Fry Something (The Highlanders)

Jamie McCrimmon, in his debut.

It's December 16, 1966, and time for us to ring in 1967. Almost everything you need to know about music in 1966 can be explained by the fact that Tom Jones is at #1 with "The Green Green Grass of Home," while The Kinks are at #7 with "Dead End Street," a song about inescapable economic despair with a chorus of "We are strictly second class / we don't understand /why we should be on dead end street/People are living on dead end street / gonna die on dead end street" while a background shout of "dead end!" repeats. (To be fair, after two verses of maudlin sentimentality, "The Green Green Grass of Home" turns out to be about waiting on death row, but the degree to which this feels like a pale imitation of Simon and Garfunkel's "Silent Night/7 O'Clock News," which does the smash fade from sentimentality to harsh materialism with far greater aplomb, and was released in the US, at least, two months earlier ultimately reminds us that this is still Tom Jones we are talking about.) Tom Jones will hold the #1 spot for the entirety of this story.

In actual news, meanwhile, you've got a nice illustration of how 60s news works in hindsight. You've got basically three categories of events. The first is of significance only to people who think that the 60s are about youth cultural revolution. For instance, The Doors releasing their self-titled debut on January 4th. The second is of significance only to people who think the 60s are about an obnoxious assault on traditional culture. For instance, the theft of millions of dollars of art from the Dulwich Art Gallery in England. And then there are the ones that are significant to both groups, and thus reveal the fault lines in what was actually going on at the time. For instance, Prime Minister Harold Wilson withdrawing all offered settlements with Rhodesia and insisting that the UK will only recognize a majority-black Rhodesian government.

This paradigm is not entirely unhelpful in understanding Doctor Who in its fourth season. On the one hand, you have the stuff that's chum for fans of later eras: The Doctor is funny! Lots of contemporary Earth stuff! On the other hand, you have the stuff that feeds the Troughton-era backlash that seems to have seized Doctor Who fandom somewhere along the line - stuff that amounts to the loss of things that were around in the Hartnell era: No historicals! Endless bases under endless sieges! And on the third hand, because this is British science fiction and we have Zaphod Beeblebrox handy whenever we want him, you have stuff that turns to Marmite: Monsters! And... um... more monsters, really.

The underlying issue is this. In its first season, Doctor Who flailed around and tried to figure out what it was. In its second season, though, Doctor Who was ruthlessly confident about what it was. That confidence was arguably misplaced at times, but it was unquestionably there. But over the course of season three, that confidence progressively waned until Innes Lloyd decided to just reboot the entire show. And now, in season four, we're flailing about again trying to make a new show. Now as it happens, we're going to get there, and there is going to turn out to be a massively influential and frankly genuinely interesting television program. But we're not there yet. So instead we get things like this. The spotters guide for The Highlanders is "last pure historical story and first appearance of Jamie," neither of which are quite true.

But this kind of mediocre fan summary is understandable. After all, we're reeling about in territory that, as Doctor Who fans, we're spectacularly ill-suited to understand. I've been knocking on about this for a while now, but it really cannot be stressed enough - watching this stretch of the show from the viewpoint of someone who knows how changing lead actors on Doctor Who works is just the wrong way to go about it.

I mention this because normally the second story is the one where we get to see what the new status quo is going to be. The Silurians tells us that the show is going to be about the Doctor butting heads with UNIT even as he helps them. The Ark in Space tells us that we're going to see a lot of gothic horror. Four to Doomsday tells us that we're going to see a lot of sloppily plotted violence. Attack of the Cybermen tells us that we're going to see a lot of fanwank alongside sloppily plotted violence. And so on. But if you try to apply that framework to The Highlanders, you will end up more or less on a completely different planet.

There are several reasons for this. First of all, it would be extremely difficult for the series to confidently step up and show us what it's going to be like with Troughton because nobody working on it actually has the foggiest idea. This story was slapped together in a desperate hurry, and the next story was initially deemed too bad to use, and only brought back onto the schedule when it became obvious that every other story was actually even worse. It's not going to be until The Moonbase that Doctor Who starts to look like it was written by people who had a clue what they were doing again.

But beyond that, the show just can't do the confident switchover at this stage. Because what it's trying to do is too strange to just do and hope nobody notices. It would be like The Beatles releasing Sergeant Pepper immediately after Help!, instead of going through Rubber Soul and Revolver first. So instead the show hits on the frankly brilliant idea of having the Doctor go through a horrifying metaphysical change that destabilizes the basic core of his identity and forces him to rebuild who he is on the fly, and then don't quite embrace that in the actual episodes. Now, having done that, we enter phase two of "what happens if we recast the Doctor," in which the show flails about for eight weeks not quite sure what to do after the main character attains enlightenment and becomes a trickster figure.

And so we get The Highlanders, an episode that is considerably more about establishing the ways in which the show is not like what it was under Hartnel than it is about establishing what it is like under Troughton. At its core, this story is an unstructured romp across some famous history in which, in lieu of following any discernible plot, the Doctor runs around and plays dress-up for four episodes.

Taken on its own terms, it is easily the single most baffling Doctor Who story to date, making The Web Planet look perfectly normal and routine. Taken in context, it actually seems even stranger, in that it offers the bewildering spectacle of Doctor Who visibly and loudly refusing to be Doctor Who as we know it.

Let's first clear up the easy part of the spotter's guide fallacy. Yes, Jamie McCrimmon appears in all four episodes and departs with the TARDIS crew at the end. But he's a completely minor character with very little role in this story, elevated to companion status out of nowhere except the realization that Frazier Hines has some star power. His sticking around at the end of the story is only slightly more probable than Dodo's sticking around at the end of The Massacre, and that's down purely to the fact that at least Jamie appears in his debut story. But if you want a story that is at least in part about establishing Jamie, tune in Monday.

But the real thing is the idea that this is the last historical. Because it's not. Not that there are more historicals before Black Orchid gets attempted as a throwaway in the 1980s. No, the issue is that this isn't a historical in any sense that we've previously understood the term.

This is clear from the opening moments, really. The TARDIS arrives just after the Battle of Culloden, and it looks like we're in for a standard historical in which we learn the basic shape of the battle. But then the Doctor does something very unusual. As soon as he sees that the TARDIS has landed in a battlefield with cannons, he tries to turn tail and run, responding to Polly's quite reasonable question "You don't want people to think you're afraid, do you" with "Why not?" It's only Ben and Polly's insistence that they appear to be back in England that forces him to stay.

From there, almost immediately, the story just becomes a compilation of "stuff we couldn't get Hartnell to do." Prance about in a comedy German accent and do intense and oddly violent comedy scenes of humorously torturing people? Check. Cross-dress? Check. Be oddly obsessed with stealing people's hats? Check. Basically, liberated by his metaphysical change from the tedious requirement that he be remotely sane, the Doctor goes completely nuts here, hamming for the camera, firing off one-liners to nobody in particular, and generally having a good time, while, distantly in the background, some kidnappings and rescues go on.

This is where the spotters guide approach falls short, then. Because this isn't the last historical, due largely to the fact that other than having no overt science fiction elements, nothing about it even faintly resembles historicals we've seen before. In terms of televised Doctor Who, The Smugglers was the last historical, and this is just a parody of the genre to reiterate after last time that the entire rulebook has been chucked out the window. We'll deal with the issue of the historical being abandoned as a genre later (And once again, those of you who are obsessives now know which book from the BBC Books range is showing up in a few entries), so for now, let's just look at how unlike this sort of mad romp is.

To be fair, there are two distinct strands of historical that we could be talking about. These two styles split very sensibly on the lines of who wrote the first four historicals. The first two historicals - Marco Polo and The Aztecs - were written by John Lucarotti, and are essentially stories about being trapped in a hostile past. Marco Polo is a hugely extended epic of the TARDIS crew being trapped in the Himalayas. The Aztecs is a shorter epic of the TARDIS crew being trapped in ancient Mexico and Barbara trying and failing to make the most of it. In both cases, the main point is that history is a scary, chaotic place.

Compare to the second style - the Dennis Spooner approach - as displayed in The Reign of Terror and The Romans. Both of those stories can be fairly described as "romps" in which the major, iconic bits of the history are thrown into a blender to produce a sort of highlight tour of the historical time period. Where the Lucarotti historicals are about giving the past a richly detailed texture and forcing the TARDIS crew to survive it, the Spooner historicals are a sort of history tribute band, playing through a greatest hits album of "Roman stuff" or "French Revolution stuff" where the primary pleasure is the recognition of the key elements. So in Marco Polo, Kublai Khan's palace is a struggled towards resolution of six episodes of freezing death. When he shows up, there's a sense of relief and a sense that the danger of the past six episodes has partially passed and we are headed towards resolution. Whereas when Nero shows up in The Romans, it means we've finally gotten to the good bits.

From those first four historicals (or, really, four of the first five, with 100,000 BC basically being a Lucarotti-style), we get pretty much all of the rest. The Crusade, The Myth Makers, and The Gunfighters all belong to the Spooner tradition. The Massacre to the Lucarotti tradition. (It is perhaps worth remarking, albeit somewhat sadly, that the Lucarotti tradition is maddeningly restricted to stories written by Lucarotti. That said, when I finish banging out the extra Hartnell essays and get the book version of that out, it'll include an essay on Steve Lyons' novel The Witch Hunters, which is firmly a Lucarotti-style historical.) That's not to say that the genre didn't evolve - The Gunfighters is far smarter, more complex, and better than Spooner's amateurish go at The Reign of Terror (And indeed, Donald Cotton went and spruced up The Romans hilariously when he did the novelization), and The Massacre works in ways that The Aztecs and Marco Polo never did. (The Massacre was, admittedly, heavily rewritten, but really, let's leave that be.)

With The Smugglers, things start to break down a little bit. On the one hand, it's clearly a Spooner-style romp through the highlights of the pirate genre. But all of the previous Spooner-style stories had basically been comedies, with the possible exception of The Crusade, and even that spent an awful lot of time with Shakespeare parodies. In terms of its plot, it feels Lucarotti-style - the characters are stuck in a hostile past. The key clue? Not since The Aztecs had Doctor Who done a historical without famous people in it. But seen in hindsight, The Smugglers seems like a natural evolution of what came before. Put in context, The Smugglers looks like a model for how historical stories could have worked under Troughton, with the leading man providing the comedy instead of the situations, freeing the writers up to explore non-comedic bits of history.

In other words, there's absolutely a way to do a historical with Patrick Troughton in it. That is not the reason the historicals died. (Again, we'll deal with why they did die and what that means in a few entries.) But what is striking, then, is that this is nothing like either the Spooner or Lucarotti traditions. I mean, figuring out why The Highlanders isn't a Lucarotti historical should just be a matter of watching a few minutes while Troughton is in drag.

But why isn't it a Spooner-style historical? Because fundamentally, the Spooner-style historical is about the regulars playing stock roles in a defined type of adventure, and laughing about their being cast in those roles. This is part of why The Crusade is an archetypal Spooner-style historical - because the sections where Ian is Sir Ian of Jaffa are ultimately about the tension of a 1960s science teacher having to be a knight in the Crusades. So what's wrong with watching the Doctor be cast as Doctor Von Wer, the Hannoverian Doctor?

Because the entire point of Doctor Von Wer is that the Doctor is putting on a funny voice and playing at being someone else. The Spooner-style historical is about the TARDIS crew being mis-cast. The Highlanders is about the way in which the Doctor can put on a disguise and, most importantly, parody the very role he's supposed to be playing. The Doctor, when he is playing at Doctor Von Wer, acts neither like the Doctor nor like a Hannoverian physician in 1746. Instead, he acts like the Doctor parodying a Hannoverian physician.

So instead of being a case of "the TARDIS crew puts on costumes and plays at a different genre," The Highlanders is a complete mockery of that. The TARDIS crew puts on costumes and romps about laughing at the genre they're ostensibly in. This is not just "a bit different" from Hartnell historicals - this is an overt mockery of the entire Hartnell era, with Troughton's Doctor repeatedly refusing to play the role of the Doctor (and in fact spending 80%+ of the story playing any other role he can find). "I should like a hat like this" indeed.

This is actually quite a high-wire act, because it's an absolute assault on the good will of the audience. If The Highlanders at any point tips into a mean-spirited dig at the stupidity of historicals, the entire thing comes crashing down. Remember, most of the audience at this point has not made up their mind on this whole "new Doctor" thing, and if they've been watching Doctor Who thus far, what they like is not Troughton-style clowning but Hartnell-style adventures, historicals and all. So putting on a mockery of the previous three years of the show is not the safest move.

Thankfully for the show, Troughton is up to the task, and even though this is miles from where his characterization of the Doctor is going to settle, he is a good enough actor to hold this together and be charming. But watching The Highlanders, by far the most important thing to remember is that there is absolutely no reason why this had to work. The Doctor enters and exits this story as an unrestrained force of anarchy (as he was at the end of Power of the Daleks). No effort has been made to establish to the audience what Doctor Who is like now that Hartnell has left.

But on the other hand, we have gotten four weeks that are essentially about how much fun Patrick Troughton is. And they worked. The Highlanders, in the end, is a story about convincing Doctor Who fans that they didn't really like Hartnell all that much and that Troughton is going to be much more fun. And, astonishingly, given that Hartnell's Doctor Who was really quite good, the show more or less pulls it off.

But the consequence is a story that is by necessity nobody's favorite. Troughton fans don't get Troughton in it, and Hartnell fans get a slap in the face. Taken as a story, this is an abject failure. Taken as a step in making the transition from one era to the other, it's a success, made all the more satisfying by how improbable it is that it worked in the first place.

An Unknown Power (The Power of the Daleks)

Of the many things to love about Daleks, the
way their eyestalks wilt when they lose
power is perhaps the smuttiest.

It's November 5, 1966. The Four Tops are at number one with "Reach Out I'll Be There." In two weeks, The Beach Boys will take it with "Good Vibrations," and two weeks later it'll be Tom Jones with "Green Green Grass of Home." Meanwhile, in the news, the Rhodesia situation goes worse and worse, John Lennon meets Yoko Ono, and Barbados declares independence from the UK.

While on television...

Sometimes Doctor Who is magical. I mean this on several levels, but one of them - and a significant one - is that the show is a clear formative influence on the sci-fi/fantasy culture that will eventually produce writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. As with many things about the future, we'll get there in time. For now, the only thing you really need to know is that it's hardly unusual for the show to have something of a spiritual dimension.

I mention this because, as The Power of the Daleks spins up, it's essential to understanding the only thing that's on anybody's mind - what the heck just happened to the Doctor. Again, this is something it's easy to forget in hindsight. We've had eight further post-regeneration stories now. We know how these work. But The Power of the Daleks isn't written for us. It's written for an audience with no idea what is going on. And it's establishing all of this for the first time, which means there are no precedents for this. This isn't "a regeneration story." It's the regeneration story - the story about what happens when the Doctor changes who he is.

It's tough to say what does happen, though. Minimalist exposition and the fact that we're on the joint longest stretch of missing episodes in the series conspire to make this a maddening thing to piece together. So let's go to the behind the scenes and look at what the people making this thought was going on. For me, the choice quote from Gerry Davis and Innes Lloyd's notes on what they call a "metaphysical change" is this: "It is as if he has had the LSD drug and instead of experiencing the kicks, he has the hell and dank horror which can be its effect."

What does this mean? I probably should have tossed Timothy Leary in back when we did our roundup of 1966 counterculture. But suffice it to say that talking about LSD and metaphysical changes ties right in with the existing discussions of spiritual journeys that we've already had. But what, specifically, does LSD evoke? Well, let's crack open our Timothy Leary - specifically The Psychedelic Experience - and look at his incantations to be used in case of massive acid trip:

That which is called ego-death is coming to you. Remember: this is now the hour of death and rebirth; take advantage of this temporary death to obtain the perfect state - Enlightenment. 

So that's kind of familiar.

The other thing we need to take notice of is that this is a David Whitaker story, albeit one with Dennis Spooner doing an uncredited rewrite. Here I'm mostly just summarizing Wood and Miles in About Time (as always, available from finer Amazon widgets everywhere), but it's worth noting. Wood and Miles make an extended argument that Whitaker's writing has a ton of themes from alchemy and classic occultist sources. They demure on the extent of Whitaker's knowledge of these themes, but make a compelling case that they're there. I'll go a bit further - Whitaker said in interviews that "the lure of alchemy" was one of this favorite themes. So reading a sense of metaphysical weight and import into a David Whitaker story is hardly a massive leap.

So to recap, we have the Doctor engaging in some sort of metaphysical change brought about by exposure to the rampaging energy of Mondas, which we recognize as a dark mirror of Earth and thus a daemonic power, though not necessarily one that does not lead to enlightenment. (Remember, the Cybermen themselves took a spiritual journey - they just became horrifying monsters as a result of it. But this is the big theme of Kenneth Grant, and even to a lesser extent Timothy Leary - that the unenlightened are not qualified to judge the enlightened. The Cybermen are horrifying because they are enlightened and we are not.) The tension is simple to start - who is this man who replaced the Doctor? Is he still the Doctor? Is he still a good guy? Or has he been corrupted by Mondas?

In practical terms, however, coming right off of a story about existential body horror and daemonic shadows of humanity, we get Ben and Polly bickering. It's worth noting that we've seen Ben and Polly enough now to know how this works. When Ben and Polly disagree, Polly is right and Ben is wrong. In particular, think back to The Smugglers, where Ben systematically rubbishes every single premise of the series for comedic purposes. It's a subtle thing, but the fact that Polly believes this strange man to be the Doctor and Ben doesn't is actually a major reassurance that this is the Doctor. The show is still going to have to prove it to us, but from the opening moments, it does clearly signal where this is going.

On the other hand, the road is, to say the least, a bit rocky. The Doctor awakens from his change screaming, and seems exhausted and relieved to see that it's over. But noticeably, the first thing we see from this new Doctor is weakness - he screams, gurns, flails about, and when he finally laughs, saying that it's over, there is something deeply unsettling about it. The sense is that the Doctor is shrunken - diminished. (One thing that is not remarked upon nearly enough in reading the regeneration sequence is that the Troughton's outfit was intended as a "degraded" version of Hartnell's)

On the other hand, we do quickly get a reassurance that this is the Doctor. Ben accepts before long that this is the Doctor changed - though he wonders what's changed besides his face - and when Troughton looks in a mirror we see a last flash of Hartnell looking back at him. But this is contrasted with Troughton referring to the Doctor in the third person, and flitting about mercurially before starting to play his recorder madly and obsessively.

So what we are left with when we take off from the TARDIS towards the promised Daleks? Surprisingly little that is sensible. There is someone that might be the Doctor. But he acts wrong, and seems shrunken and ill-suited to the task. And once he gets to the main action on the Vulcan colony, things get worse - he continues to sulk and play the recorder instead of answering fairly straightforward questions about what happened to him and what's going on. And when he finds the Dalek ship, he seems positively giddy, singing "extermination" in an almost taunting voice and actively soliciting the colony to open the Dalek ship, despite knowing full well what's inside. All of this is unsettling. We've been given enough assurance that this man is now the Doctor. But by establishing that, the story brings something bigger into doubt - now we wonder if we actually know who the Doctor is, and whether he's up to the task in front of him.

And in episode two, at least, he isn't. He seems out of his depth, scared by one or two Daleks when he's previously faced armies of them. He keeps referring to Hartnell as though he was the real Doctor and Troughton is just a poor impostor. Until finally we get what is frankly the key scene of the entire six-parter. The Doctor and Lesterton face off, and Lesterton unveils the Daleks. One glides past the Doctor and turns to look at him, clearly recognizing him and acknowledging who he is. This, finally, nearly two episodes into Troughton's tenure, is the firmest assurance we have that the Doctor is the Doctor, and that he is a hero - the Daleks fear him.

And then the Daleks win. They get everybody on the colony to turn against the Doctor, shouting him down with their repeated cries of "I AM YOUR SERVANT" as he insists, louder and more pointlessly, that they are evil terrors. And this sets up what The Power of the Daleks is actually about. The Doctor, having confronted the ultimate cosmic darkness in Mondas and having engaged in a terrifying metaphysical battle with it, has to rebuild who he is in light of that revelation. And he has to do it in time to stop the Daleks, threats that can call into question the very nature of who he is and how heroic he is.

To be clear, this is not a narrative collapse story. This is something altogether stranger - a story in which when the Doctor shows up and gets started, the narrative has already collapsed. The Doctor has been reduced to nothing and has to rebuild his entire character, and the Daleks, the usual engines of narrative collapse, have already taken over the story. This isn't about the Doctor trying to maintain the integrity of what a Doctor Who story is against an onslaught of Daleks. It's a story about the Doctor trying to create a Doctor Who story in the face of a story where the Daleks have won.

And so it's striking that, in episode three, all of the uncertainty over whether Troughton is the Doctor is gone. Instead, the uncertainty is whether he's good enough at being the Doctor. And what we see over the next few episodes is a magnificent slow burn. Rather than continuing to harp on dramatic moments like the "I AM YOUR SERVANT" confrontation, the story, with astonishing confidence, assumes that cliffhanger to have been as disturbing as it is and trusts that it can spend the next two weeks slowly ratcheting up the tension. The Daleks get closer and closer to the point where they are in charge, and the Doctor continues to fail to get a toehold into the plot. This could be taken as a disappointment - certainly, rereading that paragraph, it sounds like I'm saying the story delays for three episodes. It doesn't. I can't say that enough - this is grippingly plotted, and absolutely worth tracking down a reconstruction of. This is, simply put, the best Doctor Who story we've seen yet. The slow burn here is a beautiful building of tension, and it just keeps building and building.

Until finally, in episode five, we get something truly impressive. Episode four ends with the revelation of a massive assembly line of Daleks. One thing, in fact, that this story does extremely well is make the Daleks scary again. After their massive universe-threatening antics in The Daleks' Master Plan, Whitaker instead makes them an intimate threat and takes care to repeatedly stress the contrast between their robotic exterior and their fleshy interior, playing up the essential strangeness of the concept to make the Daleks seem unusual. This is brilliant work on Whitaker's part, and gives the Daleks a new lease on life - previously they had to be in bigger and bigger adventures to satisfy us. Now, suddenly, they are in a much smaller adventure, and scarier than ever.

Then, in episode five, we get Lesterton - previously the Daleks' stooge - having a complete nervous breakdown at the horror of what he's done. And it's like nothing we've ever seen - an extended scene of clear mental agony. Lesterton rants, eventually declaring that humanity is doomed and the Daleks are now the supreme species. And again, what Whitaker is doing here is taking where the Daleks were in The Daleks' Master Plan and tweaking it - re-using battle-tested Dalek tricks and just streamlining them. Because this is the exact same scene as Mavic Chen going from top dog to extermination fodder at the end of that story. It's just done far better because now there's tension - if only Lesterton can pull himself together, he might save the day.

But, of course, he can't. And now there is an army of Daleks. The Doctor has failed. The Daleks have won. And there's a side point to make here about the fact that there are two revolutions going on here. First the Daleks are overthrowing humanity, and second a bunch of rebels are trying to use the Daleks to overthrow the colonial government. There's an intimate link between these two phenomena - one that is highlighted when a Dalek asks, in all seriousness, why humans kill humans. (Another brilliant touch - giving the line that challenges the notion that humans are morally superior to Daleks to a Dalek.) The Daleks, here, represent the same horrific darkness that Mondas does. The same one that destroyed the Doctor. (Ironically, then, it's this story that actually establishes Cybermen as villains on the level of the Daleks.)

By this point, Ben and Polly advocate just running for their lives. The Daleks are running rampant and slaughtering everybody. And only here, after it's gotten apocalyptically bad, does the Doctor step up and intervene.

But what is most striking is how he intervenes. Throughout this story we see the big thing that is different between Troughton and Hartnell. Troughton has the magnetic charisma of a leading man in the John Steed tradition - he's charming, witty, and energetic. So when he finally gets to work on the task, there's an electricity to it - especially given that the previous three episodes are all about him failing to get a toehold into the plot and being relegated to the sidelines to sulk on his recorder.

And then what he does. First he sacrifices a ton of guards in order to distract the Daleks, seemingly unworried about the ethics of sending Bragen's guards to certain death. The Doctor is going to play this his way, and woe befall those who get in the way. The Daleks declare that the law of the Daleks is in force - a fact terribly demonstrated when the Daleks, after Lesterton begs for them to spare him, saying that he gave them life, simply respond "Yes. You gave us life" and then shoot him dead. But in response, the Doctor demonstrates his own law.

Except his law is calamitous. The Daleks are destroyed in explosions of horrific viscera. And the Doctor is knocked out for it, coming to and reacting with glee when he's told the extent of the destruction he wrought. ("Did I do all of that," he asks energetically as he finds out the extent of what's been done.) And then, when confronted by the colonists with how much damage he did, the Doctor laughs it off and sneaks away. And, more troublingly, when Ben asks him if he had a plan all along, he returns to sulkily tooting on his recorder. 

And so we end with Ben, Polly, and the audience putting their trust in this new Doctor. But that trust is granted warily. The Doctor is dangerous in a way he wasn't before. Hartnell was alien because he was a temperamental old man. Troughton is scary because he is a force of pure chaos, willing to bring the world down around people's ears. Even if we've been reassured of our initial concern - that the Doctor has somehow become possessed by Mondas - now we have a whole new one. That this impish, chaotic Doctor, while he is clearly capable of stopping any monsters, might take the rest of us down with him. 

But that was always a part of the Doctor - the anarchic spirit and slight revelry in chaos. It's just that now those aspects of him seem wholly unchecked. The fear at this point is not that this isn't the Doctor. It's that maybe we never really knew who the Doctor was.

Pop Between Realities, Home In Time For Tea 4 (Adam Adamant Lives!, Batman, The Avengers)

Fun Fact #1 - Burt Ward, while playing Robin, frequently
had to be given emasculating injections to keep
his tights from being overly revealing.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. This time we look at the British series Adam Adamant Lives! and The Avengers, as well as the American series Batman.

Occasionally cultural history throws up a juxtaposition that is so brain-breakingly weird that it perfectly encapsulates an entire moment of history. For instance, nothing has ever clarified the nature and tone of Japanese narrative structures for me quite like knowing that My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies were originally released as a double feature. (Though I have yet to find a definitive statement on which film came first, which seems to me to be just about the most crucial fact in human history.)

I mention this because if you want to understand 1966 in Great Britain, it is possible that no fact is more immediately relevant than the fact that on Saturdays in 1966, at around 5:15 PM, the latter episodes of Season 3 of Doctor Who were airing opposite imports of Batman, the 1966 television series starring Adam West. If this fact does not sufficiently unsettle you, I highly recommend firing up, say, The Celestial Toymaker Part 4 or a random bit of The Ark and watching it back to back with a Season 1 episode of Batman.

What is most unsettling about this is the fact that with only three channels in existence at the time, that meant that ITV viewed Batman as the natural competitor to Doctor Who in that media environment. Because other than being adventure stories (and thus, it is worth remarking, "for boys" in a way that it never was before the dual roles of Barbara and the young female companion were collapsed into one female companion role, thus changing the show from being about a bunch of people in terrifying circumstances to being about a bunch of boys and their girl sidekick in terrifying adventures) there's not a lot of obvious similarities.

Up to this point, one of the major characteristics of Doctor Who has been the essential joke of the TARDIS crew being completely the wrong people for this sort of story. In its original form, this is clearest - two schoolteachers, a teenager, and an old Victorian inventor walk into an alien planet. Even when the companions were Vicki and Steven - two capable future types who have something resembling a valid reason to be traipsing about Galaxy Four - there was still the Doctor, who was by and large the antithesis of a correct action hero. The whole concept still hinged on the incongruity of the old Victorian inventor and these harshly modern (and increasingly postmodern) settings.

So where we've left the TARDIS crew off, that's still basically where we are. There's nothing too unusual about Ben and Polly as action heroes - unlike Ian (essentially a middle aged ex-soldier) and Barbara (the charmingly mumsy type), attractive young people are never out of place having exciting adventures. But the heart of the show - the main character - was still a conscious and deliberate contrast with what the show had him face.

The result highlights what the biggest contrast between Batman and Doctor Who was. Because every element of Batman was keyed towards the goal of frenetic and over the top action. Whereas thus far in Doctor Who, the goal has been explicitly to contrast the action/adventure elements with the fact that the protagonist is completely the wrong character for this sort of thing.

It's important to highlight this, because it's the one thing that really separates Doctor Who from all the other action/adventure shows going on. Doctor Who is about the gulf between its concepts and the juxtapositions created by them. Compare that to Batman. Even in the most sympathetic readings of Batman, where we accept that everyone involved understood that the show was ridiculous, it's hard to be that sympathetic to the show. To take the two-parter I watched, when the Joker uses a van equipped with mirrors on the outside that can cause it to appear invisible to kidnap the Maharajah of Nimpah who is actually just the Joker as part of a larger scheme to humiliate Batman into endorsing a ransom check...

Yes, it's completely mental and over the top. And this is something we're going to see a lot of in Doctor Who when, for instance, we get mad scientists trying to drain the ocean, robotic Yeti in the London Underground, or, to start on the other end of the series, the Doctor and Richard Nixon teaming up to fight The Greys. But in Batman, the knowing nods about how ridiculous it all is are all there is. There's something painfully sterile about the entire affair. The central idea of Batman - really its only idea - is dancing around the screen shouting "Look at me, I'm full of ridiculous ideas." Whereas the central idea of Doctor Who has always been to put the ridiculous and the everyday on the same screen and have them both steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that the other doesn't belong.

All the same, it's hard to get around the sense that Batman just looked cooler. Some of that is a matter of presentation - nowadays we view Batman in color, but in 1966 on ITV, it would have been transmitted in the same fuzzy black and white as Doctor Who. But for all its facileness, the fact of the matter is, Batman is trying to have more fun than Doctor Who is.

Fun Fact #2 - If you attempt to give Adam Adamant an
emasculating injection, he will cut you.

And it's certainly not that fun is the antithesis of quality in an action/adventure show. For proof of that, even ignoring Doctor Who's own future, we can pop over to Adam Adamant Lives!, aka "Oh Hey, It's That Verity Lambert Gal Again." Which is to say that while Adam Adamant Lives! is notable for a couple of things, including being the source of Adam Ant's name and the most obvious inspiration for Austin Powers ever, one of the things it is most notable for is being the project Verity Lambert and Sydney Newman turned their attention to after Doctor Who, along with Donald Cotton, who you might remember from one or two past Doctor Who stories.

Adam Adamant Lives! differed from Batman in several key ways, in that it was British, intelligent, and largely a flop. But watching it now it's hard to get past the sense that it's actually quite good. Its premise is that a classic Victorian adventurer (originally to have been Sexton Blake, before everyone remembered about that pesky copyright thing) is frozen and thawed out in 1966 in a plotline that was in no way stolen from Marvel Comics' The Avengers. (Look, they respected copyright on Sexton Blake, surely you don't expect them to have original ideas twice in a row.) He gets the obligatory swinging 60s blonde female sidekick, and, much as you'd expect, they fight crime.

The show is imperfect, to say the least, suffering somewhat badly from its inability to reconcile the ambitions of its premise with its underlying mandate to provide a generic adventure serial. Its leading actor, Gerald Harper, did an odd job with the part. Not necessarily a bad job, but he played the part with an impassioned straight-lacedness that was markedly (and willfully) out of place in the larger series. The result on the one hand captures the man-out-of-time feeling perfectly, and on the other hand is at times stultifyingly dull. When, on occasion, he gets a scene with someone who can play off of his demeanor (the episode I watched opened with a lovely scene with an actor named Patrick Troughton, who actually looks a bit like that horrid man who stole the Doctor's face at the end of The Tenth Planet) this works. More often, it either makes the show feel wooden or makes it look like everyone was scrambling around desperately to find a show that could actually match up with Harper's acting. (In the end, Sydney Newman ordered Harper to change how he played the part. Harper refused, and Newman cancelled the show.)

But on the other hand, when he was on his game, Harper provided a genuinely magnetic leading man performance, often holding the entire show together with little more than charisma and some eye boggling. (See also Tom Baker under Graham Williams) Which gets at one of the key features of this genre of show - one that is preserved to the present day in shows like Bones, House, or Castle - charismatic, funny leads. This is another area where Batman ultimately falls flat. Short of the endlessly entertaining drinking game of seeing how many times Burt Ward delivers a line in a tone that would not need to be altered at all if he were seething rage and plotting Adam West's demise, the leads on that show are played totally flat, never once seeming to be aware of the absurdity of their world, and thus giving the audience no foothold from which to laugh with the show.

Again, comparing to Adam Adamant Lives! is instructive. One thing Harper was unquestionably brilliant at in the show was using the wry smiles of his dandy character to provide an extra-diegetic meta-commentary on the absurdity of the situation. Or, to strip that of literary theory, Harper gives wry smiles that are on one level something Adam Adamant is actually doing in the story (that's what diegetic means - actually taking place in the story) and on another level commentaries on the story from Harper as an actor (which takes them from diegetic to extra-diegetic - that is, they go beyond merely being diegetic). The impact of this is massive - with one simple piece of gestural acting, Harper adds reams of intelligence to the show because suddenly we are left constantly navigating the differing narrative levels and genres of the story instead of just getting to take them for granted a la Batman.

But for all of Harper's charisma, Adam Adamant Lives! fails to hold a candle in the pure charm department to its most obvious influence, Sydney Newman's hit creation for ITV before he headed over to the BBC and made Doctor Who, The Avengers.

Fun Fact #3 - Emma Peel cures emasculating injections.

I could have put an entry on The Avengers at any point in TARDIS Eruditorum, as it predates the show by nearly three years, but the fact of the matter is, when people talk about The Avengers, most of the time they're talking about Series 4 and 5, and most specifically Series 5, which was produced in color and was the version that was actually a hit on US television as well. Series 4 and 5, you see, are the Emma Peel years.

It may be necessary to define some key concepts here for those who are not intimately acquainted with the particulars of classic British television of the 1960s. Specifically, and it really is very important that you understand this, Emma Peel is quite literally the sexiest character ever to be put on a television screen. She is the physical embodiment of classy sex appeal. Indeed, it is a little known fact that when homosexuality was finally legalized in Great Britain, the compromise was that it was now legal to be gay just as long as you made an exception for Emma Peel. (Given that Emma Peel gives Lady Gaga a run for her money in the "obviously designed to be a gay icon sweepstakes," this was not generally taken as an arduous requirement.)

If, for some reason, you are a horribly deluded person that does not recognize the transcendent eroticism of the character the moment you see Diana Rigg in character, that is basically irrelevant, as it is transparently clear watching The Avengers that the show is absolutely convinced of the character's sexiness, and that this truth is held to be more fundamental than piddly details of the universe like gravity.

If you are for some reason suspicious that I might be overselling the case slightly, I highly recommend sitting down with an episode of The Avengers. Because the debt that every other show with a charming double act as its lead characters owes to The Avengers cannot be overstated.

As a premise, The Avengers is possibly the flabbiest thing we have yet talked about on this blog. Its premise, and I hope you're hanging on tight, is that there's a guy named John Steed, who wears a bowler hat and is very dapper, and he teams up with a woman named Emma Peel, who wears sexy 60s fashions. And they fight crime. That's basically the whole of it. The show is a watermark in the subgenre known as spy-fi, in which light espionage plotlines are melded with light science fiction plotlines to have some plot in which Steed and Peel defend various civil servants from various outlandish and poorly explained technological menaces.

Or at least, that's the plot. Watch the opening credits, however, and you'll get a much clearer sense of what the show is about, namely the chemistry between Steed and Peel. Everything else is, at times explicitly, the frame upon which lightly flirtatious banter between a dapper Victorian and a sexy mod is hung. Watching The Avengers for the plot requires a catastrophic lack of active brain cells. However the show remains absolutely delightful because the fact of the matter is, Steed and Peel are absolutely brilliant to watch together. (A particular highlight is the episode Who's Who, in which they get body-swapped with some thoroughly uninteresting Eastern European agents. The scenes of Patricia Hanes and Freddie Jones trying to emulate the chemistry of Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee are frankly excruciating, but on the other hand, the scenes where Rigg and Macnee get to let loose and be villains who make out with each other frequently are every bit as wonderful as you would hope. In practice, the entire episode exists to put those scenes in, and everything else is just tiresome plot.)

So why go over all of this? Because in practice, one of the things that the Hartnell-Troughton transition was about was getting rid of Hartnell, who never played the part with magnetic charisma, and by this point was having enough trouble getting through his lines, little yet infusing them with charm, and replacing him with a more charismatic actor. We'll talk about the shift of the show towards more and more straight adventure yarns as we go. Because, yes - Doctor Who starts being more about monsters, more about action, and more about flashy visual setpieces a la Batman. (Though honestly, given that nothing in all three seasons of Batman save for Cesar Romano's painted-white mustache comes anywhere close to the barmy spectacle of The Web Planet, the bar is pretty well cleared there) But the single most important thing imported from this genre - although it will take at least until 1971 and arguably until 1979 before Doctor Who nails what The Avengers has going with Peel and Steed - is the transition from a detached and alien leading man to a charismatic and funny leading man. First and foremost, that is how the show attempts to compete with Batman, Adam Adamant Lives!, The Avengers, and their like.

Interested in any of these deeply odd series? The Avengers is out on DVD, as is the film version of the Adam West Batman. On the other hand, you'll have to import Adam Adamant Lives! from the UK. 

A Chrysalis Case After Its Spread Its Wings (The Tenth Planet)

A horrible, otherworldly monster that's nothing more than
a grotesque parody of humanity confronts a Cyberman.

It's October 8, 1966. Jim Reeves is posthumously at number one with Distant Drums. The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, The Who, Dusty Springfield, and The Troggs are all charting. Distant Drums will hold #1 for three weeks, before The Four Tops take it. In the news, we have our standard smattering of 60s misfortune with a side of a massive coal disaster that kills 144 people, mostly children, in the Welsh village of Aberfan, and the infamous escape of George Blake, a British spy and double agent for Russia, from prison in London.

But let's be honest, it's hard to approach this one from that direction. Which is a pity. There are stories fandom has done some mean things to over the years, but few we've been as brutal to as this one. Ask a reasonably dedicated fan, and there are two things to know about this story - it's the first regeneration story, and the first Cybermen story. And that basically defines it. The trouble is, it's neither.

It's certainly not the first regeneration story. Wood and Miles make a compelling case for this, including their observation, much ignored by the rest of fandom, that for years Doctor Who Magazine didn't even count this story as a regeneration, instead saying it was a "rejuvenation," and thus a completely different thing from what happens in, say, Planet of the Spiders. Even if you do take the modern viewpoint that what happens at the end of this story is the same thing that happens at the end of Parting of the Ways, though, the fact of the matter is, treating this as the first regeneration story reads it the wrong way. Calling it a regeneration story treats the ending as a defined, known thing. We get to read the story in the context of the other seven regeneration stories (Yes, there's one I'm not counting, and we'll deal with it when we get there), and get to define it via a raft of stuff that came later.

The same problem exists with calling it the first Cybermen story. Never mind that the Cybermen never look or act like this again. The real problem is that this means that when they show up, the audience reaction is "Oh, it's the Cybermen." Which is a fine reaction, but it's manifestly not the reaction the story is going for. The Cybermen in this story are not the classic monsters who are returning for another round. They're the bizarre new villains who are making their first appearance.

It is admittedly a challenge to scrape off the forty-five years of reputation that have been built on this story. The problem is, at this point the reputation is spoiling our view. Read from the future, we see all sorts of cracks. The Cybermen look like men in lycra. The regeneration is unexplained and doesn't seem a natural extension of what went before, meaning Hartnell gets a kind of feeble sendoff. (Pertwee gets "A tear, Sarah Jane?" Baker gets "It's the end, but the moment has been prepared for." Davison gets "I might regenerate. I don't know. It feels different this time." Hartnell? He gets "Keep warm." He doesn't even get any carrot juice.) And a legion of slicker bases under slicker sieges make this one look a bit cheap. But all of those cracks are only visible because for forty-five years one of the basic mandates of Doctor Who has been "Take The Tenth Planet and do it again with more modern sensibilities." Which is, not that The Tenth Planet is as good as Hamlet, kind of like saying Hamlet is rubbish because The Lion King has better songs.

No. If we're going to come at this one in a remotely sensible manner, we're going to have to throw the future out and look at this as the 1966 story it is.

Much has been made of the way that the story seems business as usual until the regeneration crops up. Our standard reference books - Wood and Miles and Shearman and Hadoke - insist studiously that it isn't. The truth is somewhere in between. Certainly nothing in the beginning of the story suggests that it is anything other than a continuation of the cod-Quatermass vibe we got from The War Machines, which is by far the second most important antecedent to this story. The establishing shots of the story are a rocket launch and some mucking about in a control room - as direct a structural quote of The Quatermass Experiment as can be managed.

So when we get a bog-standard sequence of Hartnell and his companions in the TARDIS, we have every reason to expect we're getting The War Machines redux. The only reason to suspect anything is amiss is if you've been reading the papers and know that Hartnell is on his way out.

But on the other hand, there are at least some things amiss. The base is full of ethnic acting, giving it an international feel, at least when it isn't busy giving it an "oh god make the pain stop" feel. (I will be the first to admit that the ethnic acting is this story's weakest spot. Although the worst offender, Robert Beatty's General Cutler, is probably supposed to sound that way, for better or for worse) The cutting among monitors and space capsules gives this story a global feel only hinted at in The War Machines. And the setting - 1986 - is compelling, in that it is a date that is obtainable within people's lifetimes. (Remember that The Time Travellers got much of its impact from the fact that it was set at a time Ian and Barbara would conceivably survive into. Its debt to this story, which it overtly recognizes, along with The War Machines, to which it is a de facto sequel, is considerable.) This is not a "five minutes in the future" style contemporary Earth story like The War Machines, but it is still trying something in the same vein - a vision of the future that is of something that the viewers are likely to see.

And then, as the first episode winds on, things get even weirder. One of the basic appeals of Doctor Who is its sheer pluck - the fact that it's the sort of show that, to pick a non-random example, can give you the Doctor teaming up with Richard Nixon to fight UFO-type aliens despite the fact that this premise is completely mad. This sort of spectacle-based storytelling is a fairly modern invention - the Hartnell stories indulged in it occasionally, but usually only when Daleks were involved. But here we get a whopper - more or less out of nowhere, an entire new planet drops into existence near the Earth.

It's tough to say how weird this would have seemed in 1966. You'd need someone who was more of an expert on pop astronomy than I am to know whether anyone seriously believed planets might just drop by unexpectedly and say hi. (Let's be fair, mere months ago Doctor Who was in movie theaters with the Daleks wanting a planet to drive around, so as insane as this seems now, the problem might be us, not them.) But regardless of whether the show blew all credibility with that plot twist, or, perhaps more importantly, when nobody is easily able to recognize that Mondas is very obviously an upside-down Earth (Polly is the first one to get it, because she can identify, of all things, Malaysia, but throughout the story this is treated as a controversial point despite the fact that the audience can see it within seconds), surely the arrival of another planet in orbit is a sign that this is not business as usual.

Especially because, and here's where things really get wacky, the Doctor knows this is going to happen. We've had a lot of "you can't rewrite history" and the importance of historical inevitability before, but this is the first time that attitude has been projected on our future. This is not merely a story about another planet showing up in the sky alongside ours - it's a story about how this is necessarily and absolutely going to happen as an inevitable part of human history.

And then from there we get the first cliffhanger - a sort that we actually haven't seen since The Daleks, at least as an opening cliffhanger. An alien ship lands outside the Snowcap base, and out step strange looking men who butcher the humans. Then we end on a close-up of their expressionless, mummified faces. This is a lot of why I insist on not reading this story as "the first Cybermen story." Because of this cliffhanger, which is very clearly not "Oh crap, it's the Cybermen," but rather "What the hell is THAT?"

Which raises an interesting question. What the hell is that? If we reject reading these things as the lovable robots who faff around in Silver Nemesis, what are we left with? Well now, that's a good question. Let's stop here and say that if you haven't read the post from last Friday about 1966 counter-culture, this might be a good time to do that. Specifically the bits about Kenneth Grant.

The key thing to know here is that there exists a model of spiritual enlightenment in which enlightenment is a horrifying and bleak thing. The adjective I'm going to use for this sort of enlightenment - Qlippothic - is important. Basically, it suggests that there is a form of enlightenment that can be found by encountering and contemplating the darkest parts of humanity. The Qlippoth refer to the hollowed out, vacant, and rotted shells of spiritual concepts. And the whole radical idea of Kenneth Grant is that there's not actually a difference between those, which are basically the horrible nightmares within humanity, and actual enlightenment.

I mention this because it's basically 100% necessary to understanding the Cybermen. I'm not saying that Kit Pedler was chillaxing in the Typhonic order with Kenneth Grant (though that would be awesome), but the ideas are clearly similar. Certainly it's worth noting that Pedler's original conception of the Cybermen was as a race of "star monks." Here it is instructive to look at the origin of the Cybermen, as completely and utterly screwed up as it may be. Mondas and Earth are twin planets - the one an inversion of the other. The Cybermen tell us that they and Mondas "drifted away on a journey," making a sweeping arm motion as they do, and that they went to the edge of space, then returned. In the course of that journey, their bodies wore out and they steadily replaced themselves with spare parts, removing human weaknesses in the process.

The Cybermen, in other words, are an alternative version of humanity - the dark mirror of humanity, who went on a quest for spiritual enlightenment and succeeded at terrible cost. This is the heart of their debate with Polly towards the start of the episode - one that is very cleverly staged. The audience, naturally, sympathizes with Polly, who has several built-in advantages when it comes to debating the Cybermen, namely that she is a human, a regular character, fairly attractive, and is arguing for fairly intuitive points like "Letting people die is mean." This is contrasted with the Cybermen, who are cold, inhuman, and all for letting major characters die. But the thing is, the Cybermen get to win the debate with their brilliantly cutting line "There are people dying all over your world, yet you do not care about them."

In other words, the narrative leaves just enough space for us to sympathize with the Cybermen. The Doctor continually treats them with respect and fear. Polly is shot down by them. Their explanations make sense. They offer a world of positive freedom - a world free of pain and misery and fear. And so when they say that they'll just be bringing all of humanity over to Mondas to be converted into Cybermen, well, that's certainly not nice, but it's not a bunch of Daleks shouting "Exterminate" (or a bunch of Cybermen shouting "Delete") either.

Let's pause here also to talk about the look of the Cybermen. These are the most human they'll ever look in the series history, with still-human hands. It's easy to view this as a mistake, and to decide that their appearance in The Moonbase four months later is the show going back and doing them "right." But again, nobody watching this would know that this isn't how the Cybermen are supposed to look. And they do look terrifying - human but not. Much has been said both praising and mocking the voices of the Cybermen in this story. There's a certain tiresome nature to this debate. Those who mock the voices correctly point out that they sound absurd, and that they are nothing like the harsh robotic conquerers of later Cybermen. True enough, of course, but when the Cybermen of Attack of the Cybermen or Revenge of the Cybermen are your benchmark, you're not exactly setting your goals very high. Those who praise the voices appreciate the harsh, shocking nature of them, and are largely on target (certainly Nicholas Briggs does some amazing stuff with them in the Big Finish audio Spare Parts, but then, Briggs has at this point become a bewildering yet amazing voice artist specializing specifically in recreating old Doctor Who monster voices and making them capable of acting), but as Toby Hadoke points out in Running Through Corridors, it's easy for him and Shearman to praise them because they're the sort of people who look for the existential body horror in things.

I am, predictably, more on the side of Shearman and Hadoke, but the thing I think they sell short in their praise of the voices is that the entire story interprets very well from an existential body horror angle. The entire point of the voices is to be a grotesque parody of human speech - the Cybermen's mouths open and the synthesized speech seems to pour horrifically out of their mouths. Given that the show makes the extremely brave decision to let the Cybermen win the ethics debate in this episode, the voices are an important move to make sure we realize just how horrific these people are. Not evil, mind you, but horrific.

Which is a crucial thing about the Cybermen. Wood and Miles have about three solid pages in About Time Volume 2 (available on the spinny widget on the right of the site, and if I haven't stressed this enough, an absolutely amazing book) about this, but the basic point is that Pedler is extrapolating from a sort of harmful medicine here, combining fears of artificial hearts with anxiety over the use of mood-altering drugs both prescription and recreational and a general ambivalence about artificial goods in general. But he's not quite choosing to seal the deal, and that's significant. He could make the Cybermen into the Autons - plastic monsters who are just evil. He doesn't. Instead, through plasticity and inhumanity, the Cybermen reach a sort of terrible apotheosis. They are at once the best that humans can be and terrifying monsters - a set of anxieties and hopes blended together chaotically.

In the face of these, the Doctor runs into a problem that he's been having for a while. He starts to drop out of the narrative. He looks out of place in this base. With nobody but a loud American to talk to (and we've already talked about how ill-suited the Doctor is to Americans), the Doctor is forced to the perimeter of the plot, with the center being consumed by the Cybermen.

Then comes episode three, and we get what is frankly a happy accident - William Hartnell falls ill, and is abruptly written out of the episode. Not that I don't like Hartnell. Hartnell is absolutely fantastic. But given that he's already being pushed to the margins of this story (as he has been for several stories in a row), having him actually drop out entirely is, ironically, the best thing that could happen to his character. When the Doctor is present but sidelined, he appears to be a weak character, but as soon as he is actually removed from the narrative we realize something we haven't been able to see clearly in some time - we do actually need him.

I said that The War Machines is the second biggest antecedent to this story, and left it deliberately vague what the biggest one is. But since this is the last Hartnell story, there's never going to be a better time to dust off the Hartnell's Greatest Hits reel, so let's go ahead and link to The Chase. You may recall that I created an elaborate interpretation there based on the idea of narrative collapse - i.e. that the Daleks are not merely threatening the lives of the TARDIS crew, they're threatening the entire ability to tell Doctor Who stories. It's a very interesting mode of storytelling, and one that Doctor Who is very good at, because it is basically the only mode of fictional storytelling where the stakes in the story are actually stakes that directly impact the audience. If the audience is watching, presumably it is because they like the show they are watching. So if you threaten to destroy not some alien colony or a single character on the show but the very means of storytelling in the show, that's a real threat.

The problem is, with The Chase, it's never quite possible to tell whether the narrative collapse reading is a fun deconstruction or what's actually going on (and I largely suspect it is the former, though it's a very fun deconstruction and I don't rule out the latter). But here, that's absolutely what is going on. The Cybermen represent a completely different form of humanity, and they have a real ability to impose that new vision upon us. It is not merely that they are going to destroy all humans. That would be a scheme that is clearly not going to happen. Rather, it is that they are going to destroy the basic idea of humanity and replace it with something else.

So when the Doctor and his companions are increasingly pushed to the fringes of the story, and then when the Doctor drops out of the story entirely, it's scary because suddenly it seems like there are no rules. The tension stops being "how will this Doctor Who story turn out" and instead becomes "wait, what sort of story is this?" Again, to a modern viewer, it's easy to miss this, because we're so convinced we know what kind of story it is - a Cybermen story and a regeneration story. But 1960s viewers wouldn't have known this, and as a result, couldn't possibly have seen it that way.

And suddenly, in amongst all this ratcheting of tension, the Doctor's collapse highlights just how much the show has quietly thrown overboard. Our characters are in the hands of a psychotic American, humanity is confronting its dark mirror and the dark mirror looks better than us, and, for good measure, something called a Z-Bomb is about to be launched and possibly destroy the entire planet. And then the Cybermen land again, and this time they seem a force of nature, marching with calm relentlessness. (Plus there are so many of them! Seven usable costumes! We never have seven of a Doctor Who monster! There might as well be seventy!)

Again, the present screws us over. We know that the Doctor is absent because an increasingly frail Hartnell fell ill. We know that Hartnell was bullied/eased out of the role over the summer, and that he came back to this as a guest star. We know the entire script was already written to minimize the strain on him. So we view this as an irritation - especially because it means that our last glimpse of Hartnell is a fairly thin scene in episode two, and thus his illness combined with the missing episode four means that we lose out on the end of his tenure. And this becomes part of the overall fan tendency to pretend that Hartnell's regeneration was being built to over multiple stories.

But as we'll see shortly, it wasn't. Yes, there were some murmurings in internal memos that regeneration is simply something that happens ever 500 years or so, but that's markedly not how it's written. In fact, let's go ahead and formally bust this myth that the Hartnell to Troughton transition is arbitrary. Not that it's the same process as we'll see in later regenerations - it's not, largely because it's not presented as routine. But it is something that happens for a plot-related reason, and that follows specifically from the previous episodes of The Tenth Planet.

So, we're up to episode four now. And as it opens, crucially, Hartnell rumbles back into the story full of fury and passion. The strong sense is that he stopped the Z-Bomb (though all reason says Ben did) and saved the day. He gets, in other words, the hero's entrance, full of terrible rage. This is absolutely the same man we see at the end of, for instance, The Family of Blood - a man who, when put with his back against the wall, roars back even stronger.

But there's a sense that something isn't quite right as well. The Doctor complains of an outside influence effecting him, and murmurs that his body is wearing a bit thin. Still, that is quickly set aside as the Doctor manages to finally completely unhinge General Cutler (who is quickly gunned down) and take over the situation. It's a fantastic sequence, and it's tough to remember when we last saw Hartnell this in control and decisive.

But here's where things get interesting. I mentioned way up at the start of the entry that this story has a global scope. One aspect of that was a set that was used as an office in Geneva, allowing people on the opposite side of the world to comment on and weigh in over the action at the Snowcap base. So we have the Snowcap base - the base under siege by Cybermen - and Geneva, the place far away that is commenting on what goes on at Snowcap. And then, suddenly, a Cyberman shows up in Geneva and kills the characters there. It's a fantastic violation of the rules of the story - because we treated Geneva for so long as a distant location, it seemed safe from the invasion, which was mostly threatening the Snowcap base. So when the Cybermen show up there, it's a decisive sign that things have gotten very bad.

And from there, the Doctor says and does something truly strange - he, out of nowhere, deduces that the Cybermen are planning on destroying the Earth. There's little setup for this, and it does not really seem like a rational deduction at all. But it makes sense. Many commentators take this as the point when the Cybermen's interesting motivations go away and they become generic monsters. It's not. Quite the contrary, it's the logical extension of everything we've seen. We've already been told Mondas is draining the Earth's power. In other words, Mondas is effectively a vampiric planet. It and Earth are not peacefully coexistent twins, but parasitic twins, and one of them has to consume the other. So when the Cybermen are accused of being bent on destroying the Earth, it's simply a confirmation that they are the dark mirrors we initially took them for.

But crucially, they don't actually change their behavior much. They still offer a peaceful resolution in which humanity just gets converted, and we see people who want to take them up on it. It's only when that's shot down that Plan B - murder everyone so they survive - comes to the fore. But at the end of the day, this is not a straightforward alien invasion at all. If we read the Cybermen as the qlippothic parodies of humanity, this is simply its natural endpoint. They have ascended, and now it is our turn to follow them.

But what's really odd is that the Doctor's re-emergence in the narrative suddenly crumbles. He's taken off to the Cybermen ship, where he immediately starts to feel the effects of Mondas's energy drain, fading by the second as his own energy is sapped by the Cybermen. The Cybermen sweep to center stage again, and the plot becomes about Ben's attempts to hold them off and ensure a stalemate. Which he does, for a while. And then...

Mondas explodes. Pretty much out of nowhere. And the Cybermen explode with it, suddenly becoming withered plastic shells of people (much like they alway were). Humanity is safe, not because it saved itself, but because it lasted long enough that Mondas destroyed itself. The essential conflict between Mondas and Earth, where they are both dark reflections of one another, resolved itself. One world lived, the other died, and that was that. Game over, back to the TARDIS, on to another adventure.

And again, now we complain. The Cybermen just disintegrated. There's no satisfying resolution. We've been cheated. All the good ideas of this story have turned rubbish and disappointing.

Nope. Not at all. Remember, in The Chase, that the Doctor ultimately defeats the Daleks by luck. Eventually the Mechanoids happen by and kill all the Daleks, and he escapes, but at a terrible cost - Ian and Barbara leave him. That's the same resolution we get here. The Doctor manages to hold on long enough that Mondas takes care of itself. But what's the cost?

The answer is chilling. When next we see the Doctor, he is, quite simply, dying. Frail, unable to follow what's going on, and stumbling around, he gathers himself up and says he needs to return to the TARDIS, telling his companions to keep warm. It's scary. Something is clearly wrong here. The qlippothic energy of Mondas has spared the world, but...

It hasn't spared the Doctor. He's been drained too far. Perhaps because he's old and his body is wearing thin, but this adventure was simply too much for him. Being drained of life energy by a hideous parody of humanity was fatal.

And so when we return to the TARDIS with Ben and Polly, we see something terrifying.

Back in The Chase, we formulated the basic rules of the narrative collapse story. The entire storytelling apparatus of Doctor Who is threatened, then it spontaneously reforms itself, but at some cost. And the cost is this: Doctor Who gets cancelled.

What that means changes from time to time. Certainly the Doctor Who we knew from the first two seasons - the one that did weird, inventive experimental theater, pseudo-Shakespearean comedies, and existentialist drama in rapid succession - went away with Ian and Barbara. But that's a subtle change to what we get here. We've been talking about how the format is changing out from under William Hartnell, and here that becomes inexorable.

And this is part of being a Doctor Who fan. You are absolutely guaranteed to see the show die in front of you, and then get replaced with a strange, different show using the same name. Eventually, everything that Doctor Who is comes to a crashing halt and something new happens instead. Sometimes it's wonderful. Sometimes it's heartbreaking. But it's inevitable. It's why one of the few sections of fandom I get actively angry at are the "bring back David Tennant" crowd. Because, frankly, you only got David Tennant because nine previous versions of the show got cancelled. You knew your turn would come. You don't get to pull a version of the show other people enjoy away from them and replace it with your own. If you did, we'd bring Ian, Barbara, and the Doctor back.

Yes. The Doctor. Because what is about to happen is not the end of the First Doctor's tenure. No. It's the end of the Doctor. William Hartnell only played the First Doctor once, in 1973. Otherwise, he was always simply the Doctor. And what is about to happen is not the replacement of the first version with the second. It's the replacement of the only version with something completely new.

And we know that the moment Ben and Polly return to the TARDIS, as the Doctor, silently, desperately, flings switches around while other switches flick on and off themselves. And the TARDIS screams. That's the only way to describe it - harsh, metallic noises unlike anything we've seen the ship make. It's scary. It's scary in a way not even An Unearthly Child was scary.

And we know why it's happened. It's happened because the Doctor came into contact with horrible, qlippothic forces. It happened because the Doctor encountered these horrible, dark parodies of humanity. And the question we have to ask is, what has happened to him? Because suddenly, he collapses. He collapses, and we can see it. In the past, we've seen some man in a silly wig fall over from behind. It's a bit of a joke, spotting the lame Hartnell duplicates. But this is unmistakably William Hartnell crumpled on the ground. The Doctor. Our Doctor. The silly old wizard with a terrible fire within.

Dying on the ground of his magic box, which screams around him.

He doesn't get last words. He just dies. And we know why. We know full well it is Mondas that destroyed him. That his energy was drained by that monstrous other world. And it's stark and horrific. It's the sort of cosmic, psychological horror we associate with Lovecraft - that this dark, qlippothic energy stalks the universe like a cosmological vampire and has now taken our hero away form us.

And as the TARDIS dematerialization sounds, now harsh and mechanical and scary like it hasn't been for three years, the Doctor fades away, and some new face sits where he used to be.

And here is where our second error happens. Just as we misread the Cybermen, who in fact never reappear after The Tenth Planet, although their name and home planet are recycled for some very silly looking robots, we misread regeneration. We know what happens at the end of this episode, and it's almost comforting to us - here comes Troughton! He's fun!

That's not what we're watching. Not even a little bit. This is not the rise of the Second Doctor. It is nothing whatsoever except the death of the Doctor. The only Doctor. And we forget that. We forget that the Hartnell era goes out on an astonishingly bleak cliffhanger, that The Tenth Planet feeds directly into The Power of the Daleks a week later, and that all of this is terrifying, not a triumphant moment of the show's history. We treat this scene as something that ends the book on an era. And it is that, but it is so much more.

Yeah, this entry marks the end of a major period of Doctor Who. When I pack the Hartnell stuff into a book for you all to buy, this is going to be where it ends. (Well, actually it's going to end with a bonus essay called "Now My Doctor: William Hartnell") And tomorrow you're all going to enjoy watching Doctor Who rocket off into a new era. And Monday we'll be back here popping between realities and coming home in time for tea, and it won't be until Wednesday that we pick up here.

But for all of that, on Wednesday, this is where we pick up, and it's going to be important to forget everything you think you know about this show. Because Doctor Who is over. The Doctor is dead. The horrible plastic monsters offering a grotesque parody of spiritual enlightenment have destroyed him, and replaced him with something else, just as they wanted to replace us with them. The operating assumption, given that the Cybermen wanted to help us ascend to be like them, and given that the Cybermen did in fact kill the Doctor, that he is now going to "ascend." And whatever this terrible, awful man who replaced the Doctor is, the odds are very, very poor that it's going to be a good thing.

These Books Are From Your Future (The Smugglers)

It's September 10, 1966. The Beatles are at number one again with the double-single of Yellow Submarine and Eleanor Rigby. Also in the top ten are the Troggs, the Beach Boys, and Napoleon XIV.  Over the course of the next four weeks we'll also see The Small Faces take #1 with "All or Nothing," Jim Reeves will take it with "Distant Drums," and Roy Orbison, The Seekers, Sonny and Cher, The Supremes, The Who, and Manfred Mann will also pop around the top 10. Not on the Top 10 but still enormously important, since we last saw Doctor Who, The Doors released their debut album. Also, the first episode of some American sci-fi show called Star Trek aired, which is surely just some cheap Doctor Who knockoff or something that we can safely ignore. And over in reality, while we were sleeping the Cultural Revolution began in China.

Meanwhile, Doctor Who has returned for its fourth season with The Smugglers, filmed, as with Galaxy 4 and Planet of Giants before it, at the end of the previous production block, and thus in many ways the last story of Season 3 more than it is the first story of Season 4 - especially given the degree to which the next story represents, shall we say, a decisive break from what has come before.

As a result, it is possible that The Smugglers is actually the most undisputed story in Doctor Who history. Not undisputedly anything in particular - simply undisputed in a broad sense. Neither loved nor hated by much of anyone, this may simply be the Doctor Who story about which people care the least. It's not terribly hard to see why - it's a completely missing story (Season 4, in fact, is the only season of the show with no complete stories at all), a historical (never a recipe for widespread acclaim), and was novelized all the way out in 1988. And on top of that, it's a story that just misses the milestones over and over again. It's the second to last Hartnell story, the second to last historical, the second story featuring Ben and Polly... Just about the only thing it has going for it in terms of major milestones, actually, are that it is the first historical since The Aztecs to feature no major historical figures, and that it is the first completely missing story to be novelized by Terrance Dicks.

Which, actually, is enough to make it absolutely crucial, at least in terms of how we're experiencing the story. Yes, it was a painfully late novelization, long after Terrance Dicks had passed his peak in terms of the novelizations. (In fact, it's his third-from-last novelization) But that's beside the point. Yes, there are other good novelizations from earlier in the series, including Ian Marter's novelizations. But somehow it seems unthinkable to introduce the Target novelizations properly with anyone but Terrance Dicks.

A younger fan, or one more used to other science fiction shows, might reasonably ask why the novelizations are so important. Not a lot of other science fiction series have important book series at all, little yet ones that are just adaptations of the TV shows. But for Doctor Who, the novelizations are genuinely vital. Part of this is that for sixteen years of the program's history, it was a series of novels, at least in terms of its newly produced content, and that it was the existing tradition of novelizations that, in part, allowed that to happen.

As a concept, Doctor Who novelizations have been around since 1964 when David Whitaker's adaptation of the first Dalek story, Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks, was published by Frederick Muller Ltd. In 1973, Target Books republished that book and adaptations of The Crusade and The Web Planet, and then in 1974 started publishing its own material with Terrance Dicks's adaptation of Spearhead from Space and Malcolm Hulke's adaptation of The Silurians. The line ran into 1990, at which point it ended due to a lack of anything left to novelize. However, by that point the owner of the imprint and thus the Doctor Who license was Virgin Books, who went on to publish the New and Missing Adventures, about which we've already talked.

But more importantly, the novelizations were, in effect, the first things to make it possible to revisit classic adventures. Before VHS releases, and in a time when at best the BBC might run the occasional classic story as part of a special set of repeats (the famed Five Faces of Doctor Who series, for instance), if you wanted to revisit a favorite story, the absolute only way you were going to manage that was if you could get the Target novelization. As the 80s went on and VHS became a viable medium for the preservation of Doctor Who, the novels started to take a backseat, becoming fannish collectables (even if, in many cases, the books were quite good - the novelizations of the 7th Doctor stories are particularly interesting). But, crucially, they weren't  that to begin. They were absolutely part of how fans experienced Doctor Who, in an era before "fandom," and it was Terrance Dicks who most defined the line.

As much stick as Dicks gets for his writing style (which is, admittedly, formulaic), there are some things we need to acknowledge. First of all, the odds are very good that Terrance Dicks has done more to foster childhood literacy with the Doctor Who novelizations than you will ever contribute towards that cause in your lifetime, and for a lot of people, more than they will ever contribute to any public or charitable cause over their entire lifetimes. Literally thousands of people learned to read from Target novelizations stashed away at schools across Britain. Second of all, if you can bang out a good novelization of a Doctor Who story at Target length limits in a weekend working only from the script, well, frankly, I suspect you're lying. Which is to say, Dicks routinely worked under crappy conditions and turned out pretty acceptable books regardless. (As for the criticism that the books are short and threadbare, try reading one as you watch. Dicks expands as many scenes as he cuts down. The root problem is actually that four episodes of Doctor Who don't take more than about 130 pages to novelize.)

Third, and perhaps most important, Terrance Dicks's biggest problem as a novelist is that nobody can write 64 Doctor Who books without repeating one's self a bit. On his own merits, frankly, Dicks is a capable wordsmith with some surprisingly deft touches. One thing that is quickly clear to anyone who reads even a handful of Dicks novels is that the man is a genius at beginnings. I mean, here's just a few highlights from Dicks's opening sentences (shorn of their titles, just to make that frisson of unfamiliarity Dicks is so good at stand out)

• It moved through the silent blackness of deep space like a giant jellyfish through the depths of the sea.
• Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man.
• Through the vortex, that mysterious region where time and space are one, sped a police box that was not a police box at all.
• It moved through the darkness, swift and silent despite its enormous bulk.
• Next to the crumbling Palace of the Emperor, on the edge of the sprawling ruins that were the capital of Skonnos, there rose the Power Complex.
• Night falls suddenly in the rain forests of the upper Amazon.
• In the gloomy, cavernous underground Hall of Learning, the assembled Gonds were waiting.

The thing that's most obvious from any of these (and you can take your pick as to your favorite, though for my money, the second is one of the best opening sentences I've read, period) is that they are remarkably deft at setting up compelling questions in one sentence. As for his larger prose style, it is remarkably well-developed at what it is there for. It's easy to forget that the novelizations are children's literature, and specifically designed to be exciting adventures that are over quickly and that leave the reader looking for the next one. Dicks's prose style is perfectly adapted to that goal. It would, frankly, be a lesser writer who would add rhetorical flourishes and show off. Dicks has no such pretensions - he gets out of the way of the story, and tries to tell it as plainly and entertainingly as possible. Inasmuch as Dicks has a style, it is visible only because there are about 8,000 pages of his Doctor Who writing for it to show up over.

Unfortunately, The Smugglers ends up being the sort of Doctor Who story that Dicks's approach ends up being the most irritatingly formulaic at. Part of this is that the story is profoundly unambitious. We'll talk more about the decline of the historical when we get to the end of the road for the genre with The Highlanders, but suffice it to say that the genre was in terminal decline at this point. Having attempted its last ambitious historical with The Massacre, and its last one that looks like the historicals did in season one with The Crusade, by this point the historical is a format for flat adventure in a standard issue genre (the pirate story, this time around). The result is a story that wasn't trying to be much at the time, leaving Dicks with little room to work. And since Dicks's gift really is as a novelizer, when he gets an unambitious, phoned-in story, the results don't exactly light up the page.

Where The Smugglers does work as a story is in introducing Ben and Polly as a new sort of companion - something that's clearest in the scene where they escape from prison not in what would have been the standard approach for any earlier companions (lure the guard in and whack him in the head), but through an inspired and lengthy bit of trickery and bluffing involving pretending to be evil magicians. The most striking thing about this is that it's the sort of clever bluff we usually associate with the Doctor (though it seems more callous from Ben and Polly than it would from him), indicating that we have companions now who can take a more active role in affairs. No doubt some of that is simply the show preparing for the possibility that Hartnell will not give up the role quietly, as he was asked to towards the end of filming of this story, and as he ultimately did. But it also marks a major shift in the nature of companions and what they do and don't do. It's just that the shift stays in place for most, albeit not all, of the twenty-two years separating the story from its novelization, meaning that by the time Dicks writes it up, it sounds far more generic than it did airing on television.

But by and large the sensation that the novel is a bit lacking sidesteps the fact that the novel is an extremely faithful adaptation of the television show in this case. Hardly anything is cut, and none of the cuts substantially alter the meaning of a scene. There are places where Dicks does change the meaning - having Hartnell's line at the start about how he thought he'd be alone until Ben and Polly blundered into the TARDIS (and a clarifying note on this, just to weigh into a fan debate - some sources say that Ben and Polly entered the TARDIS using Dodo's key. The same sources suggest that there is a goof in episode 4 of The War Machines in which Michael Craze knocks a piece off of a War Machine with the Doctor's cloak. These sources are wrong on both counts. Careful viewing of the scene shows that the object Craze bends and picks up is the TARDIS key [contrary to fan rumor, he makes no attempt to re-attach it to the War Machine, and instead holds it up to the light to see what it is, which an actor would never do with a part of a prop during filming], and that's how he gets it to return it later in the episode) suggest the Doctor resents their presence. In the actual episode, it is clear that he in fact was afraid to be alone. 

He also makes one significant structural change, opting to use Ben and Polly as POV characters for the start of the novel, complete with a lovely section in which Polly steadily realizes she has in fact traveled in time as she walks around Cornwall seeing nothing modern. In the episode itself, Ben and Polly's insistence that the Doctor is pulling their leg is played for laughs, in no small part because they are the less familiar characters and the Doctor is the more familiar character, so they cannot serve as POV characters. Because the novel affords Dicks an omniscient narrator, he makes the intelligent choice to have the story start focused on Ben and Polly's amazing trip and disbelief at what they're seeing in a way the show simply couldn't.

Other changes are milder - the Doctor drinks brandy in the book, while refusing it in the episodes. (He does, however, drink wine in both). Dialogue is smoothed out, including several fluffs, the worst of which, for once, is not Hartnell's fault, as Terence de Marney flubs the rhyme revealing the location of the hidden treasure. Action sequences are cut from minutes in length to a few sentences, but this mostly is beneficial, as action sequences read poorly, and furthermore, the story was already stretched to fit four episodes. (There's a truly painful bit of plot extension as the Doctor decides he needs a fourth name to solve the riddle. Never mind that the riddle could work perfectly well with three names, and that there's only one thing in the riddle that could be a fourth name, we need to add a scene to this episode and that's that.)

But by and large, Dicks's novelization is a faithful recreation of what happens on the screen. For the missing episodes, this was, for many years (and for many fans still is) the major way these stories can still be experienced and known. And several of the missing stories have classic and memorable novelizations.

The Smugglers doesn't. But to be fair, that's mostly down to The Smugglers, and not to the steadfastly capable Terrance Dicks.