You Were Expecting Someone Else 6 (Doctor Who and the Pescatons)

There is a thread that we should follow up on from Friday. We established that The Seeds of Doom was quite entertaining. But there is a serious ethical critique to be raised against it. And you'd kind of hope that there would be more people who would prioritize the ethical critique over the entertainment defense. There's something terribly unfortunate about the fact that a story that is at best wholly amoral and at worst outright ethically bankrupt can be genuinely believed by fans to be the 16th best Doctor Who story ever.

Which brings us to Doctor Who and the Pescatons, about which it is far more easy to find things to criticize than it is to find things to praise. This in and of itself is hardly an unusual position for Doctor Who to be in. Nobody gets to active Doctor Who fandom without going through a few paragraphs that begin "In spite of..." There's even a complex if unofficial set of rules to this sort of thing. It makes sense - loving Doctor Who necessarily involves a fair amount of taking green bubble wrap seriously. But there are also pathological elements to it.

Sometimes the pathology is harmless and, if you look at it the right way, even kind of endearing. There are people who factionalize hilariously within fandom, and come to love or hate a particular era with a verve that pushes them to absurdly indefensible positions. To use an example I mentioned in an earlier entry, say what one likes about "The Wedding of River Song," but to complain that it's a letdown in terms of how it resolves its plotlines while praising Pyramids of Mars as a classic when it pulls up lame as badly as it does in the fourth episode is to demonstrate a complete and utter disconnection from reality. 

But there are cases that go further than this. Fans want desperately to love Doctor Who, and sometimes are far too willing to excuse real problems in order to do so. This is not unique to Doctor Who fandom. Indeed, it's not really unique to fans. People are defensive of the things they love. A normal person would look at The Celestial Toymaker and say "well that's racist crap." But a Doctor Who fan, if they can bring themselves to admit that it is racist, is going to be actively depressed by that fact. And so many opt not to admit it, pretending that it or Tomb of the Cybermen are just fine. And this is a more pathological and upsetting aspect of fandom, and one we see pretty clearly with The Seeds of Doom.

But this brings us back to The Pescatons. Because while fans are willing to blind themselves to the faults of television episodes, it's rare to see them so willing to protect spin-off material. Few people are moved to defend the New Adventures or Big Finish Audios with the same passionate fervor as people will line up to explain why, despite the overwhelming pile of evidence, to explain why The Celestial Toymaker isn't racist.

I say all of this to set up the feeling of frank bewilderment that listening to The Pescatons inspired. There's not a lot out there in the world of Doctor Who that surprises me. Even if I'm watching a story I've never seen before, I've read too many guidebooks recreationally to be surprised. When there are surprises, they tend to come in the form of "Huh, none of the guidebooks ever mentioned that" as opposed to genuine surprise. But with The Pescatons, I knew absolutely nothing except that it was an audio drama, released in the break between Seasons 13 and 14, and that it was by Victor Pemberton. And, of course, that it was inevitable that I'd cover it. I mean, everyone knew that. It's been assumed since the You Were Expecting Someone Else entries began that I would cover it.

I had, as a result, made the understandable assumption that it was good. And so you can imagine my surprise upon listening to it. To some extent I shouldn't have been surprised. Victor Pemberton has come up three times before in the blog - as script editor of Tomb of the Cybermen, writer of Fury from the Deep, and writer of the Ace of Wands episode I covered. In none of these cases did he make a particularly compelling case for his talents. So it's not a particular surprise that The Pescatons is a barely connected series of action sequences in which every concept is either a giant fish or lifted directly from Fury From the Deep. (Hostile seaweed, monsters with menacing heartbeats, mind controlling aquatic life, and a susceptibility to high pitched noise. And the Doctor acquiring a sudden piccolo obsession. You can almost hear Victor Pemperton saying, "What do you mean he doesn't play the recorder anymore? How am I supposed to do monsters that are destroyed by sound with no recorder? I CAN'T WORK LIKE THIS!")

It was not offensively bad. Nor, however, was it particularly good. Mostly it was exactly the sort of thing most of the contemporaneous spinoffs are, and thus why I avoid most of them and this series is only up to #6 - generic tosh that happens to feature the Doctor. Which brings us around to where we started - why is this particular spin-off so beloved given its lack of apparent virtues. And I'm forced to speculate here, but I think this gets to the heart of the less pathological aspects of why we forgive Doctor Who its faults. And given that we've got a dwindling pool of just six stories before we leave the portion of Doctor Who that there's a general critical consensus in favor of and enter the portion where virtually every episode is harshly polarizing, this is something worth talking about.

The first thing we should observe about The Pescatons is that, coming out in 1976, it is among the first wave of permanent Tom Baker stories. We've talked repeatedly about the way in which being among the early Target novelizations is clearly directly related to being considered a classic story. And at this point in 1976, there were only twenty-three novelizations, consisting of four Hartnell stories, three Troughton stories, eleven Pertwee stories, The Three Doctors, and four Baker stories, two of which came out the same summer as The Pescatons. So the era of the show that is most immediately exciting is one of the least represented eras in the permanent record of stories.

That's the context in which The Pescatons was released. And so it has classic status for, ultimately, the same reasons that The Web Planet or The Moonbase do - it's a story that it was possible to own a copy of, and so it is a story that is remembered. Except add to that the fact that this is the first time the Doctor has appeared in a story outside of television. I mean the real Doctor - not a drawing of him, or some words about him, or Peter Cushing, but Tom Baker himself, playing the Doctor, somewhere other than television. This is common enough now, with Matt Smith's first CD release dropping the same week as Time of Angels and a massive line of Big Finish audios, but in 1976, it was extraordinary. Add to that the cachet of being the only proper, numbered, classic-era Target novelization to be based on something other than a television story and you have something where it's wholly understandable why people remember it fondly.

And this brings us to why we excuse Doctor Who. And more than that, what is ultimately the reason that this blog's official position is that if I can manage a defense of the story, I will defend it. Because yes, The Pescatons is rubbish. It's dull. All of its ideas are pilfered from Fury from the Deep, and it's not like Fury was a hugely inventive story in 1968, little yet eight years after. But goddammit, who cares? It was Doctor Who that people could own. It has Tom Baker with at least some good lines, and good delivery even of his crappy lines. It has some decently exciting bits in which monsters rampage through London. If you're ten, what the hell else do you want out of life?

And this is why we forgive Doctor Who. Because it is a part of our childhood and a part of who we are. I could pillory the Pertwee era more thoroughly than I did. I could take seriously the critique that the Hinchcliffe era has a few too many Hammer Horror tributes. I could feel really upset that the Troughton era has too many bases under siege, or that the Hartnell era... well, I mean, take your pick of the Hartnell era. But... I don't want to. Any more than I want to go up to a family member or loved one and just list off all of their flaws. It's not that they don't have them - it's that I just don't want to do that. This is another reason that I insist this blog isn't a review blog. If it were a review blog, I'd feel some sort of obligation to hold Doctor Who up to objective standards. No. Objectivity is for things I love less than this.

That doesn't mean ignoring the flaws or pretending they don't exist. It just means forgiving them. And, more broadly, it means forgiving our own childhoods, and even to some extent forgiving ourselves. Doctor Who is rarely perfect. But it's frequently good enough to be enthralling, and it enthralled an awful lot of people over the years. It was precious to many of us. And so when we come upon something like The Pescatons... is being a rehash of a story much of its audience was around two or three years old for really something worth condemning it for?

Especially because, while it's easier to identify its flaws, it's not as though The Pescatons doesn't have merits. Say what you like about Pemberton, and obviously I'm far from a fan, but he's put some real thought into how to make Doctor Who work as a three-character audio. The decision to trim it to the major set pieces, thought of this way, becomes a clever concession to the fact that the record is going to be played multiple times. In essence, every part of the story that might be less exciting to kids (which just so happens to be a subset of "scenes not requiring anyone but Baker, Sladen, or the monster) is removed so that the story is always heading into another "good part." It's not a hugely brilliant technique, and it certainly pales in comparison with the narrative techniques that become standard issue in the Big Finish era, but for 1976 and a writer who is a bit of a hack, it's surprisingly well thought through. He understands his medium. The worst thing one can say about it is probably that the focus on the exciting bits makes it in some ways as violent as The Seeds of Doom, but here it's played very differently. For one thing, the audio medium takes the edge off any critique of violence in that it is only as violent as the listener's imagination. But more importantly, the story plays everything off for laughs. This isn't a big exciting adventure - its larking about with giant fish monsters smashing up London.

The biggest reason this works is that Baker, instead of playing everything seriously like he does in Seeds of Doom (which works dramatically but only exacerbates the ethical issues), here he plays it like he's having a blast. Baker is, frankly, imperious here. Pemberton, if we're going to be charitable here, wrote a script that would work well for any incarnation of the Doctor. (If we're being less charitable, he wrote a script that gives zero evidence he has ever actually seen Tom Baker.) The Troughton-esque characteristics are clear enough, though they perhaps stand out more because we know Pemberton's only television credits came in the Troughton era than because Pemberton is overtly writing for Troughton. But also present at points is the cantankerously alien tone of Hartnell (in particular when the Doctor irritatedly points out that Earth isn't his planet), and the dashing defender of Earth that Pertwee gave us.

All of this, though, is held down by Baker, who puts in a performance that really helps nail down how it is that he completely redefined the role - which, of course, he did. Every actor until at least David Tennant has stepped into the role compared primarily to Baker. And once we see - or rather, hear - Baker with a script that really isn't written particularly for him - we start to see what it is about his performance that made him so definitive.

His central trick in The Pescatons is one that will, with admittedly somewhat mixed results, migrate into his television performance before too long: his asides to the audience. Baker serves double duty in The Pescatons as both the main character and the narrator, and frequently cracks jokes about the proceedings he's relating. Crucially, these jokes tend to be at his own expense as often as they are at the expense of the plot, which prevents them from purely being means by which Baker asserts power over the narrative. Instead, they serve to establish the Doctor as part of the audience of his own story. The Doctor, by making jokes about the narrative, sides firmly with the audience because both are in the position of reading the events as a story.

The result is a combination of the defining aspects of his two predecessors. To an extent every Doctor's character is a reaction against the previous one, but Baker's relationship with his predecessors is remarkably deft. The joking asides only work because the Doctor is the star of the story, and Baker's use of his magnetic charisma to position himself as the focus of the narrative evokes Pertwee's tenure. But what he does with this charisma is firmly in the Troughton position of becoming a narrative force unto himself. And when you see Baker acting with a script that is so evocative of his predecessors and so unevocative of his own tenure (both he and Sarah Jane have several lines that are deeply inscrutable given the context of the series), these aspects of the role become clear.

Which isn't a lot. But it's something. Certainly it's enough to make The Pescatons an entertaining way to spend 45 minutes as an adult Doctor Who fan in 2011. But more, perhaps than any other story we've covered in the blog, that's really not the way to approach this story in the first place. This is for the ten-year-olds of 1976, and through them it's more than earned its classic status.

An Unintelligent Enemy (The Seeds of Doom)

I was going to just caption this "It's...", but then I chickened
out because it seemed too obscure and decided on an
awkward meta-commentary instead. 

It's January 31, 1976. Queen is dead, but it's not particularly lonely on the living because ABBA are at number one with "Mamma Mia," a song that performs that classic pop trick of setting itself a low bar to clear and sailing miles over it. It lasts for two weeks, and is unseated by Silk's "Forever and Ever," which lasts one week before falling to The Four Season's "December '63," better known by its not-actual-title of "Oh What a Night." a song that is frankly alarmingly easy to argue is about someone watching Barbara Wright be menaced by a Dalek so long as one ignores the detail that it's an American song. It lasts two weeks before Tina Charles takes over with "I Love to Love." Donna Summer, ELO, Manuel and the Music of the Montains, and The Who also chart.

While in real news, Cuba adopts its present constitution, an earthquake in Guatemala and Honduras kills over 22,000, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, the disputed government of Western Sahara, is formed. For our purposes, however, most interesting is the revocation of Special Category Status for people arrested as part of the Troubles. (Special Category Status was a system whereby IRA members who were arrested for bombings and other crimes were treated as political prisoners and given certain privileges, most famously not having to wear a uniform. Its revocation was unpopular among IRA members, and many when arrested refused a uniform, engaging in protest by wrapping themselves only in their prison blankets. This became a powerful symbol for the Irish republican movement.)

Speaking of blowing things up, then, we have The Seeds of Doom. Which is apparently the 16th greatest Doctor Who story ever, at least if Doctor Who Magazine is to be believed. Which, given that it thinks that The Brain of Morbius is only 40th, it probably isn't. But the fact that Tat Wood flags it in About Time as his least favorite story of the first six years of the Tom Baker era does mean that we have now identified Tat Wood's most contrarian view about Doctor Who. And that's interesting, because while I disagree with Wood on some big points, I'm pretty much of the view that he's the most consistently intelligent commenter on Doctor Who to date. And on the comments, there's been a larger debate brewing over whether the Hinchcliffe era is, in general, overrated. So here we have a story that, look, let's just say up front is nowhere near as good as the 16th best Doctor Who story of all time that is flat-out loathed by Doctor Who's best critic. If we're going to talk about the overrated aspects of the Hinchcliffe era, here is, I suppose, where we must make our stand.

Wood's critique stems from one - and actually, as we'll see, in a way from all three - of the things everybody (By everybody, of course, I mean pathetic fans like me. Sane people, on the other hand, wonder why the same show has unrelated stories called The Seeds of Doom and The Seeds of Death.) knows about The Seeds of Doom. First, The Seeds of Doom is structured as a two-parter set in Antarctica that leads into a four-parter set in England. Second, The Seeds of Doom is the last gasp of the UNIT era. Third, The Seeds of Doom is staggeringly violent. This third of these is, unsurprisingly, the one Wood bases his critique around.

(A clarifying note for obsessives - the About Time books do not distinguish which bits are written by Wood and which ones are written by Miles. It is, however, possible to figure it out in many cases. Based on blog comments by Miles in which he alludes to his distaste for the Graham Williams era, we can conclude that the prosecution critiques in of the Graham Williams era from Volume IV are written by Miles, while the defenses are by Wood. Conversely, in Volume V, the defense critiques talk about recovering from the problems of the Williams era, which pretty clearly flags that they're Miles and that the prosecutions are Wood. In the case of The Seeds of Doom, there is only one critique, and so it presumably speaks for both. However the author bios at the end of each volume list each writer's favorite and least favorite stories covered in the book. Wood lists his least favorite as The Seeds of Doom. As a result, I am assuming he is the primary author of the critique and ascribing the argument primarily to him.)

First, let's acknowledge that the basic observation is accurate. The Doctor engages in an unusual amount of fighting here, and unusually visceral fighting, including an extremely dangerous bit of combat with Scorby, the story's henchman villain, the creation of Molotov cocktails, and the active decision to pack a gun. And, of course, there's the conceit of grinding people into plant fertilizer, and the fact that two people are fed into it over the course of the story. It's a genuinely shocking level of brutality - one that creates a real sense of unease in the viewer.

And it's worth noting that this has to be taken in a larger context within the series. The Hinchcliffe era has been consistently more violent than the Letts era. For the most part, this hasn't been that big of a problem. To argue that the Doctor embraces non-violence as such requires, after all, a tremendously blinkered view of the character. The Doctor is not a pacifist. But it is important to note that he not only doesn't relish violence, he dislikes it and wants to avoid it. He just fails sometimes. And this is something the Hinchcliffe era captures very well - violence is shown to be horrifying here, even when the Doctor is the one engaging in it. (Something that is decidedly interesting about the early days of the Baker era is that, contrary to reputation, Baker is a far more physical Doctor than Pertwee ever was.)

Baker, however, was never much of one for the violence, and in this story it seems to have bothered him more than usual - and with good reason. This led to extended conversations with Douglas Camfield in which they decided that Baker would play it as if he was genuinely afraid of the Krynoids. The problem is that this trick has already been used for so much better villains. It works to bolster Sutekh as a threat by showing the Doctor afraid and out of his depth because he is supposed to be a god. Even the Doctor should be scared of a god. But the Krynoids are just Axon costumes repainted green. And frankly, the most interesting thing about the Axons was that they were bright orange.

I mean, yes. Baker is in fine form here. He finds new ways to merge his continual undercutting and mockery of villains with a real sense of fear and danger. This time he does it with anger, with the Doctor several times going from mockery to either actual shouting fury (generally at Scorby) or to an ice cold rage (with Chase). But it's not enough. Nothing in the story gives the audience the sense that this is so bad that the Doctor is inclined to pack heat. And when the rest of the story has the volume turned up on its violence just as much, the Doctor's violence doesn't look like a reaction to the magnitude of the threat. It just looks violent and like the sort of thing you'd expect from a story that has a man-sized meat grinder.

In fact, the entire story seems spectacularly mis-toned. Right from the start, in which the Doctor is apparently on Earth and at the beck and call of government agencies, there's a sense that this story just doesn't belong in Doctor Who as it exists at the start of 1976. And this starts to get to the next thing that everybody knows about this story - that it's the last story of the UNIT era. In practice, it's not. Yes, some troops show up who are apparently from UNIT, but there's no serious effort to make this feel like a UNIT story - not even the token "fake Brigadier" we got for The Android Invasion.

But since The Sea Devils we've had the distinct sense that the actual UNIT cast might have been getting in the way at times. Even if this story wholly rejects the standard UNIT paradigm, it's clear that, like the writer's last story, this story is an engagement with the basic ideas of the UNIT era. (That the last story also featured the standard UNIT paradigm is largely irrelevant to this point.) And it even has something distinct to say about the UNIT era. But to understand that, we're going to have to sort out exactly what the role of violence in the Hinchcliffe era is.

We actually talked a little about this question on Wednesday in talking about the way in which Robert Holmes's ability to add a level of realism - albeit not the sort of realism people usually talk about when they use that word - to The Brain of Morbius by making the characters all low rent and absurd in a way that felt more honest than broad and straight-faced "seriousness" ever could. And we talked about the way this gave the story a visceral feeling that provided an interesting contrast to the increasingly magical tone of the series. Broadly speaking, violence in the Hinchcliffe era accomplished the same thing. Because the stories are trending more towards the cerebral and the fantastic, making the physical action more violent helps compliment that, making the fantastic seem real. And not real in the sense of seeming as though it could actually happen, but rather real in the sense of feeling intimate and physical.

This is an important aspect of violence in the Hinchcliffe era. It's not just that lots of people die in Hinchcliffe-era stories. It's that they die bleeding or actually being strangled by people instead of just saying "argh" and falling over as a zap gun goes off. It's not glamorous action movie violence or Jon Pertwee shouting "Hai!" and people flipping over. It's ugly, painful looking violence. It's messy and, the word I keep coming around to, visceral. It feels like this is a world in which actions have consequences.

Once you take the violence in that context - and I think given the Hinchcliffe era at large, that context is very clear - the point of this story becomes clear. Or at least it would if, getting back to our earlier point, it weren't January of 1976. The Seeds of Doom would make perfect sense where Terror of the Zygons is on the schedule, with Terror of the Zygons going here. The season would, in fact, have been far stronger if this had been the opener, with a few small changes, (The Doctor misses and arrives three months late, so the Brigadier is in Geneva. Harry leaves at the start. Just stretch out the amount of time a Krynoid takes to hatch and you're good to go.) and Terror of the Zygons, with its farewell to the Brigadier, had been at the end. Or, better still, if this had been at the end of last season where Terror of the Zygons was supposed to be.

What this order would have done is let this story exist in the gruesome context of Genesis of the Daleks, and let it be a quite edgy pushing of the limits along the lines of what I suggested The Wheel in Space might have been - an aggressive challenging of the audience's pleasures. This would even have made perfect sense with the two episode base-under-siege opener, which would have dovetailed off of the Troughton-critique of Revenge of the Cybermen. And Terror of the Zygon's critique of UNIT would have slotted in just fine at the end of the season.

Thought of this way, the story begins to seem much more appealing. The UNIT era, after all, always depended on a vision of the show as an action thriller. So here the show gives us an action thriller in which the action is brutal and horrifying to critique the superficial pleasure of the genre. It's a straightforward and time-honored technique - the sort of thing that, in later decades, Frank Miller or Zack Snyder made careers out of. This would be an absolute triumph, quite frankly.

Unfortunately, however, it's at the end of the season, long after Doctor Who has been working on a level far more complex than just taking one of its own past genres and subverting it. And long after Doctor Who has already done a far more complex and devastating critique on UNIT - and from the same author. And after hitting those heights as decisively as it did, a story that has nothing more to say than "Man, action movies are pretty violent" just doesn't quite cut it.

Still, we should be fair to the story. After all, this is the first time I've encountered it like this - in something close to its native habitat, following from The Brain of Morbius and preceding a two-entry break/spring and summer break before The Masque of Mandragora. The first two or three times I encountered it were on video, independent as sort of movies. In the past, of course, this has been something I've critiqued, complaining that we screw the pacing and feel of stories up by watching the episodes in one shot. And it's true, serializing this over days or weeks is the best way to watch it.

But if you watch it outside the context of its season, as a six-episode serial that stands on its own - its a taut, visceral action thriller with some very, very good Tom Baker bits. And while I'll admit that I'm baffled why it's apparently the 16th best Doctor Who story of all time, when you remember that fandom formed its canonical opinions on stories in the video era, and thus experienced them as stand-alones instead of as a season, you can at least see why this story is beloved.

But especially when you consider how the next season is going to play out and what eventually brings Hinchcliffe's tenure as producer to a premature halt, this story is unfortunate. No. It's worse than unfortunate. It's irresponsible. The Hinchcliffe era works because it pushes the envelope and is willing to be complex, challenging, and genuinely frightening. It's excellent children's television because it treats children like adults. And that, in the end, is what gives it a moral authority to shout down the voices of idiots who complain that it's too dark and scary for children and inappropriate.

Given all of that, it's infuriating to see the show faffing about with gruesome violence in pursuit of such a slender and overly simplistic goal when, just last story, it was proving that it could be so much more. But worse than that, its cynical. Especially as a season finale. Say what you like about the curate's eggs of Robert Sloman, but one had the sense that the show was trying to go out on a high note and that it cared about making its viewer happy. This is a season finale that has nothing to say and doesn't even try to top the bulk of its predecessors. It leaves you with a sickening sense that the past successes of this era have just been down to dumb luck.

This is a story that assumes that children just want to see over the top sensationalism. This is Doctor Who as Rupert Murdoch would design it. It's the sensationalist, sick and nasty show that its critics in this era accused it of being. And even though for most of the Hinchcliffe era the critics were spectacularly and horrifyingly wrong, it's honestly hard to say they aren't in this case. Right now, Hinchcliffe is blowing the license payers' money on a kiddie lit crossover of Saw and the Quatermass Experiment. Yes, it's entertaining. And I've in the past been willing to give Doctor Who stories a pass just as long as they're entertaining. And sure. That's the minimum Doctor Who has to be. In that regard, calling this a worse story than The Android Invasion is unfair.

Except that here I will firmly depart from being a review blog. Doctor Who doesn't have to exceed the minimum requirement of being entertaining. Sure. But on the other hand, the only reason I care about Doctor Who enough to write over 6000 words about it every week for something approaching fun is that Doctor Who is about something more than being entertaining. In other words, this story may be great television, but it's bad, bad alchemy.

Because here's the thing. At this moment in history, Doctor Who really was coming under heavy fire from some critics. We'll get to the implications of this in a few weeks, but suffice it to say that the main one, a woman named Mary Whitehouse, was a terrible human being. She was quite literally evil, and directly embodied everything that Doctor Who as a show fights against in the culture. And the show, with this story, plays right into her hands by being exactly the piece of cheap sensationalist trash she declared the whole show to be.

So yeah. Tat Wood is right. At least The Android Invasion didn't make Mary Whitehouse look good.

Sheer Poetry (The Brain of Morbius)

Marco... 

It's January 3, 1976. Despite the fact that we have jumped three weeks into the future, Queen remain undisturbed at #1. It doesn't move from number one during the next four weeks. Also charting are David Bowie, ABBA, Michael Oldfield, Barry White, and Greg Lake, the latter with "I Believe in Father Christmas," which I would like to point out is easily one of the five best Christmas songs written by popular musicians in the latter half of the 20th century. Seriously not a bad four weeks for music there.

During the few weeks in which Steven Moffat's Philip Hinchcliffe's bold new idea of a midseason break for Doctor Who have played out, also known as Christmas, Carlos the Jackal and others kidnapped delegates at an OPEC meeting in Vienna, and a bomb at LaGuardia Airport in New York kills eleven and does not lead to a decade of pointless war for the United States. While during this story's transmission, the trial of members of the Red Army Faction begins in Germany, the first commercial Concorde flight takes off, and the Scottish Labour Party is formed.

While on television, we get a classic. I mean, a bona fide, proper one - another one of the stories that people rave about as one of the best Doctor Who stories. The Hinchcliffe era has a lot of these. But here, I've got to admit, I was definitely under the spell. I had the irritating cut down hourlong version of this that came out on VHS, and on the one hand could tell it was great, but on the other could tell that something was missing. And I remember being absolutely thrilled when the full version came out, and devouring it. I must have watched this one a good half dozen times over the course of two years between the two edits. This would have been... ooh, 1993-94. So this is another one that's a tentpole of both Doctor Who and my childhood.

In many ways, this story is where the Hinchcliffe era to date comes together - in a story with as much density and power as Genesis of the Daleks, only better written and not reliant on nostalgia for its evocative power. It is another story that raises the bar for what the show is capable of. It is utterly and completely fantastic. So let's just talk about why. And then maybe towards the end we'll try something ambitious like declaring what the entire point of Doctor Who is.

First of all, there is the writing. This story benefits from extraordinary fortune in the scriptwriting stage. Terrance Dicks pitched a script based on the idea of doing a reverse Frankenstein story in which the scientist was a hideous monster who creates a perfectly normal-looking human. Then, after delivering the scripts, he went on vacation. Looking at them, Robert Holmes observed the same problem any script editor worth his salt (Dicks, no doubt, included) would have noticed: a story in which the impressive monster appears at the start and the big reveal is an ordinary person has some serious structure problems. And unlike The Android Invasion, he stepped in an fixed the problems this time, doing a massive rewrite on the script that flipped it back to a more traditional Frankenstein setup. The result is a script that has the structural zip of a Terrance Dicks script and the delightful characterization of a Robert Holmes script.

Then there is the acting, in which three things stand out. Baker, as always, is marvelous. Over the past chunk of stories he's been increasingly developing ways to simultaneously show that the Doctor is genuinely scared by the things he's fighting and to show the Doctor's steadfast refusal to take the villains seriously. Here he has something of a breakthrough, figuring out how to play the Doctor as someone who clearly genuinely believes these villains might kill him, but who is more annoyed at his pathetic a death that would be than scared by it.

Sladen, on the other hand, finds new highs for her character. The scene in which she engages in hysterical banter with the Doctor after she is blinded is absolutely jaw-dropping, providing a better depiction of someone's terror at hostile circumstances than anything seen in a "serious" drama like Survivors. In particular great is the way in which she manages to simultaneously convey anger at the Doctor for dragging her into this situation and awareness that she's always known that this sort of thing could happen. It is, simply put, one of the greatest acting performances the series has ever seen, not just up to this point but ever.

And then there is Philip Madoc as the main villain of the piece. This is just a sensible thing to do. In general, the answer to "should I hire Philip Madoc" is "Yes." In this case, he does a phenomenal job of turning a generic mad scientist into an interesting character, managing to nail the megalomaniacal speechmaking ("You chicken-brained biological disaster!") while still giving the character a wealth of subtle inflections and turns of phrase that keep him unpredictable and charming. He manages to swing gamely from raving lunacy to genuine menace, and is utterly compelling the whole time. The scene in which he apologizes to the eponymous brain of Morbius for making a bad pun is, in particular a highlight of the season.

All of this, of course, is just surface matter - another case of Hinchcliffe starting from the raised baseline of quality he inherited from Barry Letts and successfully pushing one or two elements to the point of being fantastic while maintaining Letts's skill at avoiding major screw-ups. This, in other words, is no more than what we got in Pyramids of Mars - a story whose bid for classic status amounts to doing nothing terribly wrong and several things very right. The Brain of Morbius, however, is miles ahead of Pyramids of Mars. The Brain of Morbius is much closer to what we'd have gotten if everything in Planet of Evil had actually worked right.

Back in the Pyramids of Mars entry, I talked about how that story opened a door that would be taken advantage of later. Here's the advantage. Pyramids of Mars came up with the idea of injecting the Doctor into an existing story. The next obvious step is to merge this with the genre collisions experimented with in Terror of the Zygons and Planet of Evil. And here we accomplish that with no fewer than four distinct and coherent narrative logics in play.

First, of course, is Frankenstein. The Brain of Morbius is a straight homage to that story, and, as ever, to the Hammer adaptations of it. Already there is a marked difference with Pyramids of Mars. The mummy stories that Pyramids of Mars retold were simply horror standards. Frankenstein, on the other hand, is both a classic of British literature and arguably the first real work of science fiction. This is territory with a deep and mythic resonance for Doctor Who, in other words. Miles and Wood suggest that this story has the tone of Lord Byron showing up and checking on how everyone has been doing since he died, and that's not entirely inaccurate, even if it does reiterate an unfortunate sexism of Byron's era given who it was that actually came up with Frankenstein.

The effect of this is to turn up the volume on the inevitability that comes from juxtaposing the Doctor with an existing story. Putting the Doctor in a mummy story is an exercise in contrast. But in a real, albeit mildly ineffable sense, The Brain of Morbius puts the Doctor in a situation he is oddly suited to. This may be a story that is fundamentally about magic, but it's rooted in one of the earliest modern explorations of the implications of technology. Frankenstein is, in many ways, the original "blur the lines of science fiction and fantasy" story, and as such really is perfect for the Doctor. This means that the danger of the story is enhanced, especially because of a deft sense of what to use as cliffhangers. The story's three cliffhangers are, in order, Sarah Jane being menaced by Morbius's body, Sarah Jane being menaced by Morbius's brain, and Sarah Jane being menaced by Morbius in toto. By opening with Morbius's body, there becomes a Chekovian tension to the whole thing - a continual knowledge that there is nothing the Doctor can possibly do to prevent Morbius's return as such. And this is fitting. This is a story that the Doctor actually fits into perfectly - one that actually makes a credible case for being able to impose its narrative logic on him, instead of, as we are used to, the other way around.

Let's move on to the second narrative logic - the beautiful cynicism of Robert Holmes. It has been some time since we have really seen this Robert Holmes. The irony of his tenure as script editor is that the bulk of the scripts he wrote while in charge were the ones that are the least like what he is most remembered as being. But here we are given the delightful spectacle of a struggle to stop the most feared war criminal in all of history from rising from the dead in which the main characters other than the regulars are: 1) An old woman who is literally dying of dullness. (For the record, you will never convince me that the Sisterhood's tendency to, at seemingly random moments, begin hissing "Sacred fire! Sacred flame!" is not intended to be as hilarious as it is.) 2) A mad scientist who seems continually uncertain whether he cares more about raising his war criminal master or just doing terrible things with bodies. (Let's face it, the only reason the line "To know death, Condo, you must fuck life in the gallbladder!" does not appear is because it was BBC1 at teatime, not because it wouldn't have fit. If you have no idea why this parenthetical comment exists, go play with Google for a bit.) 3) His idiot assistant who is mostly obsessed with pretty girls and getting his hand back. 4) His war criminal master's disembodied brain, which is suicidal and envies vegetables. And which gets dropped on the floor.

It is classic Robert Holmes - a set of characters, none of whom are on their own merits even remotely a problem for the Doctor who happen to be set up just right to pose a massive threat. And against this bunch of ludicrous characters is our hero, a madman with a box who is simultaneously capable of selling that this is a terrible threat to the entire universe and that he is surrounded by idiots. This gives the entire story a jolt of social realism. This is one of Holmes's biggest skills as a writer - he is extremely good at making a world that feels authentically absurd. It's a strange sort of realism - managing to be as screwed up as reality. But it's also by far the most compelling sort of realism. Far too often being "realistic" means shaving off the odd and the fanciful, an account of reality that is irreconcilable with actual human experience.

On to the third narrative logic. In which we're going to have to return to an aspect of production design again. Because The Brain of Morbius is a masterpiece of how to do design and effects work on a BBC budget. The decision here is clearly to make a couple of things - Solon's castle, the inner sanctum of the Sisterhood, and the Morbius outfit - look very good, and to just let the rest look like cheap BBC studio sets. And why not? I, Claudius looked like cheap BBC studio sets. This story is a textbook example of taking your bubble wrap seriously, and it does so with beautiful bravado. It is unapologetically an epic science fiction story done as a BBC television play on a Saturday at teatime. It makes no apologies for this. It just gets on with it.

There's a fire to this. When I talked about Terror of the Zygons, one of my more astute commenters, William Whyte, pointed out that the aesthetic I described there comes perilously close to just being a "so bad it's good" aesthetic. And he's right that we're in territory that resembles that, and that no shortage of science fiction series have fallen down badly attempting to get low budgets to stretch to epic stories. But that's not quite what Doctor Who does, and this is the story where we can really see that clearly. The story isn't "so bad it's good." Rather, it's at peace with the fact that it is going to continually juxtapose the ridiculous and the sublime. We can see here how these narrative logics start to piece together, in fact. The dodgy low-rent universe of Robert Holmes, in which epic threats to the universe are suicidal vegetable enviers, is one that lends itself to this approach. At its core, what Doctor Who is doing here is not the cult aesthetic of "so bad it's good," but rather the forming of a new aesthetic that merges the epic grandeur of Space: 1999 with the affordable maturity of I, Claudius. This is the story to point to in refutation to every claim that doing sci-fi epics on a BBC budget is embarrassing or a bad idea. And the answer is this: Doctor Who doesn't do epic sci-fi on a BBC budget. It does BBC television theater on an epic sci-fi scale.  And it's bloody brilliant.

Finally, then, we come around to the fourth narrative logic. Much is made (and I look forward to making even more) of Robert Holmes's dramatic reinvention of the Time Lords in The Deadly Assassin. And while The Deadly Assassin is indeed radical, it is far too easy to overstate the degree to which it in particular marks a reinvention of the Time Lords. Quite frankly, a lot of the reinvention happens here. It is easy to understate the significance of finding out, for instance, that there exists a matriarchal sect of immortal psychics who the Time Lords consider equals and have a peace treaty with. And, for that matter, it is easy to understate the significance of finding out that somebody like Morbius exists.

Miles and Wood observe that a large number of the Hinchcliffe stories deal with the return of a thought-dead enemy. This is the third big example of this. The first was Revenge of the Cybermen, in which the dead threat was one drawn from the show's own history and legend. The second was Pyramids of Mars, in which the dead thing is a powerful being from another story who thus offers a real threat to the Doctor's story. Now we have a third variation. Morbius is a threat from within the series - the most feared renegade Time Lord ever. He is presented, in other words, as a dark and twisted template for the Doctor.

The most obvious thing to compare this to is Omega. But Omega was presented to us as legend - as something out of stories. Morbius is stranger - presented to us as the ancient history of the Time Lords. We have never really been asked to think of the Time Lords as having history, as opposed to merely having legend. Previously our image of them has been as the sentinels of history. Now they seem subject to that which they previously ruled over. Or, rather, to that which they previously guarded. (It is perhaps here worth thinking of nothing so much as the oddly powerful impotence of the House of Lords. But more on that in The Deadly Assassin, I should think.)

But even as the Time Lords are bound into history and regional politics here, they are also given a new sort of power. For it is also easy to make far too little of the moment in which the Doctor suggests that the Sisterhood of Karn's use of psychic powers to transport matter is a sort of primitive system that the Time Lords have outgrown - a moment that seems to set what the Time Lords do not as advanced science (as it at least pretended to be in The Three Doctors) but as magic. This may seem a small change, especially given that this blog has been tracking occult and magical elements of Doctor Who since day one. But it's usually been a persistent subtext. Here it begins to break decisively into the realm of the explicit.

So even as the Time Lords become subject to history, they acquire a magical power. But we also see this magical power condemned. The Doctor eviscerates the Sisters of Karn for being unchanging, and thus for never progressing. He implies that in some fundamental sense this is why their precious Elixir of Life is drying up - that they do not progress. And we are told that death is the price of progress. Death being a concept that has always been associated with the Doctor, both in positive magical connotations and in the terrible ruin he leaves in his wake.

So those are the four narrative logics: Frankenstein, Holmes's cynicism, the theatrical tradition of the BBC, and this mythic rewriting of the Time Lords. This does not set some kind of record for the number of narrative logics going on in a story simultaneously. But past stories that have juxtaposed a laundry list like this have done it through rapid shifts - changing tones constantly, whether deliberately or through sheer incompetence. Here, however, all four narrative logics wed tightly to one another, producing a strong overall effect.

In short, there is a line of history that leads to this episode. Starting from Frankenstein in 1818 and the gothic romanticism that gave birth to science fiction, and stretching forward through the Victorian science magic that Doctor Who descends from, through right into the thinking that created the BBC and the idea of television theater, and then right into Doctor Who. A real and meaty strand of history that is carefully built up through this story. All of the component parts are explicitly laid out. And they're laid out in a way that is at once epic and firmly grounded in a sense of reality - of the mundane viscera of history. The story shows all of this. It goes out of its way to point it out, and to stress the importance of social progress - of moving forward. 

And through all of this, we know, because of the fact that it is rooted in Frankenstein, a story that is conspicuously well known, that Morbius is going to return. The one thing that is guaranteed - that not even the Doctor can possibly stop - is that this terrible threat from ancient history that the Doctor is terrified of, and rightly so because he is at once the once the original renegade Time Lord, and thus the template for all that the Doctor is, and the most monstrous criminal in history will rise again. In the end, the Doctor is going to have to face Morbius and defeat him.

The Doctor even knows this. Watch how he leaves Solon, who is obsessed with raising Morbius, unattended with the instruction to kill Morbius. This is either the single most stupid thing that Dicks and Holmes have ever had the Doctor do, or it is the moment where the Doctor accepts that he will have to face Morbius. Certainly when the Doctor does face him, the Doctor seems ready for him, already having figured out how he will fight him. The Doctor is in full on Troughton mode here, goading and manipulating Morbius, bullying and hectoring him into a trap the Doctor has figured out. 

And then they lock minds. And the story makes a staggering retcon. It is, of course, a retcon that has, by general consensus, been retconned out itself. Morbius regresses the Doctor through his previous incarnations. We see Pertwee, Troughton, and Hartnell. And then Morbius shouts about sending the Doctor back to his very beginning, and we get a cascade of other faces. Modern convention is that these faces are Morbius's past incarnations, but the implication in the episode is, as has been pointed out by many before me, that they are pre-Hartnell versions of the Doctor. 

In other words, Frankenstein - positioned as the story from which all of Doctor Who has flowed, gets into a fight with Doctor Who and successfully deals a mortal wound to it. In its own way, this is a version of Moffat's oldest question in the universe being "Doctor Who?" Morbius breaches the boundary of the Doctor's story. He breaks free out of Doctor Who. And in a truly staggering comment on the nature of history and narrative, he does it by breaking out the back door - by pushing past the beginning of the story into the unknowable fathoms beneath it. (The faces, incidentally, are various production crew. One is Graham Harper, then a production assistant, who would go on to direct two stories in the 80s, and then be brought back again by Russell T. Davies to direct multiple stories from seasons 2-4 of the new series. In other words, this moment rivals Peter Davison's daughter who played the Tenth Doctor's daughter having a daughter with David Tennant, who grew up with Peter Davison as his Doctor as the single most inadvertently meta moment in Doctor Who history.) 

The result seems to kill both. This makes sense for the Doctor, given that his own story has been attacked and punctured. But Morbius? Clearly it is essentially fatal for him. There is an explosion around Morbius's head, and smoke pours out. He runs away, screaming madly, and is driven off a cliff by the Sisterhood of Karn. This is a wonderfully bold statement. Doctor Who and Frankenstein, when they face each other down and try to destroy each other's fundamental narrative structures, fight to a draw.

Only they don't. The Doctor faces Frankenstein, dies, and then... sneaks away. He survives. He has one more trick up his sleeve. The Elixir of Life. And here we come to the one last detail that makes everything fit together. The Elixir of Life. Which for once I don't even have to stretch for. I mean, it's obvious what's going on there. A bunch of chemical reactions that create an elixir that grants immortality. Or, as the Doctor describes it, "The impossible dream of a thousand alchemists dripping like tea from an urn."

We now come to the moment where I make a definitive statement of what it is that this blog argues - in which I finally lay my cards down and make my thesis statement. In which I stick my neck out and say "This is, in the end, what Doctor Who is about."

We have already been told, after all, that the flame is drying up because of a lack of progress and change. Which means that the goal of alchemy - a concept that we have, to say the least, discussed before - can only be achieved via the progression of history, which we have been taught by the show to consider as a social phenomenon? We are told that the actual chemical synthesis is easy - that getting the Elixir under a spectrograph would be sufficient to crack its secrets. That's, it seems, the easy part. The tricky business is this stuff about death and progress. The show has never actually said this before. It feels in every sense like the culmination of everything that the show has been doing for twelve years now. Of course this is the real answer to alchemy. Of course. What else could it be? 

And this is not just trotted out as a moral. This is distilled out of ninety minutes (or three weeks) of television. No. More than that. This is squeezed out of over 150 years of literary progress. This is a statement that is not simply made as a moral, but something that is positioned as the inevitable teleological consequence of the arc of history itself. Not only is it a literary argument. Yes, Doctor Who is being presented as the most powerful evolution of a hermetic spirit that has been animated within literature from the very beginning. But this is not the only source of power it has. It is also powerful because it stems from a specifically British cultural tradition. But no. It is even bolder than that. This is being presented as part of the BBC tradition of television theater - one of its oldest traditions. And the BBC is a public institution - something that is conceived of as performing a service for the country on the grounds that it is a just and moral thing to do. And it is with all of that laid on the table, all of that acknowledged and accepted as a necessary part of what it is the show does, that it delivers the secret to alchemy.

And it doesn't deliver it merely as a part of that duty - as if to say "Oh, yes, if a BBC producer happens to understand alchemy they should really put that on the air." It is far more than that. The secret of alchemy is shown to spring inevitably from the entire cultural and intellectual logic that underlies that duty. Out of the very moral and intellectual forces that turn the BBC from some broad philosophical statements to a living, breathing entity with a moral duty. From those centuries of intellectual, moral, and cultural heritage comes at last this message:

The solution to the problem of the alchemists is material social progress.

Damn, what a show.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 18 (Space: 1999, I Clavdivs)

Yes, I really am tackling Space: 1999 and I, Claudius (or, as I insist on referring to it for no other reason than "it makes me happy," I Clavdivs.) in one entry. It even makes sense to do so. Because one thing that we're going to have to deal with over the remainder of the series is the fact that the nature of television is shifting rapidly. And the beginnings of that shift are starting to happen around what we're watching now. One of the easiest lenses to look at that through, at least for our purposes, is the way in which British television is made for the export market. In other words, shows designed to make money by being sold to other countries.

The BBC, of course, had done this to some extent for years. In terms of Doctor Who, this has been tracked extensively by the folks at BroaDWcast. But notably, these sales were mostly to Commonwealth countries, with Hartnell and Troughton stories often airing well into the 1970s. Despite Innes Lloyd eying the possibility in the 1960s (hence the conscious reintroduction to the premise of the show at the start of Tomb of the Cybermen), no successful effort to show Doctor Who in the US happens until 1972, when Time Life, who bought the distribution rights, sells a package of Pertwee episodes to a PBS station in Philadelphia. (In a moment of explaining things to a different side of the Atlantic than usual, PBS is basically what the BBC would be if Rupert Murdoch got his way - an underfunded and stitched together coalition of local stations with an extreme lack of money for producing new content outside the children's market. They market to the sorts of people who in the UK watch a lot of BBC4 and read The Guardian. But more on them in a few paragraphs.) But it's not really until the late 70s/early 80s when Doctor Who manages to take off in a meaningful sense in the US, so we'll mostly drop that strand until... oh, The Five Doctors sounds like a pretty good place to pick it up next, no?

The logic behind this is fairly straightforward: there are a whole lot of English speakers in the US, so it's a really obvious market to sell in. But right around now there's an odd transition going on in the nature of what a typical UK to US export looks like. In the 1960s, had we done a piece on exports, we'd have talked mostly about ITC - Lew Grade's production company that made, of the things we've talked about so far, The Prisoner. In the UK, Grade's shows went to ITV, whereas in the US they usually ended up in CBS.

Several things characterize the ITC approach. First of all, they were generally budgeted with the export market in mind. This gave them the budgets to do glitzy action set pieces that BBC productions couldn't touch. Second, they were generally put together so that episode order didn't matter that much. Even a limited run show such as The Prisoner really only needs its first and last two episodes aired in the correct positions in the run. Third, they were often made by Gerry Anderson.

We should pause here and talk a little bit about Gerry Anderson, just because I've kind of ruthlessly and inexcusably skipped him. I was going to do a Thunderbirds entry, but the end of the Troughton era was getting crowded and I found the five minute sample of Thunderbirds I watched dull and I just decided to cut it and come back later. Actually, I did talk about Anderson a fair bit over here. And said I'd talk more about him later, so I suppose it's later now.

Anderson, basically, is one of the great masters of schlock action stories. He is Terry Nation with a flair for the visual. His initial success was in children's television in the 1960s with a technique he cleverly branded Supermarionation, in which marionettes were controlled by extremely thin metal wires that could also transmit electricity to handle facial movements and things. The result was an iconic visual style that could be wrapped around quality action pieces just so long as nobody actually had to walk.

In the 70s, however, Anderson reinvented himself as a live action producer with some significant successes. And then there was Space: 1999 - his Waterloo, if you will. I approached Space: 1999 with... not so much trepidation as bemusement. For a variety of reasons, Space: 1999 is something of a punchline in science fiction fandom. The most obvious reason is that, along with 2001: A Space Odyssey and 1984, it is one of the great examples of a title that took a gamble on a date and got it completely wrong. Tragically, our nuclear waste dumps on the moon did not explode in 1999 sending the moon hurtling out of orbit onto an interstellar voyage.

But there are subtler reasons. Space: 1999 is one of the archetypal examples of the fringe cult show. By this I mean that it has enough fans that if you go to a sci-fi con, or at least an American one, you will have several, often very, very dedicated Space: 1999 fans (though this is less true now due to generational shifts in fandom). However, and this is equally if not more important, you will never find enough Space: 1999 fans to make doing anything that caters to them financially sensible. (Other examples of the fringe cult show include Buck Rogers, classic Battlestar Galactica, and until recently, erm... Doctor Who, actually. At least in the US.)

There are many things that characterize this sort of show, and a much larger discussion to be had about science fiction post-Star Trek and, in turn, post-Star Wars and the demise of the golden age aesthetic, but let's save that for the inevitable Star Wars post. Instead, let's just sum up the basic logic of Space: 1999, which amounts to "let's do a really big budget sci-fi show." The problem is that it was basically a complete disaster. Within the UK it failed for straightforward reasons - the fragmented nature of the ITV system meant that it didn't have a consistent airtime and, in fact, ITV's fabled Doctor Who killer failed to actually air opposite Doctor Who consistently. This led to extended and focused efforts to revamp ITV, generally with the tried and true method of hiring BBC talent and paying them about four times as much to do shows that weren't as good as what they'd been doing on the BBC. (See also Forsyth, Bruce and, more recently Ross, Jonathan.)

In the US its failure was more subtle. The show was, after all, carefully tuned to the US market, grabbing Barbara Bain and Martin Landau from the recently-finished Mission: Impossible as stars so that the show let American. But US networks were getting increasingly good at making homegrown shows in a more or less ITC style - things like Land of the Lost, or, for that matter, Mission: Impossible. And they were increasingly less interested in just buying a huge chunk of British episodes. As a result, US distribution of Space: 1999 was often outside of prime time and on local unaffiliated channels, only some of which were major powerhouses.

And, of course, there was perhaps the larger issue - Space: 1999 sucked. Barbara Bain, in particular, was godawful in it. The plots were wretched. The dialogue was often more wretched. They even hired Pip and Jane Baker. The effects were quite good, but that's about the only remotely positive thing that can be said about the series. The result basically ended Anderson's career until a 90s nostalgia revival in his old Supermarionated material allowed him a late career comeback. But if Space: 1999 marked more or less the end of the era where the UK exported glossy and cinematic action serials to the US, there was at the same time a rise of a very different sort of UK-to-US export with a considerably more enduring legacy. And for that we turn to I, Claudius.

It is not that I, Claudius is the first BBC series of its kind. It's not. But it is without a doubt one of the most important and acclaimed. It didn't actually make it out to the US until 1977 as part of Masterpiece Theater, a PBS series devoted not entirely but at least substantively to airing British (usually BBC) dramas, focusing largely but not exclusively on period drama. Masterpiece Theater has in fact been around since 1971, but the gist of it is straightforward: PBS realized that their upmarket viewers would probably enjoy British programming that felt British, and that nobody else in the US would air most of these programs, which meant they were relatively cheap to acquire as such things went.

I, Claudius being the archetypal example of this. I'm actually not going to go too into detail on the specifics of I, Claudius (Although rewatching a few episodes, I admit that I was vaguely scandalized that my Latin teacher in high school showed us the series senior year. Jesus that's a lot of sex.) mainly because for our purposes here the specifics of the show are far less interesting than its basic approach. The heart of I, Claudius - and really of the classic BBC period drama in general - comes from the fact that it developed not out of the cinematic tradition that Space: 1999 (and the ITC genre in general) aspired to, but out of a theatrical tradition.

The BBC, at least in its earliest conception, was in part a sort of national theater. We haven't talked about this tradition in a long time, but it has come up before. But on the most basic level, BBC drama drew on actors from the theatrical tradition. On one level, this is just a nice way of saying that BBC drama looks cheap. I mean, the BBC has some fantastic costume designers and can knock together a period set like nobody's business, but the fact of the matter is that Space: 1999 is a glitzy action series with explosions and space adventures, and I, Claudius is a bunch of middle aged men talking to each other at great length.  Another way of looking at it, however, is to look at it as a facet of a fundamental division between American and English styles of drama. And the easiest way of doing that is probably to look at actors.

It would be too much of a generalization to say that British and American actors have completely different approaches. But there is a real difference in what you might call the default technique of each. American acting, since the mid-20th century, has been dominated by various forms of the Method. Although it's much more common in 2011 to see people reject that label, Method acting is usually defined by a heavy focus on the actor's psychological state and on getting it to match the state of the character. (Though this is often accomplished by finding experiences in the actor's own past or aspects of the actor's own personality to draw on.)

The British tradition, on the other hand, tends to be based more on making conscious decisions about the character and following through on them. In this approach, the actor focuses less on the authenticity of the character and more on acting as a communicative practice - on how the acting conveys information about the character. This school tends to be based heavily on gesture and facial expression.

These days the dividing line is pretty lax. Matt Smith, for instance, is British, but uses lots of Method techniques in his acting. But he modeled his portrayal of the Doctor on Troughton, who is just about the least Method actor ever. But it still captures a basic division in aesthetics that is close to that of the cinematic/theatrical distinction between Space: 1999 and I, Claudius. Space: 1999, like the Method, is about creating things to be looked at. The Method tries to create a seamlessly realistic character that is observed voyeuristically through the fourth wall. I, Claudius, on the other hand, is about displaying the complex machinations of people and about communicating the various depths and contradictions of them. In other words, we're not supposed to look at characters in I, Claudius. Instead we're supposed to study them and try to understand them. In fact, if we don't pay attention and think carefully about what actors are trying to communicate in I, Claudius, we'll miss information. Whereas with the Method, the actors are supposed to disappear.

So it's worth noting that at almost the same time the cinematic ITC style was flickering out as a viable form of export the BBC was busily nailing down a new style of export in which the old television play dynamic is used and a bunch of the really excellent actors that the UK is positively lousy with sit down on a BBC set and allowed to talk to each other a bunch. And this proves a reliable success for the BBC that continues to the present day - indeed, not just for the BBC, as ITV are busily proving with Downton Abbey these days.

This is a thread that's going to develop a lot as the blog moves forward and these two approaches begin to intermingle more and more. But for now lets simply observe that for all of its love of the occasional action set piece, right now one of the absolute most interesting things about Doctor Who is that it is a science fiction show - a genre usually associated with the cinematic approach - that nevertheless acts like a television play in most regards. And that distinction, in both the extended and immediate future (and for that matter in the past), is going to prove enormously significant for the series in both good and bad ways.

A Bit Dodgy, This Process (The Android Invasion)

Frankly, this image is just here so that my heart doesn't
sink whenever I scroll past this entry and remember the
story.

It's November 22, 1975. Billy Connoly is at number one with "DIVORCE," a novelty parody about dogs and, well, divorce. The remaining three weeks of this story, on the other hand, belong to "Bohemian Rhapsody," one of the most epically successful singles ever. It is worth pausing and discussing what "Bohemian Rhapsody" does that is so significant. First, it's a high profile case of a band performing a successful end-run around their label. EMI had no faith in the single for its length and lack of traditional song structure, and it was instead deliberately leaked via DJs. Second, it's aggressively not poppy. It's telling that there's a lengthy period here where the number one song goes from a six year old piece of protoglam to a novelty record to this that provides a useful context for why postmodernist horror was proving to be adequate teatime entertainment. Third, it marks some of the initial stirrings of New Romanticism, which will eventually be one of the dominant aesthetics of the series. Also charting are Bowie, The Bay City Rollers, Rod Stewart, and Steeleye Span. 

Whereas in real news, there are no major English serial killings with which I can make a point about media sensationalism that somehow gets misread as a swipe at the people of Yorkshire. But there are Juan Carlos formally becoming King of Spain with the death of Franco, the official outlawing of the IRA, and the Rocky Horror Picture Show being released. New York City received a massive bailout to handle its massive cash-flow problems.

While on television, we run into one of the fundamental weaknesses of the Hinchcliffe era, especially compared to the Letts era. I've discussed the idea that there are two approaches to take when trying to improve a television show: increasing quality and reducing badness. This may sound like an obvious point, but it's significant, in part because it gets to the heart of an art/entertainment debate. Barry Letts improved Doctor Who by targeting weak episodes and trying to eliminate them. Hinchcliffe did it by targeting strong episodes and trying to make them masterpieces. And just as the Letts era was never so frustrating as in its Sloman/Letts Curate's Egg scripts that could have been great and weren't, the Hinchcliffe era is never more frustrating than it is when it's obvious that Hinchcliffe and Holmes have decided that this just isn't one of the stories they're going to put much effort into.

So, for instance, when they decide to just hire a writer with a massive list of television credits and pair him with the previous producer as director, it's pretty clear that the plan here is that they're going to go pay attention to other stories and let this story play out however it plays out. And it plays out terribly. It's boring, unambitious, and terribly plotted. It brings back UNIT characters for another round without having anything resembling a reason for them. It is, in every regard, the story Terror of the Zygons was making fun of. It's the first story in months where my notes for one episode are totally blank because I just stared at the screen seeing nothing interesting happen for twenty-five minutes straight. It's not even bad in interesting ways. It's just bad in boring ways. In all honesty, I spent a solid day contemplating an entry that, after going through the usual historical/music intros, just said "While on TV, everything was very boring" and moving on. I'm not quite willing to declare that there is nothing interesting to say about this story... but I am willing to declare that there's very little interesting that I want to say about it.

So let's talk about Terry Nation instead. Because I, like virtually everyone who has engaged in extended critique of Doctor Who, am really hard on Terry Nation. And while I'm not going to back down and become an unabashed Terry Nation fanboy, Nation deserves the sort of extended analysis that's been offered to many other creators. After all, look, you don't create two successful television series and the Daleks and have a writing career on Doctor Who that spans seventeen seasons by being an incompetent hack. You do it by being an extremely competent hack. And though Nation was deeply flawed as a television writer, there are things he is extraordinarily good at.

The heart of it is something that we've talked about before, way back in The Keys of Marinus when we observed that Nation more or less hit on the correct plot structure for a video game, only he did it in 1964. Nation is as good as writers get at crafting action and events. Even when Nation's scripts are, as they are here, stultifyingly dull, they're not dull because nothing happens. A Nation script is a constant blur of people doing things. And there's often a charm to the things he manages to come up with. For all that it's irritating because of how badly it lines up with other conceptions of the TARDIS, his scenes in which the TARDIS develops technical faults in his two Pertwee stories are quite pacy little numbers that involve people solving problems in ways that the viewer understands but that still look clever. Likewise, the Doctor noticing that all of the coins in the village have the same date is exactly the sort of thing Nation does well - a detail the audience recognizes as anomalous but wouldn't notice themselves that thus gives the Doctor something useful to do.

No. Nation's problem is altogether subtler than that. Indeed, it's arguable that Nation's problems are what made his influence on Doctor Who so important, as opposed to his solutions. Being able to pack in a lot of events into serialized television is certainly useful, but it's not as though Nation is the first person to crack that nut. Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes are both at least as good as Nation at that, and it's a stretch to say that either learned from Nation. No. What makes Nation so fascinatingly important is that for all the skill he displays at making things happen, he has zero sense whatsoever of structure or visual storytelling.

The Android Invasion is a prime example. Absolutely everything that anyone would enjoy about this premise - namely watching everyone get into spats with their doppelgängers - takes place in the fourth episode. Other than a brief bit of having a fake Sarah in episode two, the actual part of the story where androids invade Earth is put off until episode four. This isn't just bad plotting in the "Oh bugger, we don't have an ending, let's have the Doctor play logic games and then throw the 'Kill Sutekh' lever" sense of that phrase where a massive flaw is introduced. This is bad plotting in the sense that every single aspect of the plot structure of The Android Invasion is comprehensively misconceived. The twist of "They're not on Earth after all! We're just sitting around waiting for the plot to start" has to go down as a jaw-droppingly terrible idea - one that is not only uninteresting on its own merits but that actively tells us we've been wasting our time for the preceding weeks and that nothing that happened actually mattered.

In essence the problem is that Nation has very little sense of what an event is. He can do action well enough, but in the sense of keeping things constantly moving. What he can't do - what, in fact, every single Terry Nation story has massively lacked in - is getting the story to move to anywhere. Instead, the archetypal Terry Nation moment is something like the emergence of, say, giant clams or the Slyther or the Mire Beast - a monster that adds nothing to the overall impact of the story and instead fills some time with monster-avoiding shenanigans. But what he can't do is built to a satisfying climax. In fact, the Android Invasion, much like Death to the Daleks and Planet of the Daleks before it, ends with the same slow decline ending in which the Doctor, in basically sequential scenes, takes care of his various opponents, generally moving from the most immediately threatening to the least. (Nation is not alone in favoring this sort of anticlimax - Robert Banks Stewart did it with Terror of the Zygons, for instance - but it's still a desperately weak ending to stop all the androids then go polish off the one not-very-interesting alien baddy.)

On top of that, Nation has no sense of the visual. This is actually clear from his very first appearance. Remember that while Nation invented the Daleks, his invention was some shrieking robots in an abandoned city. Almost everything that made the Daleks brilliant was provided by Raymond Cusick's visual design. There's nothing about the original idea of the Daleks that's any better than the original idea of the Voord or, for that mater, the Kraals. But the Daleks ended up in the hands of one of the BBC's best designers who ended up doing career-best work on them. That doesn't mean Nation got lucky - they're also an enormously successful execution of a basic malevolent alien race. But he didn't invent a massive pop culture success. He invented something that Cusick could design into a massive pop culture success.

Once you realize that, the flaws across Nation's Doctor Who work become clear. He has no sense of what's going to work on the screen. Whether it involves badly misestimating what BBC budgets can do (Keys of Marinus, The Chase, Death to the Daleks) or just not quite grasping what's going to be exciting on television (for all that I quite like the landmine scene in Genesis of the Daleks, Nation's belief that men fiddling with machines is gripping TV viewing is badly misguided. See also the climax of this story), Nation does not do a very good job of coming up with action sequences that are going to work well once they're filmed.

But there's another way to look at all of this. Let's start with Nation's extreme pacing issues. There's a phrase used by comics fans, "writing for the trade." What it means is that a given story is written with very little consideration for readers who are waiting a month between installments, instead being written for people who are going to read the whole run in one shot when they buy the book version. Nation, in a real sense, writes for the novelization. And did so long before novelizations were a thing. Look, for instance, at the ginger pop sequence in The Android Invasion. A detail - that Sarah hates ginger pop - is introduced in the first episode. In the second, it is used as the explanation for why the Doctor knows that Sarah is a duplicate. It's a nice deduction. Except that with a week between episodes, basically nobody is going to pay attention to Sarah's preferences in fizzy beverages to see the setup. The fact that there's a week gap between those two scenes is something that Nation seemingly doesn't even care about. He's writing as though the episodes are going to be watched in one stretch.

This also gets at the problem with Nation's sense of the visual. Ultimately, it's a mistake to think of Nation as a screenwriter. I mean, sure, most of what he wrote was for the screen, but he didn't actually write like a screenwriter. He's a pulp sci-fi writer who belonged writing for Hugo Gernsback or William Clayton for magazines. Or, better yet, a writer who belongs churning out cheap novels in an H. Rider Haggard style. Almost all of the foibles of his writing - not thinking about episodic structure or how things will play out visually, but instead just writing fast-moving sci-fi adventure stories - are things that would not be foibles in the least if only he were writing in that medium.

And the thing is, for all the flaws evident in that, and there are many, it also explains why Nation is so important to the development of the program. Because Doctor Who has always been TV for people who read. I don't mean this in a pompous or elitist fashion either - it's not TV for people who only read the finest literature or anything like that. No, it's just TV for people who read. That's why the Target novelizations happened, frankly. It's a fair part of why the series was, unlike any comparable cancelled TV series, sustain itself for over a decade as a series of novels. And a real part of that is that Terry Nation embedded a strangely textual sensibility into the program from an early date. Just by writing stories that appeal so heavily to readers of science fiction instead of viewers, he played a large part in instilling an aesthetic of literacy.

And the Hinchcliffe era, even if it quotes film as much if not more than it quotes literature, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of that. The fact that Doctor Who has always been for bookish people is a large part of why, in 1975, when "postmodern" was a term still associated entirely with the avant grade, Doctor Who was able to quietly appropriate the logic of postmodernism and use it to tell thrilling adventure stories.

Yes, The Android Invasion, which I've managed quite satisfyingly to avoid saying much about (although I would argue that I've said everything worth saying about it) is a disaster. And by 1975 - heck, by 1973 - Nation was sufficiently far behind the standards of modern television that he could not supply good material without an excellent collaborator to help him. (Ideally, it turns out, David Maloney) But for all the vast and cratering flaws of this story and of Nation's writing in general, let's instead just say this: there was a reason he seemed like a safe pair of hands for Hinchcliffe and Holmes to put this story in and leave be.

I Don't Exist in Your World (Pyramids of Mars)

No! Not the Mind Nightlight!

It's October 25, 1975. So... next Tuesday, basically. Art Garfunkel, who only has eyes for you, is at number one. It lasts for two weeks at number one, and is improbably overtaken by David Bowie's "Space Oddity," rereleased six years after its original release and providing Bowie with his first number one single in the UK. "Space Oddity" plays out the story. ABBA, The Four Seasons, Roxy Music, and John Lennon also chart, the latter with "Imagine."

In real news, Peter Sutcliffe, the so-called Yorkshire Ripper, commits his first murder, killing Wilma McCann in Leeds. It is worth pausing here and commenting on the fundamental absurdity of the phrase "Yorkshire Ripper," combining as it does the macabre celebrity killer glory of Jack the Ripper with Yorkshire, a thoroughly working class region generally lacking in glitz and generally associated with the imagery of its mining regions, or with a more idyllic, pastoral imagery of agriculture, or, more broadly, with a wide variety of non-London cultural touchstones. Yorkshire, in other words, is conceptually miles from the seedy glamor of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper. "Yorkshire Ripper" is, in other words, a phrase that trades on the shocking contrast between the images evoked by each of its words. This is not to detract from the utter horror of Sutcliffe's crimes - he's one of the most brutal serial killers around - but rather to remark upon the sheer and callous skill with which he was transmuted into a media event, complete with a catchily incongruous brand-name that could be splashed across the red tops. (Just as a note for anyone who wades through the comment section, this paragraph has seen a good three revisions due to infelicities of phrasing)

Franco steps down in Spain, beginning to bring that dictatorship to an end shockingly long after everyone assumes a country like Spain was democratic. (By "everyone" I mean "Americans" here and not "people who read this blog.") The first petroleum pipeline opens in Scotland, the Green March takes place in Morocco - a mass coordinated demonstration to try to take over Western Sahara, and, for fans of truly great bad music, it's the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. (For proper effect, read that sentence with a Gordon Lightfoot-esque inflection so that "rald" is said about twice as loud and a solid octave higher than the prior syllable)

While on television, we have a story that is, from a critical perspective, somewhat weirder than normal. Two of the sort of standard issue angles to take on Doctor Who stories are, roughly speaking, "it's got some problems but it does some really extraordinary things" and "it's terribly unambitious, but executes a standard type of story very well."It seems like these two things should be exact opposites, but somewhat incredibly, Pyramids of Mars manages to be a story that simultaneously does both.

In one very real sense, this is where the Hinchcliffe era comes together. It is not the best story to date, although it is very, very good. Rather, it's a story that finds something the Hinchcliffe era hadn't done yet that was such an utterly obvious move within the larger aesthetic of the era that, once it happens, everyone is left with little to do but say "Oh, yes, of course that's how it should be." In this regard it is much like the era's debut - a story that feels like it's doing something that Doctor Who has always done, even though it's actually not.

Most of this hinges on a return to first principles. One of the most enduring observations we've made about Doctor Who is the one we made in our very first post - that Doctor Who is a show about people being where they shouldn't be. And one of the earliest forms of doing that was the historical. Much is made of the supposed educational roots of the historical, and while those were clearly there, the historical also survived a good few years after the show had all but completely abandoned its educational mandate (which was never that clear in the show itself anyway). Far less is made of the fact that the historical was just common sense for Doctor Who.

Remember, in the 60s Doctor Who had the task of presenting 40+ episodes a year that provided as many as ten different stories. Meanwhile, the BBC has always had incredible skill at period drama. If you need to get several distinctive and immediately recognizable settings on the cheap while working at the BBC and you don't go for period drama, you are an idiot. And because in the 1960s tropes of history were more familiar to audiences than tropes of science fiction, most of the recognizable genre pastiches were historicals: Shakespeare, the western, the espionage thriller, the pirate story, etc.

There's a point in the history of Greek drama where it goes from being all exchanges between a chorus and a single character to where it has two characters on stage at the same time. And what's nifty about this moment of change is that it's incredibly obvious in hindsight but still absolutely transformative. And in a lot of ways, the fundamental change of the Hinchcliffe era is exactly that - the idea that you can lash different genres together to form new things - a werewolf Scottish moor UNIT story, for instance, or a Lovecraftian space adventure.

But the thing about Pyramids of Mars is that there's not actually two genres here. Instead Hinchcliffe and Holmes abruptly go for the other obvious modification to the idea of genre collisions - instead of dropping the Doctor into a recognizable genre, drop the Doctor into a recognizable story. This may sound like a subtle difference, but it's actually fairly large. In The Gunfighters, the Doctor showed up in a generic western. In The Pyramids of Mars, however, the Doctor shows up in what is basically Blood From The Mummy's Tomb - a specific horror film. (Blood From The Mummy's Tomb is one of several horror films by Hammer Productions featuring mummies, actually, but its plot, which is lifted straight from Bram Stoker's The Jewel of the Seven Stars, is the most similar to this story. As is widely cited all over the place, the Hammer Horror films are a major influence on a couple of stories in the Hinchcliffe era. Pop Between Realities entry on this subject to follow in the book version. Sorry about the delays on the Hartnell one by the way. It turns out that volunteer-based copyediting is a horrible idea. I'm not changing horses in midstream on that one, but the plan will definitely be different for Troughton onwards.) In this regard it's a different sort of historical - one in which instead of visiting a period, you visit a period piece.

Note that this is extremely distinct from just doing a remake of an existing story. It's still doing a genre collision in which the Doctor is thrust into a story he doesn't belong in. Doctor Who, after all, is a science fiction show. While Sutekh, even if we're told he's actually an enormously powerful alien with robot mummy servants, is clearly supernatural. He works by magic. Eventually the show's repeated moves towards villains like Sutekh (or the anti-matter monster, for that matter) will firmly and permanently call into question whether it is best thought of as a science fiction show or a fantasy show, but in 1975, that's just not the game yet. Doctor Who is science fiction, and ancient Egyptian curses are fantasy-horror. Putting them together is incongruous. But it's incongruous in a very strange way, because there's a perpetual tension over who's rules are actually in place. And that gets at what's so interesting about this story.

When I started in on the Hinchcliffe era, I was surprised by a small but significant bevy of comments from people who felt the Hinchcliffe era was overrated. And among those commenters, Pyramids of Mars was the story singled out as the most overrated. Which at the time surprised me. I'd seen the story as a child, and remembered it fondly. It wasn't necessarily one of my top five classic Doctor Who stories (my favorites are actually mostly from the 80s), but I enjoyed it and felt like those for whom it is one of the absolute pinnacles of Doctor Who were not completely on crack, which is more than I can say for, say, Tomb of the Cybermen.

I haven't really changed my opinion - I thought, rewatching it, that Pyramids of Mars was an absolute cracker. Yes, it has problems. Miles and Wood are correct to point out that not doing the exteriors as a night shoot did massive harm to the story's ability to be scary. And almost everybody who has pointed out that the fourth episode is a train wreck of delay tactics and recycling of Death to the Daleks is spot on. And, of course, it's irritatingly stereotypical in its portrayals of Arabs, though in a way that can be entirely attributed to its thorough reconstruction of the Mummy genre. (This is not a good defense, but it is at least a revealing one. As is usually the case when Robert Holmes makes one of his irritating strays into being a bit of a bigot, he does it because he can't be bothered to clean out existing bigotry as opposed to because he's introducing new bigotry. There is a difference between leaving ethnic stereotypes in a period mummy story and leaving them in a futuristic mummy story, and a bigger one yet between that and inserting them wholesale into a story.)

But on the other hand, Sutekh is given an amazing voiceover by the fantastically named Gabriel Woolf, Baker and Sladen have completely hit their stride and become the iconic pair we remember them as being, and not for the first time in the Hinchcliffe era, almost everybody's A-game (and one guy's hand!) shows up at the same time. As 70s Doctor Who goes, this is better made than most of it, and a damn sight better than most of the competitors. (To jump ahead a couple of entries, Space: 1999 doesn't actually look that much better than this.)

No. The problem with this story is subtler one: it all seems a bit simple. Dropping the Doctor inside an existing story and watching him interact with it and reshape it is not quite as complex an idea as injecting the Doctor into an already fraught juxtaposition of two existing genres. This story thus feels like a bit of a step down in a somewhat ineffable sense - as though Doctor Who has given up on being ambitious and is just contenting itself to tell satisfying scary stories in different settings.

First of all, though, and I recognize that I am saying this as the person who wrote this entry, but let's admit how utterly pompous that sounds. We've consistently held to the rule that criticizing Doctor Who for merely be an exceedingly entertaining piece of television is manifestly unfair. So obviously we're not going to start now. But more importantly, all we're really doing is complaining that Hinchcliffe and Holmes had their second best idea after their first instead of before it. Yes, injecting the Doctor into a known text and watching what happens isn't quite as interesting as the postmodern genrebending of the previous two stories. But that doesn't mean it's remotely uninteresting.

The thing about putting the Doctor inside another story is that the Doctor is so defined by the way in which he alters stories. So when you put him inside of a story - not just a genre, but an already existent story, there's something truly unusual that happens. In one sense, this is the very definition of a fixed point in time. The Doctor can't change Blood From The Mummy's Tomb without making it no longer Blood From The Mummy's Tomb. He's more trapped and hemmed in here than he usually is. And this is reflected in the story. Part of what makes this such a satisfyingly taut story (at least for three episodes) is the way in which the Doctor seems genuinely afraid of Sutekh. Not for the last time, Holmes writes the Doctor as if he believes that he really isn't likely to make it out of this alive.

(There is of course an alchemical element of this. Sutekh is specifically Set - the mythical figure who slew the risen god Osiris. Egyptian mythology is one of the mythologies most primarily drawn on by the major English occult traditions such as Aleister Crowley and, perhaps most significantly, Kenneth Grant. The conquering of Set by Horus is the fundamental event in Aleister Crowley's belief that he was to usher in a new Aeon of human civilization. In this sense, the Doctor dealing a final defeat to Set is readable either as the final confirmation of the transition to a new aeon, albeit in a typically Robert Holmes sense of "well I guess that wasn't a utopia either.")

All of this culminates in the story's most remarkable scene, in which the Doctor takes Sarah forward to 1980 (And UNIT dating sheds another tear) and shows her that if they fail to stop Sutekh, the world will be destroyed. This scene apparently requires a bit of care. Some people, by which I mean Miles and Wood, make several paragraphs out of the supposed problems this scene causes before finally concluding that maybe Sutekh is just special and... oh, what is it the Doctor says in the scene itself? "It takes a being of Sutekh's almost limitless power to destroy the future." Right. That. It takes them two paragraphs to conclude that.

Remembering that, the scene is fantastic - we're shown the future destroyed not, as some commenters seem to think, in order to make these historical stories have any weight - that's fridge logic at its worst. We're shown the future destroyed to make sure we understand how bad Sutekh specifically is. We're shown it in order to make it genuinely uncertain who is going to win. And I do not mean who is going to win between the Doctor and Sutekh. That's not a real issue of suspense - we know that regardless of how despairing the Doctor is, it's going to be OK. The Doctor's fear of Sutekh exists to make the story more epic, not more suspenseful.

No. The central debate of this story is whether or not this show is going to jump track headlong into fantasy. It's what we initially talked about - putting the Doctor in a specific other story constrains him more, and creates a genuine tension. We can imagine circumstances in which the Doctor wins via magic - a psychic battle with Sutekh or tricking him into his own destruction. And we can imagine ones where he wins via sci-fi techniques, as he ultimately does. And throughout the story, we don't actually know which one is going to win. And that's interesting, because we're in a  run of stories where it's less and less certain what the rules that govern these stories are.

The problem, of course, is that Holmes doesn't come close to sticking the landing. The fourth episode is crap. Sutekh takes villain stupid pills and leaves the Doctor alive, The Doctor solves some logic puzzles, fails to stop the bad guys anyway, and then pushes some buttons to kill Sutekh. The fact that there are people alive in the world who sincerely believe this to be a better story than The Wedding of River Song is frankly a travesty of the modern education system. (Because someone will ask in comments, The Wedding of River Song is consciously a shaggy dog story, and this is flagged to the viewer. There's nothing wrong with a shaggy dog story, but switching from gripping horror reenactment to shaggy dog story is not a very good idea.) There are, in other words, undoubtedly things to improve with the approach here. But the fundamentals are very, very sound. This idea has legs, and it proves them admirably.

In the end, putting the Doctor in a setting that is defined by being a particular narrative as opposed to a place where a particular genre happens is an interesting way to ratchet up the tension, and something the Hinchcliffe era had to get to eventually. And, honestly, it also had to, at some point, demonstrate that its approach could turn out a straightforward thrill of a Doctor Who story - not a deconstructive critique of a thrill or a huge event, but a story that just goes out and gets the business done very well. Doctor Who isn't high avant garde art, and if an approach to it doesn't lend itself to doing an exciting romp then it's worth asking what good it is.

Because the other thing about this story that's worth noting is that once you've taken the in-hindsight obvious step of actually putting the Doctor inside a completely known story that isn't pure history, the next step is completely obvious: using a known story as one of the elements in a genrebender. Which is where we're going to find ourselves in two stories' time, and it's going to be absolutely incredible. Unfortunately, there's just one thing standing in our way...