Ready to Outsit Eternity (The Ark)

Oh, and to top it off, the Monoids are dark skinned. So we
have the dark-skinned savage of a monster kidnapping
the cute white girl. Nothing amiss here. No sir.

It's March 5, 1966. Boots continue to be made for walking. The Walker Brothers will, come March 17th, discuss how the sun ain't gonna shine no more. This seems flatly contradicted by the episode of Doctor Who that airs five days earlier, in which the sun expands and burns the Earth to cinders. Thankfully, that takes place in the far future. In 1966 itself, these weeks are fairly tame, presenting a nice tableau of what we might call stories about the British character. The Jules Rimet trophy for the World Cup is stolen, and dug up a week later by a dog named Pickles. The Archbishop of Canterbury courts controversy for having the gall to sit down and talk to the Pope. And Ronnie Kray, one of the two Kray Twins who basically run organized crime in London, commits the murder he'll finally be sent away for when he walks into the Blind Beggar pub and shoots George Cornell in the head, causing a record of "The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine No More" to skip endlessly on the word "anymore." Kray would manage to get away with this for three years by virtue of the fact that nobody was actually stupid enough to testify against a man who walked into pubs and shot people dead, this being a sort of tautological behavior. If you have the insane confidence needed to shoot someone in the head in front of numerous witnesses because you believe yourself to be untouchable, you also have the insane confidence needed to actually be untouchable. At least for a while.

It's not that these are dark days. They're not. It's that they're deeply schizoid days, in which the sort of rampant corruption needed to have the Kray twins exists side by side with the charming nationalistic glee of Pickles the trophy-finding dog.

"Deeply schizoid" is an apt phrase, really, for talking about the end of John Wiles's tenure producing Doctor Who, which happens with this episode. He was only on board for four stories, though of course, one of them was rather long, and yet it seems difficult to overstate his importance to the show. Even if, under him, the ludicrous failure to resolve The Massacre well (a problem that really is constrained entirely to the last ten minutes of the story, as the rest of it is phenomenal) and thus failed to quite resolve the ongoing plot arc of the Doctor's inadequacy, the fact of the matter is that, on quality, The Myth Makers, The Daleks Master Plan, and The Massacre have been among the best Doctor Who stories we've seen. And now we have his finale, and the lone story of his tenure to be complete in the archives.

Oddly, though, The Ark is the first and only time under John Wiles that we'll get something that feels more or less like a normal Doctor Who story. It's actually been six months since we last had a story in which the Doctor and company arrive on an alien world and have to learn the rules and situation of that world, as opposed to a historical or a big story about Daleks, who are great villains, but require no learning or exploration from the Doctor. The introduction of Daleks pretty much brings to a conclusion any speculation as to what the story might be or what's going on. 

Watching the opening of The Ark, then, one thing that is very clear is how much faster and more confident the program is in its third year. For all the complaints about the pacing on The Ark, it's very difficult not to notice that its first two episodes are basically The Sensorites done in 1/3 the time. Under Wiles, the show has learned to get to the point and tell a story. It will get better (the pacing of Doctor Who basically accelerates constantly over the years, and frankly, this is almost always a good thing), but Wiles has done a lot to tighten the storytelling.

The biggest loss to make up for this is, frankly, not that big a loss to anyone over the age of about ten - the show is much less didactically educational than it used to be. As tedious as the opening of The Ark in which Dodo walks around the jungle identifying animals is, just imagine if this had been a Season 1 story, in which case biological features of the animals would have been crucial to the resolution. Instead we get a remarkably savvy and clever sequence that fools us into thinking that we're looking at a stock footage elephant (complete with a shot-reverse-shot cut to Dodo's face that seems designed to hide the lack of a real elephant) only to have the TARDIS crew stride up and touch the elephant. And honestly, that's better than an educational digression about elephants.

Similarly, even though it takes over half an episode to get the Doctor to the plot, the plot starts moving before that. We don't spend the entire first episode on a mystery about where the TARDIS has landed this time. Nor, in the second episode, is the race to find a cure for the outbreak of disease on the Ark delayed by a runaround through the sewers. Instead, things happen with considerable frequency. So much so that, two episodes in, it looks as though we may have watched a two-parter and be on our way out of the story.

Then something interesting happens. The Doctor, Dodo, and Steven are driven off to the TARDIS (this is one of my favorite details of this story, by the way - the little golf carts that are used to transport people around the Ark, giving it a sense of scale.) The golf cart drives off, we watch the TARDIS dematerialize, and then... it reappears.

And it's here that The Ark simultaneously reaches its maximum genius and runs smack into what is, in the end, the biggest problem I have with John Wiles's tenure on the show. See, in episodes 1 and 2 of The Ark, in the background, there was a plot going on about the Monoids. Basically, the Monoids are tall aliens played by men with ping pong balls in their mouths painted like eyes, and weird Beatle wigs on top of their costumes. We're not told a lot about them - they were refugees who came to Earth when their own world was dying, and are valued as a servant class. They seem friendly enough throughout the first two episodes. There are a couple of things that are unsettling - they're clearly second-class citizens. For instance, when the TARDIS crew is on trial for his role in spreading the plague across The Ark, the trial only gets really serious when a human dies of the plague, when previously it had just been Monoids. And there's a really uncomfortable scene where the Monoids have a funeral procession for one of the plague victims, and Dodo says they look like savages.

All of which is remarkably subtle set-up for the episode 2 cliffhanger, in which the statue that the humans were building, which we were told would take 700 years to build, is now complete. Oh, and it's a statue of a Monoid. 

And unfortunately, after 22 episodes of incredibly high quality, which left me expecting to watch The Ark and write up a nice retrospective on John Wiles that talked about him as an overlooked creative genius in the history of Doctor Who, we got the two episodes that made me completely re-evaluate his entire tenure.

I mean, not that he's talentless. The last two episodes of The Ark are great to watch. That's not the problem. The problem is... well, OK. The usual criticism of The Ark's latter half is that the Monoids, once they're in charge and oppressing the humans, are utterly stupid villains who do things like inadvertently explain their whole plan, out loud, to the humans. And they have a Security Kitchen (though to be fair, eventually when the show comes up with ideas like a kitchen/prison, we decide it's brilliant. To my mind, if you hate the Security Kitchen, you'd better give up immediately on the Yeti, The Axons, Erato, The Eternals, Varos, The Candyman, Cassandra, The Adipose, and the Star Whale too).

Except here's the thing... I don't think it's poor plotting that makes the Monoids stupid. I think, actually, they're supposed to be stupid. I think that's completely deliberate. Because this story is a piece of colonialist, imperialist, and downright mean-spirited crap. 

Let's look carefully at the Monoids again. Refugees who arrived in a world otherwise full of white British people and were dutiful servants. Who are "savages" (or so says Dodo). Who can't even talk in the first two episodes. Does this sound remotely familiar to you? Perhaps if we threw in some poetry.

Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child.

That's Rudyard Kipling, by the way.

I mean, by any modern standards, the Monoids should be sympathetic. Treated like servants and second class citizens, they only rise up, we are told, because of a genetic defect that makes the humans docile and unfit to lead. And even then, they are only capable of rising up because the humans are foolish enough to arm them and give them the ability to talk. In a modern Doctor Who story, we'd want to see the Doctor on their side - fighting for their independence. Surely treating an entire race as a class of servant-like savages is wrong.

Except it's not, in this story. The Monoids rise up and are moustache-twirling villains. And their tendency to give away their plans to anyone around them? Well, I don't want to glorify it with an entire blog entry, but we can jump to another show on the BBC to get a sense of what was going on there. The Monoids are deliberately minstrel characters. They're incompetent because the whole point is that savages like them can never actually run a country, and we'd be fools to turn one over to them.

In fact, even being nice to them - giving them more power like speech and weapons - is wrong. The Monoids deserve to be a race of servants, because that's all that savages like them are good for. And when, at the end of the story, the humans are ordered to make peace with the Monoids, one does not sense that it will be a peace of equals, but rather the return of the Monoids to being a well-treated servant class.

And it's just sickening. It's a sickening, vile piece of racism and neo-colonialism that, while not wholly out of step with its times, was reactionary and nasty in 1966, and is only worse in 2011.

But the real problem is that once you see it, you see what was going on in the rest of John Wiles's tenure. It starts with a seemingly inoccuous detail - that the Monoids have Beatles haircuts. The Beatles, of course, are the icon of youth culture. It's very, very difficult to come up with a reading of the decision to make the irredeemable savages have Beatles haircuts as anything other than a savage condemnation of youth culture. Especially when combined with the decision to write Vicki out of the show unceremoniously, and the near-decision to actually kill her. Or, for that matter, the decision to replace Vicki, our Scouse revolutionary, with the bumbling and naive idiocy of Dodo - a jaw-droppingly harsh reconsideration of how to portray youth culture. Much is made of the fact that Dodo is a (poor) attempt to add a contemporary London girl to the cast, but not nearly as much is made of the fact that she's played as stupid comic relief. She's not an icon of youth culture like Vicki. She's a vicious condemnation of contemporary youth. She's an explicit comment that they're stupid, ignorant, and worthless.

And suddenly the running plot of how the Doctor sometimes just has everyone die seems a lot more sinister. The Doctor, who a little over a year ago was a pyromaniacal figure of revolution, is now a force of destruction. Time after time he shows up and people die. Even here, he shows up and just gets people sick and calls the overthrow of the nice British people. And all put together, it's very difficult - for me, at least, impossible, to get away from the message. Revolution is bad. Youth are stupid. Dark-skinned people are savages who cannot be redeemed. And if you, like the Doctor, side with those people and help them, you will cause untold death and destruction.

For all his skill in making a good program, the fact of the matter is, the 24 episodes produced by John Wiles are mean-spirited, reactionary, and, frankly, in the final analysis, racist. They're well-made. But ten again, "The White Man's Burden" is a well-written poem about being a racist imperialist. It doesn't make it good. And just because Wiles broke new ground in the idea of pushing the Doctor to the limit, it doesn't mean his tenure was any less of a racist, reactionary mess.

The Ark is fun to watch. But it's sickening, and by the end, quite frankly, one is glad to see the backside of this regime. The script editor changed over after The Massacre. Now the producer has as well.

Frankly, thank God.

Do you own The Ark on DVD yet? If not, you can buy it from Amazon via this link and make me some money.

Not Always. I'm Sorry. (The Massacre)

Don't worry, my dear boy. I leave women I sleep with
behind to die all the time. Some day, I'll learn to dump
them in parallel universes, but for now bloody historical
tragedies will have to do for us both, hmmm?

It's February 5, 1966. The number one single is The Overlanders with "Michelle," which will be unseated by Nancy Sinatra with "These Boots Are Made For Walking," which, actually, I'll be able to make something out of later on in this blog post, so that's nice. The Spencer Davis Group, Cilla Black, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones all also chart.

News-wise, the most interesting things going on are that the Russians landed a thingy on the moon and a bunch of governments go up in flames and military coups. Oh, and the Naval Minister of the UK resigns. Which I suppose is worth mentioning, if only because Christopher Mayhew holds the wonderful distinction of being (I think) the only major politician overseeing a military force to be filmed tripping balls on mescaline. Which, and this is the really good bit, has nothing whatsoever to do with why he resigned. He was just cranky about a change in military policy towards land-based aircraft launches instead of aircraft carriers.

Doctor Who is not going to get around to becoming a full-out drug trip for another 8 weeks, though, and it’s not even going to be a very good trip. Instead, well, let's recap. Twelve week Dalek epic, massive death toll, Doctor at the lowest point we've ever seen him and completely frail and mortal, so things must be looking up this week, eh?

Well, OK, perhaps not if you read the title of the story. But as has been pointed out by others, this, more than any other story, is one that visibly loses something when you turn it into a movie with its own title. The official title - The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve - is rubbish. For one thing, the massacre in question is on St. Bartholomew's Day. The usual defense of this teensy problem - that the story ends the day before the massacre, and that the story is thus about the eve of the massacre - opens the far larger problem that the title of the story now turns the slaughter of thousands of people into a holiday. For comparison, this would be like setting a story in Nazi Germany on November 8, 1938, and calling it “Kristallnacht Eve.” (Oh boy, I hope Father Gestapo comes!)

The alternative title - The Massacre - does considerably better, but is still a deeply flawed title in that it gives away the end. It would be like renaming The Rescue "The Guy Who's Disguised As A Monster."

Because the thing is, this story hinges on the fact that it's a historical that isn't about a well-known historical event. As has been frequently pointed out, the audience, watching this, would not have a clear idea of how this is all going to play out. It's a story that works precisely because its component parts are not called The Massacre, but are instead called, in order, “War of God,” “The Sea Beggar,” “Priest of Death,” and “Bell of Doom.”

Let's back up for a moment. We've talked about missing stories, and how good the reconstructions are. Every once in a while, though, you hit one where the reconstructions just aren't up to the task. It's not their fault. Other eras of Doctor Who have the advantage that the producer employed a guy named John Cura to point a camera at his TV screen and take pictures throughout the program, giving us pretty high quality images at the rate of about three a minute. Except the producer for these stories - John Wiles - didn't employ him. So instead the reconstructions have to work off of a meager set of publicity photos.

But even if there were telesnaps, I think this would be a strong choice for the story I'd most like to see recovered, for one simple reason. Watching it, there's a gaping ambiguity where I don't think there's supposed to be.

Let's start with what we know for sure about this story from the existing reconstruction. In it, the Doctor and Steven arrive in 16th Century France. The Doctor quickly wanders off to go explore, leaving Steven in a tavern where he gets dragged into some political intrigue between the Protestant Huguenots and the Catholic majority in France. Steven blunders about as the situation deteriorates rapidly, meeting a young girl, Anne Chaplet. At the end of the story, the Doctor reappears and tells Steven that they have to go. After they depart, the Doctor reveals that Steven has been witnessing the buildup to a brutal massacre of thousands of Protestants across France. Steven, enraged that the Doctor left Anne to die, storms out of the TARDIS, and then some other stuff happens we'll come back to later.

One thing that's immediately clear is that, far from The Daleks’ Master Plan being the culmination of all of the plot threads we've seen since The Time Meddler, this story is where they actually come to a head. After a string of brutal failures, this is where the Doctor fails so dramatically and so drastically that even Steven abandons him. (Indeed, one way of looking at this extended plot arc is as Steven’s big test of faith in terms of the Doctor.) This is where the Doctor's string of failures finally resolves as a plotline, leaving him at the lowest we have ever seen him as a character, with a bit that is some of the best acting Hartnell ever gives in the series where he stands, alone in the TARDIS for the first time in his life, and he almost decides to give up and go home before realizing that even that choice is lost to him.

But this scene is also the thing we can't figure out from the reconstructions. Is Steven right to leave him? Is the Doctor's monologue - in which he continues to insist he did the right thing and that Steven just doesn't understand - one where we are meant to be sympathetic to him and cross that Steven left? Or are we meant to be frustrated that our hero doesn't understand why he's doing the wrong thing?

Because most of that hinges on a specific ambiguity within the story. See, the Doctor only appears in episodes one and four of the story. But William Hartnell appears in all four. In episodes two and three, he plays the Abbot of Amboise, a savagely anti-Huguenot priest heavily involved in the conspiracy to assassinate a key Huguenot leader. The entire interpretation of the story rests on when the audience and Steven realize that the Abbot is not, in fact, the Doctor.

Certainly given the Doctor's fondness for taking on other people's identities and getting involved, Steven’s hypothesis that he might be impersonating the Abbot is a valid one. But is it the most likely circumstance? Within the reconstruction, it's tough to tell. The first episode appears to have a scene in which someone obviously recognizes who the Doctor is as he leaves the pub, and follows him. In theory, that scene should establish firmly that the Doctor is misrecognized as the Abbot early on, and thus that it can't be that he takes on his identity later (as clearly he shares the same face at the start).

Except the evidence for that is basically a caption on a reconstruction. Without seeing how that scene of the Doctor being recognized by a Catholic actually played out, it's impossible to tell whether or not it should have been a major clue that when the Abbot appears at the end of the episode and looks just like the Doctor, he's not actually the Doctor. And, of course, the fact that this is a cliffhanger suggests strongly that we are meant to doubt that the Abbot is the Doctor. After all, the revelation that the Doctor is doing his normal impersonation thing is hardly a cliffhanger. If the point of a cliffhanger is, as we have repeatedly understood it, to lead into a week of active engagement with the show where you try to figure out what's going to happen next, then the entire point of that cliffhanger must be trying to figure out whether or not this is in fact the Doctor. Which only makes sense as a cliffhanger if we have some active reason to think that the man who looks just like the Doctor isn’t. Which is where the earlier scene comes in. Looked at from this perspective, it must have given us a reason to think it was not - namely that someone clearly recognized the Doctor.

The other big clue that would be nice to have is Hartnell's acting. By the sound of the recording, it does seem that he's acting the Abbot differently than the Doctor. This is actually one of the biggest debates about the episode, though. Let's give Mad Norwegian Press some more free publicity. On the one hand, we have Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles, who declare in About Time that Hartnell's performance is "so radically different from his portrayal of the Doctor as to warrant separate consideration. After this, it's impossible to think of Hartnell's Doctor as anything but a concerted acting performance. The Abbot is cold, ambitious, and word-perfect, with none of the apparently spontaneous 'hmms' and giggles we're used to hearing from the Doctor." Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke, in Running Through Corridors, the other amazing comprehensive review of Doctor Who out from Mad Norwegian, say that "it feels pretty Doctor-ish to me; Hartnell sounds a bit posher, perhaps." (I should note that's Shearman, specifically, and not Hadoke, as the book does distinguish between its two authors, whereas About Time does not, making it occasionally tricky to figure out whether its Wood or Miles I want to denounce at a given moment).

In the end, it's a case where one really wants to see it. Judging television acting from audio recordings is extremely hard. So much of Hartnell's Doctor is in his poise, how he looks around, and in particular how he uses his hands. Lacking all of that, it's tough to tell whether the Abbot is meant to be read as Hartnell playing a cold, calculating villain or whether he’s meant to be Hartnell playing the Doctor playing a cold, calculating villain. The remaining evidence is a split decision. Steven believes the Abbot to be the Doctor, which is telling, but the credit sequences just credit Hartnell as playing the Abbot, dropping his Dr. Who credit. (Of course, whether he ever played “Dr. Who” is an issue too, but we’ll deal with that later.)

The reason this is so significant is that judgment of Steven's actions depends on whether the audience agrees with him about whether the Abbot and the Doctor are the same person. And here there are two completely different interpretations of the story that, on the evidence we have, it's impossible to figure out which is correct.

In option number one, Steven's major failing in the story is his choice to delay and wait for the Doctor, who he thinks is impersonating the Abbot, to work it out. He spends an episode and a half trying to figure out what the Doctor is doing. If the audience was supposed to know that Hartnell was playing two different roles, Steven's deference to the villainous Abbot is his major error, and his decision to leave with the Doctor instead of insisting on taking Anne with them is primarily his failure. In this interpretation, the Doctor could have been persuaded to take Anne with them, but Steven continued his deference to the Doctor at the expense of taking action for himself and, just as he was unable to help the Huguenots avoid the massacre, he also failed to help Anne.

In option number two, however, the Abbot is an unfortunate coincidence that screws over Steven, but the primary failure belongs to the Doctor for simply dropping out of the story with no explanation for three days, and in that time failing even to realize when in French history they are, exactly, and what's going to happen. Then, furthermore, for failing to even save one person. (Contrast this with The Fires of Pompeii, where saving one person is precisely what the Doctor does in order to resolve the dilemma of how to handle tragedies of history.) In this interpretation, Steven's anger at the Doctor is the natural culmination of a story arc that's been functionally running for months now.

Notably, in either interpretation, leaving Anne to die was wrong. The question is whether the primary responsibility for that failure lays with Steven or the Doctor. Clearly the idea of the TARDIS crew simply failing to save the day continues in this story, but it's not clear whose failure it is from the reconstruction. (In this case the novelization is no use - Lucarotti's script was heavily rewritten by Donald Tosh, and his novelization restored his original script, meaning that it does not give us a clear idea of how the actors involved were playing their parts. Though, has anyone asked Peter Purves about it?) And it's an amazingly frustrating failure, as it's the difference between this story being the lowest point the Doctor has been brought to and this story being a story about how Steven is just as imperfect as we know the Doctor to be and is naive for trusting in the Doctor so much after seeing what happened on Kembel.

It's also relevant because of the end of the fourth episode, in which a new companion, Dorothea Chaplet, better known as Dodo, is introduced. While we had Vicki on board I mostly set the Problem of Susan aside, in no small part because Vicki was, by and large, a model for how the problem could be more or less handled. There was obvious affection between Vicki and the Doctor, but it was affection based on genuine friendship and seemed undoubtedly chaste on both sides, and, more to the point, for a reason. One could understand why Vicki liked the Doctor, and why the Doctor liked Vicki. And Vicki had a meaningful role as our starchild mod future.

Dodo forces us to return to the problem. So let's recap it. In a nutshell, the problem is this - given that the Doctor has been cast as male in all eleven incarnations to date, thus resulting in a natural tendency towards female companions, how does the show deal with the intrusion of sexuality and sexual awakening into its landscape? It is named the Problem of Susan for two reasons. First, because I like giving homages to Neil Gaiman. Second, because the problem originated with the Doctor's first companion, Susan Foreman, who was ostensibly the Doctor's granddaughter, thus setting up a dynamic by which the Doctor is simultaneously forced to be a protective father figure and a provocative adventurer, two roles which naturally fall on opposite sides of the relationship with developing and emerging sexuality.

In other words, either the Doctor wants to go on madcap adventures with young women (And as the Doctor has a granddaughter and has displayed romantic affection for women on screen, it is hardly difficult to understand why he might like doing that) or he wants to protect his companions from harm. But the two positions are contradictory, in no small part because the role the companion can take in each position is sexualized. If she's on madcap adventures with a magical man, then she's growing up and sexually awakening - she's an empowered woman in control of her desires. Her boots, if you will, are made for walking. If she's being protected, she's a female in peril, and we've sexualized that because we have a bit of a problem with that sort of thing. The companion here is frankly a sex object. Her boots are made for running down corridors screaming. They are never going to walk all over you. (I told you I'd get something out of that song. Not that it would be good.)

Virtually every female companion other than Barbara has had to grapple with that problem. Some do it successfully - sexualizing Vicki is just not that big a problem, because she is explicitly allied with a sexually awakened youth culture. She was unambiguously a character who was having madcap adventures with the Doctor, and if the Doctor she was traveling with were played by Matt Smith instead of William Hartnell, well, watch the last few minutes of Flesh and Stone and you'll see how that one plays out. (Heck, Doctor/Vicki is one of two pairings you can plausibly make with the First Doctor. Ironically, the other one is Barbara.)

Dodo, on the other hand, does not so much fall into the Problem of Susan as throws herself into it full-force. She's depicted as a working class English girl. OK - that's pretty straightforward. Parents are dead, aunt wouldn't care if she ran away from home - that's less straightforward, but OK. We're clearly wedding the youth culture of Vicki to a contemporary London idiom, right?

Except for two big, big problems. First, the Doctor takes her on board in part because she reminds him of Susan. Which flings her right on the pyre, really. Second, Steven ends up forgiving the Doctor because Dodo's surname - Chaplet - means she might be a descendent of Anne Chaplet. In other words, she's proposed explicitly as a replacement for the girl the Doctor failed to save. But here's the thing, as Miles and Wood slyly point out in About Time. Surnames don't pass matrilineally. Which would mean that if Dodo shares Anne's surname because she's a descendent, Anne must have had her out of wedlock. Which is an unusual enough thing that Steven shouldn't assume it. Unless, of course, he has specific reason to think that Anne might have gotten knocked up...

So with Dodo, we have a sudden, jarring introduction of a new companion who is, from day one, frankly fraught with problems. Not the least of which is that she is somehow used as the pretext for Steven to return to the TARDIS. (Contrary to some accounts, he does not decide to stay with the Doctor because of Dodo's surname - he has already entered the TARDIS and they've taken off by the time he learns her surname.) In other words, this character, for no clear story reason, serves as the interruption and return to order after the chaos that started with Mission to the Unknown. There's no justification for it - she plows into the TARDIS and interrupts the Doctor's self-pitying monologue, and that's it for that sentiment.

Which is the biggest problem with this story, really. On the one hand, the run from Mission to the Unknown to this has been extraordinary. If we take the stories on their own, The Myth Makers is really staggeringly good, The Daleks' Master Plan is quite good once you learn to watch it, and The Massacre, up until Dodo charges in, is a fair contender for Hartnell's best story. Even with Dodo it's still pretty clearly the best historical we've seen, with the possible exception of The Myth Makers. The Season Three historicals have, by and large, been amazing, and come the closest we've seen to a clear justification for why these stories should be a part of the Doctor Who formula. It's hard to imagine why they'd give them up after a run like this, really. But here we realize something - for all the incredible drama that's been wrung out of the Doctor's repeated failures over the last 21 episodes... there wasn't a way out for the writers. The fact of the matter is, Hartnell's monologue, stunning as it is, has nothing that can follow it. This is the story where the Doctor is finally broken completely. And they had nowhere to go from there. All they could do was bring on another companion, have Steven take back his storming out for no discernible character reason, and call it a day.

Steven is really the one who suffers the most from this. Prior to this, he'd been a fantastic companion - a leading action man in the Ian tradition, but one with the mad energy of Vicki. This story, however, just breaks the character. It's not Peter Purves's fault - he gives the part his all, and holds the screen when called to. There's a reason he made a great presenter on Blue Peter, and it's because he has a real charisma that begs you to watch him - something Hartnell, honestly, doesn't have, which is why he needed the male companion role so much. But as a character, with this Steven goes from the Doctor's second in command and a worthy backup to a character who just doesn't make sense and lurches chaotically from plot point to plot point.

Now, you can make a case that this is another narrative collapse a la The Chase, with Dodo being the intrusion of the ridiculous that restores the order of things after the collapse. But The Chase was one story. This has been four stories and 21 episodes. Mission to the Unknown was over four months ago. This darkness and failure on the part of the Doctor is not the content of a story, but a major theme that's been running through the show for a long time now. And in the end, all the writers can do is say "Well that ran its course" and abandon it.

Which is true - they did push it to beyond the point where the show could recover without an insane side jump like Dodo. But in the end, that begs the question of why they took the show down that road in the first place if they didn't have anything to say or do afterwards other than shrug their shoulders and walk away from it. Which is to say that, although this story sings when taken on its own, after making such a fuss about why we shouldn’t do that for The Daleks’ Master Plan, it’s tough to turn around and praise this one when it poses so many problems in its original context. The Daleks’ Master Plan was an excellent culmination to a storyline about the failures of the Doctor. This, good as it is, just feels like kicking him when he’s down.

Doesn't It Just Burn When You Face Me (The Daleks' Master Plan)

The Daleks stare incredulously at each other as the big blue
dude keeps talking. 

It's November 13, 1965. The Rolling Stones are still on top. They'll be replaced by The Seekers. The Beatles will take the Christmas number one, hold it for five weeks, then turn it over to The Spencer Davis Group, followed by, finally, on January 27, The Overlanders.

Those of you who like arithmetic may have noticed how we've covered twelve weeks there. That's not a mistake. This is The Daleks' Master Plan. In twelve parts, plus its prequel a month ago, it is by far the longest Doctor Who story ever, running nearly five and a half hours. And for not the first time, but thus far the most important time, we're going to have to pause here and look at what this story means to Doctor Who as a whole. It's the capstone experience for John Wiles' tenure as Doctor Who producer, which admittedly only began last story and ends two stories hence. It is, in other words, absolutely epic, and everybody knew it. It said so in our handy 1980s books on the series that listed all the episodes. Really. I quote Peter Haining's Doctor Who: A Celebration, which says that this story is "quite simply the longest-ever Doctor Who story and also one of the best."

It's also 75% missing. So for a long time, that description was what we got. The Daleks' Master Plan was the big Hartnell epic that was really good and missing. And 75% gone is an improvement. Episode 2 was only found in 2004. Prior to its discovery, major characters from the story simply didn't exist. It wasn't novelized for years, because it was just too long. In other words, it was one of the great lost epics of Doctor Who. There are a couple of these scattered through Doctor Who history - stories that were allegedly among the greats of their era that are missing and can never be seen. In the 80s, Doctor Who got into the habit of remaking some of its old classics for new viewers. Mostly these were disasters. But the first instance of doing this was actually in 1973, when two six-parters were quietly welded together to form a twelve part epic that, after some misdirection in the first story, turned out to be a Dalek epic. That's how good this story's reputation was. It was so good that there was a desire to redo it eight years later.

Life's been hard since the 1983 guide, though. In 1992, the two surviving episodes at the time, episodes 5 and 10, finally made it out for home viewing on a documentary called Daleks - The Early Years, sparking a bit of a rethink. The problem is that what we knew about the story before seeing those episodes was that it was a massive epic of Daleks in which tons of people died. The novelization had come out super-late in 1989, so hardly anyone had read it. A few hardcore fans would have seen screenings of the missing episodes at conventions, but the fact of the matter is, this was the first time most people saw anything of this brilliant epic.

Pity about what they saw, then. Episode 5 involves some bizarre comedy involving Daleks, mice, and the possibility of mice inventing teleporters (Yes. Douglas Adams did watch this at the age of 13. Why do you ask?), and Episode 10 is a strange farce about Daleks, intergalactic emperors, the Monk, and a bunch of Egyptians. They're miles from the dark epic we were promised - so violent it never got sold abroad, Peter Haining told us! Where was our violence? Why were there mice?

And so the great re-evaluation began, and the story was ruled a brilliant idea that was way too long and brought down by the silliness. And so it was for a while, until in 2004 episode 2 came out and finally people actually saw one of the bits of the story that looked like what we'd been promised in our 1980s episode guides. 2004 was also when Loose Cannon got their reconstruction out, making the story even remotely available for people. And the new consensus is... well, there isn't really one yet. There's only been two top-down attempts to review Doctor Who done post-2004. Miles and Wood make a good case for the idea that the story works but is so far afield of what we think of as the Doctor Who format these days as to be impossible to judge. Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke seem to like it, but get a bit burnt out on it.

OK. So we've got all that down? Good. Now throw it all out. Absolutely nobody understands a damn thing about this story. Miles and Wood come closest when they say that it doesn't work like modern Doctor Who, and are right to suggest that viewing it as a weekly serial makes it make more sense, but they don't actually explain how it works. So I guess that's where I come in.

I've talked in passing about how Doctor Who aired in the 1960s and how modern conceptions of Doctor Who are unsuited to it. Never has that been more important than here. So let's review. Doctor Who was on 40+ weeks of the year. It aired on one of two channels. Television transmission in the 1960s was on the old 405-line system - that is, there were 405 lines of information used to constitute a television picture, as opposed to the later 625-line system, which is in turn distinct from modern digital television. I'll go ahead and just quote from Miles and Wood here to explain what this meant, because they do a bang-up job of explaining it.

Its mode of address was both to convey the viewer to somewhere extraordinary, and to visit people in the intimacy of their living rooms. "Intimacy is a key word here, because 405-line broadcasting was a dialogue with the viewers. 

In a later volume, which I don't have handy at the time of writing, so now I'm paraphrasing from memory, they clarify that the issue was that the 405-line broadcast screen required a very different mode of watching than we're used to now. The screens did poorly in light, and so had to be watched in dimmed rooms. The pictures were fuzzy, requiring the viewer to engage in an act of explicit interaction with the screen and to actively interpret the images as representing things. The overall format of the experience - commercial-free and linked together with continuity announcers so that a given show was something that was part of an unceasing experience of The Day's Transmission - encouraged this. The show was scary because it was part of a defined space in the televisual day and week marked out for being scary. This also explains the oddly presentational style we've seen - both at its high points (and I will defend The Web Planet as a high point of the series tooth and nail against the mobs of people who just don't have a clue what it is they're actually watching) and its low points (namely the Mary Celeste sequence of The Chase). 

On top of that, episodes had individual titles, and cliffhangers often extended from one into the next. We really see this here, with this story picking up immediately from the panic at the end of The Myth Makers. This is in marked contrast to the modern approach, where these stories are reskinned as discrete entities and packaged as individual movies. So instead of being able to watch Season 1 of Doctor Who on Netflix, you can get DVDs of "The Beginning" (the first 13 epsodes), The Keys of Marinus, or The Aztecs, each treated as discrete stories that are marketed more like films than television. This is not how the show was actually written or experienced. Yes, individual stories had separate writers and directors, and you could see where one left off and the next began, but what you didn't get was the idea that the episode entitled "Volcano" was "The Daleks' Master Plan, Part 8 of 12." Nobody even knew the phrase "The Daleks' Master Plan" in 1966. It was just another episode of Doctor Who, aired on Saturday evening that the family sat down for and made an experience out of. Yes, it was clearly part of a larger Dalek story that had been going on for a while now, and didn't seem terribly near to finishing up, but first and foremost it was the thing that happened around 6pm on Saturdays and had been basically every week for two years now. And part of a serial, which went on over real time. The Daleks' Master Plan isn't five and a half hours long. It's four months long, counting Mission to the Unknown. And as I've been saying, really it's longer than that, paying off plot threads that started way back in The Time Meddler. 

This is a mode of interpretation we just don't have anymore. There's no vocabulary for it. It's impossible to reconstruct with some DVD rips and a digitization of a VHS tape from Loose Cannon being streamed over a wireless network to an AppleTV hooked up to a 30" HD LCD television via an HDMI cable. Even though the word "television" appears in the description of both, we're not really talking about the same medium here. Watching it today you get one of two choices - actively try to reconstruct the experience of the original medium, or deludedly pretend this is television as you understand it. If you pick option B, you get a conclusion along the lines of "this is neat, but a bit of a mess." If you pick option A, you suddenly realize why everyone in 1983 remembered this story so fondly from when they were growing up.

So let's try to translate this into modern terms. First of all, let's rubbish the idea that this is a twelve-part story. It's not. It's really about four separate stories, two of which is nested inside others, one of which is a direct sequel to another, and all of which are contributing to the larger serial that is Doctor Who. 

The first story is five episodes long. The first of these was Mission to the Unknown, and the second of them is The Nightmare Begins, more commonly thought of as episode 1 of The Daleks' Master Plan. In the middle of that was the second story, The Myth-Makers. So what we had was a story that opened with a reminder that the Doctor doesn't always show up, then took a brief digression to show that even if he does it might not be so great. Then returns and has him show up. 

In other words, there's a huge amount of this story that has already been established the moment we see the TARDIS actually show up. The TARDIS shows up in a state of panic. As viewers, we immediately recognize that we're landing back in the Dalek story from a month ago. And we arrive in chaos. Katarina is in the TARDIS clearly out of place and confused. Steven is critically injured. Daleks are conspiring to take over the universe. And at this point, after the last five weeks, there is no real reason why we should expect the Doctor to be able to save the day. Even he seems out of his depth, unaware of the direness of the situation. He quite likes Katarina, and once he makes it out of the TARDIS seems almost to forget about Steven in favor of a nice romp around the deadly jungles.

Then comes the real genius of these first four episodes. Something that, again, people miss. Another one of the reasons this is a big epic of a story is that it's Nicholas Courtney's first appearance in Doctor Who as Bret Vyon. This is touted as one of the big parts of the story. Reading about it, you'd think he was in practically the whole thing. He's touted more than Mavic Chen, the Guardian of the Solar System who spends all twelve episodes plotting with the Daleks and generally being a ridiculous and awesome villain. He's actually only in four episodes. But man, what an impact he has.

Early on, he encounters the Doctor, and tries to demand the key to the TARDIS. The Doctor engages in his usual chinwagging and charisma to try to talk his way out of it. And in response, Brtt Vyon does something we have never seen anyone do to the Doctor before. He simply says "Give me the key, or I'll kill you." And this quickly re-establishes the theme of the last five episodes. The Doctor is not the toughest thing in the universe. (Bret Vyon goes on to an even better scene in the second episode, in which he takes over a spaceship by walking onto the bridge, pulling a gun, and saying, and I quote, "I'm taking over this spaceship." The point is clear. He is every bit the ontological force the Doctor is, epic and heroic because he says he is.)

These four episodes are a tense runaround with enormous stakes. The Daleks have a bunch of delegates from across the universe, all with strange alien mannerisms. They have Mavic Chen, Guardian of the Solar System, selling out the whole solar system and suavely helping the Daleks. Their goal appears to be the conquest of everything. Ever. They have a super-weapon called the Time Destructor. And the only thing standing in their way is the Doctor, his injured friend, his worshipful handmaiden, and Bret Vyon, the British Nick Fury. (There is zero reason to think Steranko was directly influenced by Doctor Who, as he almost certainly didn't see it when he started making Nick Fury a straight mirror of Bret Vyon in 1968. This is amazing, as anyone who looks at the two would immediately conclude that one must be a straight rip-off of the other. This is, as we have already seen, not the first time that Doctor Who has managed the puzzling feat of obviously inspiring something without actually having any direct link to it. Honestly, it rapidly becomes easier to just assume that Doctor Who is some sort of mystical phenomenon that leeches into the zeitgeist than it is to try to make sense of this. See also the first shot back in An Unearthly Child. What's particularly strange is how these moments of ridiculous prescience on Doctor Who's part - doing one of the most acclaimed runs in comics history three years earlier - get put right alongside hilarious anachronisms like the importance of magnetic tape in the far future.)

As you might imagine, this builds stressfully. The Doctor manages to escape Kembel with the Tarranium core of the Dalek superweapon (which, despite its name, bears more than a passing analogy to a nuclear bomb), but an escaped convict makes it on board with them.

And here we get the climax of this story. So let's talk for just a moment about Katarina. She's a character who has very little to do in this story. Three episodes into it, on her fourth appearance overall, she reiterates her near worshipful attitude towards the Doctor, and prays for divine intervention. The Doctor treats her with loving patronization. She is, by all appearances, our new female companion, replacing Vicki. And towards the end of the third episode, she reiterates how she knows that she's safe with the Doctor.

Mere seconds later, she's grabbed by the convict and lets out the most blood-curdling, horrifying, anguished scream we have ever heard a companion give in Doctor Who. And that's our third episode cliffhanger.

And then, less than five minutes into her fifth appearance on Doctor Who... she's dead. She sacrifices herself by blowing herself and her attacker out the airlock. That's the cliffhanger resolution. Remember that cliffhangers are primarily about audience interaction - part and parcel with the interactive dialogue of the 405-line era. The question isn't "what happens to the Doctor," it's "How are they going to get out of this one?" And in the first minutes of the next episode, we get the answer.

They don't. Katarina, the innocent, naive girl who was all but shoved onto the TARDIS by Vicki, dies. And this is hammered home. It's like nothing we have ever seen before. This just spits in the face of the audience. And look at what it comes after - four episodes of dark, brooding tension and real suggestion that maybe the Doctor isn't good enough. And here, again, he isn't. He loses a companion. And the show rubs it in - shrieking music plays over an fx shot of her dead body floating away in space. 

As brutal as this is, to really understand what's going on here we need to go a little further and learn some production details. See, Katarina wasn't supposed to die here. Katarina wasn't actually supposed to exist here. She's by far the most minor companion ever - she never does anything, and appears in five episodes total, one of them only for the first five minutes. And she's a fill-in.

It was supposed to be Vicki.

Vicki - the Scouse future girl who represented the mods and the youth rebellion that was at the heart of cultural Britain. Was supposed to be flushed out an airlock in a shock cliffhanger resolution. Think of how that would have played out - especially after the second and episode of The Myth Makers, where Cassandra declares that Vicki is a spy and must be killed, and then we get "Next episode: Death of a Spy." Clearly meant to make us think Vicki might die, and to make us spend a week trying to find some other way to account for the title. And of course Vicki makes it out just fine. Because the cliffhanger always turns out OK. That was supposed to be set-up for just cutting her down at the start of this episode. It would have been the single cruelest, most cynical moment in Doctor Who history. The plucky joy of British youth, slaughtered. And all of that would have aired right as Vietnam War protests really kicked up in the US, and as the UK careened towards a possible war with Rhodesia. This isn't just reactionary. It's savage - a declaration of the fundamental failure of 60s counterculture made in late 1965, right as it was really starting to kick up to its heyday.

And then to cap it off, at the end of the episode, after some hype about Kingdom, the crack special agent coming in to clean this up, we learn that Kingdom is Sara Kingdom, decked out in a catsuit with a laser gun. She strides into the ship and guns down Bret Vyon - the seemingly unstoppable character who the Doctor has just been treating like a companion mere moments before. It's odd that Katarina and Bret - who have basically the same amount of screen time - are treated so differently by later fandom, with Katarina being the first companion to die (even though it wasn't until 2004 that we actually had an episode she appeared in to watch) and Bret being "that part Nicholas Courtney played before the Brigadier." Within the episode, they're clearly meant to be of equal importance, and this episode is meant to be an even more shocking punch in the gut than the end of The Myth Makers was.

That's the first and second Daleks' Master Plan stories done. Two to go. And these two are going to be nested again. So, to recap, it's December 11th, 1965. It'd be The Seekers at number one. And after the most brutally cruel episode of Doctor Who to date, we get...

Comedy about mice. Jean Marsh striding around imperiously in her catsuit of awesome. William Hartnell doing some truly impressive writhing around in pain, and by truly impressive I mean absolutely ridiculous. It must be "Counter-Plot," for a long time one of two Daleks' Master Plan episodes we actually had. And one that is just completely misread, because we took it in isolation and assumed it was all like this. Had episode four survived instead, one imagines the reception of this story would have been radically different for years - especially because, since we do have the clips of Katarina's death, we know how brutal that episode really is.

And here's where that serial thing really comes in. It's December 11th. Every Doctor Who story since October 9th - two months ago now - has come to the same conclusion. The Doctor doesn't always win. He's 0-3 in the last three outings. And here we're starting up another strand of the plot, and it goes comedic and light, with silly bits and mice, and Daleks exterminating the mice because they might be powerful alien overlords. Nobody watching this who has been following the serial thinks this is a daft comedy episode. The comedy is bleakly unfunny. By now, we've been better trained to expect the other shoe to drop than we have been to enjoy the Doctor Who stock tropes. And the panic and tension mounts faster and faster - the Doctor gets teleported back to Kembel, the Daleks hunt him down, and only because Steven - in an oddly unfamiliar role as the slow one, being from earlier in human history than Sara and obviously less knowledgeable than the Doctor - risks life and limb to make a fake Tarranium core that the Doctor can fake the Daleks out with. 

The mice are not a stupid digression or a time-waster. They're a reset button. A clear marker that we've finished one story and started another, and are back to a status quo. But that's terrifying. We know this is going to go wrong. As soon as the action speeds up again, after three sucker punches, we're just waiting for the inevitable.

And then that story gets interrupted by another. So let's use that nice vertical line trick I worked up for The Myth Makers, and deal with the fourth story that is The Daleks' Master Plan.

---

It's December 25th, 1965. It's the Beatles at number one now, for those playing at home.

So, as I said, these next four episodes kind of come out of left field, interrupting the story in progress. Basically, this is a four episode redo of The Chase that opens with a Christmas episode in which the Daleks don't even appear. For some bizarre reason, this is what fans fixate on. In particular, the fact that the Christmas episode ends with the Doctor breaking the fourth wall to wish the viewers a merry Christmas, but more broadly the fact that the episode is half set in a Liverpool police station and half on a Hollywood silent film set.

I will say that I have no clue whatsoever why anyone objects to this. I mean, jump ahead to Episode 11 of the story, and pretend that had followed straight from episode 6 instead of taking a detour. Then imagine sitting down on Christmas to watch it. Or on New Year's. I mean, the show was airing in December on a year that Christmas fell on a Saturday. There was surely no question of continuing the story straight through. It had to find an excuse to go do something fun instead. So we got two pure comedy episodes of the Doctor running around various set-pieces. A Liverpool police station (which is not an arbitrary choice), a silent film set, and, in the New Year's episode, landing on a cricket green, at which point the commentators just try to figure out if this has ever happened before. (Yes, I already told you, Douglas Adams watched this when he was 13. Why do you keep asking?) Followed by the return of the Monk.

So why the next two, which feature Mavic Chen, suavely evil Guardian of the Solar System, the Monk, the Daleks, the Doctor, Steven, Sara Kingdom, and a bunch of Egyptians? Mostly because the Doctor is now off Kembel and has the Tarranium core. The Doctor can't steer his TARDIS, as we know, so we have to find some way of getting him back to Kembel and getting the Tarranium to the Daleks. And that's all episodes nine and ten are. The Monk is brought in to give the Doctor a way back to Kembel, and we do a quick Egyptian runaround to follow on the two comedic episodes so we can get back to the main plot. That's all these four episodes are - a necessary detour caused by Christmas.

Which means that if you want to bludgeon The Daleks' Master Plan into a normal structure, the thing to do is to just cut episodes 7-10 entirely. Drop them. Don't even watch them. Jump straight from episode 6 to episode 11, and pretend the Doctor had to give up the real Tarranium core instead of a fake one. You can just pick it up and go from there, and get a proper 8-part Dalek story in two clear four part chunks. The only thing that's majorly going on in these four is some Christmas fun, some plot hole filling, and the establishment of Sara Kingdom as the new companion.

I mean, there's a few neat things. We can do some nice commentary on the genre-bending abilities of Doctor Who and Hollywood, and how it picks up on the Morton Dill segments of The Chase. There's a line about the Doctor's human form just being a disguise that's chilling and mysterious and something someone should have picked up on since 1966. There's the best technobabble explanation in the history of the show, namely the Doctor just openly refusing to explain something to Steven and literally handwaving it away. And there's a bunch of stuff that heavily reiterates the fact that the Doctor is not, in 1966, a Time Lord and that it is next to impossible to read the whole Time War business into these episodes and have them make a damned bit of sense. That it's clear that this storyline would feel so much more normal if it were the Master instead of the Monk in it. And, tellingly, that these four episodes, once again, end with the Doctor losing, putting him at 0-4. We can note all of those. And have.

But really, this is here because the scheduling in 1965/66 demanded it. It's not part of a 12 episode epic to be watched in one shot. It's part of an ongoing, always-on serial that happened to be airing on Christmas. It made perfect sense in 1965/66 when it was aired, and it was only designed to air then, once. Any questions about how it "holds up" or of the pacing of it when taken as a 12-part epic just miss the point.

---

So we're back. And what's key is, were it not for Christmas, we really could have jumped straight here. Episode 6 could just as easily have ended with the Doctor having to cough up the real Tarranium core, and then cliffhangered straight into episode 11. It would have made total sense.

Given that, episode 11 - The Abandoned Planet - watches brilliantly. It's one of the periodic Doctor free episodes, a nice parallel to where we started. Steven and Sara have the bulk of the work, trying to figure out where the Doctor is and what he's up to. Meanwhile, Mavic Chen gets the endpoint of hs plot, going from valued ally to the Daleks to utterly superfluous. As the episode plays on, it becomes clearer and clearer that the Daleks will, in fact, eventually kill him too. It's easy to mistake this episode as episode seven of not living up to the genius of episode 4, but that's not what's going on here.

No. This is bold and clever. The Doctor has, as I said, suffered four consecutive defeats now. And so he's removed from the picture, and the audience is invited to remember the fact that, flawed as we now see him to be, he's still far better than the alternatives. We want him to be found. And when the episode ends without that, with Steven and Sara being led into the Dalek base without the Doctor, it's scary. Sara ends up being our audience identification character, by and large, stressing over and over again that it's important to find the Doctor (while Steven seems, all told, fairly competent on his own).

And so we come to the finale. Mavic Chen, our charismatic villain, has fallen completely, seeming almost delusional in his demand that the Daleks respect him, and clearly doomed. It's not even clear whether he wants power, at this point, or whether he's just desperate for the Daleks to approve of him. And eight minutes into the finale, the Doctor finally returns.

This should be good. This should be where he wins, and it's all OK. The Doctor seems determined. He has a plan. But Hartnell is good. He really is - a genuinely good actor when he is well enough to do it. And in this episode he is. He has a plan, but he seems frantic, perhaps even scared. He tells Sara and Steven to get back to the TARDIS, and he runs off with the activated Time Destructor.

But Sara believes the Doctor needs her. She goes back for him.

After four consecutive defeats - Mission to the Unknown, The Myth Makers, and twice now in this story, perhaps we expect victory. That is, after all, what the Doctor's disappearance from Episode 11 seems to set up - that the Doctor will return to the story and save the day. Surely we've seen the worst in Episode 4, if nothing else. Surely.

No.

The Time Destructor is horrifying like nothing we have seen before. We expected a straightforward superweapon - a bomb. But no. Instead we get a glowing, shrieking ball. Seemingly harmless, even silly at first. But then it turns awful and horrible. It is shredding the Doctor and Sara, savagely. Sara ages before our eyes, well aware of what is happening to her. She knows she's dying. And when this starts to happen...

This isn't suspense. This is tragedy. After four defeats, the Doctor has so little iconic, mythic heroism to him. He's so... vulnerable. And as he staggers back to the TARDIS with a dying Sara Kingdom at his side, we know how this is going to play out. All Sara's youthful, sexy power - her cat suit and laser pistol - is gone now. A shell to hold a fragile old woman, disintegrating before our eyes. It's brutally long, taking place over minutes. The horrific shrieking shot of Katarina drifting off into space at least came after the death. Here the sense of anticipation - the thing that was the entire justification of things like The Dalek Invasion of Earth's first episode, where we wait endlessly for the Daleks to arrive - is turned against us. We know how this will play out. We're forced to watch anyway.

It works. And it works because of the structure - the weird serialized nature of it. It works because we have had the structure of Doctor Who taken apart in front of us over and over again for nearly three months straight. It works because the show has been setting us up for this for months now, showing us worse and worse defeats, showing us how powerless the Doctor can be. This payoff can only happen in the serialized structure of a show that is constantly on. This payoff is absolutely a product of what Doctor Who in 1965 and 1966 is.

And the Doctor collapses. Steven charges out of the TARDIS, trying to save him, and manages to flip the Time Destructor into reverse, making it run time backwards instead. It's too late for Sara, but just enough for the old and collapsed Doctor to be dragged to safety. And we see the Daleks return... the Daleks, who by now are the Daleks as we know them, the ultimate foe of the Doctor, perfectly matched, each side well aware of the other and full of nothing but hatred. It's time for the final showdown, after all of this.

But we're denied that. Instead, we get the Daleks screaming as they are regressed. This is the first meaty death of the Daleks - the first time they have seemed like flesh, not robots. The Dalek casings collapse, revealing the shriveled mutants within. It's physical. It's grotesque.

And in the end, Steven is left to mourn the stupidity of it all. Katarina, Bret, and Sara, all dead. Kembel destroyed.

The Doctor has failed. Inevitably. This was the consequence of everything that went before. That all the youth and hope he represented would be dashed on the rocks.

A flip through the news gives context. Rhodesia, the brutal coup in Nigeria, another former British colony, the Vietnam War. There is horror and death in the world.

Before we thought those things were opposed by the Doctor. Balanced. That he could save us.

Now, on Kembel, where the lush jungle has been reduced to a barren desert full of bodies, we know the truth.

The Doctor loses sometimes.

There's an episode next week, of course. Impossible as it seems. Something actually follows from this. The story continues. Surely, after all of this, after five defeats, after this horrible, gruesome death of Sara Kingdom, things must turn around.

Surely tomorrow must be better?

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

There Should Have Been Another Way (The Myth Makers)

From futuristic Scouse space girl to Shakespearean
title character. You go, girl.

It's October 16, 1965. Ken Dodd's Tears continue to rule the chart. It will continue for the next three weeks. For once, let's start with the opening shot of Doctor Who again, because last week left us in such a strange place. And we open with... Achilles and Hector fighting in the fields of Troy, with Achilles killing Hector when the materialization of the TARDIS distracts him. So immediately, we know that we are not in Dalek country.

We also know, by sight, that we're in a comic historical. We've seen them enough before. Perhaps somewhere in the back of our minds we remember that the last comedy historical, The Saxons, was unexpectedly interrupted, but one genre-breaking story does not erase the existence of the genre. So whatever shock we might have in the unexpected failure of the Daleks to show up again, we can at least settle down quickly.

And indeed, the first episode of this story is pretty straightforward. By the end of it, we know what we're watching. It's a typical historical. This is something that really can't be stressed enough. I've said that Doctor Who is building to something in these stories over and over again now, and we're almost there, but that's an easier claim to make in 2011 when I know what the next 16 episodes of Doctor Who are and have seen them. In 1965, this tonal shift was jarring and confusing, and it was in no way clear where all of this was going. And so the fact that the episode appears to offer some foothold - that it looks like something resembling normal service - is probably nice. After something as weird as Mission to the Unknown, the historical version of the Galaxy 4 phoning-in is pretty welcome looking.

But as the episodes play on, a couple of things are clear. For one thing, this is funnier, at least to modern tastes, than any past historical. There's a scene in the second episode in which Paris slips out to the battlefield to make a token effort at challenging Achilles to single combat, and happens upon Steven, who wants to fight him. Paris's visible dislike of the idea of combat, and wants nothing more than to get out without dying. Similarly, in the first episode, there's a wonderful scene of Menaleus complaining that, honestly, after ten years of Trojan War, he doesn't even care that Paris stole Helen, and he'd rather just go home. 

Much of this is down to a new writer, Donald Cotton, who, on the early evidence, appears to be quite a sharp, clever writer who one hopes will make a return to the series down the road. But the result is a really sharp, funny story. The acting is also good - Max Adrian as Priam is fantastic (even if his homosexuality allegedly caused serious tensions with an increasingly temperamental William Hartnell), as is Frances White as Cassandra, retooled as a villainess who demands Vicki and Steven's execution as Greek spies. Her counterpart on the Greek side is Odysseus, who gets some fantastic scenes with the Doctor as the Doctor tries to bluff his way out of having to solve the Trojan War before finally giving in and just proposing the Trojan Horse. 

So it's a return to form - like Galaxy 4, an attempt to go back to what Doctor Who is known to be good at, but unlike Galaxy 4, a profoundly non-lazy attempt that makes a real effort to be interesting, funny, and better than what's come before. Right?

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It's November 6, 1965. At long last, Ken Dodd goes away and is replaced by the Rolling Stones ordering people off of their cloud. It is worth, for once, looking at the immediate history surrounding this moment. In Britain, two things of extreme note are going on. First, the transmission of this story coincided with the breaking of the Moors murders, a series of five brutal child murders committed around Manchester. The murders are named because two of the graves were discovered in Saddleworth Moor. We should take a quick moment to define "moor" here for unfortunate Americans - rural, uncultivated hilly areas of Britain. They'll be worth knowing about come 1970 or so.

The other thing to know about the last month or so of British culture is that there has been an escalating crisis in the colony of Rhodesia, which we now know as Zimbabwe. You may recall from a few previous entries occasional remarks about the UK losing another African colony now and again. Mostly these went pretty well. The fact of the matter is that the UK was really good at losing colonial power. Up until Rhodesia. Rhodesia was a disaster.

The main problem was that the UK's policy under Harold Wilson was that it would not grant a colony independence unless the ruling powers in the country were the ethnic majority. That is to say, the UK actively declined to have a situation where it would liberate a colony in such a way that white colonists and their descendants formed the government. Ian Smith, Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia (as it was known to the British), disagreed, and over the four weeks that The Myth Makers aired, the situation hurtled towards its resolution, which came five days after the end of the serial when Ian Smith and his supporters signed the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, separating from the UK and establishing a white minority government. The situation was a complete disaster - the UK was under enormous international pressure to stop Smith from declaring independence by whatever means necessary, while within the UK opinions were divided on whether a minority white government was actually all that bad. Remember, after all, that the whole kerfuffle with Gandhi in India was only resolved about twenty years ago. The British Empire was clearly dying, but that didn't mean it wasn't beloved by some.

I say all of this to stress that the first three episodes of The Myth Makers, with its broad comedy of the impersonal irritations of war, would have had a particular tone airing in this climate. With the real possibility of a British military action looming and the general darkness of horrifying child murders in the news, the dark and pessimistic humor of The Myth Makers must have struck a very particular chord. And so now we get to episode four.

And suddenly, the comedy drops out horrifyingly. The story veers abruptly from a comedic historical to something that feels like it's just shredding the basic structure of Doctor Who. Some of the tropes of narrative collapse from The Chase come in - a character called Katarina is hastily introduced amidst a wave of everyone acting like they've known her for three episodes now. But unlike The Chase, this is not a funny episode. This is, instead, an episode where half the characters brutally murder the other half, and the Doctor runs around trying desperately to collect the TARDIS crew and escape.

It's something we haven't seen before. The Doctor doesn't save the day here. He barely escapes. Not since The Aztecs, really, have we seen the Doctor simply get out of a situation at all costs instead of saving the day. And there, the only real loss was the Perfect Victim. Here it's a bloody massacre.

The most striking sign of this is the end fates of the two villains of the piece. Odysseus goes from a vaguely comedic figure to an extremely dark, threatening figure. Cassandra, on the other part, goes from a snarling antagonist to a tragic figure who is ultimately cut down by Odysseus.

Meanwhile, in the chaos of things, the Doctor loses Vicki. I mean loses. Not that she dies - she doesn't. Instead, she runs off to be with Troilus, taking on the name Cressida. But, notably, we are denied a proper farewell sequence for her. By all appearances, she makes it into the TARDIS, until we see her later on the battlefield with Troilus promising to help him rebuild - specifically to go help Aeneas found Rome, which is oddly circular given what her first adventure after joining the TARDIS was. But, more significantly, her entire departure is consumed, along with her name and identity. She loses her status as a companion of the Doctor's and becomes a Trojan woman. This, I think, is some of why Vicki is marginalized as a companion - she really was fantastic, and did a ton to establish what the role of the young female companion was. I've praised her before, and will not belabor the point here, but Maureen O'Brien is undoubtedly one of the overlooked gems of the Hartnell era.

Katarina, meanwhile, gets all but kidnapped onto the TARDIS - taken onboard in the chaos of their departure. She, being an ancient Trojan, does not understand what is going on. She believes herself to have died and gone to the afterlife, and believes the Doctor to be a god - much to his consternation. She's only there because Vicki sent her and told her all would be well. We will see, next story, how well that goes for her, but it is worth tracking her character arc - thrust into the TARDIS because the Doctor destroyed her world with his Trojan Horse idea, promised that all would be well, and very much lost.

As for Steven, in the closing minutes of the story he suffers a gruesome wound in battle, paralleling Vicki's sprained ankle at the end of Galaxy 4, but taking now a much more sinister tone. The Doctor admits that he needs to seek medical assistance for Steven. What has changed so that the essentially similar endings - a member of the TARDIS crew carrying an injury - take such different tones? The answer, it seems, is Mission to the Unknown - the intrusion of the fact that the Doctor can't save everybody. After the Doctor's failure last story - a failure he doesn't even now about - his status as an absolute hero who saves the day is endangered. Now it is shattered. Sometimes the Doctor can't win.

In this regard, The Myth Makers is by far the best historical we've seen. The last episode is a brutal sucker punch that advances the themes we've seen. This is the weakest we've seen the Doctor. When we saw his cowardice in the Cave of Skulls, it was because he was still learning to be the Doctor. By now he knows, and his failures are a sign of something far more troubling. That perhaps being the Doctor isn't enough.

Next week, we are told, The Nightmare Begins. Given how dark things are at the end of this episode, that is a chilling prospect.

My Mother Verity (Mission to the Unknown)

It's a fun Doctor Who fan parlor game to try to match names
to the alien delegates in this story. Here's a clue - the gal in
the super stylish dress? She's Verity Lambert. She's the
one who actually runs the universe.

It's October 9, 1965. Ken Dodd's "Tears" is still at the top of the charts. Post Office Tower, the tallest building built in London in the 1960s, opened yesterday, the biggest visible monument to the cultural capitol that is London. And Doctor Who is doing something unusual - the only single-episode and Doctor-free story of the classic run, Mission to the Unknown.

I've talked about the way in which the stories are, right now, building towards something. More than any story under the script editorship of Donald Tosh or John Wiles (who was producer in all but official name of the whole of this season), this episode exists first and foremost in service to that something. One of the things that was settled on quickly after The Chase was that instead of doing two Dalek six-parters on either end of the season, they'd do a massive twelve-part Dalek epic in the third season. However, due to a quirk of accounting stretching back to having to refilm the first episodes of both An Unearthly Child and The Daleks, as well as condensing the last two epsiodes of Planet of Giants into one, it became necessary to produce an extra episode at the end of the recording block that started with The Rescue, and, ideally, to give the entire cast a break at the same time. So a one episode TARDIS-free prelude to the Dalek epic got put on the schedule.

That's the lens through which this story is normally approached. And it is, factually speaking, true - tat is why this episode exists. But it has the unfortunate side-effect of turning a very interesting episode of television into a lesson on the intricacies of BBC budgeting in the 1960s. And, I mean, I say this as a ridiculous pedant who actually finds BBC budgeting in the 1960s interesting, but that does a real disservice to the episode.

For one thing, it's a flagrant retcon. Nobody watching this story in 1965 was thinking about it in anything like these terms. And nobody making the story was primarily making a historical document to illustrate BBC funding. This is purely an invention of hyper-knowledgeable Doctor Who fans trying to develop a history of the show. While this is usually a wonderful thing - the fact that Doctor Who's production is so well-documented is part of the show's importance, frankly - here it's a bit of an irritation. Part of it is no doubt that, being yet another missing episode, for most fans the received wisdom and history of the story is all we've got - especially because Mission to the Unknown, along with The Daleks Master Plan, were not novelized until 1989, among the absolute last stories to get an adaptation. So prior to 1989, detailed information on this story just wasn't there. But these days we can do better (and to be fair, a number of books including About Time, Running Through Corridors, and The Discontinuity Guide have done so already, and I am simply perched giddily atop their shoulders).

The first thing to realize about this story, then, is that it must have been completely mind-blowing to the viewer, who would have settled in and watched in increasing bewilderment as the TARDIS fails to show up. Even in 2011, that's unusual. And in 2011, at least we usually get told in advance what the Doctor-Light episode of a given season is going to be, as opposed to here, where it was a complete surprise. But here, there's nothing that indicates this as a Doctor-free episode. Instead we settle in and assume that we have an establishing shot of the world before the Doctor arrives in it - something that has become a fairly standard category of opener by this point.

Except the establishing shot never ends. The tension mounts and mounts, and the audience keeps waiting for when the Doctor is going to arrive and the situation will start looking better, and it never comes. The establishing shot keeps going until the tension ratchets up so far that everyone dies. And the TARDIS never comes. The episode is just a massacre of all of its sympathetic supporting characters at the hands of the Daleks, and there's no Doctor at all.

This does a couple of things. First, it pokes a massive hole in the Doctor's mythic heroism. Starting with The Dalek Invasion of Earth, we've been told over and over again that the Doctor is fundamentally a hero who makes everything OK. Now, with a story occupying the exact same slot that Dalek Invasion of Earth episode #2 did - the one that had the Daleks nervously screaming "We are the masters of Earth" in response to their meeting with the Doctor - we get the exact opposite story. One where the Doctor doesn't show up, nothing is OK, and the Daleks exterminate everybody. While it is still true that the Doctor can save the day, this episode is a sobering reminder that sometimes he doesn't show up.

To a highly engaged viewer inclined to take a conceptual look at the series, this is significant. The Doctor has a time machine. He's defined by now as a character who can show up anywhere and any time. But this episode is a brutal reminder that he doesn't. To some extent we know that - he refuses, in a significant way, to save the day in both The Aztecs and The Reign of Terror, instead allowing death on a massive scale because he won't interfere with history. But the implication has always been that the future is fair game - that he will save the day there. But now we know that he doesn't show up. Much as The Web Planet was in part significant because Doctor Who never had to show that extremely alien a planet again, this is significant because it reminds us that every time the TARDIS touches down and the Doctor steps out, that's a choice. He has a limited life and doesn't show up at eery point of danger in existence. When he saves the day, it means something. (This is actually the best argument against making the Doctor truly immortal - an immortal time traveling hero will eventually save every day. For the Doctor's actions to mean something, he has to be genuinely unable to save everybody in the entire universe every time.)

The other thing it does is finally put the Daleks from the Dalek Book  onto the screen. Not the swooping armies of space Daleks, but at least Daleks that are properly galaxy-conquering terrors. Nation has, it should be noted, put four different sets of Daleks on the screen now - horrible monsters lurking in a ruined city so desperate to survive that they've lost all that made them "human," kind of daft 50s alien invaders, the comedic legion of The Chase, and now the ones from the comics. And one thing that is very clear here is that Nation is more interested in these Daleks not only than the others, but than the Doctor. For the first time since The Daleks, one gets the sense of Nation just writing something he wants to write as opposed to writing for the paycheck. And it's the best writing we've seen from him to date, frankly. The episode is tense and exciting in a way that past stories of his haven't been.

But when all 25 minutes are over, what, exactly, is the audience supposed to make of it? It is significant that the story ends not with the slaughter of Marc Cory and his crew, but with the establishing that Marc Cory's warning survived. In other words, although the Doctor didn't show up to resolve the immediate crisis of this episode, there is still another crisis, and the show is still Doctor Who - eventually the Doctor is going to walk into this story. Presumably, next week... But more on that Wednesday.

OK. So let's draw a line under that, and take a quick turn to the other thing about this episode - the thing that, actually, makes treating it as nothing more than a prelude to The Daleks' Master Plan really egregious. Daleks' Master Plan is a John Wiles produced story. This is a Verity Lambert produced story - the last of them. And the reason she was off ignoring Galaxy 4 was so she could make sure she went out on a truly spectacular note. Mission accomplished. But more to the point, any list of the ten creative figures with the biggest influence on Doctor Who has to include Verity Lambert in the top three. Basically, it comes down to a decision on how you want to order Patrick Troughton, Russell T. Davies, and Verity Lambert. And of them, it's Verity Lambert who has by far the most interesting story.

Doctor Who was, on paper, created by Sydney Newman, the incoming head of drama at the BBC. He'd been poached by the BBC to make them more competitive with commercial broadcasting. It would be easy to assume that he was thus a ruthlessly populist figure who went for the lowest common denominator, but he wasn't. He was clearly working with the mandate of figuring out how to do BBC-type stuff and having it be commercially successful - not with changing what the BBC was.

And so he developed Doctor Who as an educational program. Which didn't last long, but as we saw in the early episodes, was there. But he also developed Doctor Who to be big, popular entertainment. Which is why one of his first decisions about it was so striking. Because not a lot of people in 1963 would put an inexperienced 28-year-old Jewish girl in charge of a flagship series.

Of course, not a lot of 28-year-old Jewish girls were Verity Lambert. By that point in her career, she'd already managed such accomplishments of keeping a live TV show running on camera after the lead actor dropped dead between scenes, keeping order while the proper director scrambled to rewrite the script. She was known by anyone who met her as a force to be reckoned with, and rightly so.

And so there was Verity Lambert, in her first TV production job, holding it together as Doctor Who figured out what it was. It was Lambert who told Newman he was wrong not to like Delia Derbyshire's theme music. It was Lambert who managed to talk Newman into being OK with the Daleks, to obvious results. It was, over and over again, Lambert who managed to get temperamental William Hartnell to work well with the crew, and Lambert who made virtually every decision that kept Doctor Who from the unfortunate fate of flaming out early on.

By all accounts, Lambert was a wonder - capable of standing up and fighting with anybody who she thought was getting in the way. Most accounts are demure, but the strong impression is that Verity Lambert was someone who could rely on winning an argument if it came down to a screaming match, and so was perfectly willing to let it if need be. On top of that, she had an unfailing eye for what would be popular. She, more than Newman, was responsible for the decisions that made Doctor Who a mass success, drawing it away from the frankly dull didacticism Newman had in mind and towards the weird and wonderful show that produces things like The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Rescue, The Web Planet, and The Space Museum.

And she did it at the age of 28, as a girl, in 1963. She did it so well that after proving Newman wrong on both the theme music and the Daleks (and having the guts to tell her boss to sod off, she knew what she was doing), Newman stepped back and let her run the show, basically ending his direct involvement until he stepped in and helped rescue the transition to Patrick Troughton. Needless to say, especially given that Lambert was, to be blunt, absolutely gorgeous (have a look at this photo of her and Carole Anne Ford. No disrespect to Ford, but it's very obvious which one of them is the leading lady and ingenue who would be called An Unearthly Child, and which one is a behind the scenes producer. Very obvious, and completely wrong), the rumors were that she slept her way to the top.

She didn't. She worked, fought, and occasionally knifed her way to the top, going head to head with everyone who disagreed with her and getting her way, which was unerringly right. Frankly, you can look at the list of contributors on the first two seasons of Doctor Who, and there is nobody who it's completely impossible to imagine the show working without. Even the Daleks, being an equal product of Terry Nation and Raymond Cusick, don't have a single name that you can point to and say "That's why the Daleks made it on screen and worked." Nobody in the production is clearly and unequivocally essential to the show working.

Except Verity Lambert. Who at the same age I am now, did 18 months of work that were, let's be honest here, more important to the world than anything I am ever going to accomplish, and probably anything you are ever going to accomplish. Doctor Who exists because a brilliant, beautiful, and strong-willed lady named Verity Lambert spent 18 months fighting tooth and nail to make it happen.

Doctor Who will, over the other 46 years of its existence, become a number of things, some of them miles from anything we saw on screen in Lambert's time as producer. But at the end of the day, there is nothing about Doctor Who that is not completely dependent on her. And her influence never left the show either. Flip forward a decade or so, and think about where the people working on Doctor Who might have gotten the idea for a brash, strong-willed, capable female who worked alongside the tempestuous Doctor. Ask yourself where a model for a character like Sarah Jane Smith, or Romana, or Tegan, or Ace, or Martha, or Amy might have come from. The answer's obvious. The Doctor always had a companion like that. From day one. It's just that she never stepped out in front of the camera before Lis Sladen stepped out in The Time Warrior.

So screw the foreshadowing, screw the epic plot Mission to the Unknown sets in motion, screw the mythic significance of the Doctor as an ontological heroic force in his own unceasing narrative. Screw it all. You want to know what Mission to the Unknown is about? It's about saying goodbye to one of the greatest women who ever lived.

Verity Lambert died in 2007 at the age of 71. She lived long enough to see the show she started her career on impossibly come back from the dead. There's a gorgeous interview with her and Russell T. Davies from 2006, where her love for the show in its current form is as clear as Russell T. Davies's massive admiration for her. And reading it, knowing her history, knowing what she managed to do, it's impossible to read it and not tear up at it.

Years later, in the Time Crash mini-episode, there's a beautiful moment where David Tennant, only half in-character, tells Peter Davison how influential his playing of the Doctor was on Tennant. And he ends with the wonderful line that "you were my Doctor."

In the interview, Russell T. Davies doesn't say it in as many words. But he means it. Verity Lambert was his producer. So let's give him the last word.

Like I said, a lot of it was also about taking it back to the 60s… no Time Lords, proper people as companions who had histories and real lives, seeing the wonder of the Tardis, travelling into the future and the past… And that’s what you did. There have been so many different versions of Doctor Who since then, but I sat down and said we need to get back to that 60s version, where Daleks were mysterious and powerful and had empires and things like that… 

Goodbye, Ms. Lambert.

You fucking rocked.