaches Malkuth, the Kingdom, in which it takes on its material form."

Or at least, you think that's what they say. Two voices overlapping and all. It's a bit unclear. It might have been something more like:

"Edward Packard's The Cave of Time, the first of the Choose Your Own Adventure series, came out in 1979. An overtly analog and literary form, they nevertheless tied in with the burgeoning interest in computers characteristic of the period. It is a case in which a variety of influences, all distinct in their own right, combined within the zeitgeist to form a culture that was inexorably clear to those within it. Packard was not a computer scientist and had no immediate connections to Douglas Hofstadter's massively popular Godel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter, in turn, was not directly connected with Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and cites Computer Lib/Dream Machines not at all in Godel, Escher, Bach. And none were among the generation raised on the Sinclair ZX81, the BBC Micro, or, in the US, the Commodore 64 and Apple II.

But to be alive in the 1980s was to be intimately aware of all of these. The idea of structure was resurgent, but not in the stark and modernist sense of design. Rather, structure was a source of playfulness. It's not that the ideas are new. Rather, it is their confluence - the fact that all of this was immediately prevalent in mass culture. This is in many ways the birth of postmodernism as a cultural force - the point where we all realized that rules, law, language itself were just jungle gyms waiting to be climbed and hung upside down from. That the map, while not the territory, is still a territory, inexorably connected to its object, endlessly explorable."

It is difficult to say. The din and stink of sulfur drives you on up the road. In time the voices fade, and you realize the pitch blackness of the vast and empty space has given way to a crackling purple glow.

Go to section 9.

You Were Expecting Someone Else 8 (Alan Moore's Doctor Who Work)

2012-02-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

Let us first stipulate that there is relatively little reason to care about these particular comics on their merits in either Alan Moore's ouvre or the Doctor Who canon. Bits of them - particularly "Black Death," may have credible cases for placing in any given top ten list of Doctor Who comics, but they're not self-evidently the best Doctor Who comics ever or anything, as one might hope from the combination of Alan Moore and Doctor Who.

On the other hand, there's something fundamentally irresistible here. I mean, obviously there is - I wouldn't do a post like this if there weren't. But I'm also hardly the only one. Russell T. Davies himself namechecks Alan Moore's Deathsmiths of Goth in a text piece published about the Time War. Miles and Wood argue that it was Moore's take on Time Lord history in "Star Death" that shifted the consensus view of the relationship between Rassilon and Omega. And more generally speaking, starting from 1987 and continuing to the present day, Alan Moore has been a massive influence on the show whether directly or indirectly. (For the purposes of this statement remember that Neil Gaiman is in many ways the quasi-authorized successor to Alan Moore) Much like Douglas Adams before him and Neil Gaiman after him, Alan Moore carries a massive fanbase that is separate from Doctor Who, and thus the intersections between the two of them carry odd and peculiar resonances.

This doesn't change the fact, however, that we are talking about a mere 28 pages of comics here, all drawn with David Lloyd, later to be Moore's artist on V For Vendetta. His first two stories consist of four two-page installments, and then he did a set of three interconnected one-parters at four pages each. That is it. We are necessarily not talking about a huge contribution to Doctor Who here. Furthermore, all of these were published in 1980 and 1981. These predate anything that it would be fair to call a major work of Moore's. This is Alan Moore, in other words, before he was even one of the very goods, little yet before he was one of the greats.

It shows, most particularly in his second offering, "Business as Usual." He's reliant on clunky and awkward thought bubbles to convey exposition, for instance, having a character explore an industrial plant and think "This must be the warehouse section. It seems to be full of kids' toys. I suppose it figures... after all, our reports say that toys are Galaxy Plastic's main product..." It's a case of poor mechanics - simply put, Moore isn't using the medium well enough to get the exposition out organically. The pacing, similarly, is badly flawed. This is one of Moore's first multi-part stories, and he hasn't yet figured out how to make each two-page installment a distinct experience. It's really an eight page story with four cliffhangers as opposed to a story comprised of four two-part installments.

But although Moore's mechanics are still clunky at this phase, even in this - by far the weakest of his Doctor Who efforts - there's quite a bit that's sharp. Moore has a solid handle on what makes Auton stories fun, and the touch of evil toy soldiers that actually shoot people is worthy of a Robert Holmes Auton story. And under the hood the story has a good idea - treating the routine nature of alien invasions (the fact that they're "business as usual" in Doctor Who) as linked to the sociopathic excesses of corporate culture, and using the plastic, manufactured Autons to tell a story about that. The basic idea is sound and there's a good story to tell there.

He's even got a solid handle on the idea that the dual word/image nature of comics means that you can juxtapose information. The first part has a running narration provided via captions that muse, over two panels, that "it was quite normal for a man in Blunt's position to appoint his successor... / after all... what if something should happen to him?" But the second caption is over a panel in which a character panickedly announces "It's Mr. Blunt.. H-He's shot himself!!" Neither the panel nor its caption on their own reveal what's happened, but the juxtaposition between two channels of information provides story enough. It's a good technique - one that Moore would eventually make much use of in Watchmen. All of this suggests that Moore has a solid handle on what the medium can do, and that he's just yet to completely master its mechanics. He can pull of virtuosic moments, but the overall flow of his writing is still choppy.

Or maybe it's just that Autons aren't a particularly inspiring subject for him. His story from a few weeks earlier, "Black Legacy," is altogether more solid. An exploration party of Cybermen hunting for an "Apocalypse Device" are slowly hunted and picked off by that device. In this story Moore manages a density of ideas that rivals that of Bob Baker and David Martin: Cybermen haunted by bad dreams and prophetic visions, a weapon that wants to be used, a society of weapon makers who killed themselves to stop their own doomsday weapon, a disease that rots away Cybermen bodies, a base under siege story where the Cybermen are under siege - all of this is very solid. Unlike Baker and Martin, he manages to wrap it around character moments. Yes, it's a stock character - madly hubristic military leader whose arrogance dooms everyone around him - but it's a character with a distinct arc. And he manages moments that are genuinely chilling and unsettling throughout the piece.

What's interesting about "Black Legacy" is that it shows Moore finding ways to push the basic fabric of the Doctor Who narrative and universe. The story is specifically interesting because it's the Cybermen who are being hunted and scared, and they're not supposed to be scared. The story would lose all power if it were greedy humans seeking the weapon because greedy humans getting prophetic nightmares is business as usual. But by putting the Cybermen in a story that is ostensibly wrong for them the story becomes considerably more powerful. This may sound like an obvious point, but if one looks at the "classic monster" stories of Doctor Who up through 1980, when this was published, really only the Whitaker Dalek stories come anywhere close to building a story out of a frisson between the monster and the setting. It seems like a wholly obvious sort of idea in 2012, but the fact of the matter is that writers up to 1980 hadn't figured out how to use that idea on Doctor Who's own core monsters. (Maddeningly, they really don't get it figured out until the show gets taken over by Alan Moore devotees, at which point it immediately becomes standard.) To be fair, Steve Moore had been doing things like this from the beginning with the comics, most obviously with Kroton the Cyberman, but Alan Moore takes it by and large further. Steve Moore comes up with an interesting twist on the Cybermen. Alan Moore writes a story about a limit case of the Cybermen.

Then there are the three stories set around the war between Gallifrey and the Order of the Black Sun. There are several things we should note before diving fully into these. First of all, we should note that Moore ceased working for Doctor Who Magazine in solidarity with Steve Moore and that there is no particular reason to think that he was "done" with the Black Sun as a setting. We are in essence loking at three fragments from a whole of unknown size here. Second of all, we should note that there's equally little reason to think that there was some organized master plan on Moore's part that he had mapped out. We don't have a full story here as such, but to treat this as the beginnings of a radical reconceptualization of Gallifrey is also misguided. For one thing, Moore does not appear to have been a fan of Doctor Who ever, really, and certainly not since the Hartnell era. (He's said that he thinks all of the post-Hartnell Doctors feel a bit too pedophilic for his tastes) Which is to say that he's hardly the type to want to do a thorough continuity-laden job like sorting out Time Lord history. More likely, as Miles and Wood suggest, he chatted up a Doctor Who fan over a few pints and wrote from that research, hence his establishing that Rassilon and Omega were part of the same event in Time Lord history (a fact that was in no way clear in the television series at this point, or, indeed, any other).

But that Moore was not overtly planning a revamp of Gallifreyan history doesn't mean that his stories don't clearly gesture towards a vision of it. Given his relative detachment from Doctor Who it is surely coincidental that both he and Terrance Dicks/Christopher Bidmead turned towards a more fantasy-like conception of the Time Lords at almost the same time. Or, rather, both State of Decay and this are symptoms of a larger process, since in hindsight Shada turned more towards a view of Gallifrey as a source of ancient power than as a technological marvel. Nevertheless, it is worth noting explicitly that Moore's conception of Rassilon is overtly as a wizard, that the name "Order of the Black Sun" comes from an occult/mystical background (and Moore wasn't even anywhere near converting to snake-worship yet), and that these stories are overtly placed in Gallifrey's ancient past. This is flat-out science fantasy in the "long time ago in a glaxy far far away" sense.

Also significant is the fact that Moore is playing with the nature of time travel more overtly than the series has ever really dealt with. The idea of a temporal war in which one side is attacked before they commit the act that is seen as kicking off the war is an interesting and complex one. More, though, than taking a particular monster and pushing them into a new type of story based on the nuances of their concept, this begins looking at the consequences of the very premise of the show. The series hadn't played seriously with the consequences and nuances of time travel since Day of the Daleks, so the idea of a story with complex and non-linear causality was heavily overdue.

And it's equally worth noting that Alan Moore and the production team hit on this at almost the exact same moment, with Bidmead putting out Warrior's Gate and Logopolis in quick succession right around the time Moore was doing these comics. There's a temptation to suggest that this means Moore isn't nearly as ahead of his time with these comics as his fans would like to think, but I think we can afford to be more charitable to the man. Being in step with Christopher Bidmead in 1980-81 is, in fact, being ahead of your time. One of the things that is notable about Bidmead's Doctor Who is that it is an era that has seemingly increased in stature over time as more and more of it turned out to be prescient. That doesn't mean it lacks flaws - narrative logic is not always Bidmead's strong suit, and he can have a bit of a tin ear when it comes to speech patterns - but it does mean that the style of fantastic science fiction that Bidmead favors is something that the rest of the world eventually caught up on.

And Alan Moore, more than any other writer in Doctor Who comics, and in many ways more than almost any other writer period in 1980, was right in step with Bidmead. Like Bidmead he had some weaknesses in storytelling mechanics, at least in 1980-81. But unlike Bidmead his future career is famous. And his Doctor Who work points towards it. He hones his style over the next few years, but as soon as 1982 he's doing work like Marvelman in which his instincts on how to write a story that cuts to the heart of an existing concept get their first really successful airing. And eventually he takes those skills to American comics to do revamps of Swamp Thing and, indirectly, the Charlton Comics stable of characters before expanding his horizons away from licensed characters and towards whole swaths of literary and cultural history. Followed by sketching out an aesthetic and magical philosophy with revolutionary potential that better understands and describes how stories work and what they do in the general case than just about any other out there.

But, of course, this isn't his story. This is the story of Doctor Who, which he never came back to after 1981 and has made clear he never will. (Though to be fair, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 has three Doctor Who references in it, one of them pleasantly obscure.) Nevertheless, this fleeting point of intersection is telling. Moore was thoroughly in step with what Doctor Who was doing in his early career. The 1980s are far kinder to Moore than they are to Doctor Who, and Moore quickly comes to outpace Doctor Who in quality by some miles. But this in turn means that when the pendulum swings back and Doctor Who begins being influenced by Moore in 1987 there is something natural to it - a case of Doctor Who being influenced by an outgrowth of itself. It is not, obviously, that Moore was influenced by Doctor Who itself. By all appearances he wasn't. Rather it is something subtler - the fact that Alan Moore and Doctor Who are, in many ways, different tellings of the same story. Though they share only one landmark, they are vividly and clearly two derives through the same psychchronographic landscape.

Even if the 28 pages of it he wrote are mediocre.

You Were Expecting Someone Else 7 (Doctor Who Weekly Comics)

2012-02-06T02:00:00.000-08:00

When talking about the British comics industry in the 1980s it is key to note that despite the vast number of important creators coming out of it there were only a handful of actual significant British comics magazines. IPC had other publications beside 2000 AD, but most could be counted on to fold after a few issues and be folded into 2000 AD. Humor publications like The Beano and The Dandy existed, but in their own almost wholly parallel dimension. Dez Skinn had 26 issues of Warrior out that were hugely influential and high-quality but that were, after all, only 26 issues. And Marvel UK had a motley of titles that combined repackaged US comics with original UK-market material. But that was about it. It was a very small industry into which a very large amount of talent was packed.

As a result, when Dez Skinn created Doctor Who Weekly for Marvel UK it was almost inevitable that it would attract some A-list creators. And so it is that Doctor Who comics have been created by Pat Mills and John Wagner (creators of Judge Dredd), Steve Moore, Steve Dillon, Grant Morrison, Bryan Hitch, John Ridgway, David Lloyd, Dave Gibbons, and Alan Moore. We’ll deal with the latter of these on Wednesday in his very own feature because, well, duh. And those that didn’t work on the Fourth Doctor strips will obviously wait as well. But that still leaves us plenty to look at here.

The story that gets most of the attention is the first one, The Iron Legion, and the third, The Star Beast. Both are penned by Wagner and Mills, with art by Dave Gibbons (who handled the overwhelming majority of the Fourth Doctor strips). This is actually a bit unfortunate. Neither is actually very good. I mean, they’re fine comic stories - Wagner and Mills are competent plotters, and Gibbons is obviously a fantastic artist. But the tone is all wrong. Wagner and Mills are action writers who belong on 2000 AD and their attempts to fuse Doctor Who to a straightforward sci-fi action sort of space militarism make Eric Saward’s efforts of the mid-80s look positively coherent by comparison.

It’s not that they make any of the obvious mistakes. Their characterization of the Doctor is imperfect, certainly, but far from disastrous. He gets a couple of good moments throughout the strips. But for the most part he feels like a passenger in Mills/Wagner strips, generally tagging along with some anti-authoritarian rebels with lots of guns as they blow things up and have elaborate chase scenes. It’s obvious that the writers are enjoying their cyborgs, alien chariot races, and bizarre alien parasites more than they’re enjoying the actual star of the strips. Combined with a clear commitment to violent action (there’s a cheeky yet revealing panel in the first installment of The Iron Legion in which a shopkeeper is gunned down and several cans of baked beans are shown exploding in front of him in lieu of actual blood and gore) this just... is off tone for Doctor Who.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some great moments across the four Wagner/Mills stories. If nothing else there’s Beep the Meep, an adorably cute little creature that happens to also be a galactic tyrant with some serious self-image issues. It’s both a brilliant use of comics (where cute cartoony creatures thrive) and a great concept in general - an irony-fueled updating of the classic Robert Holmes villain. But these moments of grandeur are few and far between, and while The Star Beast, which debuts Beep the Meep, is clever, it’s a better comic than it is Doctor Who.

Better Doctor Who, in the early issues of Doctor Who Weekly, comes in the backup strips by Steve Moore and Steve Dillon. Steve Moore is doomed forever to be better known as Alan Moore’s best friend than he is for his own work, which is a mighty pity. He’s not as good a writer as Alan Moore (they are not, as every piece on the two of them has to state by some sort of contractual obligation, related), but that’s true of practically every comics writer and so hardly seems worth making a fuss about. In many ways he suffers from the same problems that Terrance Dicks does. He is an immensely functional writer whose stories have an unfussy zip to them. Unlike Alan Moore, Steve Moore has no particular fondness for lengthy captions or narrative voice. He tells entertaining and pacey stories and gets on with it.

And like Terrance Dicks, the ease with which he bashes out entertaining scripts obscures the fact that he’s a tremendously inventive writer. In fields in which people who are both brilliant and flashy about it exist those who are brilliant and just get the job done too often get overlooked, and Steve Moore, like Dicks, is a prime example. For all that is made of Wagner and Mills creating “the villainous Beep the Meep” and of Alan Moore’s clever ideas in his handful of stories (Davies went out of his way to namecheck the Deathsmiths of Goth, an obscure Moore creation, in his hilariously over the top and fannish account of the Time War) nobody ever gives Steve Moore credit for inventing two of the most enduring concepts in the Doctor Who comics within a thirteen week period - Kroton the Cyberman and Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer.

Kroton the Cyberman is one of those searingly obvious concepts that it’s a wonder took until 1979 for anyone to do: a Cyberman who retains his emotions. But unlike the latter renditions on the part of Marc Platt or Chris Chibnall, Kroton is not primarily defined by a sort of excruciating agony at his own body horror. Instead he displays a quieter and more existential sort of angst, brooding and philosophizing his way through life. The result is in many ways the first story since The Tenth Planet to actually feature the Cybermen as they were originally designed - as philosophical challenges to the nature of humanity instead of clanking robots. Kroton is, to Steve Moore’s credit, a proper star monk.

Abslom Daak, on the other hand, is just hilarious. A flagrant parody of the standard issue 2000 AD hero, Daak is an over the top action hero with a chain sword (a chainsaw/sword hybrid) who slaughters Daleks out of overt pathology. The two Moore-penned Abslom Daak stories consist of Daak casually cutting through Daleks and emoting excessively, and are flatly hilarious parodies of the Terry Nation-style Dalek Annual stories. Daak has just enough depth to be a usable character that avoids being a one-note joke (at least as Moore conceived him - later writers cheerily removed that depth in favor of the one-note joke), but remains utterly absurd at his core. Although his strips don’t particularly feel like Doctor Who, in an era where programmatic parodies like Duggan appeared regularly in the series they at least feel like an idea that could be merged in with the parent series.

In both cases we see what the real appeal of the backup stories were. They took existing Doctor Who concepts - typically classic villains - and expanded cleverly on the concepts. And early on they were by and large better than the main stories. Then, for whatever reason, Pat Mills and John Wagner moved on. This had two main results. First, the backup strip opened up and Alan Moore came onboard, but again, more on this Wednesday. Second, Steve Moore got promoted to the lead writer.

The ensuing seven stories are in many ways the high point of Doctor Who in comics. For one thing, Steve Moore demonstrated, both here and in his backups, a remarkable and almost unheard of trait for the writer of a Doctor Who comic, namely that he had clearly actually watched the series. He’s said in interviews that he really only watched while working on the comic, but it’s equally clear that he actually bothered to think about how the series worked. The Doctor actually resolves situations in ways that closely resemble the sorts of things he does on television. This is actually staggeringly innovative for Doctor Who comics, which generally fall miles from that goal.

But equally, Steve Moore’s features tell stories that generally could only work in the comics (which, after all, ought to be the point of doing comics). In some cases this is just a matter of scope. His first main feature, The Time Witch, is a clever little story of a mental duel between the Doctor and the eponymous Time Witch, but makes little effort to do more than set up a situation where the Doctor and the villain can both create anything they imagine and then work through the battle. It’s full of entertaining moments - most obviously when the Doctor and the Witch each create identical big hulking guards who then go at each other, the Witch’s repeating her instruction to “kill them” while the Doctor’s repeats “make a cup of tea.” But it’s a slender little story that doesn’t have nearly enough depth to sustain a four-week serial. In other words, it’s exactly what a Doctor Who comic is for.

Other times Moore’s ideas are untranslatable for budgetary reasons. His longest feature, The Dragon’s Claw, throws the Doctor into a kung-fu movie in which the mysterious “Eighteen Bronze Men” turn out to be the Sontarans. It’s a raucous little piece that behaves exactly how a genre fusion like “Doctor Who does kung-fu” should, helped by the fact that Steve Moore is in fact an avid fan of both the genre and of Chinese culture at large (he’s produced several books of commentary on the I Ching from reputable publishers and is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society) and captures the tone of it in a way that both captures the manic glee of a bad kung fu movie and the tone of Chinese mythology and culture. But it would be unfilmably expensive with several colossal battle sequences. It’d make a glorious four-parter, but even in today’s glossy series would be impossible on a television budget. Instead it's a comic, and we're lucky to have it.

But Steve Moore’s best strip, a single-issue eight-pager called The Spider-God, combines both of these tricks. Its concept is full of visuals that take advantage of the fact that the budget for comics is the same no matter what you make the artist draw. Spaceships, giant spiders, people hatching from eggs, massive webs, and huge numbers of cocooned people all show up in an eight-page stretch. It’s the Web Planet gone overboard. But on the other hand, it’s a mere eight-pager. There’s not enough story here to make 25 minutes, little yet 100.

But in this story, that’s an advantage. Moore efficiently sets up a mystery around what the giant spiders are doing, then has a bunch of human colonists freak out in misunderstanding what’s going on and begin gunning down the spiders. The Doctor explodes in rage before we finally get it adequately explained that the spiders and the humanoid creatures on the planet live in a symbiotic and peaceful relationship. The strip ends with a single panel of the human commander’s arm dropping his gun in horror at what he’s done as the Doctor, back turned to the reader, stalks away in anger. It’s the pro-environment story Barry Letts always wanted to do in the Pertwee era, only done with efficient grace and epic scale in an eight page comic. It is frankly better than 80% of the actual televised Tom Baker era.

It’s also, unfortunately, Steve Moore’s last strip - a dispute with the editor of the magazine over the writing of an Abslom Daak story led to both Moores ditching the magazine, Alan in solidarity with his friend. The next writer, Steve Parkhouse, is perfectly fine but lacks the sense of the tone and approach to Doctor Who that Steve Moore instinctively had. A strip like “End of the Line” is interesting, and it's got an emotional sucker punch of an ending, but it’s so bleak that it would make John Wiles sit in a dark room and listen to Radiohead while cutting himself. Again, a fine enough comic, but not a great Doctor Who comic.

And shortly thereafter Dave Gibbons would depart. The comic would enjoy good artists and good writers a couple of times over the remainder of its run, and we’ll deal with them as they crop up, but the pinnacle of Doctor Who in comic form had passed. It never again had a writer of Steve Moore’s quality or an artist of Dave Gibbons’s for an extended run. Still, IDW in the US has the entire runs of both Steve Moore and Wagner and Mills in one handy omnibus (along with half of Parkhouse’s Tom Baker strips and three Grant Morrison ones featuring the 6th and 7th Doctors). And it’s good enough stuff that even without functioning Amazon Affiliates links anymore I’ll link them at both Amazon US and Amazon UK. The Steve Moore strips really are phenomenal stuff that not nearly enough Doctor Who fans have read.

And this is all before we deal with the brief but compelling intersection of the best comics writer of his generation with Doctor Who.

That Jackanapes (The Keeper of Traken)

2012-02-03T02:00:00.000-08:00

His coat contains a furnace where there used to be a guy.

It’s January 31st, 1981. John Lennon is down to two top ten singles - “Imagine” at number one, and “Woman” at number two. “Woman” takes the number one a week later, holds it for two weeks, and then yields to Joe Dolce Music Theater’s “Shaddap You Face.” John Lennon’s posthumous chart success going down to “Shaddap You Face” has to, upon reflection, be one of the better metaphors for the fall of civilization ever. Ultravox, Slade, Dire Straits, Blondie, and Stevie Wonder also chart.

In real news we’re a bit thin on the ground. Gro Harlem Brundtland becomes Prime Minister of Norway, while Wojciech Jaruzelski becomes Prime Minister of Poland and immediately begins trying to find an excuse to impose martial law. And the Stardust Fire happens in Dublin, killing 48 and teaching everyone an important lesson about not locking the fire exits that continues to periodically and fatally be ignored. On a related note, 21 people die in the Karaiskakis Stadium disaster in Greece, likely because of a failure to open an exit gate enough.

While on television it’s The Keeper of Traken, a story that threatens to be overshadowed by its continuity significance. This story also marks a personal milestone for the blog - from this story on I have seen every episode of the series at least once, although sometimes only that and nearly 20 years ago. These two facts are not entirely unrelated. For the archive-centered Doctor Who fan the primary appeal of The Keeper of Traken, superficially, is a triple-header of events: the introduction of Nyssa, the introduction of the Anthony Ainley version of the Master, and the beginning of the loose trilogy of stories covering the Doctor’s regeneration.

Every single part of this is horrifically misguided. One of the more tedious debates available in fandom is whether or not Nyssa counts as a companion in this story. It’s tedious because it’s a classic pitched battle not merely over no stakes whatsoever but over a technicality of an invented concept. There is no doubt that Nyssa is a companion, there is no doubt that she debuts in this story, but because she doesn’t join the TARDIS crew this story and is instead brought back in the next story there’s a debate over whether or not she’s a companion in this story. Personally I advocate the far more entertaining fandom debate - if we take Asylum seriously and assume that the Doctor knows Nyssa is a companion from the start, does the Doctor’s not taking Nyssa with him at the end of this story constitute a deliberate attempt to alter history?

(There’s actually an entertaining theory to be spun here. The fact that the Doctor knows he meets Nyssa in his fourth incarnation means that he cannot regenerate until he does. This corresponds perfectly with his cockier and more domineering demeanor in the Williams era. And after meeting Nyssa in this story he becomes deeply sulky and funerial, as if he knows the jig is up. Of course, the idea that he’s just grumpy about losing Romana is probably the better account.)

But regardless of one’s position on that particular trivia question - and let’s face it, the debate really centers on the desire of some fans to have a reason to tell other fans they’re wrong about something - the fact remains that Nyssa’s introduction in this story is not a big deal in terms of this story.

Likewise, the debut of the Anthony Ainley Master is little more than a cliffhanger for Logopolis - and a dumb one given what that story’s trying to do. Yes, Ainley is there throughout the story as Tremas, and there’s the debut of the anagrammatic silliness that surrounds the character in this era, but this story is not focused on the Master at all; he’s a twist in the final episode. The villain in this story is not the Master in any meaningful sense, and indeed was rewritten late in the game to enable the reveal. Again, it’s important for what came after but almost wholly irrelevant to this specific story.

The only thing about the Master that is worth noting is that there is a new relationship with the series’ past that debuts here. The Master isn’t revealed until episode four, but the story parcels out clues in an almost matter-of-fact way prior to that. First is the revelation that the Melkur is in fact controlled by someone inside it (and that the interior is dimensionally problematic given the size of the Melkur, although given the frequency with which aliens in human suits are mis-sized this actually barely registers as a clue), then the revelations of a gaunt and disfigured man inside it, the existence of TARDIS-like roundels inside it, and the fact that it makes a TARDIS sound as it dematerializes all clue the end reveal, but none of this is particularly called attention to or flagged as a clue. It’s a relatively unhighlighted subtext for a more obsessive brand of fan that is likely to remember the fact that nearly eight years ago there was a regular Time Lord villain called the Master and that some four or five years ago the Master looked kind of like the guy in the Melkur statue does now.

Which leaves only it’s status as part one of an accidental trilogy (since Castrovalva wasn’t even remotely planned when this story and Logopolis wrapped). I suppose I’ve rather given the game away on that one by pointing out that it’s an accidental trilogy, but there it is - this is in no way intended to be the start of some high concept arc, and reading it through that lens is deeply misguided. Again, there’s some distant interesting aspect here - the way in which Bidmead and Nathan-Turner navigate the nearly impossible task of writing Tom Baker out of Doctor Who is an impressive piece of television show-running. They take the counter-intuitive but likely necessary approach of declining to make Baker’s departure the climactic event or allowing him to be the star of it, instead opting to build the Davison era’s trappings up around Baker and then finally delete him from a show that’s no longer his own. Certainly several major steps in that direction happen here.

But all of these macro-level moments of significance pose a problem for The Keeper of Traken itself - one I remember vividly from when I finally got my hands on a VHS copy and watched the much-anticipated story. Yes, there are a bunch of things going on behind the scenes of tremendous importance for the future of the program, but they’re collectively a tiny fraction of what’s going on in this story and if they are the spirit in which the story is watched it ends up being quite a disappointment.

On its own merits, however, it’s rather nice. The word Shakespearean gets thrown around a lot in relation to this story, but inexplicably it’s usually in relation either to the dialogue or the costumes and set. Given that Johnny Byrne and Christopher Bidmead are not exactly the go-to guys for searingly brilliant poetry and that “Shakespearean costumes” really just mean that we’re on another pseudo-medieval planet of the sort that we’ve seen three times already this season including last episode this argument holds very little water.

But that doesn’t mean the adjective is wrong. There’s something very Shakespearean about this story: the plot. In the end this is a story about a dying king and a battle of succession. The main Traken characters are all noblemen and advisors to the throne. All of their defining actions come from character traits and personal motivation. Nobody is a programmatic character save for Melkur, and his role in the story is more Hamlet’s father than Iago. The plotting is completely open - the audience knows more than any of the characters (save for one major exception we’ll get to later). This is textbook Shakespearean plotting, where it’s exceedingly rare to have closed plotting and where the dying king/bunch of squabbling nobles setup is absolutely textbook. Even the Melkur’s status as a magical statue faintly evokes The Winter’s Tale, albeit with a cruel reversal. The only difference is that in Shakespeare the stranger whose arrival kicks things off would have been a secret heir to the throne and ultimately the suitor of Nyssa, not the Doctor.

Miles and Wood identify the style of the story as being that of children’s television, and if I may be so bold as to suggest, we’re basically on different tones for the same thing here. As Miles and Wood note, children’s adaptations were commonplace. And the BBC was, in 1981, in the midst of an epic series of adaptations of all of Shakespeare’s plays. This is a straightforward example of Doctor Who nicking a production style from elsewhere on television.

Which brings us to another point. Anyone who doubted Wednesday’s claim that Bidmead is the closest thing to Whitaker’s heir that the program has seen to date should consider that the last time the series went full-Shakespeare was a Whitaker script that was, like Keeper of Traken, sandwiched between two deeply experimental pieces. This is a throwback right to the Hartnell era and its mandate to simultaneously educate and take the viewer to new places, alternating between science fiction oddness and familiar history pieces. Indeed, in the stretch of Full Circle through Logopolis Bidmead manages to imitate this structure perfectly, with the three more challenging scientific pieces fit around two evocations of familiar stories. The only difference is that the historical has been replaced by the fusion of science fiction with period imagery.

So we get a Shakespearean plot in which instead of revealing hitherto unknown information about the royal bloodline the Doctor solves science problems. It’s yet another story of Bidmead demonstrating how his approach can do anything, and more to the point, do it distinctively. Bidmead, over the course of this season, has cracked how to do Doctor Who that can at once retain the series “do anything, go anywhere” potential and remain distinctively Doctor Who. Starting by showing how his style could cover all the bases of what Doctor Who was he continues his second act of showing how his style can do all sorts of new things.

Which brings us to the one exception to the open nature of the storytelling here - Melkur’s unexpected ascension to the role of Keeper and the episode three cliffhanger. This is the one point where we discover that there was something big that we didn’t know - that Melkur had a trick up his sleeve the audience didn’t know about. But even this has firm roots within the Whitaker tradition that Bidmead is reanimating. It’s just narrative collapse. Melkur suddenly and abruptly breaks the rules of the narrative, becoming a vastly more compelling villain in the process.

And here we get to the part of the story that does feed into the future. Because once Melkur breaks the rules of the narrative the story is set up with just a bit of a problem. Namely that it has to find some account for why Melkur is able to defy the rules of the system. Doubly so within the Bidmead aesthetic, where the narrative rules of the system are paramount because they extend from the scientific rules. When Melkur breaks the rules of the Shakespearean world it is, in fact, a massive jaw-dropper of a moment. It’s just that the trick only works when you encounter the story in the wild. If you know that Melkur turns out to be the Master then the revelation is flat. If you don’t then it cuts against everything you think you know about the story simply because the story has, by all appearances, not been hiding anything prior to this point.

And so the story has to come up with a sufficiently compelling reason for why Melkur was able to break the rules. The answer, of course, is that he’s the Master. And the story plays perfectly fair with this, giving enough clues that anyone with a good enough memory of the show can figure out that he’s the Master before the big cliffhanger. But it’s still a great trick. And it does set up the season finale in Logopolis perfectly. The Master breaks this story and then escapes, setting up a finale in which he breaks the entire structure of the show.

Crucial to this is the character of Tremas. Whatever fault might be laid at Anthony Ainley’s feat for the latter days of the Master the man could act, and his performance as Tremas is a masterpiece of quiet dignity. But by rights, given that the Doctor is not a secret nobleman who will take over Traken, Tremas should be the Keeper at the end of the story. That is, after all, the “correct” restoration of balance. Indeed, the first clue that something is very much awry (other than the fact that bringing the Master back for that brief a twist ending would be utterly lame) is that the least developed of the Council becomes the new Keeper instead of him.
And so when the Master brutally cuts him down - and note that given that this story is not structured like a Shakespearean tragedy but rather like either a comedy or a romance Tremas should be perfectly safe - and steals his body it is an egregious act of violence against the basic structure of the story. Tremas clearly isn’t supposed to die. This is why it’s wholly fitting that the Master should be reborn. Even without a decent plot explanation for why the Master can just pinch bodies that easily and why he didn’t do it before it makes thematic sense simply because it’s such an act of violence against the plot. Of course when the Master does something as audacious as cheat the ending of a Shakespearean romance he gets a new body. That’s how it should be.

The only problem is that the season as a whole can’t have it both ways. Next story it tries to set up an ambiguity as to whether the Watcher is the Master, but it completely flubs this by having us know what the new Master looks like. You can either sacrifice Tremas to the narrative collapse to rebirth the Master and set up the destabilization of the entire narrative logic of Doctor Who or you can have a mysterious maybe-Master in the next story, but you can’t actually do both.

But this is a minor complaint. What we have here is another deliberate and carefully measured step along a well considered reinvention of what Doctor Who is and should be in the 1980s. For the first time in years we have a coherent vision of what Doctor Who is being executed with reliable competence by the production team. This is a crowning glory for the show.

Going To Be Alone Again (Warrior's Gate)

2012-02-01T02:00:00.000-08:00

The Tharils' extensive facial hair makes them

resemble lions.

It’s January 3rd, 1981. St. Winifred’s School Choir is at number one with “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma,” which is unfortunate. One week later John Lennon takes number one with the posthumous rerelease of “Imagine,” one of three number one hits he had that week along with “Happy XMas/War is Over,” “(Just Like) Starting Over,” and, later on, “Woman.” ABBA, The Police, Adam & The Ants, Queen, and Phil Collins also chart.

In real news, the Salvadoran Civil War starts to get ugly as the FMLN launches a major offensive against the US-backed military government, which, over 1980, murdered nearly 12,000 people, upping it to 16,000 unarmed civilians in 1981. Ulster Defence Association gunmen shoot and wound former MP Bernadette Devlin McAliske. The first DeLorean is made in Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, of interest to fans of lesser time travel narratives, and in one of the great “fuck yous” of international politics Iran releases its American hostages minutes after Ronald Reagan is inaugurated to replace Jimmy Carter.

While on television there is a castle with a ruined feast hanging in an empty void on the edge of the universe. Mechanized suits of armor stalk the halls as noble lion men fight to regain their freedom. While the noblest Roman strikes off on her own, finally ridding herself of her own chains, forged less out of dwarf star alloy than out of red and burgundy wool.

Warrior’s Gate is a strange beast. A story structured with overt poetry, where thematic associations link the very fabric of the world together as much as scientific reason. In this regard it is the biggest test case of the Bidmead approach - a poetic setting extrapolated from science. On one level is the frame that has been holding the last three stories together - the so-called “E-Space Trilogy.” In truth these trilogy linkings are less useful than we might hope. The thematic “reworking past eras” trilogy of Meglos, The Leisure Hive, and State of Decay and the three science fairy tales at the end of the season are far tighter trilogies than three stories into which the idea of a miniature external universe with negative coordinates was shoehorned in.

The idea of E-Space is simple enough. The CVE is essentially a wormhole, E-Space as basic a parallel universe as they come. But here finally we have the idea explored as more than a mere plot hook (although there is something to be contemplated in the idea that Alzarius is actively the inversion of Gallifrey). If E-Space is to be understood as negative space and the normal N-Space as positive then what of the zero point between the universes? What would that be like?

But from this start exploring the more or less scientific concept the story opens up onto a more eccentric vista. I used the word poetic, but there’s an obvious oddity to this term when applied to television. Typically when we use the word “poetic” we really mean “lyrical,” that is, essentially working according to a non-narrative structure. Lyric poetry, contrasted with the narrative form of epic poetry, is a poetry based on the expression of emotions. But film and television are almost entirely narrative media. A tradition of experimental film existed by 1981, but it was still obscure and, well, experimental. It’s not something you can just spring on BBC1 in a family slot and expect people to catch on.

Or, at least, you wouldn’t be able to were it not for the fact that the music video was increasingly in ascendence. In the US MTV would launch in eight months, but of course, the idea of MTV is only possible when its underlying concept is familiar. In the UK the concept existed within Top of the Pops, a program that requires explanation and description in a couple of ways. First of all, its nature. That’s simple enough. It showed quasi-live performances - a combination of live performance and backing tracks - of popular music.

Second, its purpose. The BBC, being a public broadcaster, could not out and out get involved in tastemaking. This posed a problem for any effort it might want to make to document rock music and youth culture. Its solution was thus necessarily to be documentarian about it. Top of the Pops would feature whatever was popular. Any single ascending the charts was eligible, and no week-to-week repetitions were allowed unless the song was the number one. By design and mandate it wasn’t allowed to flinch or avoid things unless they were blatantly inappropriate. As a result counterculture got free reign on Top of the Pops - even the Sex Pistols made a 1977 appearance.

Third, however, is more subtle. Top of the Pops was an artifact of the television theater approach that characterized the BBC. Top of the Pops performances were full of visual trickery and effects, which is why the glam era of Doctor Who was associated with glam in the first place. But they were still basically live performances - whatever video tricks and pop art touches were added, the basics of a Top of the Pops video was still the idea of the band on a stage playing instruments.

But in the late 1970s Top of the Pops began allowing limited numbers of pre-recorded music videos. This is another symptom of the larger shift in the nature of television away from the BBC’s theatrical model and towards a different model. Increasingly the video clip became recognized as an existent item. This has been manifesting across the board - in the increasing realization that junking the BBC archives was a mistake, in the shift towards a more heavily edited style for Doctor Who, and in how music is performed.

What this allowed is best captured in the music video for “Ashes to Ashes.” Abandoning the notion of the performance for a series of solarized, deformed video clips nested one within another, Bowie’s persona flickers from form to form, the mercurial performativity that had defined his career at once literalized in video and captured in a song that cannibalizes his own past, it marks a point where the language of video and editing could be wedded to the lyrical structure of music as opposed to a narrative structure.

Warriors Gate ports that visual language back into the realm of the narrative. The space between two universes manifests as a music video, television in a featureless void becomes television in its lyrical mode. The result is the most cinematic Doctor Who has ever been. The lengthy tracking shots through the spaceship border further on Alien - indeed, the homage seems almost deliberate this time. An unmistakably grimy, working class spaceship defined as a whole space instead of just as a set. But the narrative itself is simply the play of symbols. The action of the Doctor righting the cup in a ruined feast and the later action of him angrily knocking one over are as important to the plot development as any sleuthing about or cleverness he engages in.

Here, then, we circle around the heart of the Bidmead approach. And around an issue that’s been lurking around since what may in fact be my most controversial post, the one on The Masque of Mandragora. There I suggested that even that story, more overtly about the triumph of science over superstition than any other in the series, cannot quite be taken as nailing the case. On fundamental levels the entire grammar of narrative undercuts the argument.

With Bidmead we have a second test case. Someone who is as adamant about grounding Doctor Who in rationalism and rejecting superstition and magic as anyone has ever been. And yet here we have a story where everything is governed according to a logic of symbol. A story where the world in every way runs according to the logic of magic. On the most basic level this seems as though it must call Bidmead’s sincerity when he talks about removing magic from the show into question.

Two points, then. First of all, if we take Bidmead’s task as the rejection of magic-based narrative structures his job was impossible from the start. Narrative is always magic. On a basic level, Aristotelean structures mean that in a story everything is significant, either pointing forward to set up the inevitability of later events or to explain the significance of either ones. Narrative is conspiratorial - always and necessarily so. There is always a teleology to narrative. There is always a god. Even on the most basic and literal sense, narrative makes sense as narrative because we assume an authorial consciousness controlling its contents. There is no such thing as atheistic fiction, because all fictional universes, in point of material, real fact, have a god. This is the real reason why even Masque of Mandragora can’t throw off superstition. Because at the end of the day all even a false prophet like Heironymous is giving the audience information through his prophecies. They are not mere contentless babble but communicative, revealing statements. Magic is always real in fiction.

Second, and perhaps more significantly for our purposes here, Bidmead is a very intelligent man who is unlikely to have been unaware of this. He’s not sodding John Byrne or anything. If anything, the fact that he made stories like Warrior’s Gate suggest very strongly that he knew what he was doing. He understood instinctively that narrative is an overtly magical medium. As I’ve said before, his goal was always to wed those magical tendencies to a scientific model.

In a way this is just a restatement of Clarke’s Law. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Thus by pushing science past the point of understanding Bidmead is able to generate magic-like effects out of science. The point, from this perspective, is simply that it’s not really magic - it’s just fancy science. This is, if you will, the last stand of the purely rationalist defense. The last way you can draw the line and try to hold Bidmead and Doctor Who as some sort of arch-rationalist project. And up to this point it worked. You could, if you wanted to be adamant enough, insist that this was what Bidmead was doing. Less so that it’s what Doctor Who as a whole was doing, but even that’s down to some very old story elements.

Actually, it’s bleakly fitting. There’s an event we missed talking about in Shada. A news story that would have happened during when that story aired. The man with the best claim to having created Doctor Who, David Whitaker, died on the 4th of February, 1980. And it is Whitaker, in the end, who most troubles the idea that Doctor Who is a rationalist show. His stories are drenched in alchemical symbolism, as we’ve noted many times before. If you want to argue that Doctor Who is a nearly 50-year-old quasi-sentient metafiction that has actively placed the spirit of Hermes Trismigistus into the heart of contemporary British culture - and I admit that I do - you face an uphill battle. Except for the fact that David Whitaker essentially created the show. Do I believe that David Whitaker actually consciously did this?

I don’t disbelieve it. Let us leave it at that.

Clarke’s Third Law. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Very well. Let us then offer... a corollary? An inverse? It has, of course, been stated before, obvious inversion that it is. But no sourced version can be located, it seems. Nobody actually knows who first inverted it. At least, out loud. In practice, for us, the name is obvious. We’ll call it Whitaker’s Law, even if he never codified it as much. No. That’s wrong. Not Whitaker’s Law. Whitaker’s Heresy.

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science.

Whitaker’s Heresy haunts all of Doctor Who, lurking about in the shadows being unseemly and suggesting with a startling lack of decorum that the lady doth protest far, far too much. Oh, yes, all of these ancient gods are just aliens. Of course. Nothing to see here. Move along, lest Miss Hawthorne get a word in edgewise and point out that this is how magic has always worked anyway.

Oh, yes. Miss Hawthorne. If Whitaker is haunting the program literally as well as figuratively now, disappeared into eternity without so much as a thorough interviewing to finally nail down what it was he was doing, we mustn’t forget about the other overtly magical influence on the program, Mr. Barry Letts. The one we know was high on Dennis Wheatley at the least, whose debut on the series was directing Whitaker’s last solo script, who wrote The Daemons, and who got brought on to supervise for Nathan-Turner’s first year. We know he had his fingers in Warrior’s Gate, rewriting the I Ching sections a bit.

And then there’s Bidmead. The arch-rationalist. Or, if the heresy may be permitted, the truest spiritual successor to David Whitaker to date. Let us remember that Bidmead’s belief was that the show had strayed too far from its original mandate of teaching science to kids. But who was in charge for that original mandate? Whose view of the program was Bidmead actually returning to? Clarke’s Law and Whitaker’s Heresy are already, by their nature, indistinguishable. One can never quite tell which is in play. But by simultaneously embracing the development of a new visual grammar for television and a drive towards real science Bidmead conflated the two more completely than anyone on the series had to date. He is the ultimate Whitakerian heretic.

Warrior’s Gate hangs suspended between two universes, a mirror reflecting each back at itself sitting at the threshold. On one side a scientific concept, the play of “Charged Vacuum Emboitments” (and what an odd term, “emboitment.” Wherever might that come from, and what might its significance be? Ah well. Surely the concept won’t come up again, so let’s not worry about it), becomes the occasion for a set of symbols to interact. On the other the symbols and the interactions that stem necessarily from those concepts can be named and treated as a predictable system, at least from within the system. The two views are coextensive.

Here we start to see what the magic that Bidmead sought to eliminate was. It was specifically the use of magic as an excuse to not explain things - the sort of silly play whereby the Doctor survives things or accomplishes things simply because he is the Doctor. It is an assertion that the Doctor’s mercurial powers must function materially now - that he must not simply destabilize the world but work his way through it, using language and observation and play within the system to dismantle it. The Doctor’s magic must be advanced magic, indistinguishable from technology, based on the play within a system and rules and the ambiguities and gaps of that system.

The problem, then, is the Doctor. Baker remains magnificent in the part, but the series is, in this model, forced to fight against him continually. Not just in terms of his own preferences on the series, which were much more in line with what he got in the Graham Williams era than what he was getting now, nor in terms of his increasingly difficult behavior, but in the basic nature of his character. The Doctor that Bidmead wants are the Doctors that Whitaker wrote for - the small and seemingly harmless men who skulked and observed and learned to understand the system before making a single decisive move within it. Not the Doctors of the 70s - big, starring leading men who were the center of attention and whose charisma and likability drove the entire story.

In this regard, Bidmead’s approach works better with Romana. Lala Ward’s at once imperious and elfish presence is perfect, and she’s the best thing on offer here, once again stepping into the secondary Doctor role that has been increasingly carved out for her. She boggles and charms and throws people off-guard, not clowning but conniving. Her scene as she steps out of the TARDIS to deal with the slavers is pure Troughton.

But, of course, this is the problem. Romana steals the episode and then leaves. Ward, by all accounts, hated the emotionless nature of her departure, but frankly, she’s wrong. It’s a fantastic scene, and her delivery of the line “no more orders” makes it. It’s the Problem of Susan solved - the companion who finally grows from girl sidekick to an equal who stares down the Doctor and makes him blink. In this exchange Romana upends the entire structure and logic of the show, confidently stealing the starring role out from under the Doctor. But the result is that we want to follow her, not the Doctor. She should be the protagonist, and her adventures in E-Space sound a damn sight more exciting than Tom Baker wandering around with that whiny prat in the yellow pajamas.

Never mind becoming the Doctor’s equal. Lalla Ward has gone and bettered him.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Thrill Power 25 (2000 AD)

2012-01-30T02:00:00.000-08:00

There are, of course, many ways in which British culture has jumped over and influenced American culture. But the British Invasion in the comics industry remains one that it's easy to miss the significance of, in part because its three leading lights - Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Neil Gaiman - have largely sucked the oxygen from the event, obscuring the fact that for a significant period of time the overwhelming majority of significant comics writers and artists in the US were, in fact, British. Consider the following list: Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Garth Ennis, Peter Milligan, Jamie Delano, Andy Diggle, Mike Carey, Andrew Cartmel, Paul Cornell, Mark Millar, Lawrence Miles, Warren Ellis, Tony Lee, Alan Davis, Barry Kitson, Dave Gibbons, Glen Fabry, Kevin O'Neil, Bryan Talbot, Gary Erskine, Frank Quitely, Trevor Hairsine, Sam Kieth, John McRea, Frazer Irvine, Brian Bolland, Garry Leach, Steve Yeowell, Steve Dillon, John Ridgway, Carlos Ezquerra, Pat Mills, John Wagner, Jock, John Bolton, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Mark Buckingham. Aside from one or two Doctor Who names I threw in there because this is a Doctor Who blog after all, these are some of the biggest names in comics, whether because they are or at some point were superstars or because they were on one or two massively famous projects. But more significantly, everyone on that list has published at least one thing in either 2000 AD or its spinoff Judge Dredd Megazine. And for the majority of them that was some of their earliest work.

So if you want to suggest that 2000 AD is one of the most important British science fiction publications ever, period, you're not exactly short on ammunition for your case. On the other hand, generally speaking, if you want to argue that it was one of the best... well, now you're in a bit of a harder situation. Because as vital as 2000 AD was and at times still is, it's not exactly... good.

First some background. In late 1975 an editor at IPC Magazines got an inkling that science fiction might hit it big soon and hired Pat Mills to develop it. Pat Mills had overseen two previous comics aimed at the same age group - Battle Picture Weekly and the infamous Action, which was sufficiently violent and blood-soaked to as to piss off Mary Whitehouse. 2000 AD was a stunning example in the same vein. There were five strips in its first issue - sorry, prog - Invasion, Dan Dare, Harlem Heroes, Flesh, and M.A.C.H. 1. Almost all of them are gloriously and tastelessly violent - only Dan Dare, reimagined as a more properly "futuristic" strip, displays even a glimmer of basic taste. Harlem Heroes is about a sport that combines "football, boxing, kung fu, and basketball," while M.A.C.H. 1 was an ultraviolent Six Million Dollar Man ripoff. Invasion was about working class British men violently resisting Soviet... sorry, Volgan occupation. And Flesh, perhaps the greatest of all of them, was about time traveling dinosaur farmers and a particularly murderous T-Rex.

That said, this basic aesthetic of 2000 AD is perhaps better summarized by the strip that replaced Flesh - a sixteen issue job that is rarely mentioned as one of the absolute classics of 2000 AD, despite being absolutely fantastic in every regard. I am speaking, of course, of Shako. Shako tells the story of a particularly homicidal polar bear who has swallowed some vital military hardware and is being chased by government agents. It is, in practice, nothing more than sixteen short strips of a polar bear violently slaughtering people in improbable and needlessly imaginative ways. Though really, little needs to be said about Shako beyond its tagline: Shako! The Only Bear on the CIA Death List! This, in a nutshell, is what 2000 AD was - a comics magazine of completely and utterly insane premises that was willing to execute those premises with a reckless and manic glee well captured by its fictional editor/overlord, Tharg - a futuristic galactic conquerer turned British comics editor who excitedly praised the comic's "thrill power" with a gusto that would make John Nathan-Turner blush if he wouldn't have been instantly vaporized by Tharg for entertainingly specious reasons.

All of which said, the real heart of 2000 AD is Judge Dredd. Originally intended to launch in prog one, Dredd was held back a prog due to not quite being ready in time. But he quickly and understandably became the magazine's signature feature. On a superficial level Judge Dredd is much like all of the other 2000 AD strips. He's a police officer in a futuristic city who is also authorized to dispense justice on the spot and who is a complete authoritarian hardass who thus solves every problem imaginable by shooting it, sometimes repeatedly. But what's interesting about Judge Dredd is that underneath the extravagant violence is a rather wicked bit of intelligent satire. The entire premise of Judge Dredd rapidly becomes that the audience is rooting for a character who is obviously a bad guy.

This move underlies much of what appeals about 2000 AD. In its earliest days what is compelling about it is its stark anti-authoritarian streak. A character like Bill Savage, the protagonist of Invasion, was a classic anti-authoritarian tough guy who defied the rules and saved the day. Even in a strip without such an overtly rebellious lead, though, there's an ostentatious brashness to 2000 AD. A strip like Shako is so needlessly violent and so cavalier with its plotting as to appear deliberate. There's the sense, in other words, that 2000 AD is just trying to piss off Mary Whitehouse so it can laugh in her face after. Tis, at least, is fun, and is what leads to the usual description of 2000 AD having a "punk" sensibility. And notably, thus far the most 2000 AD-style story Doctor Who has televised is probably The Sun Makers.

But as ever, punk's real apotheosis is its destruction and replacement with post-punk. We saw it in Doctor Who, and 2000 AD is no different. 2000 AD's pure punk phase lasted one prog. Prog 2, with the introduction of Judge Dredd, moved on immediately to the post-punk phase in which the anti-authoritarian streak was applied to the ultimate establishment figure. Judge Dredd was a punk who not only worked for the man, he was the living embodiment of the man's power. He's the punk antihero who hasn't so much sold out as existed from the first moment on the side of established power. And the tension implicit in this is simply allowed to stand. Dredd simultaneously embodies a punk sensibility and a biting critique of the impotent silliness of grown men in acting like angry children.

This is the essential genius of a lot of 2000 AD - its awareness of its own excessiveness and its tendency to undercut it. But Judge Dredd, with its absurdly over the top settings (Mega City One was explicitly cited by Russell T. Davies as the inspiration for New New York in Gridlock) and active willingness to play with the unsympathetic nature of its protagonist (one of its best-regarded story arcs is about Dredd violently putting down pro-democracy protesters), pushes this approach to a different level. The undercutting in Judge Dredd isn't just a matter of the comic being ostentatiously over the top but a matter of active self-critique. Judge Dredd is continually calling into question its own pleasurability. It defies the reader to enjoy it even as it wallows in its own over the top excess.

It's a good trick, and one that 2000 AD mirrored in a number of other classic strips - Rogue Trooper, Strontium Dog, Nemesis the Warlock, and Sláine all follow the basic approach of juxtaposing excessive and over the top violence with a sort of aggressively materialist and cynical view of the world that subjects that view to active critique. But as I said, it's not quite good. 2000 AD is something that one respects more than one enjoys, if you will. Because its best moments go out of the way to be off-putting and alienating, it actively resists letting you just fall in love with it. And so as clever as this Judge Dredd sort of approach is, it's not a trick upon which you build an entire takeover of another country's comic book industry.

For that we need Alan Moore. To be fair, in my worldview we always need Alan Moore. I spent a while trying to figure out how many different Alan Moore entries to do over the course of this blog before realizing that the correct answer is "write a book on Alan Moore and Grant Morrison as modern day magical warfare after I finish the Wonder Woman project and mostly leave it out of this blog." I mean, obviously the two projects intersect like mad, but yes. One of tentatively three entries in which Alan Moore will be substantively dealt with. (Though the third is a bit nebulous.)

Alan Moore is, at the end of the day, the most important of the British Invasion comics writers. Yes, Neil Gaiman surpasses him in raw popularity, but Gaiman broke in largely because he could imitate Alan Moore reasonably well. Sure, his style has improved since then, but he still started as an Alan Moore clone. Grant Morrison would desperately like to be the most important of the British Invasion comics writers, but the fact that Grant Morrison badmouths Alan Moore almost whenever he gets the chance while Moore has not, to my knowledge, ever spoken Grant Morrison's name out loud pretty much says what there is to say about the asymmetry in that rivalry. No, at the end of the day Alan Moore is the one with the most influence. He's the one who ultimately defines his era. You can tell, because he displays that trait that defines the truly influential - he has a host of imitations, and no two of them seem able to agree on what it is that defines his style. And while 2000 AD is not the start of Alan Moore's career, it's pretty darn early in that career. Which means that this is where we ought square away what makes Alan Moore so distinctive and influential.

The overwhelming majority of Alan Moore's 2000 AD work consists of short pieces that are only a few pages long. He has three longer pieces - the ET knockoff Skizz, the unfinished epic The Ballad of Halo Jones, and the D.R. and Quinch strips. And the latter of those are still fairly short - a series of humor pieces where no story lasted more than five installments or so. Everything else consisted of short four-page stories in the recurring series of Tharg's Future Shocks or Time Twisters.

Given the extent to which Moore is known for a sort of perverse verbosity (he's been cackling madly in several interviews lately about how his new novel is longer than the Bible and how he hopes people will call it the Really Good Book) this sort of ultra-short format is an interesting place to watch him work, particularly so early in his career before he'd really settled into a firm style or voice. One can see what really made Alan Moore stand out, even at the start of his career, from everyone else around him.

The first thing is the one that is most superficially obvious about Moore, which is that Alan Moore is an exceedingly intelligent man. His knowledge of and ability to pastiche genres is startlingly vast, and while it's not until the denser and more sprawling work of the 1990s that this tendency really starts to show, the Future Shocks give him plenty of opportunities to show off his broad mastery of genres. He's also deft at coming up with clever solutions and ideas - few of his stories lack at least one neat or surprising twist somewhere in the story.

He is also an arch-formalist. More than almost any other comics writer Moore has spent an astonishing amount of time thinking about the mechanics of the medium and how to use them to tell stories. This isn't as clear in his 2000 AD work where the constraints of the format naturally limit what he can do, but even in this early work, particularly in his Time Twisters stories, there's moments where you can see the beginnings of his later arch-formalism.

This sort of cleverness is always a sound approach, although of Moore's strengths it is also the one that most lends itself to cynical readings. I rarely end up linking to my more properly academic work from here, but this piece from a special issue of ImageTexT I edited a while back on Neil Gaiman's comic work forms a fairly succinct account of the ethical and aesthetic problems this sort of raw cleverness can form. And, if we're being fully open about it we should note that Steven Moffat, with his tendency to have the resolutions of episodes hinge on things like wordplay based on phone lock screens, suffers from/enjoys the same sort of popularity based on cleverness. In short, Moore, Gaiman, and Moffat are all popular for roughly the same reason - they're very clever in ways that make the audience feel clever for keeping up with or appreciating them. It works, but in and of itself it's not enough.

But there's a second trick Moore has up his sleeve, and it's both the one that really defines him as a comics writer and that is far, far less often imitated. And that's that Moore is unmatched in his ability to get at the emotional content of a fantastic scenario. Even in a relatively early and unremarkable story like 1980's "The Dating Game" he manages to take a drab old "the city's computer has gone mad and is doing terrible things to people" scenario and spin it into a kind of creepily poignant yarn about a computer that has fallen in love with a man and started to stalk him before going a bit Fatal Attraction on him.

But Moore's real strength was in pieces like "The Reversible Man," a four page version of the simple premise of narrating a human life completely backwards in which he wrings delightfully ironic pathos out of moments like coming back from a funeral to meet his mother in the hospital for the first time. (Her condition gradually improves and she moves in with him and his wife.) But even on a smaller level, Moore is meticulous about having emotional motivations for characters. Even in a humorous piece like "The Wages of Sin" he builds his parodic treatment of stereotypical intergalactic conquerer villains around a washed up repairman in the fading Veeblefetzer market.

For all that I adore the arcs of his philosophy and his inventiveness, this, in the end, is the real core of why Alan Moore was and is such a successful writer. He is phenomenally good at finding ways to use high concept science fiction and fantasy as a way into stories about everyday emotional experience. He is not the first or the only writer to do so, but he was very good at it, and his capacity to wed that to a sort of manic inventiveness and formal bravado propelled him to the top of his field.

And this, in turn, explains the other real revolution that took place within 2000 AD and its descendants. Even Judge Dredd benefited concretely from this approach, eventually and in Moore's wake telling stories in which the over the top antics of Mega City One got used as the backdrop for remarkably affecting stories about the city's inhabitants, often treating Dredd himself as a force of nature haunting the city instead of as a character. It wasn't just a new type of comics storytelling, it was in many ways a new type of popular science fiction storytelling - one whose later influence on people like Joss Whedon and, let's be honest here, Russell T. Davies was obvious.

And so while large swaths of 2000 AD are sophomoric and blood soaked odes to ludicrousness (and CIA Death Listed bears) it marked a major shift in what science fiction was and could be in the popular consciousness - one that quickly spread over to the US and became one the dominant paradigms of halfway decent science fiction.

And, of course, the 2000 AD crowd also ended up having a bit to do with Doctor Who, but that's another post.

Fish From Space (State of Decay)

2012-01-27T02:00:00.000-08:00

Peter Murphy had to tone it down a bit before Bauhaus

really took off.

It’s November 22nd, 1980. Blondie remains at number one with “The Tide is High.” A week later ABBA take over the spot with “Super Trouper,” their last number one hit on the UK charts. It remains at number one for the remainder of the story. The Police, The Boomtown Rats, Kool and the Gang, UB40, and John Lennon also chart. Meanwhile, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash, and Devo lurk about in the lower portions of the charts, the latter with “Whip It,” which peaks in the 50s, which is probably considerably lower than people would guess if pressed.

In real news, we should probably start with the murder of John Lennon, which, a week later, causes his then declining single “(Just Like) Starting Over” to suddenly jump from 22nd to number one and prompting a hurried rerelease of “Imagine.” Because for an anti-capitalist pacifist legend John Lennon and Yoko Ono were nothing if not shrewd businesspeople. A massive earthquake kills nearly 5000 in southern Italy. And Jean Donovan, and American missionary, is murdered in El Salvador along with three Catholic nuns. Her singles, of which there are none, do not chart as a result.

While on television, it’s 1977. Those who enjoy the ways in which the musical charts and Doctor Who oddly parallel will be bemused that 1977 was by most standards the peak of ABBA’s popularity, and that the last time ABBA was at number one was during The Invasion of Time, the last story of the season that was meant to begin with The Vampire Mutations by Terrance Dicks. Unfortunately the BBC was busy doing a high-profile adaptation of Dracula at the time and Head of Serials Graeme MacDonald commenced the first of a long series of butting heads with Graham Williams and ordered the script spiked for fear that Doctor Who would be seen as “sending up” the BBC’s more serious adaptation. It was replaced by Horror of Fang Rock.

Then came Bidmead, who as we’ve seen had a distinctly different take on what the program should be than his predecssor. Bidmead viewed Doctor Who as a more or less straight drama, whereas Adams, though not the cavalier jokester his detractors portray him as being, clearly preferred a mixture of comedy and drama. Beyond that, Bidmead preferred structures where real scientific concepts were transformed and expanded into the fantastic where Adams preferred to work with stock sci-fi ideas that didn’t need explanation. The result was that Bidmead saw little value in anything Adams had commissioned save for Christopher Priest’s “Sealed Orders,” which didn’t quite work out due in part to Romana needing to be removed from it. (Bidmead did commission another script from Priest, but that one fell afoul of Eric Saward, creating one of the great “what might have beens” of Doctor Who’s history) The best option he could find, then, was to go way back into the program’s archives and dust off The Vampire Mutations.

As a result we have a script that was made for 1977 and the aesthetic of the Hinchcliffe era being made in 1980. This turns into a study of contrasts. The nearest equivalent story in the program’s history is The Brain of Morbius - another Terrance Dicks effort adapting a classic British horror story, although Holmes’s script for The Pyramids of Mars is also an obvious antecedent, as is The Talons of Weng-Chiang. We are, in other words, back in the model of the literary homage, where the Doctor is unleashed inside of someone else’s story to jockey for supremacy.

But in the old model - even in the “serious” days of the Hinchcliffe era - this was done in part with a bit of humor. But Bidmead’s drive towards drama has stripped much of that away. Even still, the Doctor is funnier in this story than he has been all season (or, if you want to think about it in terms of production order, his humor wasn’t done being stripped away). But this is something that can’t simply be wound back. The three years of Graham Williams focusing primarily on the Doctor and his charismatic charm make it impossible to go back to the lower key humor of the Hinchcliffe era. It’s dialed back here, but in an odd way - his clowning is still broad and excessive, just considerably rarer. The result is a script in which the Doctor is mostly serious save for a quick bit of physical comedy with Romana and a deliberately parodic bit rousing the villagers into an opposition army against the vampires.

But this really does pose a problem for the Hinchcliffe approach. With the exception of the extremely serious Pyramids of Mars, the Hinchcliffe era’s horror pastiches were mostly quite funny. The Brain of Morbius, after all, had a suicidal vegetable envier as its great galactic conquerer. And the seriousness of Pyramids of Mars is hard to read as a virtue - when looked at alongside the rest of its era it, like The Seeds of Doom, comes across as fast-paced and brutal because of a lack of other ideas as opposed to out of a commitment to gripping action-packed drama. So by stripping the impish and mercurial qualities out of the approach Bidmead sets himself up with a real problem - how do you make the story work?

Further complicating things is the fact that Bidmead’s usual approach faces a real challenge here. At his best Bidmead creates the fantastic out of the real, through playful expansions upon existing concepts. In Full Circle he took the basic idea of evolution and created a world out of literary uses of it. In time, when he starts contributing his own scripts, he’ll build worlds and universes out of mathematical and computer science concepts. But there’s no real way to make hard scientific concepts out of vampires. You’re pretty much up a creek when it comes to making vampires stem from science. Fundamentally, they stem from literature and stories. And that’s not a direction Bidmead is eager to go in.

Under normal circumstances this would be a recipe for disaster. I mean, occasionally you get gold when the scriptwriter and script editor are pulling in different directions, but more normally you get a muddled trainwreck of conflicting ideas and men in very bad lizard costumes. But this is Terrance Dicks. That’s not a knock on David Fisher, who’s a fine scriptwriter, but Terrance Dicks is, god bless him, the most magnificently efficient hack on the planet. And I use “hack” here not in a pejorative sense at all. This has always been the gift of Terrance Dicks - he can write well even when he has no desire to be writing what he’s writing. I mean, nobody seriously believes he enjoyed every Target novelization he wrote, do they? No. Dicks is the ultimate “lock himself in his flat for a weekend and bang the fucking thing out” writer, and there’s not a set of circumstances on the planet that is going to get him to turn out half-assed work. Or, rather, his half-assed work is barely distinguishable from his top notch work. Even if his heights of genius are lower than those of Robert Holmes - or even of Christopher Bidmead - Terrance Dicks’s worst case scenario is still leagues above most people’s best day at the office.

But in this case there’s an assist from an odd direction. Because what ends up happening is that the vampires are explained in terms of ancient Time Lord legend. And this, in turn, hits upon an odd transition in the nature of the Time Lords. There are, in the classic series, essentially three visions of the Time Lords. Two have shown up so far - Terrance Dicks’s and Robert Holmes’s. (The third, of course, is Andrew Cartmel’s) The Dicks version is the one we see starting in The War Games and extending through the Pertwee era. The Holmes version begins with Genesis of the Daleks and lasts until The Deadly Assassin. But then comes the odd decade or so between The Deadly Assassin and Remembrance of the Daleks in which both Dicks and Holmes weigh in on the Time Lords with no real coherence or mutual plan.

For the most part Terrance Dicks “wins” this debate by outliving Holmes, writing most of the novelizations featuring the Time Lords and then writing several books in the 90s and early 00s with Time Lords such that he basically got to spin out his vision at great length. Whereas Holmes’s vision lurks around under the surface of Dicks’s, never quite becoming clear. (A prime example is Dicks’s obsession with the CIA) The usual statement of this - coming in part from Jan Rudzki’s legendary screed about The Deadly Assassin - is that Dicks’s Time Lords are powerful technocrats whereas Holmes’s are petty squabblers. But this is wrong. Dicks’s Time Lords are just as prone to factional squabbling as Holmes’s - The Three Doctors is full of the stuff.

No, the difference is rather one of attitude. Dicks’s Time Lords are detached and above the fray whereas Holmes’s Time Lords are historically bound. I am not going to rehash the argument made in The Deadly Assassin, in no small part because it was 15,000 words long, but the end point was that Holmes’s Time Lords functioned as creatures who still interacted with the universe through memory and imagination whereas Dicks’s Time Lords were austere technocrats who looked down on the universe from a position of superiority. (Another way of putting this is that Dicks’s Time Lords were what Williams did with the Guardians.) Holmes’s Time Lords, in other words, are mysterious even to themselves, lords of something they do not fully understand. (It is, as ever, a gorgeous bit of cynicism on Holmes’s part - after all, what lord ever understands those who are ruled over.)

This marks the first time since The Deadly Assassin that Dicks has gotten to return to his creations in a meaningful sense. While none but Romana and the Doctor appear, the nature of Time Lords is central to the story. The plot hinges on the existence of an ancient war between the Time Lords and the vampires, and speculates that vampire legends on all planets come from some ancient memory of this conflict. On one level this is just your usual von Danikenism - oh look, human legends of vampires are really just legends of aliens. But there’s something underpinning it that is new. Past stories have usually contented themselves to explain aspects of human mythology in terms of aliens. But here the script asserts that vampire legends exist across species. I have not exhaustively checked this next claim, and so may turn out to be wrong, but I believe this is the first time that the von Daniken trick has been applied on a universe-wide level instead of on a planet-wide level. (The closest I can think of is the end of Underworld, which suggests that the Greek myth was in fact a prophecy of future) And because we’re so familiar with the von Daniken trick it’s easy to miss the radical element of this, which is that it means that narrative principles are quietly revealed to be a fundamental principle of the universe. There is such a thing as a universal narrative.

Once again we have that characteristically odd double gesture of the Bidmead era - and Miles and Wood pick up on this at length with their essay on this story, in which they use it to argue that Doctor Who could well be fantasy and not science fiction. On the one hand vampires turn out to be ancient aliens with scientific explanations and they are only able to maintain their power by keeping the people from reading or learning - knowledge is forbidden and the chief vampire is actually a scientist. But there are two things that undercut this. First, of course, is that vampires are real at all. Even if they’re “really just” aliens, they are real and work like we expect them to.

But second and more significantly, everything about the vampires is still grounded in a sense of the ancient and the unknown. Look at the Record of Rassilon itself - an obscure directive buried in an ancient museum piece of technology that is old and obsolete even by the standards of the TARDIS. It’s not a fancy record in the databanks but a set of weathered punchcards the Doctor feeds into the TARDIS. That there was some logic and sense to the Time Lord/Vampire war when it happened it’s clear that the very sense of it is lost and that it has been forgotten.

The result is on one level a swipe at the Holmesian Time Lords - a suggestion that they’re just fallen Dicksian Time Lords who have forgotten too much and are now bumbling around in a universe they’d understand if they only stopped and read up on it. But this misunderstands how the ancient and unknown function in this story. They’re not merely mysteries to clear up. Defeating the vampires overtly requires relics and the ancient. The Record of Rassilon, old and arcane as it is, is essential to defeating the vampires. The power of the ancient, in other words, is not merely that it’s scary because we’ve forgotten how to understand it. There is real power to ancient artifacts in this story.

And so the austere autocracy of Dicks’s Time Lords is preserved even within the memory and imagination-bounded vision of Holmes’s Time Lords. Dicks makes mastery over myth and legend a part of the Time Lord’s technocratic superiority. But in the course of doing so he also solves Bidmead’s problem for him. The vampires are simultaneously able to be literary creatures and scientific creatures because they are based on the lost science of the ancient Time Lords. This science flickers between rationalism and a literary approach, with the gap between Holmes and Dicks’s conceptions of Time Lords serving also as the point of ambiguity that allows for an ambiguous relationship between science and fantasy.

And so Bidmead is able to demonstrate how his approach can subsume the Hinchcliffe-era approach of this story. Dracula can fuse with the Doctor because Bidmead’s conception of the scientific is based on the odd fusion of the scientific with the literary. What happens when Dracula is merged with Doctor Who isn’t just some highbrow literary jokes or some recycled thrills from popular movies (though the script has a couple of each) but the move of Dracula out of the familiar conceptual space of a cliche and into a strangely ambiguous conceptual space that bridges reality and imagination.

There are, of course, downsides. Simply put, the production team is not a production team that does these stories with the instinctive skill that the Hinchcliffe era could. An ailing Baker feuding with both of his co-stars and the production team is still phenomenal in the part, but the combination doesn’t lend itself instinctively to a seamless execution. Peter Moffatt begins a lengthy career of idiosyncratic Doctor Who directing with things like the questionable decision to have Aukon, Camilla, and Zargo deliver large swaths of dialogue standing in a tableau and staring at the camera, and it is very, very hard not to laugh when Zargo begins pulling evil vampire faces in the backgrounds of these shots. The result is either a full-throated embrace of overacted lunacy that outdoes the Graham Williams era in its skill at this sort of joke or just bewilderingly ill-advised. (The former is a real possibility, though - look at the joke musical cue K-9 gets when exiting the TARDIS in episode four, as if to comment that he’s woefully unimpressive. This is not the last time we will be left to stare incredulously at the screen trying to figure out if Moffatt is just fucking with us. Nor, for that matter, the last person with that name we’ll be doing that with.)

This begins a frustrating tendency of the John Nathan-Turner era, which is that it frequently reaches for doing things the series did in the past and falls short of their past executions in some key ways. Nathan-Turner’s usual defense of this was the catchphrase “the memory cheats,” and there’s at least some truth to it. For all that is wrong with this story - and there are a fair number of things wrong with this story - there’s quite a bit that’s better done, and it still holds to the general truism that the quality of television improves constantly. The costumes and sets for the tower are fabulous and the sorts of things that The Brain of Morbius would have killed for in places. The action sequences are tighter than they’ve been in ages. Though there are some appalling effects the use of fades and video overlays is adding new types of storytelling to the show’s repertoire. And the music is an improvement on Dudley Simpson.

Which is what makes it so infuriating that Aukon, Zargo, and Camilla are only occasionally even tolerable, the peasants look like they came out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and nobody can be bothered to cut together a decent horror sequence in a story about vampires. Yes, the memory cheats in thinking that you could just run Pyramids of Mars as-is on BBC1 in 1980 and have it look good, but the fact of the matter is that if you watch the stories back to back there are obviously some basic technical things that Pyramids of Mars is solid on that State of Decay isn’t. And this keeps being true of the Nathan-Turner era. With maddening frequency it soars on advanced topics in television production while crashing and burning on the basics.

But past that, we still have something interesting here. For three stories now Bidmead has been showing off a new approach for Doctor Who in terms of what came before and showing how it can genuinely improve what Doctor Who is. Now it’s time for what we might call the pure Bidmead era. The first half of the Bidmead era is Bidmead sketching out a vision of the show in terms of things we’ve seen before. Now come four stories that are unlike anything we have ever seen before or since. For sixteen episodes, Doctor Who is going to become one of the most distinctive pieces of science fiction in Great Britain at the time. In fact, I’d say the most distinctive piece if it weren’t for the fact that in another medium entirely an even bigger revolution was already well underway...

That's The Lion King (Full Circle)

2012-01-25T02:00:00.000-08:00

But I want a television in my tummy!

It’s October 25, 1980. Barbra Streisand is at number one with “Woman in Love,” which lasts for three weeks before Blondie unseats her with “The Tide is High.” David Bowie, Adam and the Ants, and The Police also chart, while Air Supply, Kate Bush, and XTC lurk about the lower reaches of the chart.

In real news, six IRA prisoners in Maze prison begin a hunger strike that lasts through December. El Salvador and Honduras resolve to put a border dispute to the International Court of Justice to decide. The border dispute stemmed from the 1969 “Football War,” the first war to be directly caused by a football result. The Polish government reluctantly recognizes Solidarity, Jimmy Carter gets his ass kicked by Ronald Reagan, and Voyager I flies by Saturn.

While on television things begin to get interesting. Some people suggest that this is the true beginning of the John Nathan-Turner era. This claim, however, is based on the difficult to defend assertion that there is a unitary John Nathan-Turner era. Nathan-Turner oversaw four script editors, three of whom deserve to have eras named after them. And one of those - Eric Saward - oversaw the bulk of five seasons and two Doctors, stretching the notion of the era to something in the vicinity of its breaking point there alone.

No, the Nathan-Turner era, inasmuch as such a creature can be said to exist at all, firmly began with The Leisure Hive and the ostentatious drive for change that it entailed. Nevertheless, there’s clearly something that shifts here. The most superficial aspect of it is Adric, who I suppose I have to deal with. Like so much of the John Nathan-Turner era, however, it is difficult to deal with Adric in the correct order. His first moment on screen is haunted by what’s to come. A commenter way back in Planet of the Spiders observed that the story is far better when Jon Pertwee regenerates into a funny looking man with curly hair instead of into Tom Baker. A similar principle applies here. Knowing what becomes of Adric makes every moment he is on the screen resonate oddly and in a way it could not possibly have at the time.

Added to this is the difficulty of Matthew Waterhouse himself. It is difficult to find any creative figure associated with the show that fewer people have anything good to say about than Matthew Waterhouse. He is notable for being, one of only two living leading actors on Doctor Who to have never reprised their roles (the other being Jackie Lane). It is a challenge to find kind words from any of his co-stars about him. One ought be fair - he was eighteen when he took the role. That the work I did and the gossip of people who knew me when I was eighteen is not how I am primarily known to the world can only be called a blessing. But Waterhouse is difficult to like even now, and his autobiography about his time on the series is an... interesting document to say the least.

But we’re putting lipstick on a pig here. The root of the problem is that Matthew Waterhouse was godawful in the role of Adric. I mean, this is an era where even K-9 - a character expressly designed for younger children - was being used in more sophisticated and complex ways. In the next story the musical cues begin making metatextual jokes about K-9, whereas in this story his decapitated head is waved around by the Doctor as a fetishistic totem to ward off swamp creatures. It’s the most interesting and complex use of the concept the series has seen to date (admittedly a low bar to clear). So when that is contrasted with Matthew Waterhouse’s performance of Adric, an overly emotive mess consisting of no successfully communicated emotions other than petulance and vanity, it is very, very hard to come up with anything good to say about the character. He’s a trainwreck of the sort that the series hasn’t seen since Mike Yates.

It’s tempting to try to build this out into a larger critique of John Nathan-Turner’s casting, but the fact of the matter is that he’s no more offensive than the children in The Horns of Nimon or than any number of other unfortunate moments in Graham Williams’s casting of the series. Graham Williams avoided ever making this bad a casting decision in the leads, but given that Williams only cast leads twice (plus two K-9s, only one of whom can even be argued to be flawed) that’s hardly vicious. John Nathan-Turner oversaw the casting of nine more leads in his time on Doctor Who, and while one or two can be quibbled with he never botched another quite this badly. (Casting was never the problem with Colin Baker, and Bonnie Langford has her charm.) Yes, his guest actor policy occasionally led to some questionable decisions, but the fact of the matter is that Waterhouse was no worse than plenty of what came before and that the casting improved dramatically over time. The only thing that really hurts is that he’s a regular.

It’s easier to build a critique of Adric’s high-concept nature. But even there, companions have been in high concept mode since Leela. Sarah Jane was the last “generic female assistant” companion for nearly a decade. Leela and Romana were both high concept, and everyone else in the classic series save Peri is as well. But at least in this critique there’s a grain of truth. Certainly it’s unmistakable that Nathan-Turner oversaw a shift in the series where it became more high concept than it had ever been. Increasingly many stories had blockbuster taglines and single catchy concepts (often, in the problematic middle years, “the return of X,” usually regardless of whether or not X was something anyone gave a crap about).

The question is whether or not that’s a bad thing. “High concept” is an epithet among the highbrow, but given that we’ve spent the better part of a year here taking Doctor Who very, very seriously any claim we might have to highbrow values is probably shot to hell. So let’s take it for what it is. The tag “high concept,” when used derisively, just means that the work is easily summed up in a single sentence. This is not actually entirely appropriate for Full Circle. While its idea - a planet with three species that turn out to be different forms of one species, one of which delusionally believes that it’s actually a species of alien colonists - is relatively simple, it lacks the movie poster punch of something like Alien.

A better definition of high concept is one we’ve been using for a while without attaching it to that phrase, which is a mode of storytelling in which every aspect of technique is pointing in the same direction. A high concept film, in this definition, is not merely one that has a simple premise, but one where every creative decision is made to promote and advance a single aesthetic goal.

This is much harder to criticize. Superficially, and About Time hints at this objection, it seems to mark a rejection of the multiple simultaneous audiences that characterized the Williams era. But closer observation of Full Circle shows that this doesn’t hold. There are clear components of the story that are designed for different audience segments, with children expected to like the Outsiders, teens expected to enjoy the science bits, and adults given some human drama anchored by the unsurprisingly fabulous George Baker. What’s different is not the multiple modes of reception, but rather what they’re supposed to do. The Williams era often held to a model akin to that of the Adam West Batman series where a younger audience was expected to take it seriously while an older audience knew enough to laugh at it. But here even though the show is working for multiple simultaneous audiences, every part of the audience is expected to get more or less the same aesthetic result out of it. It’s using different approaches to get to the same end as opposed to working towards multiple different ends.

This gets us towards the other way in which Full Circle marks a concrete turning point in Doctor Who. It is, if nothing else, the beginning of the Bidmead era. But as with everything else about this story we’re forced to hedge and qualify a little. For one thing, the shuffled production order complicates this. The production order actually goes State of Decay-Meglos-Full Circle. And over those three stories you can see Bidmead successfully developing a distinct style and launching it in a very concrete and sensible way. But it’s worth observing exactly how he does this. With State of Decay he applies his style to what was, in most regards, a Hinchcliffe-era script. (More, obviously, on Friday.) With Meglos he applies it to a story fully in the Williams style (whereas with The Leisure Hive he flailed around desperately trying to “fix” a Williams script).

This script, then, is the culmination of that. Andrew Smith is in many ways the first modern Doctor Who writer. Tat Wood argues in the sixth volume of About Time that the writers of the Cartmel era were all working from a folk memory of what the series was, and credits this with the turnaround of the show in those years. What is significant about this is that it means the writers of that era were all on some level fans of the show - they were not just writing stories for Doctor Who but were writing from a concrete and lived experience of what Doctor Who stories were. Certainly that characterizes every script written for the new series, and it’s unimaginable that there will ever be many, if any at all, scripts in the future that are not written by people who are writing Doctor Who based in part on a memory of watching it.

But Andrew Smith is the first writer this is true of. And so we get something interesting. Again, Miles and Wood come close to observing this by noting how the script incorporates stock elements of Terrance Dicks, Robert Holmes, and Malcolm Hulke scripts. But what they don’t quite nail down precisely is the consequence of all of this. This is the first time that Doctor Who has done a story that is, at its core, the distilled essence of everything that had previously made Doctor Who good. Sure, it’s done ultra-traditional stories before - most obviously Planet of the Spiders, which is unrepentantly a greatest hits reel of the Pertwee era. But those are retrospectives of a single era. This is a retrospective of, in many ways, the entire show. It contains bits of everything that the show did frequently enough to become a trope.

But crucially, it doesn’t do them all out of a sense of nostalgia or cynicism. Smith is changing things around. The tropes aren’t used for their own sake but because Smith is so steeped in Doctor Who that its tropes are completely instinctive to him. So when you get the foolish and bureaucratic old men who are lying to the entire population - a vintage Dicks/Holmes concept - that’s immediately undercut when you find out that they’re only lying because they’ve lost the manual to their spaceship and can’t fly it. The conflict between the people and those in charge, which previously would have been the plot of an entire story - indeed, which next story is the plot of an entire story - is here just a shorthand to get at a different story entirely.

On top of this, there's a sense of seriousness and drama to it. With a script that's just got its head down and is doing its work there are opportunities for depth of acting that have been missing. Tom Baker, for all that is said about how miserable he was on the program and how unpleasant he was, is once again on form in a way he hasn't been since Season 14. When he gets angry here there's a palpable depth to his rage that is new. And the death of the Marsh Child is played so straight as to be devastatingly effective.

Unfortunately it’s a while before this sheer and easy comfort with the past of the show becomes standard issue. Smith, for whatever reason, never pens another script, and as I said it’s not really until the Cartmel era that writers working from an instinctive understanding of what Doctor Who is become the norm. But whatever other weaknesses the script has - and there certainly are a fair few - the fact that the script is so comfortable with being Doctor Who is a major advantage that lets Bidmead, in his edits of it, really shine and do what he’s trying to do.

Which brings us back to the strange paradox of Christopher Bidmead - the fact that despite being the most openly pro-science and anti-magic script editor Doctor Who has ever had he ends up overseeing some of the most magic-filled stories in Doctor Who. On the one hand this is ostensibly a story about evolution that’s meant to teach all the little boys and girls of the United Kingdom how that works. On the other it has next to no understanding of how it works, what timeframe it works over, and postulates a bizarre system in which spiders, humans, and the Creature From the Black Lagoon are all meaningfully the same species.

Miles and Wood indulge in a long and relatively fun essay entitled “How Does Evolution Work” on this point that suggests various scientific models that could rescue evolution in Doctor Who from its obvious scientific difficulties (most obviously the fact that virtually every intelligent lifeform in the universe visually resembles British character actors), but the essay is firmly a case of trying to find a diegetic solution to a non-diegetic problem. Any in-universe explanation for the phenomenon is really just window dressing for the obvious answer that every intelligent lifeform in the universe is being portrayed by British character actors.

But what’s key to understand is that the non-diegetic answer is, in most regards, the superior one. I mean, if you actually want to understand Doctor Who the fact of the matter is that what is going on is not primarily based on some elaborate in-universe explanation about the origins of life. It’s based on the fact that the show is being made in England. We’re back, in other words, to my old anti-realist argument about how art is generally better understood as a constructed aesthetic experience than it is as gossip about imaginary people.

But this is what is so interesting about Bidmead. For all of his pro-rationalist leanings, he is ruthless about subjecting science to the larger concerns of narrative. What we noticed in Meglos about the chronic hysteresis only becomes more extreme here. Alzarius is a planet where the laws of evolution serve the plot of the story in an unabashed manner. The three species we see are all differing forms of one another despite the improbability of that. The story is set in a moment where the evolutionary turmoil of the planet is coming to a head. Everything, in other words, is actively geared towards the matter of telling this specific story. The story may be, on one level, a primer on evolution, but it’s a primer where every aspect of evolution is subject to a larger narrative goal.

The State of Decay-Meglos-Full Circle trilogy, then, is where Bidmead shows what he can do. These are the three stories in which he shows how his vision of what Doctor Who can be improves existing models of Doctor Who. From a production standpoint, he moves through both previous versions of Doctor Who - the Hinchcliffe and Williams eras - and in each case attempts an improvement in which he shows how his approach expands on the potential of the previous models. And now, having completed those, he finishes with this, a script that takes the best of the entirety of Doctor Who. And over it he lays his scientific-minded approach, showing how the intersections of real scientific ideas with narrative structures can tell increasingly interesting stories.

And the thing is, it works. By grounding the fantastic in the high-mindedly real Bidmead manages to construct a model of Doctor Who that is fascinating - one that merges the high concept visuality that Nathan-Turner is demanding with not just strong narrative but with the very essence of Doctor Who. For all its flaws - and to be fair, most of them are Adric - this story is a shot across the bow that suggests a new vision of what Doctor Who can be. Now Bidmead just needs to show that he can carry on with these sorts of high wire acts.

Like A Computer, But There's Something Wrong With Its Pitch (Meglos)

2012-01-23T02:00:00.000-08:00

By this point Baker's relationship with Ward had grown a

bit prickly.

It's September 27, 1980. The Police are at number one with "Don't Stand So Close To Me. It stays in number one for all four weeks of this story. Stevie Wonder, Queen, Diana Ross, Thin Lizzy, and Barbara Streisand also chart. Those who notice a tendency for the music charts to suddenly go a bit dull right when Doctor Who is having a rough time of it get further ammunition today.

While in real news, it's announced that The Evening News will be closing and merging with The Evening Standard, James Callaghan announces that he will resign as leader of the Labour Party, the Metro is released by British Leyland, and Margaret Thatcher gives her "The lady's not for turning" speech in which she basically declares that she doesn't much care if her economic policies are disastrous, she's not going to change them. They are, and she doesn't.

And if none of that sounds terribly exciting, you should see what's on television, namely Meglos. To paraphrase an old joke, it's terribly boring, plus the episodes are too short. But all of this masks something approximating a sensible decision. Meglos is the second story of the John Nathan-Turner era to make it to screen, but it's actually the third story of the era to be made, coming after State of Decay in production. Notably, State of Decay features Adric, the new companion, meaning that Meglos marks an active decision to go back and create a fill-in story before Adric's introduction instead of transitioning straight into the E-Space stories.

On the one hand this means that the Nathan-Turner era began with the three stories least like how it meant to carry on. Two were by and large Graham Williams stories with the serial numbers filed off, and the third is basically a Philip Hinchcliffe story. But even given this there is a sense that a deliberate effort to make a steady transition away from the Williams era and towards a new model. The second, subtler John Nathan-Turner revolution is rumbling along here. It's just that this is an excruciatingly rocky step along the way. The Leisure Hive was rocky, but this is an out and out disaster.

First, then, why? Frankly, the answer here is writers again. It's almost entirely that simple. Certainly, and this doesn't get admitted enough, for all that the script is two steps backwards from the Williams era the production is at least one step forward. It's clear that the show is trying to do more than point cameras at Tom Baker and some other people and hope entertainment happens. That isn't anywhere near enough, but it's something. But my God, John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch turn out an insipid script almost entirely lacking in characterization or depth. Bidmead focuses more on getting the science right than on improving it. The result is horribly flat and insipid.

Christopher H. Bidmead is an interesting figure. There are some writers who come across much better and saner in interviews than they do in their scripts. Bidmead, on the other hand, falls into the opposite and usually much more interesting category. His three scripts for the program are all phenomenally good, but reading him actually talk about what he was trying to do with Doctor Who makes him come off as a bewildering hack of a writer who believed that the problems with Doctor Who were an excess of comedy and that it was too "magical." You can generally count on zero hands how often removing comedy and magic from Doctor Who is going to be a recipe for success.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Bidmead's tenure is that he does such a wretched job of removing magic from the series. Even in this story the dodecahedron gives the sense of being powerful because it's a Platonic solid as opposed to because it works on anything resembling an actual scientific principle. And in future stories, most obviously his own scripts, the sense that there might be some magical thinking underlying them becomes even more unavoidable.

By any standards the underlying ideas here are bonkers. And not just the dodecahedron's reliance on Plato Power either. Meglos's shapechanging abilities do not seem to come from any logic or concept. He apparently needs to be merged with an Earthling to change shape, but why this is and why an Earthling instead of, for instance, a much nearer by species is wholly unclear. And then there's the chronic hysteresis.

In practice, the chronic hysteresis is simply a time loop. But as time loops go it's one of the strangest we've seen. The way that the Doctor and Romana are able to get out of it is by mimicing their own actions out of sync with the loop and thus throw the loop out of phase apparently by "tricking" it. As Miles and Wood point out at great length, this is completely insane from any rational perspective. It's one of the most non-sensical time loops ever in the series. And perhaps most interestingly, it's overtly magical. It makes sense only if the time loop - and thus the universe itself - is not only aware but understands itself through the manipulation of symbols and language. Saying the right words tricks it. It is the exact inverse of everything that Bidmead ostensibly believes about the program.

Except that it actually does make sense. Bidmead, apparently, was responsible for renaming the loop a "chronic hysteresis." And those words are significant. "Chronic" is sensible enough - ongoing, continual, that's all sensible language for "caught in something for all eternity." But "hysteresis" is an odder word. What it specifically means is that there is a bit of lag between cause and effect in a system. It's not, in and of itself, the right word for a time loop. It has nothing to do with recursion or reiteration. But it just about makes sense as a description of this particular type of loop. After the initial set of repeated actions the Doctor and Romana get a few seconds of awareness of what's happening before they have to go repeat it. There is, in other words, a point of lag in it. And a hysteresis would at least in some sense be meaningfully interacted with by throwing it "out of phase," which is the term the Doctor uses - i.e. altering the nature of the gap.

What we're faced with, in other words, is on the one hand something that overtly works like magic in the "manipulation of the universe through the manipulation of symbols" sense of the concept but that also clearly adheres to a set of fixed and consistent rules. Which is fair enough. Certainly "magic" isn't the most unreasonable shorthand ever for "when there are no rules governing what happens." And it appears that this is the sense that Bidmead means his "less magic" prescription for Doctor Who. That aspects of the story have to work according to fixed rules as opposed to arbitrarily. Thus if the time loop is going to be broken in that way the time loop has to be consistently conceptualized as something that can be broken in that way.

What's interesting about this is that it marks an explicit transition in the sorts of things that appear in Doctor Who stories. For much of Tom Baker's tenure he's solved problems by inventing spurious branches of science and applying them to things. So, for instance, in The Pirate Planet he creates "a hyperspatial forceshield around the shrunken planets" before "invert[ing] the gravity field" of it. This is not even remotely meaningful. It's just arbitrary technobabble. It makes sense because it fills a gap in the plot usefully and sounds like a vaguely credible way for how the Doctor might have solved the problem he was facing at that particular moment in time.

But the chronic hysteresis is different. Instead of being a solution that fills in a gap in the narrative it's an object with a defined set of rules that the Doctor interacts with. In this regard it's much more like a hard "SF" sort of concept - a scientific idea that must be solved like a puzzle. Except that instead of working like science it works symbolically, like language. It's important to stress that this isn't just a switch in the sorts of stories that are told. It's a distinct switch towards the unification of concept and event that we've been talking about for a while now. Instead of having dialogue that simply explains what happened Doctor Who, under Bidmead, is trying to have its ideas dictate the way in which they are interacted with. This makes it much easier to engage in more visual storytelling because the actions that the Doctor takes are ones that extend not from his cleverness but from the nature of the world he's in.

There are also some strong bits of the production. After a rather crass and overbearing score by Peter Howell in The Leisure Hive we get a score that is at times genuinely effective. Dudley Simpson's scores get more of a bad reputation than they perhaps deserve, amounting usually to "bland and occasionally irritating wallpaper" as opposed to "sins against man and God," but the music in Meglos at times actually starts to make it clear why replacing him wasn't just a case of shaking things up but a positive change. There are, in fact, moments where the music manages to make the Tigellan city actually seem mystical and wondrous. Which is impressive, because there's nothing else that contributes even remotely to that impression.

The other thing that's at least decent about Meglos is the acting, or at least, some of it. Much has been made by several people about Tom Baker's supposed lack of enthusiasm in this season. While it is true that over the course of the first few stories filmed he was apparently quite ill, and this does put a visible damper on his performance, as Tat Wood puts it in one of the best sentences in all of About Time, he "is having fun finding ways of suggesting he's a mad cactus." It's known that Baker did not get along entirely well with Nathan-Turner and his attempts to rein in Baker's more self-indulgent tendencies. But as with the cases where Pertwee was not entirely happy with things, Baker is in many ways improved by the curtailing. Far from being off his game he is, in this season, much closer to the character as he was at the height of the Hinchcliffe era.

Credit also has to go to the "cactus Baker" makeup, photos of which are one of the more popular and common images from this era. The reasons are straightforward enough - it's a fantastic and unnerving image that turns the popularity of the actor and his character on its ear. It's what Baker and Martin were trying to get with having the Doctor be possessed in The Invisible Enemy, but done this time with a simpler and yet more dramatic physical transformation that lands much more squarely in the realm of "creepy."

And finally some mention must go to Jacqueline Hill, returning to the program after far too many years as Lexa, the religious zealot/secondary antagonist of the story. Given next to nothing to work with as far as her character goes Hill, surprising absolutely no one who has ever seen her in anything, nails it and is one of the strongest parts of the episode by far. She's as wasted in it as she was in several parts of the Hartnell era, but carries off the same steady dignity that is so familiar from that era. She remains a direly under-appreciated actress who deserved a longer and more extravagantly prestigious career than she ever got. But it's marvelous to see her again.

Past that, however, there's not a lot to say about the story that's terribly interesting. It introduces another new piece of filming technology - a technique called Scene Sync that's basically CSO that allows camera movement. Its fourth episode may actually have fewer minutes of new footage than most of The Mind Robber. And it's over so we can move on to more interesting things. So there you go.

You've Discovered Television (The Leisure Hive)

2012-01-20T02:00:00.000-08:00

Tom Baker increasingly gets the sense that he's stayed in
this role a little too long.

It's August 30th, 1980. David Bowie is at number one with "Ashes to Ashes," a phenomenal song that I should probably just link to Chris O'Leary's phenomenal blog post on. A week later The Jam take over with "Start." Then comes Kelly Marie with "Feels Like I'm in Love," which holds the spot through the end of the story. Gary Numan, Elvis Presley, Stevie Wonder, ABBA, and Queen all chart.

Since Graham Crowden cracked up while dying and ignoring what we covered in the hypothetical during Shada, the Soviet Union has its first rock music festival, then kills fifty as a Volstok-2M rocket explodes on the launchpad. The US announces it will boycott the 1980 Olympics, and also does so. Riots break out in the St. Pauls area of Bristol. The origins of the riot are unclear, but the underlying racial tensions and anger over police racial profiling are searingly obvious. The US severs diplomatic relations with Iran and mounts a disastrous attempt to rescue the hostages held there.

Speaking of Iran, terrorists take over the Iranian embassy in London. the SAS retakes it five days later. Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, kills himself. A month later Joy Division has its first charting single with "Love Will Tear Us Apart. Both The Empire Strikes Back and Pac-Man come out, one the day after the other. CNN is launched and, eight days later, gets to cover Richard Pryor immolating himself while trying to freebase cocaine. 1700 people die in a heat wave in the US. And Ronald Reagan wins the Republican nomination for President at a convention where, bowing to pressure from the Religious Right, the party drops its support for the Equal Rights Amendment. By legend copies of JG Ballard's story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" are passed around at the convention by people mistaking them as a serious study of Reagan's strengths as a candidate.

While during this story Terry Fox's Marathon of Hope run to raise awareness of cancer comes to an end when it turns out that his cancer has spread to his lungs. There's a military coup in Turkey, the Solidarity union is founded in Poland after weeks of strikes in Gdansk, and, um… not a lot else, I'm afraid, so let's move on to The Leisure Hive.

As I've suggested in several entries, the drama of the gap between the Williams and Nathan-Turner eras is in many ways a product of Nathan-Turner's own invention. There are many ways to frame this fact. Certainly what I've referred to as the fan-industrial complex plays in. This is visible even in looking at artifacts from the time period. What is now Doctor Who Magazine started in the closing days of the Williams era as Doctor Who Weekly and consisted purely of comics and lashed together text pieces on the history of the program. But as Nathan-Turner took over two things happened. First, the magazine changed to Doctor Who Monthly. Second, and more importantly, it started to actively engage with the program that was actually on the air.

Let's say that again, because it's a fact about the magazine that is absolutely crucial to everything that's going to happen over the next decade that is nevertheless almost wholly unremarked on. Durng the Williams era, which the magazine overlapped for a good few months, the magazine did not actually directly refer to what was going on in Doctor Who itself at all save for in its letter pages. It was purely a Doctor Who comic book with some text pieces. Then John Nathan-Turner took over and began implementing the obvious practice of actually connecting to the TV series. This started with a location report of the Brighton filming for The Leisure Hive, then continued with photo previews of upcoming stories, interviews with Nathan-Turner, the magazine's first ever review of a televised story (Jeremy Bentham's exceedingly congratulatory take on The Leisure Hive, which went out of its way to credit John Nathan-Turner with immediately improving the show's quality), an end-of-season retrospective with John Nathan-Turner, etc.

In other words, as of this story Doctor Who began historicizing itself even as it was made. The paratext (a term in literary criticism and theory that basically means "all the stuff about a book that isn't the actual string of characters constituting the book" - i.e. the cover, the advertising, interviews with the author, etc) of Doctor Who is, as of now, part of Doctor Who. And this is not something that has ever or will ever stop. From The Leisure Hive on any competent reading of Doctor Who has to remain aware of the paratext because the paratext is genuinely part of the storytelling. Things happen on screen that have dramatic resonance provided to them by what happens off-screen.

Last entry I suggested that there were techniques that were unique to television. This is one of them - an expansion of the principle suggested by the cliffhanger that has been invoked by this blog for some time. If we take the cliffhanger not as a momentary event but as a week-long process of interaction with the narrative then Nathan-Turner's approach of having a continual story of Doctor Who's production running alongside the show is an expansion of this. Doctor Who, from this point on, begins actively telling its story not merely through what happens on screen but through what happens off the screen and during the moments the show is not transmitting. (Eventually a paratextual model of film arises - it's central to the way that the "summer blockbuster" now works, with the actual release of the movie merely being the climactic event of an often years-long paratextual piece of storytelling - but it starts with television and Doctor Who is an early adopter.)

If we wanted to be cheeky, and we kind of do because that's just how we are, we could suggest that this, more than anything, is the real revolution of the Nathan-Turner years. Certainly it is a real revolution, and one that eventually proves to have a nasty, nasty downside for the program. The fan-industrial complex and all of its problems are, in many ways, simply a disastrous execution of this idea of using the paratext of television as part of the storytelling. To some extent this problem can be summed up as "it eventually gets to where the only way to follow Doctor Who is to be an obsessive fan." And, correspondingly, one of the successes of the new series can be summed up as "it figured out how to make much of the paratext a value-added extra instead of a prerequisite." (Though notably, some paratext is necessary to understanding the show at all. The new series requires that the audience know what a season premiere or a season finale is in a way that the classic series never did.)

But it's not. Even if the biggest part of the John Nathan-Turner revolution was in fact the announcement of the John-Nathan Turner revolution, it's not the only part. The nature of paratextual storytelling is that it tends to rely on a fairly complex linkage of events. First the John Nathan-Turner revolution is announced in the pages of Doctor Who Monthly. Then when the series premieres there are a host of superficial but visible changes. A new title sequence, new theme music, a new costume for the Doctor, and a new style to the incidental music all create a strong sense of change. None of these are huge changes to the show, of course. Several are things that have happened before without major comment.

But again you can see Nathan-Turner constructing a complex meta-narrative of Doctor Who. Changing all of those things at once, including something as inviolate as the theme music, which had remained virtually unaltered in its iconic (and most brilliant) Delia Derbyshire arrangement since 1963, makes a powerful statement of reinvention even if you don't do anything else at all. Combined with the bits of heraldry in Doctor Who Monthly you get a very effective performance of a revolution.

I don't mean this to suggest that the John Nathan-Turner revolution was all hype. It wasn't. What I mean to suggest is that the John Nathan-Turner revolution was stage-managed. It was a carefully designed event. Considerable time and effort was made to have The Leisure Hive appear like a big change. And this is where Miles and Wood's competing reviews on this story fall flat. Wood stages a cute little experiment of showing people a clip of The Leisure Hive and a clip of The Nightmare of Eden and asking which one was the "slick, modern" production, and takes the fact that Nightmare of Eden was said to look better as evidence that there was no Nathan-Turner revolution. Miles, for his part, goes to great lengths to show how anyone who was paying attention would have noticed the difference.

But neither of them bother to think about the fact that even someone paying no attention at all would notice that one of the most iconic theme songs in television history had changed. What happens after the fade to the Brighton beach is almost immaterial to this. You don't need to be paying attention. The series is screaming at the top of its lungs "I have been reinvented." That constitutes a reinvention. Anyone watching would have an immediate and tangible sense that something was different. The question is whether they could have articulated what beyond the superficial.

But in some ways it's best if they couldn't. This story and the next are often read as "false starts" for an era that begins in proper with Full Circle. But this attitude misses the point. Nathan-Turner is engaging in a savvier sort of television making than that. There are in effect two Nathan-Turner revolutions that go on simultaneously but at different paces. The first is the visible revolution marked by the paratextual material. The second is a still visible but much subtler revolution, which is slower. Part of this second revolution is the emergence of the paratext as part of Doctor Who, but there are other components of it as well.

These other components also help explain why this was a slow revolution. For one thing, they're considerably more complex - indeed, Nathan-Turner has some genuine problems with some parts of them, which is why both The Leisure Hive and Meglos are kind of weak as stories. For another, large parts of them are simply a matter of accelerating the changes that were already happening in the late Williams era - most obviously in Destiny of the Daleks and The Nightmare of Eden.

Simply put, Nathan-Turner wanted to change the show from being about comedy to being about visual science fiction storytelling. But he made this change over several stories. In this regard, the change is much like previous changes. Hinchcliffe didn't just junk the UNIT format and run off cackling in another direction. He engaged in a two and a half year steady separation of the Doctor from Earth-centric storytelling. Lloyd didn't just abandon historicals in favor of bases under siege in one week. Letts worked within the inherited UNIT structure for six stories before doing Colony in Space.

And Nathan-Turner started with a comedy script from David Fisher that he tried to do a better job with. This had mixed results. His decision to cut out all of the jokes was misguided, not least because it required padding like the absurdly bad sequence in excess of a minute and a half pan across beach chairs on an abandoned Brighton beach. (This also gets at what will eventually prove the more problematic aspect of Nathan-Turner's use of the paratext. He defended it in an interview on the grounds that they had to reintroduce the series and introduce Baker's new costume. Left conspicuously unanswered [and courteously unasked] is why the heck the fact that Tom Baker is wearing new clothes would need to be actively introduced or how 90 seconds of beach chairs accomplished any of this.) The result is a story that feels confused, as if it doesn't quite know what it wants to be. Which, to be fair, it doesn't.

But Nathan-Turner also takes a decisive step towards fixing another problem - one that is probably essential to the series surviving the season. Over the course of the Williams era Doctor Who very much became the Tom Baker Show. This is not inherently a bad thing. Tom Baker is a marvelous performer, his Doctor is understandably the most popular of the classic series Doctors, and the Tom Baker Show was reliably entertaining and often much better than anything else going on in an episode. But the Tom Baker Show has one major weakness that Doctor Who doesn't, which is that if Tom Baker leaves it's dead in the water.

Simply put, it's very difficult to imagine how Doctor Who could have survived under Graham Williams if Tom Baker had actually carried through on his frequent threats to quit. Not that Williams couldn't have done anything else - truth be told Williams probably would have made a better show with someone other than Baker starring in it. But that Baker was irreplaceable within the context of what the show was. And The Leisure Hive goes to considerable lengths to decentralize Baker. Sure, the opening - a 90 second boring shot that finally gives us Baker - is as flagrant an instance of "let's all cherish the leading man" as the show has ever engaged in, but by the end of the first episode Baker is being rent from limb to limb as he screams. And the end of the second episode dramatically hyper-ages the Doctor into a decrepit old man. It's a small thing, but it flags that the Doctor is vulnerable. He's not the narrative center of the universe. And misguided as it is, the reduction in the number of jokes plays at that as well. By removing the means by which Baker dominates the story and making him vulnerable, Nathan-Turner, from the first episode of his tenure, is working to make it so that the show can handle Baker's eventual departure.

And then there's the visuals. Which are markedly different. But for that it's probably necessary to have examples. So, since it's been a few months, let's do a video blog, shall we?

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 24 (Quatermass, Day of the Triffids, Blake's 7, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Alien, Sapphire and Steel)

2012-01-18T02:00:00.000-08:00

Or, as I've been thinking of it all week, "the entry from hell." Normally it's fairly easy to pick what goes into a Pop Between Realities entry. I mean, I tend to put them in whenever the series goes on any sort of break, and I just grab two, sometimes three pieces of relevant media or history from the time period. They've all been very natural.

And then we come to this infuriating gap. Part of it is that the next two Pop Between Realities are no-brainer single-item entries for me, and as a result anything science fiction television from now to the start of 1982 or so is booked. I mean, the end-of-Doctor chaos of side entries is already worse than usual for the Baker/Davison transition. But also, good LORD there are a lot of sci-fi things going around on television in here that require coverage. And this isn't even all of it! I'm not redoing Hitchhiker's as a television series and I'm punting The Adventure Game down until Janet Fielding appears on it.

Still, in some ways this is also the perfect entry here. John Nathan-Turner and Christopher Bidmead are about to determinately reshape what Doctor Who is in order to make it work better as proper science fiction television. In which case the obvious question is… what does science fiction look like around this point in time?

Well, it looks like…

Quatermass (1979)

In late 1979 ITV ran a four part Quatermass serial produced by Verity Lambert simply called Quatermass. The film version for the export market went instead with the title The Quatermass Conclusion. The production was the very definition of problematic. Kneale wrote his scripts in 1973 for a BBC production that got abandoned. Following the success of Star Wars and everyone becoming re-obsessed with science fiction, however, Euston Films snapped up the rights to the scripts, having them rewritten to work both as a 200 minute serial and as a 100 minute film.

The results were frankly unfortunate. Lambert's production values were impeccable, and the film (which is the version I got my hands on) looks quite solid. The problem here really is one of an unfixable underlying concept. Verity Lambert's defense of the project - that there are problems inherent in any effort to update an old concept like this - isn't entirely fair. After all, plenty of other science fiction revivals have worked. But on the other hand it's not as though there were a long line of successful television revivals to begin with. This is probably about as good a version of Quatermass as could have been made in 1979.

The problem is just that Quatermass didn't fit 1979 at all. And the blame here really goes to Nigel Kneale. That Kneale is a conservative writer is hardly a revelation. But by 1979 that had tipped into an unfortunate overdrive. Quatermass is so appallingly reactionary as to occasionally tip over into comedy. Its central premise involves mind-controlling aliens whose mind control doesn't affect old people. It largely concerns itself with the dangers of hippies and how they contribute to urban decay. The other part of its premise is that there's a cult called the Planet People, who believe that aliens are nicely transporting them to a utopia on another world when in fact they're just being incinerated.

Kneale has said that he feels the Planet People should have been portrayed as punks instead of hippies, which makes sense, as not only are punks more intuitively connected with gang violence and urban decay, but they're also well known for their tendency to gather in stone circles to await their alien saviors. Which is to say that the real problem here isn't just that the script is hopelessly reactionary but that it's carelessly and unthinkingly reactionary. Dystopian science fiction in which there is a sense of imminent danger based on existing trends is one thing, but doing "five minutes into the future" stuff in which those damn kids have ruined society and only the smart old people can save it is just bewildering. To do it with no understanding of the idea that the punk damn kids and the hippie damn kids are even remotely different is just stupid. It was vile when Hainsman and Lincoln did it in 1969 with The Dominators. A decade letter it's just sad.

But there's a larger conservatism to this. Kneale is still writing with the idea which government-funded elites can fix everything if only the chattering masses would shut up and leave them alone. It's not just the loathsome politics of the piece that kills it, it's the fact that the entire piece acts as though no valid or interesting question has been raised about the nature of authority since the 1950s that might possibly justify altering its approach to science fiction. The result is, essentially, 100 minutes of Nigel Kneale yelling at the kids to get off his lawn.

Day of the Triffids (1981)

It is perhaps tempting to treat Quatermass as if it somehow implicates the more classic tradition of British science fiction and shows that it doesn't have legs in the early 1980s. After Star Wars, when science fiction was just another flavor of action-adventure, the serious-minded science fiction of the 1950s was a relic, for better or for worse. Tempting as it may be, however, it would also be demonstrably wrong given that Day of the Triffids is visibly one of the best piece of science fiction of the 1980s.

Based on John Wyndham's 1951 novel, Day of the Triffids can roughly be described as Survivors done right, although to be fair, it's more accurate to say that Survivors is Day of the Triffids done wrong. Both are post-apocalyptic survivor stories in the genre that OH BUGGER LOOK THIS UP.

Day of the Triffids is another textbook example of the correct lesson from Star Wars - that the public is comfortable enough with science fiction that you can just do drama with science fiction in it and be confident about it. Day of the Triffids is, at its heart, a story about being alone in a crowd that uses a world with giant man-eating plants to tell itself. This contrasts it immediately with Survivors and Quatermass, both of which are at their core fables. Survivors is a moral parable about the virtues of good middle class English folk, and Quatermass is a moral parable about how Nigel Kneale is a cranky old man.

Whereas Day of the Triffids is first and foremost a story about people. Survivors, at least, spends some time being that at the beginning before it wanders off into stupidity, but Day of the Triffids also has the good sense to be a miniseries, to show how the big disaster affects the characters, and then to end. Its characters aren't various versions of "the _____ one" or bland archetypes. They're not epically deep portraits of humanity either, but they're characters for us to think about and get to know. The first episode consists of the main character in his hospital bed waiting for a doctor that never comes to take the bandages off his eye. He narrates his story in flashback, and we spend the whole time getting to know him and his world before the post-apocalyptic stuff kicks up. It's a gorgeous bit of structure, and one that grounds the story in people.

A glance at the production credits quickly shows what's up. This is produced by David Maloney, better known to us as the director of Genesis of the Daleks, The Mind Robber, The War Games, The Deadly Assassin, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and a few other stories. He's an old pro at science fiction and one with the confidence to do what this story requires: calmly and without fuss make serious drama with man-eating plants in it. And, equally crucially, recognize that there's a difference between serious drama with man-eating plants in it and serious drama about man-eating plants.

Blake's 7 (1978-1981)

Sadly Maloney was not so lucky in his other major contribution to British sci-fi television of the era. Blake's 7, and the apostrophe is strictly a lexical courtesy, is a classic example of an almost great show. It's tempting to suggest that its key problem is that it's created by Terry Nation - and certainly the fact that he wrote all of the scripts in the first season despite not actually having a season's worth of ideas doesn't help the series. But with a production team including both Chris Boucher and David Maloney that shouldn't be that massive a barrier.

The problem is that it's too often a BBC-budgeted Star Trek where everybody hates each other. Only one of these ideas is an inherent flaw, but to their credit the days of the BBC trying to do Star Trek are basically at an end as of here. The larger problem is that they don't quite hit the characterization right for what they're trying to do. The characters are all just a bit too programmatic for their conflicts and arguments to be compelling.

It is, actually, helpful to compare it to Day of the Triffids. There the characters also aren't massively brilliant (though they're mostly better than Blake's 7), but in Day of the Triffids the drama isn't centered around the fact that everybody is constantly at each other's throats. When your drama is based primarily on everyone being furious at one another and constantly betraying each other then the bar is a bit higher.

Or maybe it's just that after Firefly it's tough to swallow the same basic show being done by Terry Nation. But the criticism here is merely "this isn't a mind-blowing classic of science fiction" and not "this isn't good." Blake's 7 is, in fact, extremely good. It does some things very well. Certainly it shows that people are putting a real effort into trying to do new things with the standard space formula. And the final episode bears some real mention.

Really. It does have one of the great final episodes in all of science fiction. They bring Blake (who left the series after the second season) back, have Avon (his replacement as main character) kill him with a fantastically large explosion of blood (on the request of Gareth Thomas, who wanted to make sure that nobody would think his character could ever come back. Apparently even he was surprised quite how much blood there was.) Then the entire cast save for Avon is shot down over the course of about few minutes, Avon is surrounded by men with guns, he smiles, and the screen cuts to black as the sound of gunfire rings out. It's a stunning, stunning finish, and for that alone deserves some real credit.

Of course, Paul Darrow, who plays Avon, has several times pushed for a theory that suggests that Avon ducks as the screen cuts out, the dozen or so guards all shoot each other, and he escapes to create a sequel series. And fans of the series have taken this seriously. And that, I think, tells you everything you need to know about Blake's 7 and its fans.

Buck Rogers and the 25th Century (1979/1980)

A fairly often discussed point regarding the "new look" John Nathan-Turner era that we'll finally start talking about on Friday is that its ratings early on were abominable. So bad, in fact, that ITV's attempted counter-programming of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was winning the timeslot. And it's true, the ratings were very, very bad - bad enough that during Full Circle they fell to 3.7 million. The lowest point of the Sylvester McCoy era, for comparison, was 3.1m, and that was still better-ranked in the week than Full Circle's nadir. Its second episode, at 170th place for the week, appears at a brief glance to be the worst chart placing Doctor Who ever attained.

Many words have been spilled to attempt to explain what the hell happened. And it's genuinely difficult to explain. It cannot be said to be a straightforward result of Nathan-Turner's producership because the drop happened with his first episode. Horns of Nimon 4 pulled 10.4 million and was 26th for the week. The Leisuire Hive 1 pulled 5.9 million and was 77th. And look, as bad as Horns of Nimon was, it wasn't that bad because its ratings grew episode over episode. Then, to make it stranger, Doctor Who took a Christmas Break on December 13th 1980 with a 5.4m episode of State of Decay that was 125th for the week. It came back at 7.1m and 88th for the week and stayed in that general ballpark for the rest of the season.

But setting aside the "why" - a topic that there's never going to be a clearcut answer for anyway - the fact remains that in 1980, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was immediately and directly more popular than Doctor Who. This fact, it must be noted, is downright depressing. Because Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is not even remotely a good show. WIth Gil Gerrard playing Buck Rogers as a sort of cross between William Shatner and Adam West except without the self-awareness that makes both of them good, some astonishingly gaudy and generic space sets, and a sense of plotting is an incompetent execution of cliches.

A fairly standard example from the episode Planet of the Amazon Women. The plot centers on a planet that is kidnapping men and selling them as husbands because its male population has been decimated. Half the scenes in the first half are based around Buck Rogers and other candidates not knowing what's going on and figuring things out. One scene is based around characters panicking with the belief that they're about to head off towards human sacrifice or gladiatorial games as Rogers remains calm. And it's a perfectly good hero moment - one in which the hero knows more than the audience and thus impresses the audience.

Except that the other half of the scenes have already given away the overwhelming majority of the plot so that there's not actually a mystery here. The entire episode, in fact, plays out as though nobody has thought even a little bit about when information is being revealed to the audience or how. Large swaths of the scenes are clearly there to tick off boxes. An entire subplot exists not because anything happens in it but to give the comedy robot, who is easily the worst comedy robot I have ever seen, an appropriate number of jokes. The show is cynical and uninterested in doing anything but stringing together action sequences with a plot basic enough that nobody will fail to follow it.

As with its creator's previous Star Wars ripoff, Battlestar Galactica, the series enjoyed some brief popularity before getting canned. It was in no way what audiences wanted, but rather an attempt to give them something supposedly just like what they had previously enjoyed but, in practice, nothing more than warmed over and cynical attempts at capturing what Blake's 7 can't manage even with some top notch creators on it. For those who want to argue that Star Wars killed science fiction there is little better ammunition.

Alien (1979)

Far from showing that the older style of science fiction was dead on arrival, the legacy of Star Wars increasingly shows that the generic "space adventurer" model was dead. The "SF" or "hard" model of science fiction was already dead when Star Wars hit the scene. Star Wars, however, took the space swashbuckler approach to its limit as well. Simply put, nobody was going to top Star Wars in the Buck Rogers clone department. Not even, as we've seen, Buck Rogers. As I've been yammering on about for a month now, what Star Wars did was show that science fiction could be taken for granted.

But that's far from the death of science fiction. It's just the death of a pair of exceedingly programmatic models of science fiction - the science logic puzzles that characterize much of the so-called "golden age" and the pulp adventure… in space! In many ways, then, it's the birth of science fiction in a general sense - using imaginary forms of knowledge to tell stories that couldn't be told with entirely real things and the substantial liberation of the form from its two most popular niches.

Which brings us around to Alien. If Star Wars is the film that opened the door to the possibility that science fiction doesn't have to be an end in itself then Alien is the film that decisively walked through that door. There is nothing particularly original about Alien in its conception. It is a derivative enough piece of science fiction that despite being a near exact copy of The Ark in Space there's no reason whatsoever to think the two have any direct connection. What Alien illustrates is not a particularly clever or novel idea but rather the sorts of things that can be done with science fiction in 1979 that, culturally speaking, couldn't be in 1975.

Back in the Nightmare of Eden entry we talked about a style of storytelling in which concept and event are indistinguishable. Alien is a prime example, especially when contrasted with The Ark in Space. The Ark in Space is a teleplay. Its events are people acting on a set. It's a very nice set with some real care taken in it, and the people act very well, but what happens is still people acting on a set to tell a story. That story is about aliens for whom humans are meat.

Alien, on the other hand, is a film in which every single part of the design is created to generate a coherent experience. It is a film about being chased through dark and cramped corridors by a monster. It is a film about human spaces that are violated by the horrifically other. So the spaceship is made to be effectively chased through. The alien is made to be visually horrifying and visceral and to work well in shadows and fragments. The editing is done so that the calm sterility of the beginning of the film gives way to fast editing and camera movements as characters are hunted. Everything is about being trapped and hunted. the story of Alien cannot meaningfully be separated from its experience. (Indeed, the film is thoroughly unimpressive as described, which is why it took me nearly 30 years to ever get around to seeing it. It is, of course, as good as everyone says, but its plot - a crew is hunted one by one by what is at this point a familiar movie monster - does nothing to recommend it.)

It is, unfortunately, miles beyond what Doctor Who can do in 1980. But the underlying approach works even if the specific techniques are beyond the show. With the technology that is shifting in the BBC - the introduction of steadicam back in Destiny of the Daleks, the introduction of Quantel Paintbox in the next story, and other more sophisticated techniques - the show is rapidly gaining ways to make what happens on screen and the idea behind the story into a single thing. This isn't to say that the language of television is just a primitive form of film - it's not, and there are techniques that Doctor Who is going to pick up that could not work in film, though most of those start in during the Peter Davison era. But Alien shows how it could be done.

But notably, a television version of this sort of storytelling also existed in 1979.

Sapphire & Steel (1979-1982)

Occasionally, in the course of doing the Pop Between Realities entries, I get absolutely blown away. It's rare. Children of the Stones genuinely impressed me. Doomwatch was considerably better than I thought it would be. And, I mean, there are other things I've covered that I really liked, but they were ones I knew how much I'd like going in. But Sapphire & Steel knocked my socks off. It was stunning. One of the best pieces of science fiction television I've ever seen, in fact.

Part of it is simply surprise on my part. It's an impressive little Trojan Horse of a show. An odd and inverted mirror of what it initially appears to be. On the surface it's a straightforward show that feels almost like a light ripoff of Doctor Who. Steel and his assistant Sapphire, who appear human but aren't, show up where odd things are going wrong with time and fix them. But beneath the surface the whole thing exists at a slight angle to expectations.

First of all, who Sapphire and Steel are and how what they do works is left unexplained - not merely unexplained in the sense of pre-War Games Doctor Who, but in a more fundamental sense. There's an odd incoherence to the entire premise. Even the opening narration doesn't quite make sense. "All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper, Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel have been assigned." The explanation of what happens - that creatures roam along the corridor of time and break in at weak points where an anachronism, including something as innocuous as a nursery rhyme, exists.

It's also phenomenally well-made. David McCallum's performance of Steel is so obviously an inspiration for Sylvester McCoy's Doctor that I'm astonished the two aren't mentioned in the same breath with great frequency. Joanna Lumley isn't quite as phenomenal as Sapphire, but is still raw class in the role. But what's really amazing is the way in which it makes deft use of its studio sets. It was an inexpensive program that has one location shoot in its entire run. What is usually said is that this was used to create a sense of claustrophobia, but it's more complex than that. What the show does is look like a fairly straightforward piece of children's television made on cheap video. It feels as though it fits seamlessly and smoothly into that genre.

But as with its basic narrative premise, it is continually not quite right. It's far creepier and more unsettling than it has any right to be. Its narratives hold together not on science fiction logic but on associative and emotional logic. The monsters overtly feed on emotions, and though everyone involve acts as though the stories are science fiction their logic never actually follows that course. The result is a show that is deeply unsettling because the unknown is always immediately present. It's not just a world full of lurking horrors and creepy music, but one that feels as though it is beyond understanding even as it threatens. It's familiar enough to follow what's going on but never familiar enough to let you feel comfortable.

And equally crucially, this is, in a very real sense, the television version of what Alien is doing. Sapphire and Steel is a show about the frisson between the familiar world and the lurking uncanny. It's shot as an uncanny version of a familiar type of television. Its premise is enough like familiar television to be followable but not quite right or sensible. It stars familiar television actors but keeps them cold and distant and denies them showboating "hero" moments. Everything about it is made with the same slight gap between familiar and strange. It's got a real claim to being the first piece of science fiction television to pull off the Alien technique of having every part of the production be inseparable from the act of storytelling.

Plus it's just really well written. Its most famous moment is justly in its second storyline, with its glorious climax as Steel callously sacrifices an innocent man's life, arguing and bargaining with the unseen monster who has possessed Sapphire and given her an impressively creepy facial prosthesis of a maggoty face. It's a jaw-dropping piece of drama.

It's also, of the things we've discussed, the one closest to the realm of what Doctor Who can take as a direct model. (Indeed, it basically is the model for the McCoy years, as I said. Ghost Light may as well be a Sapphire and Steel story.) This isn't entirely surprising. It's a direct heir to the Hinchcliffe era, so it makes sense that the two would be rejoined. (And, of course, PJ Hammond, who wrote the bulk of Sapphire and Steel, got picked up by Russell T Davies to do Torchwood) But there's a more fundamental connection underlying the two. On a basic level, it's attitude towards storytelling and genre is very compatible with Doctor Who. At their best, both shows are ones where the premise is not the point of the show but a tool to do unusual and compelling things. But what Sapphire and Steel shows - really what all of the successful things covered in this entry show - is that what can be done with a premise is rapidly expanding. And that, more than anything, is the challenge facing Doctor Who at the start of 1980: discover how to use the premise of the TARDIS in a new era of television.

Oh, and fuck SOPA.