Substitute for a Sound Character (The Crusade)

Richard the Lionheart really wishes the Doctor wouldn't
bother him while he's in the loo.

It's March 27, 1965. The Rolling Stones still hold number one, although that weird tendency for totally rubbish pop trash to take over whenever the show goes into historical mode promptly rears its head with Unit 4+2 and Cliff Richards ready to pounce. If The Web Planet felt like it was going out into a world of bracing and sudden change, The Crusade feels like it's going out into a world that's a bit dull.

The most interesting thing to happen during the four weeks it's airing, in fact, is Mary Poppins winning a bunch of Oscars. Mary Poppins is interesting for presenting a ridiculously nostalgic look at British culture that, effectively, was a love letter to Victorian children's literature that was so effusive that its major effect was to make everybody think that Victorian children's literature was actually anything like that.

I mention this because The Crusade is Doctor Who's pseudo-Shakespearean story - quite distinctly, with bits of the script written in iambic pentameter. There's something odd on the face of it here - the possibility of saying "the X story" for Doctor Who suggests an oddly definitive power for the show. Miles and Wood (who, if it's not obvious, I have the sort of tremendous respect for that it is only possible to have for people with whom you disagree almost completely) point this out explicitly - the odd thing about the historical stories, in specific contrast to the monster stories, is their unrepeatability. If the Doctor faces the Daleks or the Zarbi, it's an attempt at creating a popular and marketable monster. These monsters are supposed to happen multiple times. But the Doctor is not supposed to return to a historical location - especially not those like the French Revolution or the court of Kublai Khan where he meets historical figures.

And so for Doctor Who to do the pseudo-Shakespearean story is definitive. This is meant to be the one story of this type. Which poses something of a problem when, as is the case with this story, half of it is missing. Indeed, the bulk of it was missing for years until a series of unlikely events caused the first episode to surface in New Zealand. (Short form of the story - the TV station that had been airing Doctor Who in New Zealand was destroying film it no longer had the rights to. A collector bribed a huge lot of it out of the dumpster blind, and then this print bounced around collectors in New Zealand for years without anybody realizing it was the last surviving copy of the episode)

This means that its release came in 1999 - which, you may remember, were some dark days for the program. The sort of floundering that was going on is actually visible on the quickly released VHS copy of the two surviving episodes, for which William Russell provided in-character linking narration that makes an oblique reference to one of the BBC Books novels in a sort of bizarre attempt at cross-promotion. I say bizarre because it's not as though anyone cared about the show anymore. The only people who wanted to see the recovered episode of The Crusade were the hardcore Doctor Who fans with bad enough taste that they were actually reading the BBC Books.

The weird thing is that it's hard to imagine an audience less suited to The Crusade than, well, Doctor Who fans. This is the thing about the historical adventures - because their central concepts are singular and they (by necessity) represent a different sort of storytelling from what Doctor Who eventually settled on as its default, they feel like exactly what they are. They're not even a dead end of Doctor Who so much as a different show that inadvertently got made under the name of Doctor Who. So that watching them, the major work becomes trying to explain how the heck this story fits in between giant ants and whatever comes next week.

And to be fair, the first few times we did this, that's a pretty valid question. Marco Polo was a bizarre thing to shove between Edge of Destruction and Keys of Marinus, and its major contribution to the series  frankly has to be taken as showing that any attempts to predict what the hell the series is about are doomed to failure. The Aztecs is a similarly dissonant note, though one with more unambiguously successful contributions to the evolution of the show. But The Romans and, in particular, The Reign of Terror both felt like bizarre intrusions on the show.

Perhaps the strangest thing about The Crusade, then, is that it actually fits quite well between The Web Planet and The Space Museum. Which, without getting too far into The Space Museum, is actually a completely bewildering task. Much of this is down to a positively inventive opening. The trope, basically invented by Whitaker in The Rescue, of starting in the world of the story and having the TARDIS enter it is used again. Thus the pseudo-Shakespearean tone of the story is strengthened - because the story is about Shakespeare world being visited by the Doctor, not about the Doctor visiting Shakespeare world.

When the TARDIS crew shows up, they drop immediately into action - there's basically no establishing dialogue before Barbara gets kidnapped. The result is that the first episode picks up as though it's recovering from a cliffhanger.

Which is actually perhaps the best starting point to get into this story, and something we should probably talk about anyway. See, classic Doctor Who is, as a general rule, consumed wrongly these days. Doctor Who was a weekly show where adventures lasted a month or so, coming, usually, in four episode chunks. Each chunk (save the first part of a story) would end with a cliffhanger that led into the next week's episode.

In fact, in these early days, this was true between stories. Episodes were not sent out as The Crusade Part 1, but with individual titles, and usually each story picked up with a cliffhanger direct from the previous. This is much of why so many stories up to this point have featured plots based around something happening to the TARDIS - because it's one of the few cliffhangers that can readily be built around "And now we're going to a place!"

The thing is, other than these trans-story cliffhangers, the cliffhangers were generally not exciting as such. I mean, picking up on Davies's "That's not cynical, that's wise" observation, odds are pretty low that any audience member - including the children the show is (idiosyncratically) for - actually thinks a member of the TARDIS crew is going to die. The TARDIS crew is self-evidently safe. So the ostensibly obvious purpose of the cliffhangers is pretty rapidly defused.

This is not to say that the cliffhangers are bad. There's a reason that the new series has chosen to put a few two-parters into the mix, and it's the classic appeal of cliffhangers. This is one of those cases where understanding the classic series is probably easier in light of the new series. So take, for instance, the cliffhanger at the end of The Time of Angels. The Doctor is in a trap. The Doctor basically says "Ooh, blimey, I'm in a trap." Then he points out that putting him in a trap is a really dumb idea, and fires a gun into the air. And, cliffhanger.

There's no actual tension here. The Doctor says he's going to get out of the trap he's in. Then the Doctor does something. It does not take a particularly advanced understanding of narrative technique to figure out that whatever he did was probably getting out of the trap. So the cliffhanger is not "Is the Doctor OK." He is. We know that. The cliffhanger is "Why was firing a gun the right thing to do?"

In other words, the point of a cliffhanger is not to leave the audience in any sort of doubt as to what's going to happen to the leads. John Byrne, in a moment of epic stupidity, describes the contrary position to this approach.

When I was a lad, I worried every time Superman fell into a kryptonite death trap. Usually I only had to wait four or five pages to find out that he was going to be okay, but it never occurred to me to shrug and flip to the next story to see if he survived. Only when reading SUPERBOY was I ever aware that there was no "tension", since we knew Superboy would become Superman. (I refer to this as "Superboy Syndrome", and caution writers to be very careful about it when doing flashbacks or, more significantly, flash forwards.) 

If you reach a point at which you "know" no real harm can ever befall the main characters, and you are unable to simply accept that (without commenting that there is "no real tension") then you have crossed an important line, and there is no point in you continuing to follow this kind of fiction. Accept it for what it is, or move on -- but don't find fault with the ocean because it is too wet.

Here's the thing. John Byrne is an idiot here, and it's a wonder he ever managed to write a decent comic thinking about it this way. I mean, the problems here are enormous. First of all, why Byrne would even need to flip to the next story to see if Superman survived is beyond me. Is there a next story? In a comic called Superman? Then I'll wager that the odds are pretty damn good Superman is in it.

Byrne tries to handwave this away by saying that it's essential that you pretend you don't know what's going to happen. But how the hell that's any harder with Superboy than it is with Superman is a mystery to me. Not even the most credulous of childhood readers of Superman thinks Superman is going to die in a kryptonite death trap. They know he has to survive because otherwise there's no next issue, and they have to have a next issue. They recognize Superman as something that appears with regular frequency at a store. Just like any viewer of Doctor Who recognizes it not just as a bunch of characters, but as something that reliably happens on Saturday night.

The tension of the cliffhanger is not - and never has been - whether the characters are going to be OK. Rather, the tension of the cliffhanger is how. That's what the page gap in Superman comics, or the week-long gap between Doctor Who episodes is. A space in which the reader or viewer has to fill in their guesses as to what's going to happen.

It's why serialized media begets fans. The entire reason there are Star Wars fans is because Empire Strikes Back ends with Han Solo frozen in carbonite. Because serialized media encourages its viewers to compete against the writers - to try to see if they can come up with a better next move. Which is why the week long gap in Doctor Who matters. Because it is actually a beat of the story - one that gets erased when you can just hit "next episode" on the DVD and resolve the cliffhanger.

This is very clear in the first cliffhanger of The Crusade. Barbara has been kidnapped by Saladin. The Doctor and Ian are trying to persuade Richard the Lionheart to make a deal with Saladin for her release. He refuses, saying he'll never deal with Saladin, and storms off. Ian goes to follow him, the Doctor holds him back, and the credits roll. Clearly this is not a situation of particular danger. So why is it a cliffhanger? Because the challenge facing the Doctor is clear - he has to figure out a way to rescue Barbara, and asking the king isn't going to cut it. So the Doctor is left pondering his next move. For a week. Which means the audience is pondering the next move as well. That's the major point of a cliffhanger - the writerly moment whereby reading the text and constructing it become conflated.

The thing that you miss if you watch the show on DVD - the thing that is not intuitively reconstructed if you stop and think about this - is that in a given 168 hour week, Doctor Who is on for 25 minutes, and in the midst of a cliffhanger for 167 hours and 35 minutes. The bulk of the show is in fact the writerly moment - trying to figure out where the narrative is going.

And this is why John Byrne is so transparently and idiotically wrong in his Superboy Syndrome idea. Because the whole point of Superman comics is those moments of trying to fill in the gap - the moment of participating in the story. The would-be credulous reader he imagines who ignores the fact that Superman is going to survive is, in fact, a stupid reader. A smart reader plays along, and engages with the story as a story. (Of course, the fact that John Byrne thinks comics are for stupid readers is fairly clear to anyone who has actually read a John Byrne comic, but that's neither here nor there.)

So when The Crusade picks up acting as though it had a cliffhanger leading into it (when in fact it didn't), this is actually a supremely interesting moment. First of all, it extends the writerly pleasure distinctly into the episode itself - the viewer is simultaneously anticipating developments and trying to reconstruct past events. I mention this mostly because the next story takes this even further, so let's set it aside for the moment.

Instead, let's focus on the way in which this cliffhanger business ties in with what I said last time about The Web Planet. There, you'll recall, I talked about the idea that Doctor Who is dealing with non-representational techniques. I made passing reference to a synonym for this, which I'll expand on here. Doctor Who is theatrical. Which is closely related to why it's at home in a serialized tradition with cliffhangers - because the cliffhangers are, as I said, a case of presenting the show to the audience instead of immersing the audience in the show.

Which is why Doctor Who can follow giant insects with pseudo-Shakespeare and have it feel like anything other than the weirdest thing on television. But, ironically, this depends on dropping the inter-story cliffhanger. In order to work properly, The Crusade has to be a Shakespearean world that the Doctor and company drop into. Which is why Whitaker uses the fast start from within the pseudo-Shakespearean world instead of the normal TARDIS arrival sequence. This is the first major step towards abandoning individual episode titles - which will finally happen in a little over a year.

But the thing is, this theatricality was not in the least bit experimental. I mean, don't get me wrong - Doctor Who is, on the whole, massively experimental. But it has never been a show that sought to sit on the cutting edge. And theatricality is in no way part of its experiments. The show, after all, is on the BBC. Which is something that it's easy to lose sight of.

Let's pause for a moment and help out those who are in less fortunate countries with poor education systems that don't teach them important things about the world. Like America. The BBC is a publicly owned non-profit corporation. When you buy a television in the UK and start using it for anything other than watching DVDs or playing video games, you have to pay a license fee of 150 pounds a year for a color TV. When Doctor Who started, that fee was four pounds a year. And that fee is a tax. It is not like a cable bill - it's a government tax that it is illegal not to pay.

So, for Americans. You know how the Republicans want to slash the modicum of funding for NPR and PBS? In the Britain of 1965, that viewpoint would mean that you want to eliminate 50% of television outright. Television and radio were, in Britain offered as a public service. And as you might imagine of 1960s Britain, that meant that proper art had to be shown on them.

Not exclusively, of course - the looming competition of ITV was sufficient to establish at least partially that making some commercial programs was a good idea. But Doctor Who was not, strictly speaking, a commercial mass hit either. Rather, it was a bizarre sort of hybrid program. It's a show anchored by an elderly character actor that's meant to entertain kids and secretly educate them, but that airs in a family slot so has to entertain everybody. This sort of mad concept could only happen in the name of the public good.

But it also meant that Doctor Who had to occasionally go and do things like The Crusade. Not out of some sort of BBC mandate, but just because that was part of being the public service program that it was. Because Doctor Who was never particularly subversive to what the BBC was. And so of course it did a high culture, theatrical Shakespeare story. Because the BBC was about the arts, and when it came to drama, the arts were theatrical. Which is why the concept of nipping off to do a bit of theater in between stints on the most popular program on the BBC is still not that weird an idea in England. (For a comparison, imagine if CSI went on an 18-month hiatus with only a few 90 minute episodes to air sporadically through the time so Lawrence Fishburn could be in Othello. See?)

And so The Crusade has Julian Glover, who's actually a Shakespearean actor of non-trivial repute, tromping about alongside the regulars. Because this is a particular sort of theater, and the BBC is well-equipped to put on that show. Which, again, is profoundly non-immersive. You're not supposed to go "Ooh, Richard the Lionheart!" You're supposed to go "Ooh, Julian Glover as Richard the Lionheart." You're supposed to recognize that the rules, this week, are Shakespeare rules. Which is, again, why we start the serial in the world - because the rules apply to the Doctor here too. (Hence his extended comic set-piece about clothes theft in the first episode.)

But here's the thing about Doctor Who. On the one hand, it's happy to play along and do its Shakespearean duties. On the other hand, and this is where Doctor Who in March of 1965 differs from Doctor Who in, say, a year earlier. Then doing a historical serial meant playing it all very straight and doing a big, epic. Now, however, there's enough of an idea of Doctor Who and its sort of mad cap ethos starts to run up against its own setting.

And so here we get the absurd meta-conceit of Vicki cross-dressing as Victor for no discernible reason whatsoever. Why? It's funny, yes, and as this episode leaves Vicki with no room to give a monster an amusing diminutive nickname, her comedy beat has to come from somewhere. But, notably, it's specifically a joke about the Shakespearean theatrical tradition - namely its convention of having the female characters be cross-dressed males (a situation which, I hasten to add, was played for laughs at the time because nobody has ever actually seriously suggested that immersive narrative is a good idea prior to about Wordsworth, nobody took it that seriously until the mid-to-late 20th century, and if I had my way nobody would ever take it seriously again because it's absolutely idiotic.)

I want to focus on this for a couple of reasons. First, it's campy and theatrical in a big way, and evolving an ability to revel in theatrical camp is kind of a survival instinct when it comes to watching Doctor Who after about 1963. Second, it's a staggeringly meta joke that puts the lie to the idea that Doctor Who is for children in any sort of exclusive way - no ten year old is going to get the humor of dropping in on a Shakespeare play and cross-dressing your female character as a male so that they're allowed to be there. Third, anyone wondering when drugs entered the Doctor Who production office can probably make a pretty safe bet that it's somewhere in the vicinity the tentacle rave bouncy castle at the end of The Web Planet and the introduction of cross-dressing comedy to Doctor Who.

Some other quickies to notice about this story. This is the first time people who actually have dark skin appeared on the set. Albeit not in any scenes with the Doctor. I wonder why. (I know full well why, but that's another entry.)

And there's another bit tailor made for the obsessive quoters, as Joanna, sister to Richard the Lionheart (and, in the original script, kinky incestuous lover until William Hartnell objected) describes the Doctor by saying "There's something new in you, and yet something older than the sky itself." Once again, the mythic nature of the Doctor is established - in this case necessarily so, as otherwise he has no chance of standing up against Shakespearean King Richard in the plot. As it stands... he still doesn't really manage to do anything over all four episodes, but honestly, the theatrical spectacle of it all and the fact that 50 minutes are collapsed into about five minutes of Ian hastily summarizing the plot mostly papers over that.

Do you own the (existent) bits of The Crusade on DVD yet? If not, consider buying them from Amazon via this link. If you do, I'll get some money.

A Place Where Nothing Is Impossible (The Web Planet)

Astonishingly, some people look at this photo and
think that they're looking at something that
has something to do with realism.

It's February 13, 1965. The Kinks, The Righteous Brothers, The Seekers, and The Rolling Stones are going to be our #1 singles for the next six weeks. The album charts are mostly The Rolling Stones, with The Beatles taking the top spot for fun one week.

What you have to realize about these times is that, looking at what was popular, it is very clear that the world was changing. That things that had previously bubbled under the mainstream have, at this point, broken through in a big way. The Rolling Stones and The Beatles are visible part of what it is increasingly clear is a 90% obscured iceberg. In America, the Civil Rights movement is at its boiling point. White supremacists are beating demonstrators to death. Malcolm X is assassinated. 1965 is not the present day by any stretch of the imagination. But it is also impossible to argue that 1965 is in any way more normal or understandable than the present day. The world of 1965 is staggeringly complex and weird.

I bring this up because for these six weeks, Doctor Who is showing The Web Planet. Which is easily the weirdest Doctor Who to date, and a strong contender for weirdest ever. It is also among the most popular, in terms of viewers, ever. And it is among the most misunderstood episodes of Doctor Who ever.

The word used in almost every review of The Web Planet is "ambitious." It's easy to see why. Every character save for the TARDIS crew in this story is non-human. You've got the Zarbi - bipedal ants who make a constant beeping sound. You've got the Menoptra - butterfly people, and the Optera - sort of grub creatures. And you've got the Animus - a giant tentacle monster. The episode is a special effects bonanza as a result.

And here's where people misunderstand it. Much is made of Doctor Who's wobbly sets and poor effects. And it's true - the effects on Doctor Who are often cheap. Where this becomes inexplicable is when people criticize the effects for being unbelievable, unrealistic, or unconvincing. And so when The Web Planet is discussed, it's usually exhibit A for those who want to talk about how the old series had lousy effects and was unconvincing and silly.

Here's the thing. Everybody who complains about the unrealistic effects in this episode is being a complete idiot.

There's a moment on the DVD commentary for a Russell T. Davies-penned Doctor Who episode where the show briefly appears to have killed off Rose. And Davies and one of the other producers are talking about whether children would believe that they really did kill of Rose. The other producer suggests that he hopes children would not be so cynical as to say "Oh, they wouldn't really do that." And Russell T. Davies, in what is, to my mind, the most revealing thing he has ever said on a DVD commentary, says "That's not cynical. That's wise."

That, right there, is the heart of the issue. The fact that Davies understands that is why he was able to make Doctor Who as successful as it had ever been. And it's telling that one of the times in its original run where it was that successful was The Web Planet.

Apologists for the episode usually fall back on a defense along the lines of "watch it from a 1965 perspective and it's more convincing." This is the suspension of disbelief argument - that viewers could overlook the silliness and get themselves to believe what they were seeing. But no. Even viewers in 1965 could tell that William Hartnell was flubbing his lines left, right, and center, and could notice when one of the Zarbi actors walked into a camera. When William Hartnell trails off in mid-line after identifying the planet as Vortis and William Russell sort of wearily says "What galaxy is that in, Doctor" to prompt him, it does not take some savvy modern viewer to know what's going on.

Modern viewers, for some reason, assume that TV Tropes represents some new understanding of narrative. And so they assume that, for instance, viewers in 1965 were somehow more convinced by People in Rubber Suits than they are today. I'm not going to heavily link TV Tropes in this blog, but let's consider for a moment.

One of these legs is not like the others... Well, two, really.

Here's a picture of the Zarbi. Now, what seems more likely? That viewers in 1965 could not tell that two of those legs were not like the others, or that viewers in 1965 were well aware that those were men running around in ant costumes? It seems to me that any argument that is dependent on the idea that anyone, ever, in the history of the planet has looked at a Zarbi and seen anything other than a man in an ant suit is extremely, extremely strained.

But why would that be a problem? Outside of television and film, we don't really get very worked up about this sort of thing. Nobody has ever read a book and gone "Ooh, these ink stains on this piece of dead tree pulp don't look much like what they describe." The idea that art might be non-representational is not actually a very complex or hard to accept one.

This is actually not a still from Doctor Who, but I bet
I could have fooled you into thinking it was.

And yet in all the discussions of The Web Planet - and the Miles/Wood About Time books spend a thousand words on the issue of influences on this story alone - nobody seems to mention the really obvious fact that this story belongs in the tradition of things like Méliès's A Trip to the Moon. Never mind that it's an obvious influence. I mean, again, to be very straightforward in my evidence here, have a look at a still from Trip to the Moon. The similarity in visual style is obvious.

If you accept this idea, The Web Planet suddenly becomes a lot more understandable. For instance, there's a scene in the first episode where The Doctor and Ian appear to stare up at a massive stone edifice. It's an obvious effects shot. The only point of the shot is to show off that they can have that effect. In fact, much of the episode is structured around that effect shot. If the effects shot is meant to be believable, that makes no sense. That kind of effort only makes sense if the effect is going to be noticed - i.e. if it's going to be visible as an effect.

In this interpretation, The Web Planet is interesting as a series of set pieces - as a six-week long exercise in spectacle that was not going for convincing illusion, but rather for striking visuals. This is well-supported by the episode. Take, for instance, the bizarre lighting effects used for all shots of the surface of the planet Vortis, produced by smearing the camera lenses with Vaseline. Or, for that matter, the decision to have Rosalyn de Winter, a choreographer, work with the Menoptra to make them seem suitably alien.

The result is, in fact, stunning. Realistic? No. But all the same, stunning, in the same way as Méliès - a spectacle. And if The Web Planet is read in this way, which, as I said, is almost certainly the way it was read by its initial audience, it makes a lot more sense. It certainly explains why The Web Planet was one of two stories from the second season to be novelized.

Ah. Right. The novels. We'll talk more about these in a later installment (tentatively the Season 4 premiere, The Smugglers), but for now, let's note simply that in 1964, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks was published, and in 1965 two follow-ups based on this story and the next were published. And that these were the first instances of something that would eventually prove to be quite important for the series.

A photo of a page of a book. There's something
a bit weird about that, actually.

The thing that you have to realize is that in 1965, there was nothing resembling home video. When Doctor Who and the Zarbi came out, six months after airing, it was the closest thing to a personal copy of The Web Planet as could exist. The purpose of the book was to spur memories of the popular serial The Web Planet. Notably, the book was illustrated. The illustrations are nothing special, but they are telling in that they emphasize the points of visual spectacle. So, for instance, the special effects shot of Ian and the Doctor staring up at an impossibly large stone edifice is recreated in the book. Suggesting strongly that this, more than anything, is the point of the exercise.

(A canny reader may notice that the book refers to the Doctor as Doctor Who. We'll deal with that, but again, in another entry.)

The thing about spectacle is that it provides an opportunity for a very specific sort of horror. Much is made of Doctor Who's supposed scariness. And much of that scariness, as I've already suggested, comes from making the familiar strange. In this regard, the fact that The Web Planet was visibly produced is a major asset, because its bizarre visual landscape is not entirely alien. The frisson produced by the serial is precisely because what we are seeing is clearly human.

And so there's some real horror here. Not scary bits, but horror. A major plot point in the first few episodes is a gold control harness that zombifies whoever it's put on. After an extended sequence in which Barbara is taken over by the gold bracelet she happens to be wearing, we get a truly awful set of plot twists in which the harness is several times forced onto Vicki, and we watch the young companion figure - the supposed image of the future of Britain - suddenly go blank, her entire personality taken away. And it's scary. It is genuinely psychologically horrifying. One moment she's fighting and screaming, and the next all that personality is just gone.


And that's not the only really horrifying bit. There's one cut in the serial where the camera suddenly jumps to a completely unclear image as the soundtrack takes a turn into a sort of proto-Diamanda Galas screaming. And what's scary about it is that it is so utterly alienating. It is not so much that The Web Planet was ahead of its time as that it feels as though it existed in a wholly parallel time. Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood accuse the episode of failing to try to make the world credible, saying "Faced with an overwhelming mass of insect-flesh, what we really need here is for all those involved - both behind and in front of the camera - to play it casual. If everyone on Voros acted as if this were their natural environment, and as if butterfly-people were a perfectly normal pan of the terrain, then after an episode or so we might forget the weirdness of it and treat it as a place where interesting things might happen."

Baloney. The Web Planet is supposed to be shockingly weird. So that, in part 5, when there's a bit of a comic interlude about a tamed Zarbi that Vicki insists on nicknaming Zombo, the comedy does not so much fall flat as make the entire situation even weirder. It's a strikingly bizarre moment, but it's hard to laugh at it because the series has just taken us completely off the map so that even comic beats like this leave us uncomfortable.

Because, for instance, in the same episode you have a sequence where Ian and some of the Optera are walking through some caves and find a spot where the way is blocked. The story has already spent a good deal of time establishing the alien characters as, well, alien - the Menoptra, for instance, have monologues including lines like "light was our god and we existed in light flying above thought," which is both oddly poetic and alienating. This sequence with the Optera begins by picking up on that tendency, describing the problem as "A silent wall. We must make mouths in it with our weapons. Then it will speak more light."

And then it goes nuts. They break through the wall, and it turns out to have been holding back deadly acid. At which point one of the Optera shoves her head into the wall to block the flow of acid. The remaining Optera calmly leave her body behind, saying that this is part of the dangers of living below ground, leaving Ian standing beside a giant insect corpse with its head shoved in a wall. If the sequence sounds bizarre, it is. It's easily one of the strangest things I've ever watched. But when this sort of absurdity abuts comedy about Zombo the Friendly Zarbi the resulting effect is a striking alienation.

All of this comes to a head with the story's villain, the Animus. This is the first time that Doctor Who has provided a villain of this sort - an almost godlike being. Later writers engaged in a kind of ham-handed retcon that proclaimed the Animus, along with some other classic villains, to in fact be explicitly part of the Cthulhu mythos (Animus is apparently Lloigar, a 1932 creation of August Derleth). Although this retcon was, all told, a pretty dumb idea that does some real injustice to Bill Strutton's creation of the Animus, the observation that there's something Lovecraftian about this monster is pretty on target.

The Animus appears in two distinct stages. At first it is simply something that the Doctor talks to by walking into a sort of weird speaking tube. Although the Doctor covers with glib humor (and a kind of brilliant lampshading), referring to the Animus as a giant hairdryer, the fact of the matter is, it's clear that this being is something the Doctor fears. The Animus is both vastly powerful - it controls all of the Zarbi - and intelligent. Although its second form is mocked along with the other effects, it too is deeply creepy - a mass of bizarre lights and fleshy tentacles that is profoundly weird.

The result is a strong sense that Vortis is a place that the Doctor and his companions should not be. This is heightened by the fact that this story involves some real assaults on the TARDIS. The story is the first time that the trope of the TARDIS being pulled down to a planet appears - the Doctor has not inadvertently landed on Vortis, he's been trapped there. For the first time, lengthy TARDIS scenes exist in which the TARDIS is a prison. It's not malfunctioning here - it's been taken over. This story is also the first time that a monster enters the TARDIS. The overwhelming message is that the Doctor and his companions are just completely out of their league. And when the story finally resolves, with Barbara managing to kill the Animus, the victory feels like luck - the Doctor and Vicki have already failed, and Barbara can barely get the weapon she uses to work.

It would be one thing if these constant creepy and unnerving set pieces got in the way of the characters, but they don't. The Doctor is anarchically manic, continuing the odd sense of characterization as a young man we saw last episode. Ian and Barbara have a deepening relationship - Barbara's resolve to destroy the Animus is given a crucial boost by Ian appearing at the last second, a sort of Power of Love ending of the sort that will become standard under Russell T. Davies. Vicki and Barbara's banter provides the first episode, which is otherwise a kind of lengthy trudge around an empty planet, with considerably more energy and fun (although it's very difficult not to get the sense that Vicki is trying to seduce Barbara).

The story, in other words, is unmistakably a case of familiar, well-loved characters thrown into an impossibly strange situation full of bizarre spectacle. The audience does not need to "believe" the spectacle to get into this, because the main dramatic tension is in fact how weird and strange everything is. Immersion and belief are anathema to what's going on here - bizarre and unsettling theatrical staging does a much better job of making the audience feel uncomfortable and lost (much like the characters) than any sort of realism possibly could.

And yet the default assumption on this story - and apparently why Spooner accepted the script - is that it's a parable about communism, with the Zarbi being the deluded working class. Miles and Wood suggest that the story is about the working class, making much of the fact that the Zarbi are portrayed as cattle. The only problem is that, by all appearances, that's exactly what they are. At no point is there any serious suggestion that the Zarbi are anything other than animals who are being controlled by the malevolent Animus. There's no politics to be had with the Zarbi for the simple reason that they have nothing resembling autonomy or will. If they were portrayed as having any will apart from what the Animus forces them to do, that would be one thing, and possibly a parable about communism. As it stands, the story is not some expressly political parable. It's a creepy-ass story about the weirdness of its own special effects.

In other words, the biggest mistake that you can make about this story - and, maddeningly, the mistake that people most often make in discussing the story - is to treat it as a realist piece of science fiction that's a direct parable about the world of 1965. The truth is far more complex, and far more interesting - The Web Planet is a story about freaking out the audience and making them uncomfortable. Add the story on Netflix (Or, you know, buy it from the link below) and watch it in that light. Because the big problem with people's assumptions regarding this story is simple - they assume that because it was made in 1965, it's less modern than Doctor Who is now.

It's not. If anything, The Web Planet is, much like the six weeks it aired during, far more chaotic, weird, and tumultuous than anything going on right now.


Do you own The Web Planet on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do.

Like You Do When You're Young (The Romans)

Ian realizes that the only thing more alarming than
plaid pants is where they might have gone.

It's January 16, 1965. It's Georgie Fame, The Moody Blues, and The Righteous Brothers on the charts for the next four weeks, while at the tail end of the four weeks the Rolling Stones take over the album sales with their imaginatively titled The Rolling Stones No. 2.

The most significant thing to happen in these four weeks, however, occurred on January 24th, when Sir Winston Churchill, twice former Prime Minister, dies. His state funeral on January 30th coincides with the third episode of The Romans, the Doctor Who story du jour for the month.

Production wise, The Romans sees the return of Dennis Spooner, which, if you recall my views of his previous story, should give you a sense of where this is going. In addition to writing the story, Spooner has also just assumed the position of script editor for the series. Script editor, for the original run of Doctor Who, was the closest position to the current role of head writer/executive producer. The biggest difference is that rules prohibited script editors from commissioning themselves to write scripts in most circumstances. Instead, generally speaking, they did revisions and rewrites to other scripts. But with some frequency the situation got complicated and various pen names and other schemes arose to cover the fact that the script editor had written a script themselves.

In this case, David Whitaker, the outgoing script editor, hired Dennis Spooner to write The Romans, then quit, and his replacement, Dennis Spooner, hired him to write The Rescue. Oh, and for accounting purposes, The Romans is actually The Rescue Parts 3-6.

It's fitting, given all of this, that The Romans is the first Doctor Who story to be explicitly devised as a comedic farce. (Indeed, it's also basically the last one until Partners in Crime in 2008.) So, a comedic historical tale. Exactly what one imagines the nation wanted as their great wartime hero of a former prime minister is buried.

Of course, Churchill's legacy in the UK is somewhat more complex than one might assume. In the election immediately following the war, the Tories were hammered and he was replaced by Clement Atlee, who, in historical hindsight, is actually about as much of a lion as Churchill. Then, in 1951, an aging Churchill was returned to power for a frankly lackluster second spell that did no favors for his reputation. Churchill, in his second term, fought hard to keep the British Empire together. By 1965, the empire was all but gone.

In other words, Churchill, though unmistakably a national hero and national treasure, was also part of the fading old Britain. Watched through that lens, The Romans does not necessarily seem like less of a mismatch for the national mood, but it at least becomes somewhat more interesting.

On the one hand, The Romans, despite being a comedy, is fundamentally a conservative story, miles from the oddly post-anarchistic youth revolution of the last two stories. The Doctor's adventuring spirit that blossomed in the last two episodes has mostly vanished, he's back to abusing Ian and Barbara, and all sense of ambition towards challenging storytelling is out the window. Which makes this oddly apropos for mourning the old Britain.

On the other hand, there are ways in which the show seems to resist the over-simplification. The storytelling as a whole may be unambitious, but it does open with one of the most unusual starts of an episode - the TARDIS falls off a cliff, and we cut to a month later with the TARDIS crew vacationing in a Roman villa, showing that the idea that stories start with something bad happening to the TARDIS and the crew trying to get it back/back to working order.

The story also pushes the characters subtly. I've spoken in past entries about the lack of significant support in the show thus far for the theory that Ian and Barbara are lovers. That goes out the window with their scenes at the Roman villa, where they have a visible intimacy that we've just never seen before.

If the Doctor has regressed in his general behavior and treatment of Ian and Barbara, however he's helped by the fact that Susan, who Reign in Terror demonstrated pretty conclusively Spooner can't write for, is gone. Instead we have Vicki, and the Doctor has a whole new relationship to set up.

A brief word here about Maureen O'Brien. Much has been made of the scope of the task Patrick Troughton faced in season four in reinventing the role of the Doctor. But Maureen O'Brien's Vicki is mostly overlooked as a major companion despite the fact that her job was identical to Troughton's - revamp the role of the companion, and in particular the young girl companion role originated by Carole Ann Ford. Yeah, her character suffers continually at the hands of writers who view the young girl companion as there so they have something to have the monsters kidnap. But she gives the role some real effort, and is easily the most charismatic person in the cast.

This story is structured in order to give her some real chance to shine. Ian and Barbara are sent off on a separate plot so that Vicki gets to be the main companion to the Doctor. The Doctor, for his part, seems primarily interested in impressing Vicki this episode. He ditches Ian and Barbara to take her to Rome and spends almost the whole time showing off, including one of his most memorable name-drops as he claims to have trained the Mountain Mauler of Montana.

It's worth commenting on the Doctor's tendency to name-drop his involvement in various historical figures' lives. He begins this with Ian and Barbara, which implies a lot of adventures before he met them. Certainly there's a case to be made for that - and a lot of writers have focused on that period, including Marc Platt, who wrote a contender for one of the best episodes of the classic series. But as I've argued pretty extensively, the case for pre-Unearthly Child adventures is weak given the Doctor's temperament and clear lack of experience in dangerous situations there, and the development of his character into actually seeming to like people since then.

Which really poses no problem in terms of his name-dropping. It just means he's lying. Which makes total sense after seeing this episode, given that he simultaneously claims to have inspired "The Emperor's New Clothes" and claims he wouldn't do something like inspire the Great Fire of Rome. Of course he makes up encounters with famous historical figures to impress the girls. It's completely consistent with his character - especially when you take into account the fact that lying is the only way to account for the disparities in claims about his age.

The idea that the Doctor is lying about his past adventures seems relatively compatible with the writers' intent in these episodes. It's clear watching Unearthly Child that Coburn intended that to be more or less his first adventure, and there's only a handful of relatively small encounters that Susan corroborates, neither of which appear to be full-fledged adventures. But it also ties in well with things that the writers could not possibly have had an idea of.

For instance, it's clear the writers intend the Doctor to be the old man that he appears to be. But in this story, he, for lack of a better phrase, does not act his age. He enjoys getting into fights, tries to impress the ladies, and is extensively vigorous. Which makes sense in the context of later developments - the Doctor is, in fact, a young man here.

Actually this interpretation works pretty well in most Hartnell stories - try watching one with that in mind. It's certainly reliably entertaining, and helps tremendously in this episode, particularly when the Doctor is giddy at the notion that he helped cause the Great Fire of Rome. The Doctor as giddy pyromaniac anarchist is an easier sell if one imagines the guy as being about equivalent to 17.

Ah, yes. The pyromaniacal anarchy bit. Because here's the thing - the story ends with Vicki and the Doctor helping to torch Rome, and both of them seeming downright delighted with it. Suddenly the character that, visually, is the most Old Britain character on the show is allied with the New Britain youngster in wanting to burn it all down.

What's most interesting is that this seems almost accidental in the story. The story is a lowbrow runaround of a farce that even Jacqueline Hill seems tired of by the end, in no small part because her entire plot involves being sleazily hit on by Nero. (Spooner did basically the same thing to her in Reign of Terror, which, actually, borders on being a bit of a thing.) The story's lone solidly funny gag is the professional poisoner. There is nothing ambitious in this story, little yet pyromaniacally anarchistic.

But here - unlike the last time Spooner furnished the show with a turkey of a historical - something has happened. The show has enough strength that interesting and challenging material comes out of the concept on its own.

Do you own The Romans on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do.

A Rather Special Model (The Rescue)

Boo.

It's 1965. January 2, 1965, to be precise. Life is good. The Beatles are at number one on both the album and singles charts with Beatles For Sale and Day Tripper. Doctor Who, having plowed through Christmas with its epic of Daleks in London, settles in for a two-parter that, while lacking somewhat in raw glamour, is at least of significant historical merit in that it is the first time since the show appeared that a new regular cast member is debuted.

Watching it, it is clear from the start that it is a different sort of story - fully 10% of the story has already passed when the TARDIS crew makes its first appearance. Instead, it starts by focusing on Vicki - the new girl. The result is arguably the first modern Doctor Who story.

See, eventually Doctor Who changes to be predominantly 45 minute single-episode stories instead of the original mode of 25 minute stories of varying episode counts, and the mode for most of the series of four-episode stories with occasional 2, 3, or 6 parters, depending on what the style was. Of these, the two-parter is in some ways the most interesting - there are only 7 of them in the history of the series. (Admittedly, there are also only 7 three-parters, but stay with me) The first was The Edge of Destruction, which was an early story that was made under such a massive pile of constraints as to be difficult to compare it to anything at all.

But what is most interesting about the two-parters is that, when credits and cliffhangers are taken into account, a two-part story comprised of 25 minute episodes comes out at about the same length as a 45-minute episode. One result of this is that this story has relatively modern pacing - certainly compared to the rest of the era, where stories are often structured with excruciating tedium.

On top of that, because the story consciously situates Vicki at its center, it is the first time since the very beginning of the series where we see the TARDIS heavily from the perspective of someone unused to it. This, keep in mind, is also the hallmark of the new series, with Rose, Martha, Donna (on her return), and to a lesser extent Amy all being introduced in that fashion.

One thing that's been very clear in the stories already watched is that Doctor Who quickly became a show with real aspirations. The Aztecs, The Sensorites, and The Dalek Invasion of Earth are all stories that, conceptually, could be made today - their basic ideas are genuinely daring. Hell, plot-wise The Sensorites basically is the plot to The Doctor's Daughter. But any of those stories would need massive replotting and reconceptualizing to actually work. The Rescue, while it would still need a good rewrite, would not necessarily need any drastic changes to its structure.

This is not entirely the consensus view of The Rescue. The major critique of the story is that its central mystery is obvious. This is hard to evaluate when you know what the central twist is, but I will point out two things in the twist's defense. First, even if you do somehow decide that Koquillion is a human in disguise and thus Bennett, this assumes that the viewer isn't supposed to get ahead of the Doctor. Which is an arbitrary decision. The reveal of Koquillion's identity hardly removes all problems the characters face on Dido. Knowing things that the characters don't is a classic technique to ratchet up suspense - indeed, the scenes of the Doctor following Bennett's trail are probably even better if you've made the leap all the way to figuring out that Bennett is the monster rather than merely in league with the monster.

Secondly, the fact that there is only one possible solution to the mystery is only a problem if the viewer realizes there's a mystery, which The Rescue avoids making obvious. This is actually a fairly savvy way to do it - instead of trying to divert suspicion from the lone suspect, divert suspicion from the mystery itself. Yes, if anyone is secretly Koquillion the evil monster guy it is Bennett, the lone character who is neither a regular nor recently announced as a new regular. But all of this presumes that the audience assumes that Koquillion is not an alien, when almost everything suggests that he is an alien.

Even after it is fairly clear that something is up with Bennett in the second episode, the assumption that he is Koquillion is in no way intuitive. The sounder assumption is that he is in league with Koquillion, because Koquillion is visibly a monster. The reveal that Koquillion is really Bennett in disguise is actually handled brilliantly, with the Doctor noting that the clothes worn by Koquillion are ceremonial garb that an alien of this planet would not normally wear. Koquillion then removes his mask and we realize that he's just Bennett in a rubber suit - the real aliens on the planet, when we see them a few minutes later, are actually completely humanoid.

This is a great reversal of expectations. Because, of course, Koquillion looks like a man in a rubber suit through the whole story. But that is in no way a clue that he's really a man in disguise. Indeed, the fact that he looks like a man in a rubber suit is, within the context of Doctor Who, extremely convincing evidence that he is not a man in a rubber suit but is, in fact, a monster. This is absolutely brilliant, and, perhaps more importantly, makes it clear that the show has known from the start that its effects were wobbly, and thus that the effects have never been about being persuasive illusions, but rather have been tools in a particular sort of storytelling. The limitations of the effects are part of the narrative structure of Doctor Who.

Which basically sums up where people go wrong with The Rescue, and to some extent with the Hartnell stories in general. They expect too little of the stories. To be fair, low expectations can often be rewarded in any period of Doctor Who. But the fact of the matter is that there's some genuinely elegant visual storytelling going on here. Consider, for instance, the early scene in which Vicki gives most of the exposition about the nature of the planet and the crashed ship. Exposition scenes are essential to Doctor Who, but brutal to stage well. This one is, frankly, the series' best yet - a long close-up of Vicki as she describes the situation that makes the scene not about the recitation of technobabble but about her desperation and fear.

If the story has one major failing it is that Ian and Barbara are a few characters too many. Their presence helps explain why Bennett is the only other human around - a short story like this suffers if it has too many characters - but the fact of the matter is, they're taking up space in this story. Ian contributes literally nothing to the plot, while Barbara gets some good scenes opposite Vicki. But looking at the story, it's clear that Barbara is paired up with Vicki not because it makes sense (Vicki stumbling upon Barbara, who is conveniently unconscious but mostly unhurt after being shoved off a cliff, is a bit of a stretch) but because someone has to give Vicki some characterization scenes. Barbara is really just filling a role that would normally be filled by another crew member if the story had room for one. All the same, Jacqueline Hill turns in a typically sublime performance.

But for the most part, this is a two-character drama of Vicki and the Doctor. Vicki is the girl who is scared and trapped on an alien planet, and the Doctor is the man who drops out of the sky and rescues her, and that's what this story is.

Interestingly, when we do cut to the TARDIS for the first time, steps are taken to increase doubt about the Doctor. He appears out of sorts, apparently because Susan is gone (there's a lovely scene where he calls for Susan to open the doors, then stops, clearly pained and embarassed at his lapse, and Barbara steps up and asks him to show her how to open the doors). Ian suggests that he's gone nuts, opting to nap inside the TARDIS instead of explore.

This is something we haven't seen of the Doctor on television since the early days of the show, and there he is more spiteful than vulnerable. Here he is wounded and clearly not firing on all cylinders. It's not until he meets Vicki and feels compelled to try to help her.

This entire dynamic is interesting, because it's also the first time the show has really asked the question of whether the TARDIS did more harm than good in arriving. At one point, Barbara mistakes a friendly alien for a monster and brutally guns down Vicki's pet sand monster. Which is an absolutely horrifying scene. But in response to it, Vicki makes the quite reasonable point that a rescue ship will be along in a few days, she's alive, she can deal with Koquillion's threats and menacing, and thus far all the Doctor and his friends have managed is murdering her pet.

This - not the Doctor confronting Koquillion later in the episode - is the story's actual climax. The Doctor is confronted with the accusation that he's doing harm, not good, and his response is, basically, to fall head over heels for the young girl, turn on the charm offensive, win her over, and save the day, all of which he accomplishes in a few minutes once he puts his mind to it. Indeed, from Ian and Barbara's perspective, he wanders off into the other room of the ship, disappears somewhere, and when he reappears a bit later he's solved everything and they're ready to go. His showing up to a concerned Ian and Barbara and basically saying "Oh, yes, I got that all taken care of" is probably the funniest scene the series has had thus far.

It is probably worth a side trip to briefly observe that this is the third story in a row to be directly connected to the UK. The last two were set there, and here the spaceship is explicitly a British ship. There's a rush of nationalism here - particularly in this story and the one before. The Daleks invade Earth, yes, but what they really want is Britain, and it's the Brits (helped by the Doctor, our honorary Englishman) who drive them off. This story is expressly set a few hundred years after the Dalek invasion, and Britain is flourishing. Given that the show just sent a major character off to rebuild Britain, it's non-trivial that it immediately goes and shows the viewers that Britain does rebuild. But, equally crucially, it does not rebuild into the Old Britain of empire. Rather, it is vibrant youth like Vicki who are the visible symbol of post-Dalek Britain. Given the parallels between Daleks and the Nazis and the fact that World War II is now firmly in the past, this message is striking, suggesting as it does a profound desire for broad social reform. And it is worth remembering specifically that the first time the Doctor really lit up and engaged with the world around him was at the prospect of the Thals rebuilding Skaro.

The show, then, has quietly but explicitly allied itself with the burgeoning New Britain. Doctor Who is not only a show for kids (although it's clear that it was designed with them in mind) but for youth. Compare the ethos of a youthful, rebuilt Britain of the future with the liner notes of Beatles for Sale:

There's priceless history between these covers. When, in a generation or so, a radioactive, cigar-smoking child, picnicking on Saturn, asks you what the Beatle affair was all about, don't try to explain all about the long hair and the screams! Just play them a few tracks from this album and he'll probably understand. The kids of AD2000 will draw from the music much the same sense of well being and warmth as we do today.

The implications of this shift are completed when Vicki, our starchild, is invited by the Doctor to join them. It is very, very clear that the Doctor is a bit smitten with her (in the way that he often is with his companions). In the growing cultural divide of Britain, there is no real ambiguity as to what side the Doctor is on now. This story and the last one are the first time the show has re-invented itself, going from adventure serial to cultural icon. To a real extent, they are as important as the Tenth Planet-Power of the Daleks pair in two years, in that they firmly establish the show's capacity for reinvention and unlimited length.

And so we get, at the end of the episode, one of the series' most iconic shots - one we'll see repeated over and over again in the 46 years following this episode. Vicki walks into the TARDIS for the first time, and we see her awe at its mysteries. When Ian and Barbara fell into the TARDIS, it was a place of menace. Now it is a place of wonder, and the sequence here is the baseline that every other first-TARDIS-entrance scene is responding to.

And with that completed, the Doctor takes off again, new companion in tow. What a surprise. Everything has changed forever. Again.

Do you own The Rescue on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do.

They Always Survive, While I Lose Everything: The Dalek Invasion of Earth

The Daleks, like most creatures in the universe,
simply cannot abide plaid pants.

It is November 23rd, 1963. The Supremes "Baby Love" is at the top of the charts. Next up, the Rolling Stones take the charts for a week before that strangely perfect match for Doctor Who wanders through and The Beatles' "I Feel Fine" rounds out the year.

During these six weeks, Wonderful Radio London, one of the offshore radio stations memorialized in Richard Curtis's more or less execrable film The Boat That Rocked/Pirate Radio, debuted - a station that would have a huge role to play in the rising New Britain over the next few years.

And on television, Doctor Who premieres with its eleventh story. Hang on tight. Everything is going to change. Again.

See, there's something about Doctor Who we haven't talked much about yet. And that's the Daleks. Who debuted about a year ago now, and are frighteningly popular. In June, way back when The Aztecs was airing, The Dalek Book was published. Concurrently with this story airing the Go-Gos (No, not those Go-Gos - the other ones) release the novelty single "I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek." In other words, the Daleks were the show's best claim to pop culture relevance.

And so of course they return, in what is basically the most important Doctor Who story to air yet with the possible exception of the first episode. I have not done an extensive study of primary source material here - there are plenty of overviews of Doctor Who that have, and I don't have access to the archives that would be necessary to do it well - but my understanding is that the return of the Daleks was a known and promoted factor before the first episode of this story aired.

Which makes the pacing of the first episode somewhat odd. The entire episode is structured around its final scene - a Dalek emerging from the Thames to menace the Doctor and Ian. And rightly so - it's an absolutely phenomenal cliffhanger. But to work, it has to be the first appearance of the Daleks in the story. The cliffhanger hinges on being a spectacular reveal and a culmination of deferred desire. It's exciting not because you suspect the Doctor and Ian are in real danger - if you've watched the show before you know they're not going out on a cliffhanger like this. It's exciting because the Daleks are finally here, and this is the moment that pays off that desire.

Unfortunately, it means that the 22.5 minutes prior to that scene are horrifically dragged out attempts to hold off starting the story. Which requires such unfortunate setpieces as Ian being surprised to find out that a man who tumbled out of a cardboard box is dead. (Yep. I still hate Ian.)

But there are some key things in the first episode to look at. The first is the starkness of the setting - ruined landmarks and a silent London. For the second story in a row, the story hinges on making the familiar seem foreign and scary. In this context, its opening shot - a helmeted man staggering down towards the river with a sign reading "It is forbidden to dump bodies in the river" visible in the backdrop, then screaming and throwing himself in the river to drown - is absolutely stunning. (Interestingly, the story also ends away from the TARDIS, making this the first Doctor Who story that is portrayed from the world's perspective through and through instead of from the Doctor's.)

Much of the effect of this horror-London is historically dependent - the Daleks are visibly invading a ruined 1960s London. The iconic shot that shows that London is ruined is the Battersea Power Station. Which was abandoned within 20 years of the episode airing. But the end effect of this - bolstered by the handful of location sequences a few episodes in - is that the familiar images of London become scenes of potential horror. When you see Daleks milling around Trafalgar Square, the effect is not to have Daleks become scarier because they seem more real. It's to make Trafalgar Square scarier because it seems less real.

Also interesting in the first episode is the use of the Robomen, who are basically a placeholder monster so that there can be some good running around before the Daleks show up. This is not a hugely sophisticated narrative technique, but it is sufficiently sophisticated to tell us something important about the show, namely that it has, by this point, established monsters as part of its paradigm. You can only have a fake-out placeholder monster if the expectation is that there will be a monster. In other words, you need to have a sufficiently developed sense of what the monster should be that you can create an imitation of that role. Which is, again, a case of the show being somewhat better at knowing what it's doing than it is at actually doing it.

But it's with episode 2 that the story really takes off. Because as soon as the Dalek emerges from the Thames, The Doctor is a completely different person. Many pixels have been illuminated on the subject of where the Doctor changes from a guy who would smash a man's brain out because it's convenient to the character we recognize as The Doctor. In truth it's a gradual process - the Doctor is, after all, still prone to deciding to chuck Ian and Barbara out a mere two stories ago. But it seems to me that the final stage in that process clearly takes place here. Regardless of whether the Doctor suffers from future regressions in his personality, in this story he is without a doubt the Doctor.

And it appears that it is the image of a Dalek emerging from the Thames that accomplishes that. Once the Dalek shows up, all the Doctor really wants to do is have a proper chinwag with it, which is really the moment where you know the show you have is Doctor Who. If the Doctor and his companions escaped and fell out of the world in the first story, here is where we really see the infinite extensibility of the premise.

See, I've said that every story is a Doctor Who story. And I stand by that. But it's not the TARDIS that makes the show what it is. The show is the fusion of four distinct elements that add up to make the greatest concept in television ever. The TARDIS is the first of these to be introduced - literally, with that first shot, it is the magic box that makes the world strange.

From there we have seen two more elements clearly emerge. First, monsters, of which the Daleks are the archetypes. There are better occasions to talk about monsters than this, so for now let's simply note that they serve to make the world scary.

Next are the companions, introduced mostly in the stories from The Aztecs through Planet of Giants. Traditionally the companion is described as the audience identification figure. For a variety of reasons, this is stupid, although it's such a key piece of received wisdom that even people who are frankly smarter than that - Steven Moffat, for instance - are forced to repeat it. In fact there are hardly any companions in the history of the show who are actually audience identification figures, and even they are only audience identification figures in a handful of stories. No - the role of the companions is to serve as a check on the Doctor. The companions are, both literally and metaphorically, what makes the Doctor confront the monsters. This is the major takeaway of all those exquisite Doctor/Barbara scenes - especially in Planet of Giants, and really in The Time Travellers. The Doctor fights because his companions want him to, and he loves his companions. And inasmuch as the companion is the audience identification figure, this is how - because they stand in for his broader love of humans, and thus stand in for the audience's desire that he fight.

Which leaves us with the fourth part, which makes its appearance here in something approximating its full and final form. That, of course, is the Doctor himself. It's not enough to have people in peril from scary things in a strange universe. You also need a man who genuinely loves exploring the universe and getting into trouble. You need, in other words, a sense of fun. And that's what the Doctor injects. He takes the danger his companions are in and turns it into fun. And this is why he has to chinwag with the Daleks. For no other reason than that it is more fun. Every Doctor Who confrontation, in the end, is built around the expectation that the Doctor will enjoy it, and thus that it will be fun to watch. The Doctor talks his way out of trouble because it's more exciting. You don't want to see the Doctor just blow up the Daleks from afar. You want to see him mock them first, then go defeat them.

And you get that here. The Dalek emerge from the Thames, and within a few minutes, even though the Daleks do not recognize the Doctor as The Doctor and thus as their arch-nemesis, they're terrified of him. As he's led off to prison, the Dalek neurotically repeats "We are the masters of Earth," making it sound less like a triumphant Dalek boast than like a small child rocking itself back and forth and trying to convince itself that it will all be OK. Paul Cornell's great line that the Doctor is what monsters have nightmares about starts here. The Daleks take one look at the Doctor and are terrified of him. Meanwhile, the Doctor is having the time of his life - giggling like a schoolboy as he breaks out of prison, mocking Daleks, insisting that he is the Doctor, not simply "Doc," etc. And it's made him a better person - far from head-smashing Doctor, here the Doctor scolds other characters for being overly violent. All due, it seems, to the Daleks.

So let's talk about the Daleks in their second appearance. In their first appearance, they were simply generic monsters. The story seems to know it has something special with them, but has no idea how special they are. In this story, because they're the first monster ever to return, the story implicitly treats them as the Doctor's arch-nemesis. So what gets formulated as the Doctor's arch-nemesis?

Actually, something almost, but not quite, totally incoherent. The Daleks' plan in this episode is easily one of the most insane in the series long and storied history. They want to, and I want to stress here that I am not making this up or exaggerating at all, remove the Earth's magnetic core so they can install an engine and drive the planet around as a spaceship.

It is very much unclear why an unaerodynamic planet is the ideal place to do this, or why England is the perfect place to do the drilling here. Clearly, if the Daleks have a fully functional invasion fleet, there's not a huge need for spaceships. They're in pretty good shape on that front. So presumably the Earth is to be a sort of prestige vehicle. A sort of Porche for the mid-life crisis of a Dalek. I picture Daleks pulling along upside another planet and saying "Hey Babe. I drive a planet." 

But there's actually something strangely brilliant about the arbitrariness of this plot. Because it makes it clear that the plot doesn't matter. The plot is literally nothing more than an excuse to bring the Daleks around again. The Daleks don't need a good reason to invade a planet or be evil. They're just Daleks. They're the bad guys. They are, at this point, designed to be the things that, when they show up, you go "Oh shit, it's the Daleks!" 

Adding to this sense of the Daleks being pure plot devices is the fact that Dalek history is completely insane. The Doctor claims that this must be the "middle period" of Dalek history, at an earlier point in their history. Except that the Daleks in this story are more advanced than the late-period Daleks, who were unable to move around except on their metal floors. Furthermore, the conceit in this story as to why they can do that - the circular dishes installed on their backs - vanish without comment after this story. And the last story was ostensibly the Daleks' origin, making it an open question when, exactly, in the course of their hiding from the fallout of their war with the Thals they built an intergalactic empire.

Here's where The Time Travellers comes in real handy with this story. Because thanks to that book, the Doctor knows the Daleks have time travel technology. Thus their chronology is not entirely at issue - as that book makes it clear that time can be rewritten. Why the Doctor declines to own up to this is the sort of unanswered question that is necessarily going to come up when you try to reconcile two stories written by two totally different people 41 years apart, but to The Time Travellers's credit, it does file off some of the rough edges of this story.

But I want to be clear here - it files them off in a way that does not seem inconsistent with the episode. The episode knows full well that the Daleks are the Doctor's arch-nemesis. It has the paradigm of Doctor vs. Daleks down. But right now, the phenomenon is purely a pop phenomenon. The reason this story exists is because it's the Doctor vs. his most popular enemies in the capital of the country the show airs in. This could be dismissed as a pander to the fans, but that misunderstands what's going on here. It's not a pander to the fans - it's Doctor Who as pop spectacle. (An idea heightened by the fact that the idea of Daleks in different colors appears here for the first time) That's at the heart of the Doctor's character - his contribution to the four tentpoles holding the series up. The Doctor has fun doing what he's doing, and so of course he has a big pop spectacle of an adventure here and there. 

Terry Nation is the writer who understood this first. The Daleks was an invitation to over the top spectacle. Keys of Marinus was based around the show's ability to create madcap spectacle. In his next contribution for the show, he'll take this to its logical end. But it's worth noting just how much of the paradigm of the show has come together in Nation-scripted stories. 

But if he understands here that the Daleks are a pop spectacle, he doesn't quite get why. Hence the ridiculous plot and incoherent history on their second appearance. I mean, with nearly 50 years of Dalek stories, it's no surprise that the repeated efforts to destroy them all have gotten a bit wonky, but screwing up Dalek history irretrievably in only two goes at it is a sort of rare art of ignoring continuity that most writers can only aspire to. It works here, but only because the pop spectacle is audacious enough to carry you through the nonsense. 

But if you add in the Time Travellers, you get one key detail, which is that the Doctor has a reason to know that the Daleks are his arch-nemesis. He knows they travel in time. He knows that eventually he'll have to face them down over what he did in Coal Hill School in 1963. When the Dalek rises from the Thames, in other words, the Doctor has a reason to recognize the Doctor-Dalek relationship. And in recognizing the Daleks as his arch-nemesis, he implicitly fixes them into their role in the binary.

With all four tentpoles clearly in place and the Doctor running around having the time of his life, the show can finally begin the frankly quite important process of what I would describe as making the Doctor an ontological force in the narrative. Here, I should admit, I'm staking a major position in Doctor Who fandom - one that is specifically and categorically opposed to that of Lawrence Miles, who, along with Tat Wood, wrote a six-volume set of books analyzing every Doctor Who story, and thus owns a frightening amount of the territory TARDIS Eruditorum is working in. Lawrence Miles is adamantly opposed to treating the Doctor as a fetish object. Which, I'll admit, is exactly the same thing I'm talking about.

See, in this episode, we start to get characters talking about how fundamentally special and wonderful the Doctor is. He's treated, by the story, as the big hero of a character. Miles describes this sort of thing as "removing any possible dramatic tension." I describe it as Doctor Who fully embracing its own potential. You say potato...

See, to my mind, there is no dramatic tension as such in Doctor Who, because you know exactly when in the story the Doctor is going to make it all work, namely about ten minutes from the end of the final episode. Cliffhangers are a bit of a joke, and when they work - as they do when the Daleks rise from the Thames - it's not because you fear for the characters, but because you're desperate to see what happens next. The tension of Doctor Who is not whether the characters are going to survive or win. It's not even when they're going to win. It's how. And it's specifically a writerly sort of how. That is, you tune into Doctor Who next week having spent a week trying to guess where the story is going to go so as to check your answer. It's a game of whether you can come up with something as good as the writers to get the Doctor to the next part of the story. Which, crucially, the audience knows full well what is. What makes a Doctor Who episode great is when every episode is a better solution for what to do next than the audience can come up with.

And so reveling in the Doctor as a mythic figure and openly accepting that around fifteen minutes into episode 4 he's going to save the day is not a matter of destroying dramatic tension. It's a matter of actively engaging with your audience. Because anyone who sticks around for the long haul of Doctor Who is doing it because they want to see what's next, not out of concern that it might be all the characters dying. Miles objects that this is pandering only to long-term viewers, but I think this mistakes an investment in the mythos with an investment in the continuity. Wanky stories that are all about making allusions to past stories are pandering to long-term viewers. But if your show positions the Doctor as a mythic character continually, then writing explicitly around that fact isn't pandering to long-term viewers, it's doing what you said you were going to do. 

And that's part of the genius of Doctor Who in this episode. Exactly a year on the air, and it's figured out that if you just have William Hartnell walk around acting like he's totally confident that he's got everything under control and like he's having the time of his life, the rest of the show will click into place behind it. You don't need to spend years or decades establishing the Doctor as a mythic character. You can just have him go out there and be mythic, and the audience will go "Oh, he's a mythic character, gotcha." And to my mind, understanding how to use the mythic like that is one of the show's primary geniuses, not a horrid wrong turn. 

For why it's great, one need look no further than the end of the episode, where the Daleks are defeated because Barbara tells the Robomen to attack them. This scene is beautiful. First, it's a follow-up to an earlier scene where Barbara has her own glorious chinwag with the Daleks by spinning an extended story about the threats they face that is flagrantly just stitched together bits of American history. This is so she can get to the panel that controls the Robomen, but she's stopped at the last second. So when the Doctor finally shows up and they try the plan again, it's a lovely moment of vindication for Barbara, the useful companion. 

But more to the point, Barbara orders the Robomen to attack the Daleks with an absolutely hilarious imitation of Dalek voices produced by moving her hand back and forth in front of her face to stutter her voice. Then the Robomen riot against the Daleks, including what is probably the single most barmily wonderful shot of Doctor Who thus far, a bunch of Robomen with a Dalek basically crowd-surfing on top of them. This entire sequence is pop spectacle payoff. The episode is ending not with a careful and logical sense of narrative teleology, but with the fact that the Dalek voices are fun to do and it's funny to watch a Dalek crowdsurf. And that works here, on the Daleks' second appearance. And it's why you watch Doctor Who. Because Star Trek is never going to have a crowd-surfing Klingon.

But there's another huge aspect of this story to deal with. The Doctor, at the end of it, is fully the Doctor for, really, the first time in the series. But that, in turn, means that it is necessary to return to the Problem of Susan. We can see the problem in starker relief now. If the role of the companion is to push the Doctor into having fun as a hero, then Susan is an abject failure, as the Doctor's primary motivation with her is to run off and protect her. 

This becomes somewhat clear in this episode. In a restaging of their feud in The Sensorites, the Doctor and Susan differ on whether they should head north or try to get back to the TARDIS. In this case, as before, it's Susan who wants to go get into danger and the Doctor that wants to retreat. In other words, because the Doctor is the parent figure to child-Susan, he is unable to adventure. Susan, then, needs to grow up. Which is a sexualized process.

Accordingly, the Doctor hits on a very sensible solution - dump Susan off with the first man she's attracted to and tell her to make babies. In fact, when the Doctor does lock her out of the TARDIS, his stated reason is that she's a woman now. In other words, it's because she's had a sexual awakening - and earlier in the story she and David have, in the words of Amy Pond, a snog in the shrubbery. 

What I want to stress, though, is that this remains enormously problematic. Not just in that the Doctor is basically forcing Susan to marry the first guy she kisses and have babies, but in the staggeringly creepy moment where David tells Susan that staying on Earth with him is finally her chance to have an identity. Yes, this is a callback to a scene a few episodes earlier, but still, it highlights how appallingly powerless Susan is made.

None of this is helped by the staging of the farewell scene. Carole Ann Ford hits it out of the park, showing the producers quite clearly how much they wasted her talents. But William Hartnell, doing his part of the scene on the TARDIS set, feels like he's reading off a teleprompter (Or, as I have just discovered if one wants to be proper, a TelePrompTer brand cueing device). Which, to be fair, he probably was, since fusing two scenes together like this was actually a bit of a technical challenge, but it ends up looking like the Doctor really is eager to get rid of Susan. Which, to be fair, he has seemed to be much of the episode, but it does suck the drama out pretty hard.

The Doctor promises that some day he will return. He never does. One can try to fill in some missing story for this - a couple exist from the Eighth Doctor era - but the fact of the matter is, here Susan is treated like any other companion. Which is to say, she's abandoned. Looking at the Doctor and Susan together, it's tough to explain why. The Doctor so clearly cares deeply about Susan. And he has family reasons to be with her. But he abandons her forever.

Why? 

The Problem of Susan, then, proves here to be more resilient than we might have hoped. Initially, it appeared to be the problem of sexual awakening. But the Doctor's promise to return eliminates that - he clearly means years down the road, after she is more comfortable as an adult. So why does he lie? Why is an adult Susan so anathema to the Doctor that he abandons her? I mean, this is, in hindsight, a huge problem. Admittedly at the time we expect Susan will grow old and die normally, but later developments in the series make it clear that Susan, as a Time Lord, will regenerate and live for ages, stuck, apparently, on Earth with no TARDIS and a lover who grew old and died as she stayed young forever. This is really, really, intensely not nice of the Doctor.

The Problem of Susan - that something about her and her transition to adulthood renders the Doctor unable to return to her - is, I will go ahead and admit, still unresolved. Perhaps someday the Doctor will carry out his promise. 

Do you own The Dalek Invasion of Earth on DVD yet? If not, consider buying it from Amazon via this link. I'll get some of the money if you do.

Time Can Be Rewritten 2: The Time Travellers (Simon Guerrier, BBC Books, 2005)

I like traffic lights...

Time Can Be Rewritten is a recurring feature in which stories written in later years that were intended to be retconned into previous eras are analyzed in the context of their presumptive eras. Today we look at Simon Guerrier's 2005 novel from BBC Books, The Time Travellers.


It is November of 2005. The number one singles for the month are Westlife's "You Raise Me Up" and Madonna's "Hung Up." If 2000 was the absolute low point of Doctor Who, this is more or less the high point. On television, Christopher Eccleston regenerated into David Tennant five months ago, and in this month's mini-episode for Children in Need, the world saw him for the first time.

This book, then, is a holdover - the second to last book to emerge from BBC Books, which had been carrying the Doctor Who torch since 1997. The problem is that in April of 2005, Russell T. Davies's Doctor Who established the Last Great Time War as a major plot thread. For a variety of reasons that we'll deal with when we get to this era, this was a phenomenally massive diss to the BBC Books line, a diss that the series has basically made no effort whatsoever to apologize or make up for. So this book is, in many ways, a ghost - the last breath of an already dead strand of Doctor Who history.

Which is perhaps why, unshackled from any actual responsibilities to be good or carry on the tradition of the series or break new ground and ensure the series long term survival, Simon Guerrier was able to do something that had frankly been lacking in the bulk of the BBC Books output - write a really interesting story that filled a meaningful gap in the series history.

See, not to get too spoiler heavy, but in the televised story after Planet of Giants, Susan becomes the first regular character to depart Doctor Who. If, at the end of the third episode of Planet of Giants, you suspected this, you are, frankly, psychic, as the story gives no setup whatsoever for that development. So it makes sense to put something in the gap between the two stories - a decent gap, given that the only teaser at the end of Planet of Giants is that the Doctor has no idea where they are. Admittedly the next episode also begins with the Doctor having no idea where they are, but let's be fair, that's true of almost every episode of Doctor Who. (Oddly, Time Travellers is the only story in Doctor Who set in this gap, with other stories preferring the Reign of Terror-Planet of Giants gap despite the fact that, as pointed out by a commenter two entries ago, that gap is actually a bit dodgy, whereas this gap is pretty solid. Indeed, given that Ian and Barbara are visibly surprised that they might be in London at the start of the next story, moving a few more stories into this gap would not be an unreasonable decision on the part of those who are obsessive enough about Doctor Who chronology to care about this sort of thing.)

But The Time Travellers is more than a novel explaining why Susan departs in the next story. It is also a novel that seeks to resolve the unresolved plot threads of The Aztecs and explain coherently every single continuity error in the whole of Doctor Who. Which is normally the sort of hubristic overreach that dooms a novel, except to his real credit, Guerrier manages to pull it off.

The novel is set in 2006 - less than one year after its publication. But this is not a 2006 that extends in any way from the experience of 2005. Rather, this is a dystopian 2006 that is designed to feel like it extends from 1964. The UK is locked in a long-term war with South Africa, which appears to be winning, and, more broadly, the novel is set after a disastrous incident in 1968 where a computer nearly destroyed the world. In other words, it is a novel that is clearly not set in the right universe.

What is most interesting about this decision is that the novel works in two registers. To the sort of obsessive Doctor Who fan who would be reading a First Doctor novel published in the same month that the Tenth Doctor has his first major appearance, the novel makes perfect sense. Those fans immediately recognize that the alluded to computer is WOTAN, the villain of the third season finale The War Machines. But, just as importantly, the novel also feels like a plausible future of 1964, allowing Ian and Barbara to believe completely not that this is a possible future but the future, immutable, as the Doctor told Barbara in The Aztecs.

In terms of the Doctor's chronology, there are no televised adventures prior to this in which the Doctor involves himself in the plot completely willingly - as opposed to last episode where he enjoys involving himself, but seems to do so in part out of fealty to Barbara. Here, however, upon realizing that the British government is experimenting with time travel, the Doctor involves himself completely willingly, actively refusing to run. This is a moment of character development for the Doctor, and is worth looking at. Why does the Doctor suddenly decide to remain?

The answer, in essence, is that he's a Time Lord. This is never said in as many words - but both the Doctor and Susan, as they separately realize what is going on, immediately realize that they have to deal with this. We've seen this once before with the Doctor - with his vicious insistence to Barbara in The Aztecs that she not change history. Here the phrase Time Lord makes sense. The Doctor, even on the run from his people, sees himself as having a feudal duty to time. He must defend it. Suffering humans, dying planets, these are things the Doctor can walk away from. But the threat of time travel in the wrong hands? That appalls him. That is simply something that, as a Time Lord, he has to deal with. To do otherwise would be an abdication of the Doctor's duty as a nobleman with dominion over time. Even a renegade Time Lord must display some fealty to his vassal.

This requires, then, a revision to The Aztecs - sensible enough, given that the Doctor has, in every other story, clearly altered history with some abandon. And so The Time Travellers undertakes its most radical conceit - one so blindingly obvious in hindsight that it's a marvel 27 seasons of Doctor Who had to air before anyone thought of it.

In fact, the Doctor finally admits, every time he opens the TARDIS doors, he changes history. After all, the TARDIS was designed to observe history. That's why it has a scanner and chameleon circuit - so it can disguise itself in a given time period and simply watch in silence. The biggest aspect of the Doctor's renegade nature is not that he runs around the Universe willy nilly - it's that he ever leaves the TARDIS. The reasons he lied to Barbara in The Aztecs are that he felt this explanation was overly complex and put too much responsibility on her, and that he really doesn't want to muck with time because it would attract the attention of his people.

Furthermore, all changing history does is split the timeline. If you travel back from the future and change the past, what happens is that you're stuck in a past that can never resolve into your own future. In other words, every Doctor Who story is, to some extent, a retcon of previous stories. If a later adventure of the Doctor's invalidates a previous adventure, that is resolved simply by deciding that, yes, the Doctor changed history and is no longer in a universe where his own past adventures happened. Which is, cleverly, a key conceit of the novel. The readers know that in two seasons the Doctor will defeat WOTAN and invalidate the entire setting of this novel. But set before the Doctor has met WOTAN, the novel can also be set in a universe where WOTAN won. When the War Machines airs, it simply moves this story into an abandoned timeline.

This may seem like an obvious conceit ripped off from, say, Primer. But in the context of Doctor Who, it's actually tremendously significant in that it changes the series from being about a wide universe that the Doctor wanders - a concept that makes it mostly the educational program it repeatedly tried to be in the first season - to a series about the Doctor. If the entire universe changes at the start of every episode when the TARDIS doors open then it is the Doctor, who remains consistent as he freely alters the timeline in both big and small ways, that becomes the central character of the show. Furthermore, the "lonely wanderer" aspect of the show that is cemented by Russell T. Davies in 2005 becomes completely explicable - because the Doctor is, even at the start of An Unearthly Child, more profoundly cut off from his home than he lets on. The Doctor has, in fact, already destroyed the timeline he hailed from. In fact, since it's clear that he engaged in mildly disruptive tourism prior to Totters Lane, he has done so several times over. No wonder later in the series he never goes back for a companion. After all, as soon as he's had one adventure without a given companion, that companion is immediately not "his" version of the companion but rather one from an alternate universe.

Interestingly, The Time Travellers refers to a future episode in two other key ways. First, there is an off-handed allusion to Rose in the novel. Second, and more significantly, the end reveal of how the British attained time travel technology is a reference to 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks. This is actually a bit odd - the story seems to simultaneously hinge on the fact that The War Machines has not yet happened, but that the 22-year-later story Remembrance of the Daleks has. The Doctor in the novel seems utterly unaware of how the Daleks might have made it into 1963, or why they're capable of time travel - both things that will make the next story specifically unusual. But notably, a review of the relevant scenes in the novel shows that the POV distances itself considerably from the Doctor and Susan. We don't know what the Doctor is thinking here.

What's particularly interesting about all of this is that Remembrance of the Daleks, as a story, hinges on the assumption that the Doctor had a reason for being in 1963 in An Unearthly Child. The information given to the Doctor about the Daleks' appearance on Earth is sufficient for him to figure out exactly where the Dalek equipment was found and to put two and two together and realize that it's connected to what he did in 1963. Which is another significant addition in this scene - this story is where the Doctor quietly realizes that the Daleks are an arch-nemesis - something that crucially sets up the next story. But more to the point, it ties the monsters in with the Doctor.

In other words, what The Time Travellers does is fills in a key gap in the series by making it self-reflexive. The book serves to actually make more sense of how the series got from Planet of Giants to Parting of the Ways over the course of forty plus years by finding a way to make future developments a subtext of past ones. We've already seen this with Campaign, but the elaborate meta-fiction of that via the Game of Me mostly makes Campaign a meta-commentary on the show. The Time Travellers is still meta-commentary - indeed, as of around this point in the series, every episode becomes meta-commentary to some extent. But unlike Campaign, The Time Travellers is not pure meta-commentary, but rather meta-commentary wedded to an actual story.

Alongside this mild apotheosis of the Doctor, see, is a story about Ian and Barbara being scared of the future. The novel opens with Ian reporting Barbara's death. The reader knows this is a feint. And if this were to be televised, the viewer would know it's almost certainly a feint. But as soon as alternate timelines are introduced, an interesting variation of this feint kicks up. We know that Ian and Barbara will both be alive at the end of the story. But we don't actually know which Ian and Barbara. Indeed, early in the novel Ian watches an alternate universe version of himself - one who is, apparently, married to Barbara - get shot.

This further adds to the supposed romantic tension between Ian and Barbara. Something we haven't seen much of in the series, in no small part because, as I've alluded, William Russell is kind of a crap actor who is incapable of any emotion other than stunned fascination/terror and is clearly a bit annoyed that he's not the lead actor. When the character is freed from his ball and chain of an actor by being in a novel, he's actually halfway decent - an unwilling action hero with endless misgivings about his life. And so the book can sell the Barbara/Ian romance. This is heightened by a clever nod at the problems of doing this - Ian's romantic interest in Barbara seems produced primarily by finding out that an alternate universe version of him was married to Barbara. In other words, this novel is presented as being a sort of clear starting point in the relationship.

But as in the series itself, it is Barbara who carries the story off. The emotional heart of the novel - a pair of scenes that one reads wishing that Hartnell and Hill had gotten the chance to perform it - are the sequences where the Doctor explains that he lied to her in The Aztecs, and where he confides in her that Susan is going to have to leave the TARDIS soon. I want to actually quote the novel here for these two sequences, because they really are fantastic.

'But Susan,' said the Doctor in his softest voice, 'we change history every time we step out of the doors of the Ship.'

'You said that -' began Barbara.

The Doctor whirled on her. 'Do you really want to know, Miss Wright?' he said. 'Do you really want to know? The TARDIS is built specifically not to change history. We can visit, we can observe, and the Ship can disguise itself so no one need ever know we were there. But only so long as we never step outside. We watch it all on the scanner. My people, you see...' He paused, searching for the words.

'Doctor?' Barbara prompted.

'I couldn't do that, could you?' he said. 'It's not travel, it wouldn't be real. We've seen the most incredible things, but without stepping out of those doors, I might as well have stayed in your time, content with your television sets.'

Ian took Barbara's hand, stopping her from responding. He knew what she wanted to say: that the Doctor had lied to them, that time in Mexico.

This sequence - actually the second of the two - is remarkable. For me, it is Barbara's prompting the Doctor to go on as he trails off, unable to continue his explanation. Barbara is clearly furious at the Doctor. She must be. She's a history teacher. Her entire life has been devoted to understanding what the past is. Now she's been given the opportunity to see it and travel through it, and she has found out that the Doctor has been lying to her about what time is. She's furious and betrayed. But on the other hand, that, in this scene, exists side by side with her genuine affection for the Doctor - the fact that when he is clearly having trouble explaining, when he is feeling guilty for having hurt her, she, in the midst of her rage, still steps in to comfort him, prompting him to continue. It's an absolutely note-perfect scene.

Then the other one:

'That's why you don't change history,' she said. 'It's not that

you can't, you just won't. It breaks everything up.' And it's easy to get carried away,' he said carefully. She felt like he understood, like he'd wanted all along to spare her this pain and confusion. 'We can't afford to be ostentatious in our travels.'

'But why, Doctor? Who can ever know what you've done, 'what you've changed?'

He smiled sadly 'There are those who can,' he said. 'And they will find us more easily if we draw attention to ourselves.'

Barbara considered this. 'The experiment here,' she said. 'It's bad news for us, isn't it? I mean for you and me, Ian and Susan.' The Doctor said nothing.

'How bad is it going to be, Doctor?'

His eyes twinkled mischievously at her. 'I haven't any idea at all,' he said. In an instant his mood had changed again. 'But it will be noticed, it will catch up with us, sooner or later. At least, it will catch up with me. I shall have to find a home for Susan. Somewhere safe for her.'

Barbara recoiled from him. 'You're going to abandon her?' She couldn't believe it.

The Doctor rested his chin on his hands. 'If ever I get you and Ian back to your own time, perhaps you would take her with you? Yes, I can see she'd be happy with you.'

Barbara took his hands. 'Of course we'd do anything you asked us,' she told him. 'But you must understand: Susan won't ever leave you. Not voluntarily.'

'No,' said the Doctor, shaking his head. He looked broken. 'I don't believe she would.'

I don't even know what to say here. That's just a phenomenal scene there. One that I wish Hartnell and Hill had gotten to act. Or, heck, gotten to read.

It's Jacqueline Hill, in all of this, that I really feel bad for. Her career started in 1953. She was over halfway to her death when she started on Doctor Who. And after Doctor Who, she basically retired, waiting thirteen years to take on her next acting role, instead raising children. From there she had a brief eight year career in which she made only a handful of appearances. She then retired again, and died of cancer in 1993 at the appallingly young age of 63. And reading what seems to be the one main interview with her on Doctor Who, I'm not sure she was, during her life, entirely aware of how brilliant she was as Barbara. Working on the show, she got grotesquely uneven material - as she points out in the aforementioned interview, she was often reduced to looking scared at the ends of corridors.

But unlike William Russell, she could sell fear and fascination as separate reactions. And more to the point, as I've said, when she is on screen with William Hartnell, the series just sings. Those are the scenes that really, firmly establish what the Doctor/Companion relationship is. But more to the point, Barbara is, as a character, uniquely capable of pushing the Doctor into emotionally uncomfortable moments. There really is no other character that the Doctor could have the scene quoted above with - nobody else in whom he would ever be able to confide that he needs to push Susan out of the TARDIS. Barbara, more than any other character, is the one that pushes the Doctor to become the Doctor. And all of that comes down to the fact that Hill and Hartnell are just jaw-dropping on screen together. Jacqueline Hill, to be frank, deserves as much credit as anyone on the planet for inventing Doctor Who. And I really hope she knew that.