Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 23 (The Winter of Discontent)

"Jack always said it was difficult for us Americans to understand what it was really like here in the darkest parts of the eighties. We had a doddery old President who talked about the end of the world a little too often and was being run by the wrong people. But they had a Prime Minister who was genuinely mad. You know there were even feminists and women's studies theorists who denied she was even really a woman anymore, she was so far out of her tree? She wanted concentration camps for AIDS victims, wanted to eradicate homosexuality even as an abstract concept, made poor people choose between eating and keeping their vote, ran the most shameless vote-grabbing artificial war scam in fifty years... England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture." - Warren Ellis, Planetary #7

In general I attempt to maintain some vague illusion of critical balance on this blog. Even in political matters, where my overt progressivism is unmistakably a thing, I try very hard to acknowledge the points where leftist politics have failed and to find concrete lessons, both rhetorical and substantive, for their failures. But here we reach a new sort of problem of balance - one we've been circling about since the Three Day Week entry back in the late Pertwee era. (In this regard it's fitting that we come to this right off of a story where the biggest flaw is that it's not the glam rock era anymore.) And that problem is, in a nutshell, Margaret Thatcher.

First of all, however much I've been willing to shoot my own side of the debate when it's being stupid, I've never been one to give much quarter to the right. The idea of starting with Thatcher is hardly inspiring. The fact of the matter is, I fiercely disagree with virtually everything Thatcher stood for and everything Thatcher did. There's little margin around that to formulate some sort of balance. There's no way to hold the ideals and values I hold and thus that this blog holds and like Margaret Thatcher. There's not even really a way to hold them and avoid hating Margaret Thatcher.

But there is something about Thatcher that goes beyond mere political reason. I commented in the Dad's Army entry, to some controversy and consternation, that Thatcher was "basically the raw embodiment of all evil." The line was intended at least partially as one of those moments of excessively deadpan humor that I favor - an instance of willfully overplaying my hand and taking the most extremist position available so that all future statements on the subject are pleasantly moderate.

But there's almost no such thing as overstatement on the subject of Margaret Thatcher, as the Ellis quote I started us off with demonstrates. None of it is strictly speaking untrue (although technically the concentration camps for AIDS victims were Lord Christopher Monckton, of whom Herman Cain is a poor American remake), and it doesn't even scratch the surface of the horrors of Thatcherism. If we want to dig a bit deeper we can find impish beauty like the petition going around these days to privatize Thatcher's funeral, which is a work of sheer brilliance, doubly so because she's still alive. Or, of course, there's things like Pete Wylie's astonishingly gorgeous "The Day That Margaret Thatcher Dies!" (The exclamation point is really what makes it.)

There is, in other words, a loathing of Thatcher that exists in excess to any remotely plausible requirements. People without successful genocides to their names don't generally require this. And eventually there becomes a moment of discomfort as one realizes the sheer extent of the vitriol that one is pouring onto a lonely old senile woman dying in London. To some extent these understandable feelings can be effectively mitigated by watching video of some miners being beaten or something, but there's still some troubling kernel here - a moment where one stops short, momentarily thrown by the savagery of it all.

Part of this, and this is the other thing that the Ellis quote gets at, is that Margaret Thatcher exists in two spheres. Politically she is loathsome, but loathsome in what is at least a relatively constrained sense. She is at or near the limit point of how bad liberal democracy can get. A worst case scenario for 20th century electoral politics. And if we are to be honest, this must be contextualized in a larger sense. She is not Pol Pot or Pinochet. She may have aided and supported both, but she never actually used death squads herself, and I suppose that counts for something.

But there is also the cultural Thatcher. If we're being perfectly honest about why I despise Margaret Thatcher, given that I wasn't born when she came into power and was eight and hadn't heard of her when she fell from power, the reasons are far more prosaic. Most of the music I love is either 80s British new wave bands or bands that were heavily influenced by or influences on it. My favorite era of the classic series of Doctor Who is the Cartmel era. A large swath of my favorite writers come out of the British Invasion of comics writers in the late 80s, with Alan Moore, my avowed favorite, being at the front. And all of these were fiercely anti-Thatcher.

But more than that, they were defined by how anti-Thatcher they were. I was talking to a good friend who's just finished a book on industrial music who had been interviewing a prominent figure in one industrial band or another. I don't remember which one, and in some ways it's better that way, leaving the statement in an oddly more true universal form. Like most of industrial music it was aggressively political, and my friend asked the guy what it was they were protesting against, expecting some sort of concrete, material answer. Instead the answer was that they were opposed to Margaret Thatcher. Just Thatcher. Period. She was a teleology unto herself.

This dimension of Thatcher is somewhat harder to grasp. There are, I think, two major reasons for it. The first is simple historical fact. Thatcher was the most prominent figure in what was the most thorough and complete restructuring of British society since the immediate aftermath of World War II. Simply put, what one would consider the default values and principles of British politics in 1990 were radically different from those in 1979 to the point that when Labour finally wrested Downing Street back they did so largely by conceding almost every philosophical point they'd once differed on to Thatcher.

The second reason, though, is that for all of the ways that Thatcher represented a brutal return to Enlightenment values and the idea of a master narrative, she and her handlers were also breathtakingly savvy at media manipulation. Thatcher was the first Prime Minister of whom it could be said that the modern media environment was her native tongue. Others used the media, yes, but Thatcher as a politician did not exist separate from it. Her media image was a fundamental part of her entire politics. There was, in a very real sense, no difference between her leadership and the press coverage of her leadership. She may not have thought that society existed, but she certainly believed in the existence of the mass media like no Prime Minister before her.

(To date no leader of either the US or UK has run the country with digital media as their native language.)

We'll return to the broader consequences of this, but for now let's leave it at this. The fact that Thatcher was so media savvy caused her to be a more diffuse phenomenon rather than a personal one. In a very real sense Thatcher was an always-present force - a mental phenomenon rather than a purely material one. Of course people reacted against her in a way that did not quite make sense for reacting against a person. She wasn't just a person. She was a brand. An ideology. A sigil, if you like. That, then is the what of May of 1979. Or at least, as much of it as can be understood without turning first to the how.

First the "consensus" explanation, by which I mean the default. Of course, given the magnitude of Thatcher's social and cultural victory, we should be suspicious off the bat. History is written by the victors, and while Thatcher herself my be gone it's considerably less clear that the historical moment that she represents has given way to a new one. The 1980s, even in their longest sense, have ended, sure. But if a coherent "next step" from Thatcherism exists we remain, at the time of writing, too in the middle of it to define its edges.

Regardless, if one is vaguely sympathetic to Thatcher then the story goes something like this. Broadly speaking, there is an economic model called Keynesianism, named, unsurprisingly, after a guy named Keynes. To collapse scads of complex economic theories into a single sentence, Keynesianism says that if the government spends money it will create more money. Keynesian thought formed the basis of most economic policy in the US and UK for several decades. Then in the 1970s it abruptly stopped working and the world blew up.

Well, not quite blew up. But a big problem called "stagflation" happened whereby the economy of a whole bunch of countries stopped growing but inflation kept growing. Which was a big problem because most of the time fixing slow economic growth causes inflation and fixing inflation slows growth. The UK was hit hard by this, first in the energy crisis that led to the Three Day Week, and then again in 1976 when the government had to seek a massive loan from the IMF, which, in traditional IMF style, demanded massive austerity measures. It was, in other words, an extremely rotten economy.

In an attempt to control inflation the Labour government adopted a policy of wage control on government employees with the support of the Trades Union Congress. This lasted for several years until Ford of Britain, despite being a massive government contractor, decided to defy the 5% maximum on wage increases and offer its striking employees a 17% raise in November of 1978. This, coupled with some stinging political defeats for Labour when the TUC and its supporters rejected its latest round of wage controls, and the government was essentially left with no support for actually enforcing its wage controls on the private sector.

Seizing on the weakness, various unions began pushing hard for considerable price increases and striking to get them. The result was that in the coldest winter since 1963 industry after industry was disrupted by major strike actions, generally with considerable theatricality on both sides. For instance, when striking Lorry drivers failed to let the correct set of emergency supplies for farmers in Hull through farmers deposited bodies of pigs and chickens outside the union headquarters. Other infamous events were a two week gravediggers strike that led to speculation that people would simply be buried at sea and a garbage strike that led to Leicester Square in the middle of London becoming a makeshift landfill. Finally, in late March the Scottish National Party, frustrated at the government's lack of support for further devolution of power to Scotland, withdrew from the coalition, causing Callaghan, the prime minister, to lose a no confidence vote and force a general election which Thatcher won.

The heart of this narrative, of course, is an idea of inevitability. The system that Callaghan was following was shown to be a failure, the people voted him out and Thatcher in, and she inaugurated a new age of supply side economics. A similar story can just as easily be told about the US in 1980 to get to Reagan's election. The benefit of this narrative, of course, is that it neatly sidesteps the question of whether Thatcher was right. Whatever the horrors of Thatcherism - and as we'll get to see over the next eleven years of history, there are oh so many of them - she was necessary because the alternative was shown to be fatally flawed.

The problem with this sort of narrative is that economics aren't really falsifiable. I mean, they sort of are. It's just that running the experiments necessary to falsify claims usefully and thoroughly isn't feasible. As a result, with any sort of story like this one runs the risk of confusing what happened with what was inevitable. In truth, of course, it is impossible to say with any real knowledge or confidence what would have happened in any number of alternative circumstances. It is, for instance, wholly possible - even probable - that Callaghan would have won re-election had he called the election in the fall of 1978 instead of engaging in another round of wage controls. Or if he hadn't made a crushing gaffe in which he denied that the industrial actions constituted a crisis as he returned home from a summit in Guadeloupe in early January. Callaghan was politically incompetent as much as anything, a fact that, in politics, is more than sufficient to cause electoral defeat.

But there's a broader issue in treating Thatcher's rise as an inevitable transition, which is that it's not particularly clear that Thatcher was actually the turning point in the ascension of the ideology she represents. It is of course perilous, or at the very least a cheap argumentative move, to attempt to summarize any ideology in a single sentence. But having oversimplified Keynes let's attempt to collapse the whole of Thatcherism into one belief: the belief that monetary profitability is the only meaningful measurement of worth, and thus that more profit is always better.

But in this regard virtually all sides of the debate had given the game away long before the 1979 election. Callaghan was barely different from Thatcher in this regard. They both took it as essentially axiomatic that  economic growth was a necessary priority and that an essentially capitalist system had to remain in place. The IMF loan itself was fundamentally a triumph of neoliberalism (a term that encompasses Thatcherism, Reaganism, and the other right-wing governments of the 1980s, and that causes no end of confusion for Americans who take "liberal" and "left-wing" to be synonymous). Even the unions essentially conceded the core of the debate to neoliberalism, treating their job as extracting the maximum possible amount of money for their members and their members specifically and becoming, in essence, profit-seeking entities in their own right.

Once all sides have fully and thoroughly embraced the capitalist drive towards maximizing individual profit and endless expansion the reversion to Thatcherism is inevitable. But not because Thatcher marked some sort of historical transition. Rather, because she marked an acknowledgment of a transition that had already happened. In this regard, even though a decade has passed, we're really only finishing the job that started in 1968 when the left-wing radicalism that characterized 1960s counterculture went into terminal decline. Once you've rejected the radical possibilities of the Situationists in favor of capitalism Thatcherism isn't a transition but a logical endpoint.

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has a memorable (at least to me) moment in one of his books in which he imagines a yuppie reading a book by French philosopher Giles Deleuze and, contrary to what one might expect of a yuppie reading a book by someone who (much as I imagine Deleuze would object to the characterization - though given that he is dead and wouldn't be likely to read my blog anyway, his objections count for very little) may as well be called a Situationist, loving every moment of it, exclaiming things like "Yes, this is how I design my publicities!" and "This reminds me of my son's favorite toy!"

Reading Guy Debord in 2011 one is seized continually with a similar feeling. Every snarling epithet in which he denounces the mechanisms of capitalism reads equally well as a design manual for the very system he decries - a list of tactics to convince people that your profit and their freedom are somehow equivalent. I am not the first to joke that were one to design a bourgeois reverse engineering of Marxism to act as a collective class in pursuit of their common interests it would be difficult if not impossible to come up with a better approach to the problem than the neoliberalism of the 1980s.

Here, then, we can see the true revolution of Thatcherism. It is not the turn towards profit as the sole and absolute value of the world. Rather, it is the devastating practical refutation of what had previously been axiomatic: the idea that postmodernism was inherently leftist. This is at the heart of Thatcher's peculiar notion of conservatism. It is visible in her hilarious claim that William Gladstone would be a Tory if he were alive in the 1980s, as though the statement that her party was very progressive by the standards of a century ago was in some way meaningful. Thatcher's conservatism hinged on the willful confusion of what was with what is nostalgically remembered, seeking endlessly to mask further acceleration towards the culture of naked and unabashed greed she championed as a "return" to a past that, in truth, never was. Even her famed declaration that she was a politician of "conviction," when scrutinized, collapses to little more than a moment of arch-relativism. Her worldview was valid not because it was based on the product of consensus or even evidence, but because it was based on fundamental and unshakable personal belief. Thatcherism, in this view, is little more than heavily armed relativism.

In this regard the position that really drops out of the mix is conservatism, at least in its classical sense of trying to maintain the current state of affairs or return to the past. Malcolm Hulke, of course, saw this as far back as 1974 in his rejection of the very idea of a "golden age." But the point remains. This is in many ways a triumph of postmodernism. The past is a foreign country, accessible only through memory and reconstruction. So why not construct the future you want and pretend that it was the past. Throw in a patois of genuine social conservatism and you can hijack the rhetorical appeal of conservatism to serve a progress narrative towards whatever future you desire. Thus you have the gaudy and contradictory spectacle of the contemporary right's belief that government shouldn't interfere with business, only with how people have sex.

The real problem is that this tactic has proven appallingly difficult to counter. Once the right realized that postmodernist tactics could serve their purposes just as well as they could anyone else's it became very, very difficult to outflank them. This sort of trick still describes the right-wing playbook in 2011. Language is just a social construct, so why not completely improperly use the word "socialism" to describe Barack Obama's actually still basically neoliberal economic policies? It'll become what socialism means soon enough anyway.

For our purposes, then, Thatcher provides a moment of genuine horror. We've nodded at this in part already with the Mary Whitehouse entry, but here it becomes a very fundamental challenge to the entire philosophical edifice we've been building. We've been holding that the solution to the problem of the alchemists is material social progress. But Thatcher provides an even simpler solution. After all, what better philosopher's stone is there than money, a substance that truly can transmute any object into any other object. What is more mercurial than currency? What better represents the abstract and floating nature of the signifier than the coin, which truly can mean absolutely anything in the world?

There are, of course, a wealth of answers to that question, and Doctor Who has been formulating them with varying degrees of confidence for sixteen seasons now. Thatcher, at a Conservative policy meeting, once famously threw down a copy of Friedrich von Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty and proclaimed "this is what we believe." She may as well have thrown down the script for Evil of the Daleks and said "this is what we don't." And now she runs the country.

Game on.

Errata to the Book Version

Somehow, through means that completely escape me, the print version of the Hartnell book is missing the chapter on The Massacre.

That chapter is, of course, already up on the blog, but since the book features revised and expanded versions I have replaced the blog version with the revised book version. I will also be including the essay in the Troughton book this spring (or maybe summer) as an errata so those who are buying the books at least have all the essays.

The chapter is present in the ebook versions, for what it's worth.

My sincere apologies for the oversight.

Only Ashes (The Armageddon Factor)

This is how it ends. Voratrelundar flirting with herself.
True love at last.

It's January 20th, 1979. The Village People remain at #1 with "YMCA." One week later they're unseated by Ian and the Blockheads' "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick," which I assume, especially based on what else is popular, is sort of like Lady Gaga's Disco Stick. That's all over in a week as Blondie hits number one with "Heart of Glass," which, I mean, good for Blondie, but it's one of the most brazen selling outs of any talented musician ever. But it still sees out the season. Oliva Newton-John, Funkadelic, Chaka Khan, ABBA, Leif Garrett, The Bee Gees, Elvis Costello, and Gloria Gaynor all also chart.

In real news, now is the winter of our discontent, but we'll do that on Friday. Lesser news includes Brenda Ann Spencer opening fire on a school in San Diego because of her dislike of Mondays. Patty Hearst is released from prison on the same day that Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Tehran from exile, which just about sums up the Carter administration. Ten days later Khomeini takes power in Iran, leading to nothing but sunshine and bunnies for decades to come. Pluto nips inside Neptune's orbit to let Neptune become the outermost planet. This remains so until 1999, at which point Pluto becomes the outermost planet again. Neptune, of course, is horribly jealous about this and plots political moves to retake the position more permanently, but that's more a Tennant-era story. It snows in the Sahara Desert for half an hour, China invades Vietnam, and St. Lucia becomes independent from the UK.

While on television, the Key to Time concludes with neither a bang nor a whimper. But before we look too far at that, let’s take a step back and look at the arc as a whole one more time, and more generally at the Williams era to date. The central critical dilemma with the Williams era is straightforward enough: is it a witty and lively postmodern rendition of the tropes of science fiction, or is it just a bunch of cynical hacks mocking the show they’re supposed to be making?

Both of these, of course, overstate their case. The former, admittedly, is not nearly as impishly brilliant as Gareth Roberts’ summary of that case as viewing the era as “an artefact of postmodern forces combining to produce works of semiotic thickness through usage of meta-textual signifiers.” The latter, on the other hand, might actually be too nice. The same Roberts piece provides a damning account of the practical origins of the anti-Williams camp.

Not to leaf too many pages ahead, but there are only five more transmitted stories in the Williams era after this one. After that begins the nine-season tenure of John Nathan-Turner as producer - a tenure that defies easy classification as a single era. Nathan-Turner’s contributions to the program are far too complex to square away in what amounts to an introductory note. But one of the more sickening aspects of the era is the way in which Nathan-Turner presented himself as providing a glorious rebirth for the show and unabashedly threw Williams - his previous employer, keep in mind - under the bus to do it.

To fully understand this, however, one has to also understand what we may as well call the fan-industrial complex that started to be created in the Nathan-Turner era. Again, we’ll deal with the contours of this more specifically in future entries, but one thing that happened under Nathan-Turner was that the show overtly refocused on courting its more obsessive fans. One hallmark of this was the retaining of Ian Levine, a particularly high profile fan, as an unofficial advisor for the program. The result is spectacles like those described by Roberts - fanzines that include a dartboard of Graham Williams alongside a positive review of Timeflight, and a guidebook to the famous Longleat convention in which Ian Levine savages the Williams era before praising “the new golden age” that he’s quietly moonlighting for. Meanwhile, Saward, the current script editor, accused the Williams era of insulting the audience while Nathan-Turner talked up how he had fixed and improved the program.

This is something that any critical assessment of the Williams era simply has to come to terms with. The bulk of the arguments against Williams came out of a period where fandom had a badly incestuous relationship with the people making the program and where  the people making the program had an active interest in marginalizing their predecessors. It’s nearly impossible to look at this raft of criticism and not be slightly sickened by it. (The hit jobs on Nathan-Turner, of course, will eventually become equally indefensible, but if I’m refusing to do 1983 in this entry, I’m sure as hell not doing 1987.)

If nothing else, then, we need to, in looking at the Williams era, make sure that we distinguish between pissing off a set of Doctor Who fans who were doing official and quasi-official publications in the 80s and actually being bad. Though they’re deeply imperfect numbers, it’s worth turning to the AI figures here. For those unaware of how British ratings work, in addition to getting audience figures British ratings have an “appreciation index,” which basically polls a chunk of the audience to ask if they liked the program. These numbers are, of course, imperfect, measuring only an immediate reaction as opposed to any larger critical judgment. They are also sporadic - for some seasons in question we have only eight datapoints. And there’s a further trend whereby the numbers improve in general over time, making it difficult to use AI to compare different eras.

That said, the average AI for Hinchcliffe’s last season was 59. Williams’s three seasons got 62, 64, and 65 respectively. John Nathan-Turner’s first season got 63. So clearly whatever one might say about the Williams era, suggesting that it is in some way obviously bad is a stretch. The obvious counter-argument here is that popularity isn’t equivalent to quality, but frankly, that’s just not true. Popularity is unambiguously equivalent to quality. It’s just not the only form of quality, nor is it necessarily the best form of quality.

So it’s clear enough that the audience at large didn’t feel disrespected by the Williams era and didn’t view it as a cratering failure compared with the eras on either side. This alone is grounds to moderate any criticism of the era. But all we’ve done here is avoid the most savage criticisms of the era. That doesn’t mean we have to like it. I mean, the Letts era was popular and is even quite beloved by fans, unlike the relatively contentious Williams era. But in many ways it came up short on the blog.

Actually, the Letts era is in many ways an apt comparison. Both the Williams era and the Letts era suffer largely from the fact that it’s not entirely clear everyone involved is making the same show. But where the Letts era had two competing aesthetics - glam rock pastiche and serious minded military action - the Williams era runs into the problem  where it’s never quite clear whether the show is engaged in good-natured satire that’s aware of its own technical limitations or whether it’s just given up on the idea that it can possibly be good and is just being bitter about it. Or, to put it another way, it’s never quite clear whether the program is doing the best it can under trying circumstances or whether it’s just going through the motions.

The thing about the Key to Time arc is that it moves through three distinct phases in this. The first two stories gave every indication that they were trying and were finding inventive things to say and do with the program’s limitations. The second two were more ambiguous. Stones of Blood, if you were willing to be preposterously charitable to the urine rocks, could still be read as quite inventive. Androids of Tara less so, but both, at least, were great fun. But The Power of Kroll is very difficult to find a good take on, seeming to consist of Robert Holmes just angrily taking the piss out of the program. And then there’s The Armageddon Factor.


The biggest problem here manifests before the first shot. We praised The Ribos Operation for having the good sense to hire Robert Holmes to tackle the difficult job of starting the Key to Time off. In the same spirit, then, it is difficult to feel anything but dismay at the decision to hire Bob Baker and Dave Martin to write the conclusion of the arc. There is really no way to look at this decision and come to a good conclusion. There are two possible interpretations, both of them appalling. The first is that Williams and Read looked back on The Invisible Enemy and Underworld and thought that the writing there was of a high enough quality to serve as the climax to the entire Key to Time epic. This implies that neither Williams nor Read have anything resembling a sense of taste. The alternative is that Williams and Read have a more or less accurate sense of how good Baker and Martin are (i.e. not) and simply don’t care.

Either way, those who feel as though there’s something a bit cynical about the Williams era have little ammunition more compelling than this story. It beggars belief that anyone could possibly think that Baker and Martin are an appropriate choice for wrapping up an epic like this. And sure enough, they blow it in key regards. The problem is simple enough - they display no sense whatsoever that they see the Key to Time as anything unique in the world of sci-fi epics. They think they’re writing Star Wars for the BBC.

While on the other hand, what made the Key to Time so interesting at the outset was that it was an anti-epic in which the grandiose scale was revealed as a lie that served to erase the individual. Whereas here we have grandiose epic by numbers. The epitome of this is the Marshall, a character so ham-handedly stupid that it’s difficult to know what to say. When Baker and Martin first turned up on the scene in The Claws of Axos we had to bend over backwards to defend these sort of pig-headed caricature characters in terms of the overall aesthetic of the Pertwee era. Simply put, the Pertwee era worked by putting programmatic characters in situations where their single note was inappropriate and enjoying the results.

But look, its not 1971 anymore. The Axos approach could be justified in the Glam era when the play of visually arresting images in color was a novel thing for television to be doing. Attempting the play of visually arresting images on a BBC budget after Star Wars, however, is... not going to work. (Eventually new opportunities for spectacle will, of course, open themselves, but Scary Monsters and Super Creeps isn’t out yet.) And even if it did work, the people who are going to make it work aren’t going to be Baker and Martin, who haven’t actually had a new idea in years. In hindsight their biggest successes came on the backs of successful decisions by the design department in what was one of the golden ages of design in Doctor Who. Claws of Axos didn’t work because the writing was full of good ideas, it worked because the design department turned out aliens made of lurid yellows and oranges that looked like nothing else on television.

In 1979, with visuals that are competent but not uncanny, these programmatic characters just look like Baker and Martin can’t be bothered to write characters and so have decided on ludicrous cliches instead. We may as well just check them off. Cackling malevolence of a villain? Check. Evil computer? Check. Thinly veiled Cold War metaphor about mutually assured destruction? Yep. And we’re not even in a particularly exciting moment of the Cold War! I mean, this is detente and we’re doing evil computers and mutually assured destruction. There’s next to nothing interesting being said here except “BIG EPIC THINGS GO BOOM!”

The worst and most crushing moment of this is when the Shadow proclaims himself to be “the shadow that accompanies you all,” a moment of staggering breadth that seems, just for a moment, to hint at the idea that he’s the literal embodiment of the Jungian shadow or something. Then he cackles a bunch and engages in more schemes that make the Master look clever.

All of which said, the summary offered by Miles and Wood in About Time is thoroughly apropos: it’s not a complete disaster, which is better than one has any right to expect from the circumstances. Like The Androids of Tara, with whom this story shares a director, the production is solid enough to elevate the script. This is the best war-ravaged hellhole since Genesis of the Daleks, with scads of atmosphere. The Shadow is an appallingly written villain, but his skull mask is genuinely unsettling and does tremendous amounts to get the character to punch above his weight. The occasional howlers crop up, sure, but for the most part the production manages to get the visuals on message in a way that Doctor Who of late has had problems with.

On top of that, Baker and Martin, for all their myriad of faults, catch something of a break here with the material. Yes, this is a hackneyed cod-epic mess, but it’s got just enough scope that, combined with the on-target visuals, it manages to get a decent bit of swagger going. On top of that, in amidst the cliches, Baker and Martin do get a few clever ideas in. The fake segment of the Key is a relatively inspired use of the MacGuffin, having the sixth segment be one of the major supporting characters is charming, and the slowly stretching time loop is compelling and clever, and the visual of scenes slowly but surely playing out at greater and greater length is quite good. All of it adds up to give the story enough punch to keep it from cratering, which, let’s be fair, was a real possibility for an end-of-season Graham Williams effort penned by Baker and Martin. This absolutely had to be leagues better than, say, The Invasion of Time, and in that regard, mission accomplished.

But there’s a painful squandering of good will here in a way that only deepens the concern that the series has lost its way. This is an acceptable conclusion to a Graham Williams produced epic. It’s much harder to treat it as an acceptable conclusion to the storyline set up by The Ribos Operation. The Ribos Operation was full of ambiguities and nuances about the nature of the Guardians and balance. Here, however, the Doctor is treated straightforwardly as a servant of the White Guardian, with the Shadow being portrayed as his counterpart for the Black Guardian. All notions of balance are just out the window, with the White Guardian being the straightforward good guy and the Black Guardian being the straightforward bad guy.

What we’re left with is an uncomfortable sense that the Williams era is an era where extraordinarily good stories can happen, but where they happen almost by accident. Even within this story there’s that sense. It’s difficult to understand how a story that can produce ideas as compelling as the fake segment or the time loop can also have a 30 second sequence of K-9 making modem noises at a door or, more appallingly, Drax. It’s difficult to understand how a production team that created The Ribos Operation and The Pirate Planet could possibly think that this was an acceptable way to wrap that up. One starts to get the sense that when the series has worked this season it’s been because one or two people have shown up and put in a heroic effort.

Unfortunately, of the ones who have, most are out the door shortly. Robert Holmes is already done. The director who salvaged this and made The Androids of Tara sing has exactly one more story to his name. Mary Tamm, who salvaged more than one terrible moment with judicious applications of winks at the audience, is gone (and once again with Williams not bothering to write in a decent companion departure because he wrongly convinced himself he could get the actress to come back). John Leeson, who gave a certain charm to K-9 even at his worst moments, is gone.

The only three people to have demonstrable knacks for quality sticking around, in other words, are Tom Baker, who brings his own host of problems these days, David Fisher, who penned two solidly competent scripts, and Douglas Adams.

Speaking of whom, as it happens, Baker and Martin opted to dissolve their writing partnership with this story. This meant that rewrites needed to be done by the script editor. But Anthony Read was out the door at the end of this as well, which meant that the incoming script editor ended up writing much of the last scene himself. That script editor, of course, is Douglas Adams.

And the fact of the matter is that it shows. The final TARDIS scene is wildly better written than anything that comes before it, shot through with a genuine sense of ambiguity and skepticism about the story arc. Adams (unsurprisingly given his own beliefs) seems wholly skeptical of the very idea of gods and absolute power, and there’s the strong sense that the Doctor’s shattering of the key is done not just to screw the Black Guardian but to screw the entire process. Notably, no attention whatsoever is paid to the idea that the key needs to be given to the White Guardian.

Crucially, this is a marked change from earlier in the story. When the Doctor and Romana lash together the fake key they seem downright cheery about being “gods for an hour or two,” a marked contrast with the Doctor’s visible horror and fear at the idea of absolute power in the end. It’s a moment that highlights just how not in sync with each other the Adams/Holmes idea of the Key is with Baker and Martin. But it’s also quite marvelous, and just about lands this awkward and kind of kludged together mess of an “epic.”

Still, the overall score is... not encouraging. It’s difficult, at this point, to treat the program’s successes this season as being deliberate products of the way the show is being made. When it works, it seems to work in a desperately underground manner whereby brilliantly subversive quality is smuggled into a show that nobody knows what to do with.  When it doesn’t, it’s an embarrassing, unambitious, and cynical mess.

Still, let’s try to find the positives. When the show worked last season, it usually did so by imitating the hits of the Hinchcliffe era. The exception was one Robert Holmes script. This season it worked at least three, and really four times, always by doing something new. When it worked, it generally did so spectacularly. One can complain that the show is only good by luck these days, but one can’t do it without also acknowledging that it gets lucky an awful lot, and when it gets lucky, it’s been getting very, very lucky. Frustration may be warranted. Despair certainly isn't.

A Big Mining Thing (The Power of Kroll)

It's Christmas Adam, 1978. Boney M are still at number one with "Mary's Boy Child." Two weeks later they're unseated by The Village People with YMCA, which stays for the last week of the story as well. All of this marks the clear ascendency of disco as a subculture. In the past, Doctor Who has tracked the tone of youth subculture uncannily. In which case this alone is reason for concern. In any case, Earth, Wind, and Fire, Elton John, and the Bee Gees also chart.

While in real news, Vietnam makes a major attack on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Spain ratifies its new Constitution, an event that Wikipedia describes as officially ending military dictatorship, which is amusing given that six lines earlier in its timeline it describes an earlier stage in the Constitution's development the exact same way. And there's a big UN/UNICEF push for the "Year of the Child" featuring a big concert with ABBA, the Bee Gees, Donna Summer, and Rod Stewart. So that's horrific.

While on television, it's not a popular story at all. Let us be honest, for a moment, about the critical consensus regarding this story. Its weaknesses are evident, yes. It’s a bold fan who can defend the Swampies or the way in which Kroll is merged into shots. (The Kroll model itself is actually phenomenal, and it’s easy to see why his first appearance was an iconic moment for children of the time. On the other hand, the join between the two shots is an abomination.) But these in and of themselves don’t explain this story’s status as a punching bag, nor does the fact that it drags a bit.

No, the biggest problem this story has is that for a Robert Holmes script it’s complete and utter crap. It is, in fact, the second worst Robert Holmes script according to the DWM poll I’ve been oddly obsessing over through this story arc, coming in at 174th place. The one that’s lower is, of course, The Space Pirates, which is actually not a bad story to compare this one to.

Both, after all, have essentially the same origin. Holmes was called in to produce a script in a hurry to fill a gap. And in both cases he was given a thoroughly crappy set of instructions for his troubles. For The Space Pirates he was told to tack on two extra episodes and be sure to keep the science realistic. This time he got told to cut down on the humor and to insert the biggest monster in Doctor Who history. And in both cases the resulting script amounts to Robert Holmes writing a space Western. (Also, in a more esoteric coincidence, The Space Pirates was the first story on which John Nathan-Turner worked, then as a floor assistant. The Power of Kroll, on the other hand, was the first story produced by him, as Graham Williams, depending on your choice of sources, went on vacation or took ill, leaving him as the de facto producer.)

And in both cases the result is similar. When I covered The Space Pirates I suggested that there was a heavy degree of unknowability about the story – that it was paced in a way that would only work in 1969 and that it was so visual as to be impossible to understand from audio only. And I stand by that. I don’t think there’s another story with quite as much information missing as The Space Pirates. But were I to take a guess on what we’d conclude if we had all six parts of The Space Pirates, I’d guess that we’d basically get Robert Holmes giving the show and, if we’re being uncharitable, the audience the middle finger. Simply put, The Space Pirates gives the strong sense at times that Robert Holmes is just going “you want realistic space action, I’ll give you realistic space action: long stretches of NOTHING HAPPENING.”

Here there is a similar sense of irritation. Even the basic idea of the story has a whiff of cynicism to it. A cowboys and Indians-style western set in a swamp. Tat Wood, in what may be the single most psychologically revealing moment in the whole of About Time, asks “what other programme would give you a western in a swamp” as if this is some sort of mark of distinction or a reason to like this story, but for those of us who are not Tat Wood the fact remains that this is not a combination that really sells itself to us.

Instead one gets the acute impression that that Holmes just didn’t care about this script beyond how it let him work in his biggest fart joke to date. (The reason the refinery is producing so much methane is Kroll’s “feeding processes.”) It’s hardly the first or the last story to simply be packed with Doctor Who standards – indeed, it’s not even the last Robert Holmes story to do that. But there’s a density to the standards, and a sense that they’re an older fashioned set of standards than usual. The space western’s parallels with The Space Pirates is only the start. There’s a distinct air of base under siege to the proceedings here, and the sequences where Kroll’s tentacles begin bursting out of pipes in the refinery is more than slightly evocative of Fury From the Deep. The plot throws in captures and escapes like they’re going out of style. And conceptually the whole thing is basically just The Mutants only without the flurry of clever ideas that characterizes a Baker and Martin script.

And that, I think, is the crux of this story’s reputation: the fact that it’s just depressing to watch a Robert Holmes story and compare it unfavorably to a Baker and Martin story. But that comparison also captures, I think, why the reputation isn’t quite fair. Because if it weren’t for the increased expectations that come along with the name “Robert Holmes” much of this story would be easier to forgive. The exact same story transmitted under Baker and Martin’s names would, I think, rank as one of their best. I’d even bet on that simple change being good for a solid 20 to 30 place gain in the DWM poll.

Because even if people prefer to focus on the story’s deficiencies, there’s a lot to, if not love, at least enjoy here. The cast is surprisingly good, with both Philip Madoc (who is, to the frustration of both actor and audience, wasted in something of a bit part) and John Abineri involved. Martin Jarvis was supposed to be there too, and it’s almost a relief he dropped out, in part because it means John Leeson gets to appear in the flesh, and in part because blowing that many great actors on a story this mediocre would be painful. The directing is mostly solid. The Swampies are a wreck, but it’s not like the script gave anybody much more to go on. As I said, the Kroll model itself is actually quite good. It’s not much harder to put it on and have a fun two hours than it was with The Androids of Tara.

It’s just that so much of what stands between it and quality is so… contemptuous. Watching it there is the continuous sense that the writer is looking down on you for enjoying it. Certainly he isn’t. Even the story’s moral point is half-hearted and cynical. It’s an anti-colonialist parable that can’t muster up much more than “homicidal savages with funny skin probably shouldn’t be subject to genocide.”

To Holmes’s credit, he apparently recognized that this script was weak. Indeed, he seems to have taken it as a sign that it was time to step away from the program which, at this point, he’s contributed to ten of the last eleven seasons of. Although he does eventually decide to make a return and contribute another three and a half stories, he did intend his exit after this to be permanent, and given the sheer depth of his contributions to the program, that fact speaks volumes.

Unfortunately, few of the volumes it speaks are particularly good for the program. For the first of two times the program is finding itself put in an impossible position by the BBC. On the one hand it has a mandate to move away from darker and more intense subjects. This is never a good thing to ask of Doctor Who, but at least the program does have one fallback available when this happens – the impish mockery Holmes and Adams have done so much to develop. But not for the last time that leg has been kicked out from under the program as well with demands from on high that the program tone down the humor. So the program can neither be funny nor serious. That doesn’t really leave it with much that it can be, though.

And that’s the crux of the problem. Mocking humor works well enough as a fallback, but falling back from that lands you uncomfortably close to out and out nihilism. An anti-epic can be made to work if it’s at least a cutting commentary on the normal system of values for epic storytelling. And at the start of this season, at least, we had that. The Ribos Operation was, at the end of the day, a compellingly powerful story about the power of the marginal and abject. The Pirate Planet was a sobering reminder of the existence of genuine moral abominations. But this? This is just a western in a swamp done because the writer was pissed off. It’s not an inversion of the normal values of a sci-fi epic. It’s just a willful refusal to do it well in favor of doing it with some backhanded jokes.

And this is the crux of the problem with the Williams era. For all that it has come up with a variety of means to subvert and upend the established order, it’s not clear what it actually does believe in. And not in the Occupy sense of being a howl of rage against a massive system that doesn’t have a coherent plan to fix it. Even if you do for some reason think that a protest’s job is to provide a fully articulated policy plan it’s at least clear enough what the Occupy movement is angry about. It’s pretty unambiguous what they want torn down, even if a large and diverse protest seeking to protect the interests of 99% of the population is unlikely to be able to formulate a unified consensus for an alternative.

But no such clarity seems to exist for the Williams era. What is it that it’s defying? What exactly is it mocking? None of the answers are particularly compelling. No, worse than that, the answers are reasonably compelling, they just don’t say anything good about the program. Is it mocking everything? If so, then there’s an uncomfortable nihilism. Is it mocking anything it can outsmart? That’s just bullying for people with high IQs. Rigidity? Conformity? Then this story and the one before it, which are just straight down the line thrill-by-numbers affairs wouldn’t make sense, or if they did, would have to be taken as mocking the audience for going along with it.

In a way, of course, we’re just reiterating the dilemma from the end of the Troughton era – the realization that tearing it all down is not a viable end in itself and that separation from the world is not intrinsically noble. In fact, in one sense this is the original dilemma of Doctor Who – the animating spirit of the Doctor’s plot arc in the earliest episodes. And now it roars up again.

But this time there is something altogether more troubling about it. The fact that the program has deteriorated to where Robert Holmes gives up on it cannot be taken as a good thing. Yes, this story is entertaining. Considerably more entertaining, in fact, than most people give it credit for. And I’ve never been willing to fault Doctor Who for being “merely” entertaining. But on the other hand, that’s always been because it was other things other times. At this point it is becoming increasingly and unnervingly possible that all Doctor Who is for is light entertainment. For the first time in memory it’s becoming very difficult to formulate a decent answer to the question of what Doctor Who is for. There’s a real sense that it’s just about the man in the scarf, his witty and attractive sidekick, and the tin dog.

And this story doesn’t even have the tin dog.

And Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to All of You at Home (The Androids of Tara)

Duplicates! I haven't seen duplicates in years!

It's November 21, 1978. The Boomtown Rats are still at number one with "Rat Trap," which should probably get at least some serious mention as, at least in Wikipedia's unquestionably correct worldview, it is the first punk/new wave song to hit #1. In any case, my life gets simpler a week later when Rod Stewart hits number one with "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy," a song that is really pretty unambiguous in all regards. A week later it's Boney M with a version of "Mary's Boy Child," which stays in place through the end of the story. Blondie, The Cars, Sarah Brightman, The Bee Gees,  Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond, and the Village People (with YMCA) all also get into the top ten. In the lower reaches of the chart are The Buzzcocks, The Clash, Elvis Costello, and for our purposes (and nobody else's) most interestingly, Mankind with "Dr Who," a version of the Doctor Who theme song, which makes it as high as 25.

In real news, Harvey Milk is murdered by Dan White. The Times halts publication for nearly a year due to labor problems, which is the sort of thing you'd normally like to mock Rupert Murdoch for, except he buys the paper in the fallout from these problems so still has nothing to do with it. Next time, Mr. Murdoch, I will not be so lenient. Also, the Spanish Constitution is established, officially restoring democracy to the country.

While on television we have one of those things that puzzles one about Doctor Who fandom. I'm not one to treat the Doctor Who Magazine surveys as the definitive gauge of fan opinion, and certainly not as some doctrinaire statement about aesthetics. On the other hand, I'm not going to pretend the Mighty 200 survey has nothing to tell us about Doctor Who. Obviously it does. There's some type of fan that the survey is broadly representative of the taste of. We admittedly know little about this type of fan beyond "they answer Doctor Who Magazine" surveys, but they exist.

Where I'm going with all of this is that, not for the first time in recent memory, we're looking at a story that has a puzzling reputation. According to the big DWM poll, this is the second best story of this season, behind Stones of Blood. Whereas I am unable to come up with an even remotely sincere argument for how to consider either of these stories better than the first two of the season. And that presents an interesting problem.

First, let's quickly deal with what this story is. It's fairly simple - it's a parody of The Prisoner of Zenda. Tara is a planet with androids and advance technology that has, for no particularly discernible reason, taken on a social structure that almost exactly matches that of a Ruritanian Romance. All of this sounds cynical, and it is a bit. Certainly it's tough not to see moving from a trio of complex multi-layered narratives to a straight pastiche as a bit of a move down, at least in some sense. This is, notably, the part of the Key to Time arc with the fewest thematic similarities with the larger story. The segment is shamelessly a pointless MacGuffin this time - a random bit of a statue that then gets taken by the bad guys and doesn't even influence the plot after the first episode.

But all of this ignores the fact that it's really quite well done. Swashbuckling period pieces are right up the BBC's alley, the addition of Tom Baker to the proceedings is genuinely fun, Grendel is a hoot as a villain (and his last line is phenomenal), and there's a delightful cleverness to the whole thing. Taken on its own merits its solidly enjoyable. Only the Key to Time stuff makes it a weak choice to show a non-fan looking for something idly entertaining. It's really only in terms of the three stories that came before it and what the Williams era has been shooting for lately that it seems lackluster. So it's interesting to ask why it's held in visibly higher regard, at least within the DWM poll, than either The Pirate Planet or The Ribos Operation.

I mean, the phenomenon that people have different taste isn't all that interesting. But often on this blog we end up comparing a story's reputation to the story itself, and there's an implicit judgment there. And, I dunno, it seemed worth hashing out what we're talking about when we're talking about a story's quality, since I keep insisting this isn't a review blog and then banging on about how good a given story is. On its most basic level, of course, this claim is just that reviews imply a level of recommendation, whereas I don't particularly, when praising a story, mean my praise to be advice to watch it, nor do I consider a pan to be advice to steer clear.

But there's more to it than that. I occasionally, here and elsewhere, make reference to my belief that there is such a thing as objectivity in aesthetics. In this regard I view it much like ethics, where I am also not a complete relativist. Aesthetics can be debated and considered, much like ethics, in two regards. First one can debate the degree to which a given text does or doesn't hold up to a given set of aesthetic standards. This is the most common sort of debate that takes place - does the ending work, is such and such a bit funny, is the pacing right, etc.

These tend to be the questions I avoid, and they're particularly irrelevant here. Of the four stories under discussion, two - The Ribos Operation and this - are pretty solid in their mechanics, while the other two have some visible but not story-ruining flaws. There's not a lot of daylight among the four stories this season in terms of raw competence. This is also the area where aesthetics come the closest to subjectivity, as it's on that line where enjoyment and quality start to lose their distinction. (As I tell my students, it's fine to enjoy bad things and not enjoy good things. Enjoyment is subjective. Quality is less so.)

The second type of aesthetic debate is largely the one I find more interesting, and that's the debate about competing aesthetic values. This is the debate that takes place when one tries to, for instance, compare the postmodern horror of the Hinchcliffe era with the punk with a smile approach of the Williams era. Part of the appeal of this debate is that it's where finding new things to enjoy really takes place. It's easy to like something that works according to standards akin to most of what you like. It's much harder to do it for something that's working according to a logic you're less familiar with. Moving to the level of comparing types of quality instead of levels of quality also helps avoid frustrating moments of talking at cross-purposes of the sort that happens when, for instance, fans end up angrily agreeing that the Williams era is clever, with one side using the word as praise and the other as some sort of vulgar epithet.

The question, then, is whether it is possible to reverse engineer an aesthetic from the Mighty 200 list. There are two very obvious problems with this. The first is that the Mighty 200 list lacks any single authorship or coherent communal vision. In a real sense it doesn't represent an attempt to describe a coherent aesthetic so much as the aggregate of a large number of individual aesthetics. But this is no different from the problem of treating Doctor Who as a coherent single object from 1963 to 1978, and we do that fine. The second is trickier, however. Respondents to the survey surely, in many cases, answered based on what they like instead of attempting to make more detached critical judgments. As a result any attempt to determine an aesthetic is likely to turn out to hinge on aesthetic principles such as "I like Louise Jameson in scanty leather clothing" instead of piercing insights about the political utility of humor. And while I will be the first to admit that Louise Jameson is adept at wearing scanty leather clothing, there is an extent to which this sort of thing stacks the deck in my favor when I get to the inevitable rhetorical turn where I sandbag the DWM aesthetic.

Still, it's worth trying, if only to see what we can get out of the attempt. The first thing we can tell is that the aesthetic clearly favors some eras and not others. Philip Hinchcliffe's three seasons are all in the top five when the list is averaged out by season, and Russell T Davies's four all make the top eleven. But past that the success of individual producers varies more wildly. The John Nathan-Turner era is, of course, a mess and less what I want to talk about anyway since we haven't covered those stories yet (although the fact that the three Sylvester McCoy seasons slot into 10th, 19th, and 30th place makes that the most fascinatingly schizoid era), but the Letts era spans from 3rd to 20th, the Lambert era is in 1st and 23rd, and the Innes Lloyd-containing seasons make 8th, 14th, and 24th. In fact, the only other producer to be roughly as consolidated as Hinchcliffe or Davies is Graham Williams, who ends up with the 18th, 25th, and 27th most popular seasons.

But this only tells us broad strokes. After all, the top story is from the 22nd most popular season and the eighth moth popular story is from the 25th most popular season. Whereas the most popular season had a story languishing down at 163rd place (The Android Invasion). There is more to be gained in the odd idiosyncracies - the immediate juxtapositions that happen in making a ranked list. Yes, there's a lot of statistical noise in this sort of comparison, but the exercise of trying to explain individual comparisons is also in many ways where the most and strangest information can be found. So for the purposes of discussion/my own entertainment, I've picked five immediate comparisons, each involving a Williams-era story that we've dealt with, that jumped out at me. All of these are consecutive slots - that is, each one can be framed as "Story A is the next best story after Story B." To wit:

• Planet of Giants is immediately before The Invisible Enemy.
• The Invasion of Time is immediately before The Wheel in Space.
• The War Machines is immediately before The Pirate Planet.
• The Androids of Tara is immediately before The Hand of Fear.
• Tomb of the Cybermen is immediately before Horror of Fang Rock.

Looking at these five, the first thing that jumps out is the way in which almost every way that immediately springs to mind to compare a given pair fails to explain another pair. For instance, The War Machines is a much scarier, action-based story than The Pirate Planet. But that explanation completely fails to account for how a scary Cybermen story is beaten out by tinfoil and Sontarans. Similarly, the idea that classic monsters do better than obscure ones or one-offs that the Tomb/Fang Rock comparison implies runs aground when one considers that the Sontarans are in no way more A-list than the Cybermen. (That said, the fact that Planet of Giants and The Invisible Enemy are consecutive does, I suppose, suggest that there is a fairly coherent sense of how good miniaturization is as a plot point.) Similarly, though The Invisible Enemy and The Pirate Planet are both less funny than the stories immediately ahead of them, The Invasion of Time and The Androids of Tara are both funnier than the ones immediately behind them.

But there is one point of comparison that I think does hold for all five. In each case, the better story has appreciably better set pieces in it. For instance, Planet of Giants is all about creating memorable and striking visuals of miniaturization, whereas The Invisible Enemy's big set pieces are a possessed Doctor and an evil shrimp, neither of which really come off. The Invasion of Time, for all its faults, has some iconic Tom Baker sequences and a well-shot if ill-conceived surprise reveal of the Sontarans, whereas The Wheel in Space's big flaw is generally seen as the way it keeps the Cybermen pushed off to the margins. The War Machines has several iconic shots, whereas The Pirate Planet has to get by with the "appreciate it" speech. For all that Fang Rock has lurking horror in spades, Tomb of the Cybermen is all about building to its iconic "Cybermen breaking out of their tombs" sequence and other minor versions of the same.

The only one, actually, that's at all puzzling here is The Hand of Fear, which has both "Eldrad Must Live" and Sarah Jane's departure sequence. How is it beaten by The Androids of Tara, a story which has no sequences that come close to the stature of those two? The answer is actually fairly straightforward, I think - The Androids of Tara, even if it's set pieces never rise to the quality of The Hand of Fear's best two, is basically 90 straight minutes of set pieces that range from the competent to the excellent. 

I suspect that, in the main, this is actually a pretty on-target account of the taste of a significant segment of Doctor Who fandom. They watch Doctor Who as a parade of memorable and iconic moments. Stories with a lot of them are beloved, stories that lack them are objects of ambivalence at best. And that stands in contrast with the segment of fandom that favors weird, complex, and challenging stories. 

It would be foolish to go too far down the road of directly comparing these viewpoints or making value judgments about them, and anyway, it's not like anyone reading this blog can't figure out which side I lean towards. But I do want to pause briefly and point out that both viewpoints have a legitimate claim to extending from what Doctor Who originally was. A show about showing the viewer strange places juxtaposed with the familiar is going to be weird, complex, and challenging, yes, but it's also going to have a lot of big set pieces in it. 

But this difference explains a lot about the problematic reception of the Williams era. A successful string of set pieces, to be frank, usually requires higher production values than Williams had access to. Here the production gets away with it by remaining squarely in the BBC's wheelhouse. Mostly, though, when they try they end up with something like Underworld. Given this, it's not exactly a surprise that the era has tended towards flawed brilliance over competent set pieces. Nor is it a surprise that this story - one of the few where it does go in the other direction and gets it right - is the fifth most popular Graham Williams story. (And of the four that beat it, three are the three Williams stories that look most like Hinchcliffe stories and the fourth is City of Death.) 

On the other hand, there is one key regard in which the set pieces approach works better here than the one that has been in use thus far this season. Tom Baker, as he's playing the role these days, works much better in the set pieces approach than he does in the more conceptual approach. So much of the show at this point is bound up in the pleasure of watching Tom Baker. And this goes beyond the series being a star vehicle. It's not just that Baker mugs for the camera and dominates every scene he's in. It's that he does nothing else anymore. This is almost painfully clear in this story, where he begins by (relatively amusingly) deciding that this adventure isn't worth his time and that he's going to go fishing. His involvement in the action is entirely reactive - he either wants to save Romana or is being threatened.

Admittedly the Doctor has been a reluctant hero in plenty of eras, but there's something different to it here. The Doctor may be reluctant to help at first, but he generally finds his way into being invested in the adventure eventually. But at this point Baker never moves off audience-pleasing cleverness. It's all he does. This isn't necessarily a disaster. Baker is, in fact, audience-pleasing and clever. But by its nature it works better when the story is also just a string of entertaining moments than it does when there's something serious trying to go on under the surface. When the center of the show doesn't care about anything more than individual moments of cleverness, the show is fighting a losing battle with gravity if it doesn't as well.

Which begins to set us back up for a larger critique of the Williams era. As people have been noting in comments, for all the brilliance that goes on in these stories, the whole is often markedly less than the sum of its parts. Even The Ribos Operation, which I loved, doesn't quite live up to all of its potential.

So yes, this is fun. We haven't had a good identical duplicate since The Enemy of the World, and there's a bit of clever cheek in doing a duplicates story that also has android doubles. Mary Tamm ends up with four separate roles in the story, which is oddly charming. And it is all entertaining and fun. But if you want more than just entertaining and fun, this story is going to be a let-down after the previous three. And if all you want is entertaining and fun then there's the troubling fact that almost all of the success of this story comes from things that can't be repeated on a regular basis. It is, in the end, a good story that it's just not easy to feel very good about. For the first time in a while the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But there's an uncomfortable sense that it only accomplished that by avoiding trying to add up to too much in the first place. 

Into Submission With My Charm (The Stones of Blood)

No, Doctor, Iain Cuthbertson was two stories ago.

It's October 28, 1978. John Travolta and Olivia Newton John continue to do unspeakable things on Summer Nights and are thus left to sing about them instead. This lasts for three weeks before The Boomtown Rats make it to number one with "Rat Trap," which, given that it's now hit number one, makes me kind of regret that crack implying they were a one hit wonder with "I Don't Like Mondays." The Grease orgy continues lower in the charts with Olivia Newton-John making a solo appearance in the charts. The Jacksons, The Cars, and Public Image Ltd also chart. That said, when crafting the "also chart" sentence I usually limit myself to the top ten, and as we're getting into the period where I actually love huge swaths of stuff going on lower in the charts, I think it's time to inaugurate a sentence about the lower reaches of the charts so I have an excuse to mention The Buzzcocks, The Jam, Blondie, and Elvis Costello, if only to reassure anyone who wasn't convinced by The Cars and Public Image Ltd that these are actually pretty good times for music. Having thusly reassured everyone, Donna Summer also charts with "MacArthur Park," proving that there's no hope at all and that we might as well just elect Margaret Thatcher or something.

In real news, we manage to avoid electing Margaret Thatcher for a bit longer. Instead Dominica gains independence from the UK. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin win the Nobel Peace Prize, an event that is in part notable because Jimmy Carter does not win it despite brokering that peace, setting up a rare case of an "oops, sorry we forgot about you" Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. (Not that Carter's post-Presidency work was not meritorious, but let's face it - that prize was 1/3 about Carter's post-Presidency, 1/3 about a rebuke to Bush, and 1/3 about the fact that in hindsight he obviously deserved to split the 1978 prize.) Rioters sack the British embassy in Tehran, California voters defeat an initiative to ban gay schoolteachers, and, the day after the final episode of this story airs, the first Take Back the Night march happens in San Francisco. But the big news story happens the day the final episode of this story airs as the Jonestown Massacre happens, resulting in the murder/suicide (we'll leave it ambiguous which victims were which) of a staggering 918 people.

While on television, we should probably go back and note the one thing we didn't mention in the Pirate Planet post (and which I bet someone has already commented on, but I'm writing this before the Pirate Planet post goes up, so who knows) that ITV's failed attempt to poach top BBC talent and compete on Saturdays has been going on. The key event of that is their poaching of Bruce Forsyth, previously host of the BBC's Generation Game, now host of ITV's rather more disastrous Bruce Forsyth's Big Night. This is notable as the second time in the Baker era that ITV has botched an attempt to kill off Doctor Who. Mysteriously the architect of this plan, Michael Grade, would soon be poached by the BBC which will lead to nothing but good things.

But for now, everyone is still watching the BBC, where the first of four and a half Doctor Who stories contributed by David Fisher is on. Fisher is an odd duck. Certainly he got the nightmare brief here. Nobody in their right mind wants to be the script on after Robert Holmes and Douglas Adams. But if someone's got to have the nightmare brief, Fisher is a pretty solid choice. He's a competent writer who had actually been pursued by David Whitaker way back when he was script editor. He knows his science fiction and makes an immediate bid to be considered an old reliable hand. Sadly, he only really has two seasons in that role before John Nathan-Turner makes the only partially sane decision to stop hiring writers from before his time.

All of this is really me dancing around the crux of this story, which is that it is a perfectly competent story that works within the aesthetic and themes that have been set out in the last few stories, but that doesn't really advance them much. Its most creative element is that it checks off one of the boxes for things that this era of Doctor Who would have been remiss not to get around to eventually, which is to turn its tools on Doctor Who's own history. This is, in effect, the story where the Williams era finally takes on the Hinchcliffe era and makes its bid to be considered more interesting than it. It is, in many ways, the Williams era's Terror of the Zygons.

The story's biggest problem is that the first two episodes at times try the viewers patience. In their defense, this is part of the point. First impressions strongly suggest this story is yet another version of the von Danniken horror that was already looking tired last season in Image of the Fendahl. About the best that can be said is that the show is finally doing stone circles, which, while a significant and visible omission in the Hinchcliffe era were more than adequately covered in Children of the Stones, which, as I argued at the time, really should be considered an honorary part of the Hinchcliffe era.

But even within the first two episodes there's hints of what's going to happen. The initial setup makes it fairly clear who the villains are. The first episode is a dead-on execution of the formula for this sort of story, with Professor Rumford and Vivien Fay being the obvious allies and de Vries, the maniacal cult leader, being the obvious villain. Virtually nothing in the first episode even hints that the situation could be anything other than the obvious. It's all competently executed, and with only 25 minutes of it doesn't particularly try the viewer's patience, but there is very little that's remarkable about it either. It hits more or less perfectly the exact balance between being good enough to be fun to watch for one episode, but not good enough to sustain for four. So it's a believable and good start and the audience doesn't have to have any clues that this isn't a business as usual story. In hindsight the only real clue that anything is amiss is how rubbish a villain de Vries is. Given that he is in fact a stooge who gets whacked in the next episode, this is in hindsight telling, but the fact of the matter is that anyone treating bad acting as a sign of a red herring in the Williams era is going to be wrong a lot more often than they're right.

But in the second episode there is, slowly but surely, a massive change in tone. The key scene is de Vries's death. Miles and Wood refer to this sequence as one of the most unintentionally funny parts of the story, and to some extent they're right. Certainly one of the key sources of humor, the astonishing ineffectiveness of the Ogri as monsters, does not appear to be deliberate. Fisher had conceived of the Ogiri as stones that transform into rock men and thus walk around, but director Darrol Blake somewhat unwisely opted to turn them into giant moving stones. The result is difficult to capture in words. This is not because it is terribly hard to describe - they're giant polystyrene rocks that glow urine-yellow as they glide around. Rather it is that the human brain, when faced with that description, isn't quite capable of generating the full and jaw-dropping weirdness of it on its own, tending instead to hedge and assume that it can't be that bad. No. It is. It is pretty much the worst case scenario for giant urine-colored attack rocks.

And yet despite the atrocious nature of the monsters, somehow the scene works, albeit in what is openly a so-bad-it's-good manner. But what's key is that the scene isn't just a camp disaster that can be loved ironically by geeks who want to pretend they're hipsters. Yes, it's that too, but the way in which it jars the viewer out of the narrative actually has a narrative purpose. Given that the scene is already a transgression against the formula - de Vries, who we had taken to be the major human villain and the public face of the Cailleach, seemed sure to last until at least the end of episode three, if not well into episode four - to have him die in such an utterly ludicrous fashion is oddly effective. It makes the scene function exceedingly well for what it is, forcing the audience to sit up and realize that this is not the story they thought it was.

It's here that we should pause and consider thoroughly the views of one of Doctor Who's most prominent critics, Mr. Lawrence Miles. Regular readers of the blog may have detected a certain complete lack of respect for Miles's viewpoints on my part (mingled with a grudging respect for his fiction, which I would find it convenient to hate but utterly fail to even dislike). This is not entirely inaccurate, and his comments on this story are a fairly succinct demonstration of why. Simply put, I think his poetics are on complete crack and that he doesn't actually understand how stories work other than in one narrow sense. So yes, it's time for another one of those bits where I start getting all narratological.

The crux of Miles's complaints about this story are that it's "impossible to relate to." The significance of a living Celtic goddess on Earth is downplayed, the scary bits aren't scary, and the entire idea of the Ogri are ill-conceived. To be fair, none of these three criticisms are wrong as such. The nature of the Cailleach is downplayed, the story isn't very scary (not even the campers scene, much as Tat Wood tries to defend it), and evil rocks that move and suck blood are dumb. No, pointing out all of that isn't where Miles completely gets the wrong end of the stick.

Miles's problem is that he cannot conceive of any narrative logic where those things wouldn't matter. The only way in which he is willing to treat a Doctor Who story is via a model where the most interesting question is "what happens to the Doctor this week?" There's a great moment in the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore in which he talks about the progression of his interest in comics, and how as a small boy he was interested in what Superman was doing in a given month, but as he grew up - and by up I mean something in the 10-12 range - he became interested in what the writers were doing. This is a fairly normal progression. Mature readership involves moving beyond just blindly investing in characters and into thinking about the work of fiction as what it is, namely a work of fiction.

This doesn't mean that nobody simply invests in the characters and cares about what happens to them. Obviously that happens, most commonly with children. But the idea that reading should be done more childishly and that more developed and mature approaches are bad things is, I think, prima facie ludicrous. It's not as though reading works of fiction as works of fiction and with active awareness of the use of tropes, conventions, and structure is an emotionless process. After all, Alan Moore shot to the forefront of his field in part because he wrote more emotionally involved comics than anyone else at the time.

But more to the point, understanding long-form serialized media in terms of mere investment in the characters is actively the wrong way to go about it. If someone is a regular Doctor Who viewer, especially in 1978 when the show features virtually no long-term character development whatsoever, then they're not watching it out of investment in the characters. They're watching it because they like Doctor Who-type stories. And this is especially true for children's media, which tends to generate a lot of its pleasure from the ritualized and consistent aspects of it. Part of why the Hinchcliffe era was good children's entertainment where the Hammer films it paid homage to weren't was that even in the Hinchcliffe era there was the basic contract that at the end of the story the Doctor and Sarah were going to be OK. That taken as a premise, all the other scares are permissible. Far from working because the audience is invested in what happens to the Doctor, the series works because the audience doesn't have to worry about the Doctor and can just enjoy watching him.

Which means that even child viewers are more than capable of enjoying a story based on its subversion of expectations. (Anyone disbelieving this needs to go read some picture books. Scads of them are based on subversion of expectations. Idiosyncratically, my go-to example is The Monster at the End of This Book, a delightfully good Sesame Street book that, if you have never read, you really owe it to yourself to track down a copy. There's apparently an iPhone/iPad version.) Sure, they may not go for broad and sweeping postmodernist readings about subversion of past eras of Doctor Who, but even they'll get that the story's got a dummy villain and that it's a surprise when it jumps to a spaceship. And anyway, one of postmodernism's stock techniques is applying childlike logic to adult things. So postmodernism for children is, far from an impossible thing because they supposedly relate to things because they think they're real, actually dead simple. You can have emotionally real relationships with postmodern things. Just ask my ex-wife, much as I'm sure she wishes she hadn't.

And yet Miles inexplicably rejects this entire avenue of reading, insisting that there must be some vaguely defined notion of coherence and suspense for the story to have any resonance, and that the suspense must rest on the idea that something bad could happen to the Doctor. And, I mean, he's not wrong that that's an effective means of suspense. There's a bit of The Leisure Hive that he quite rightly praises to high heaven because it makes a sudden and unexpected turn into putting Baker's Doctor in a position of real vulnerability. But that's not the only way to do it any more than having the Doctor be all emo about Rose is the only way to do emotional storytelling. Just because it works doesn't mean other things don't.

In fact an overwhelming majority of viewers are quite capable of getting invested in the narratology of a story and in trying to outthink the writers. Yes, there have to be other things like characters that are fun to watch, but the Williams era, particularly once it gets the double act of the Doctor and Romana going, has that in spades. If there's one thing that the rise in recent years of procedurals like Bones, Castle, and, yes, Sherlock has shown it's that a good double act and some inventive plot twists really are sufficient to entrance a massive audience. In this regard, the Williams era has aged particularly well - better in many ways even than the Hinchcliffe era. It's perfectly serviceable television by standards thirty years out from when it was made. But even by the standards of its time it works. In a world where Star Wars, Fawlty Towers, and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy all work, this isn't too far ahead of its time.

So this really is a titanically large blind spot for Miles. And it kills the entire Williams era for him. In terms of this story, it causes him to miss a key fact - that the weaknesses of the story are in fact the point. The entire structure of The Stones of Blood is based on the fact that it starts out looking like an extremely familiar story structure then makes an about face and becomes a different story structure all without overstaying its welcome. And, more importantly, it becomes a story structure that's markedly more fun. This is very much a story about the Williams era showing that it has more fun than the Hinchcliffe era ever did, and it just about gets away with it.

The heart of this is the Megara, which are essentially a pair of flying judicial fairy lights who end up putting the Doctor on trial for more or less arbitrary and capricious reasons. This gives Baker an episode's worth of time to do one of the things his Doctor is absolutely best at, which is to browbeat stupid authority figures. And the entire sequence just sings. It's delightful, particularly as the Megara become increasingly frustrated with him. (For my money, the real highlight is that the Doctor has a barrister's wig in his pockets, which is one of the funniest uses of the recurring joke that Baker's Doctor has all manner of bewildering things in his pockets.)

The problem, and it's a significant one, is with the b-story. Not that it's bad. Beatrix Lehmann, in her last television role, lights up the screen as Professor Rumford, and the sequence of her, Romana, and K-9 figuring out what planet Vivien is from via recipe books (a sequence gently appropriated by Russell T. Davies for the Slitheen) is delightful, doubly so if you've caught the lesbian subtext between Rumford and Vivien and can fully appreciate the domestics of it. The only problem is that instead of having them show up just in time to save the day after the Doctor has run out of tricks to delay things they show up after the Doctor has already solved it and proven to the Megara who Vivien is. Which makes the entire sequence pointless. And it's not as though it needed to be. Successfully running rings around the Megara for long enough that Romana and Rumford could solve the mystery would have ben a fine accomplishment for the Doctor. Instead he gets the entire victory and the supporting cast is left irrelevant - a troubling instance of Baker hogging all the oxygen of a story. At this point it's not even something he consciously or rudely does. It's simply how he plays the part. Writing for Baker's Doctor in this era just demands putting him at the center of everything. This - not his lack of vulnerability - is the heart of many of the narrative troubles this era does have. It's not that nothing bad ever happens to Baker, it's that he demands so much of the narrative focus that it's hard for anyone else to get a subplot in.

But this gets at the nature of Romana, which is worth commenting on as she is a uniquely popular companion (though moreso in her next incarnation). Williams - and to his credit, Hinchcliffe moved in this direction as well with Leela - favors companions who are capable of winning audience affection in the same way the Doctor does. Romana is as capable as the Doctor at always finding something to try. (And on the rare occasions that the script gives her nothing to do she at least goes for a decent laugh by looking irritated and like she's stalling for time through scenes and then, when the Doctor inevitably shows up, delivering the line "Oh Doctor" as if relieved that she doesn't have to keep carrying on a conversation with the bore of the party.) It doesn't always work, but it's a savvy choice - so much so that the ability to always find some new thing to try in a situation becomes a mainstay of companions from here on out. Previous companions were often resourceful. But after Romana a good companion is defined by being as irrepressible as the Doctor without being quite as clever. It's just unfortunate that right now she has to be to stand up to the lead's chokehold on the narrative focus. And even still he might marginalize her right out of the plot.

But this defect aside, what we have here is quite charming. A genuinely enjoyable subversion of the by now tired standbys of the Hinchcliffe era that goes into some of the most fun Doctor Who has ever had being anti-authoritarian, and with a new sort of authority figure. We haven't seen the Doctor do the legal system in a while. And another nice step in the larger anti-epic via the Megara. The Megara are, after all, keepers of justice, and what is justice if not the maintaining of fairness and balance? And, of course, the Megara are shown to be ridiculously blinkered and silly, striking another blow against the basic assumptions of the Key to Time.

But there is also an increasingly clear counter-narrative about the Key. Not only has every segment been stolen and, in being stolen, thrown something out of balance and into chaos or confusion, but furthermore there is an increasing theme of the segments being, for lack of a better word (or perhaps just because I really like this word) mercurial. Both the second and third segments have actively had shape-changing powers, and the first segment, more broadly considered, is effectively a tool to cause vast social upheaval. (Unlike the second and third segments, where their theft causes chaos because of the absence of the segment from its proper context, the first segment causes chaos by its presence.) The ethics of this story arc are, in fact, becoming increasingly clear, with the distinct sense that, far from being about the proper balance of forces it's about the need to upend rigid definitions of the world. Not destroy, but challenge and unsettle. And in this regard the ornate structure of The Ribos Operation even reiterates in the structure of the arc. The arc is about the ethical validity of postmodern play that subverts rigid categories. It is told through postmodern narrative techniques even as it defends the philosophical underpinnings of those approaches.

I am beginning to run out of new ways to describe how good this season is thus far.

To Fight a Bigger War (The Pirate Planet)

Well, I can poke at it for a bit, but eventually we're just
going to have to give in and invent some technobabble. 

It's September 30, 1978. John Travolta and Oliva Newton John are at the top of the charts with "Summer Nights," one of the classic cuts from Grease, and I'm going to go wash my fingers out with soap for even typing that phrase. This situation lasts for four weeks, and at two separate points other songs from Grease (John Travolta's solo "Sandy" and Frankie Valli's title track) also chart. In addition, ABBA, The Commodores, Exile (with "Kiss You All Over," a country song whose sales may owe more to the topless woman on the single cover than to the song itself), Electric Light Orchestra, and the Boomtown Rats also chart, the latter with something other than "I Don't Like Mondays."

People who do like Mondays include the New York Yankees, who defeat arch-rivals the Boston Red Sox to make it to the AL East title (having been 14 games out of place a mere two months earlier) on their way towards winning the World Series on Monday, October 2nd (they win it on Tuesday, October 17th), and Karol Józef Wojtyła, who becomes Pope John Paul II on Monday, October 16th. Other eventful days of the week include Sundays, as Tuvalu becomes independent from the UK and Vietnam attacks Cambodia; Fridays, as the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras takes place. Designed as protest march/commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, the event attains a permit which is then revoked, leading to numerous arrests and public outings of people for what had been legal activity; and Tuesdays, as a massive electrical fault brings down NASA's SEASAT satellite after only 105 days of operation.

While on Saturdays, we have The Pirate Planet. By far the least loved of Douglas Adams's three Doctor Who scripts and ranked a staggering fourth out of the six stories from this season in the Doctor Who Magazine poll, The Pirate Planet is, I think it's safe to say, a deeply under-appreciated story. Somewhat unusually, the reasons to criticize this story haven't changed much since 1978, with the major lines of critique closely paralleling the production difficulties the story had. These difficulties centered on two major concerns. First, Adams's scripts required substantial revision. This fact is taken by some as evidence of Adams's flaws as a writer, which would make total sense if the script editor hadn't, at the end of the season, recommended Adams as his replacement. All reports in fact suggest that the problem with Adams's scripts was excessive complexity. While I m not saying that this is prima facie not a problem, we ought be honest about the sort of problem it is. Writing above the level of complexity that Doctor Who ought go for is a heck of a lot easier to fix than being Bob Baker and David Martin is. That does not, of course, mean the script is good (though it is, as we'll see), but at the very least there's no strong reason to think it's bad.

The second problem that came up was when Head of Serials Graeme MacDonald objected to the story as it was shaping up on the grounds of its excessive humor. This objection was problematic in two reards. First, the entire reason that Williams was pursuing humorous scripts like those that would be expected from Douglas Adams is that he'd already been told not to pursue scary scripts, making this something of a case of "well what do you want me to do then." (This will not be the last time in which the BBC gives the production team seemingly contradictory instructions) Second, however, and rather more significantly, reading Douglas Adams's script as simply being "comedy" badly misunderstands what's going on here, albeit in a way that it's not quite clear that the people working on the story did not misunderstand it as well.

The first thing we should note about Adams's script is that there are some intensely serious issues lurking about underneath the humor. First and foremost is Adams's idea to do a story about drug addiction that took it seriously as a moral problem. The direct analogy between what's going on in this story and drug use faded somewhat in the final version, with it not being entirely clear in the transmitted version that Queen Xanxia is effectively a drug addict, but the basic logic is sound. Adams's idea is a classic science fiction idea, with its most famous execution probably being Ursula K. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas." The core of the idea is the basic philosophical debate over Utilitarianism: is a comparatively small amount of evil justifiable in the name of a greater practical good?

What interested Adams, essentially, was the question of what the moral justification for cracking down on drug use was given that the drug users themselves ostensibly do not suffer so much as enjoy themselves. Central to this was Queen Xanxia, suspended in the last moments of her life and requiring increasing power (i.e. drugs) to maintain her current state - a clear parallel to the way in which drug addicts require increasingly large doses to achieve the same high. This ultimately proves to be how he creates his new and improved moral case against drug addiction.

Contrasting that, however, is the fact that the bulk of the population of Zanak is perfectly happy with the default state of affairs. People repeatedly implore the Doctor not to get involved and upend things on the grounds that there are no visible problems - the planet is prosperous, everyone is more or less happy, and other than a mild psychic gang problem nothing is really wrong. Initially, at least, this is a world that not only resists the Doctor's intrusion but that does so out of a sense of legitimacy. The only thing that really drives the Doctor forward is a mystery of the sort that in any season other than the Key to Time season wouldn't even be a mystery. Yes, the planet isn't Calufrax, but the TARDIS lands on the wrong planet regularly, and the insistence that the coordinates check out would, absent the knowledge that the TARDIS actually is being driven to deliberate locations this season, come off as nothing more than the sort of "of course we're where I said we'd be" grumpiness that the Doctor has been engaging in since The Reign of Terror. As reasons to overthrow a society go, not only is this a relatively thin one, it's one that cuts against the basic shape of the program.

This is also where the alleged excessive humor of the story enters. On one level there is a constant sense, watching The Pirate Planet, that this is exactly what Adams was talking about when he complained about actors seeing comedy and deciding to do over the top performances and funny voices, with Bruce Purchase's Pirate Captain being the most obvious offender. But Adams here gives himself too little credit. Purchase's scene devouring is a perfect accompaniment to a story that already features an evil robotic parrot but (more brilliantly) features a fight scene between the parrot and K-9. The story is, let's be honest, willfully silly, and it's unmistakably Adams who is responsible for this.

No, the defense of the "silliness" in this story doesn't hinge on trying to sequester the blame to one or two people. It hinges on the fact that the silliness sets up one of the best shifts in tone that the series has ever managed. Between the overtly and almost excessively comedic texture of the world and the lack of any immediate threat the audience is lulled into a sense of utter complacency. This complacency is only heightened by the repeated stumbles the program has taken lately. At first every piece of evidence is that we're in Invisible Enemy territory again.

This is, admittedly, a bit of a risk. It's not as though the model that the story is flirting with has been a particularly successful one for the series. But on the other hand it's certainly one that is, at this point, well-defined within the series. For better or for worse... eh, why pretend. For worse, this is a part of what the program is now. You may as well use the tools you have, and The Pirate Planet certainly does.

The first and most famed twist comes with the Doctor's sputtering outrage at the Captain's plans, and Baker's monologue when asked whether he appreciates the engineering of Zanak is rightly hailed as one of the high points of his tenure. But the degree to which this monologue is praised obscures the degree to which it's shocking. Being the bit of this story fans all know about going in, its arrival is expected. And because it's such a great moment for Baker, there is a tendency to forget that its power comes from how unusual it is to see Baker like this.

For all of Baker's strutting and dominance, it's been a surprisingly long time since we've seen him take such an unambiguously moralistic stand. Typically Baker's rhetorical weapon against evil is dismissal, as characterized by his brilliant dismissal of the Rutan in Horror of Fang Rock, in which, instead of a stirring speech about the indomitable nature of human beings, he dismisses the Rutan as a "defeated dictator." Here, however, he's simmering with rage, and his condemnation of the moral obscenity of Zanak's genocidal existence is like nothing else we've ever seen from him. The scene would be par for the course for Pertwee, but from Baker's mouth it serves to, in one shot, escalate the stakes of the story. It's a brilliant contrast - one of the silliest stories we've ever seen is also the one that provokes the most furious reaction from the Doctor.

The second twist is less hailed, though Tat Wood praises it repeatedly in About Time. It comes at the start of the fourth episode as a cliffhanger about the Doctor being forced to walk the plank is revised. First, inevitably, some context. Over the course of the story there is a slow and relentless move to the foreground of a female character on the bridge of Zanak. When she first appears in the second episode, she seems to be an assistant of some sort to the Captain. In this capacity she attracts little attention. Indeed, for a viewer aware of the habits of individual directors, she looks like little more than the standard Pennant Roberts female character. (Roberts typically changed a male character into a female one when directing a story, generally to the betterment of the story) Slowly, however, she rises to the forefront.

At the start of the fourth episode the Doctor strides calmly into the room from which he was previously unceremoniously shoved down a kilometer drop and reveals that the Doctor who just fell to his death was in fact merely a holographic projection. This, however, is not the most remarkable thing about this cliffhanger resolution. The most remarkable thing about this cliffhanger resolution is the revelation that the nurse is also a holographic projection of Queen Xanxia, and that the entire systematic destruction of planets thing has just been to attain power to create a new body for her.

The fallout from this revelation ends up completely reconfiguring the audience's understanding of the story. Previously all evidence was that the Captain was in charge of the ship and the primary antagonist. But it quickly becomes clear that the Captain is enslaved to the queen, who effectively tortures him into compliance, and that he has been covertly plotting her downfall for years. And from there the stakes get escalated gloriously, with the story's climax involving the Doctor risking the destruction of the TARDIS itself to stop Zanak. This too should be stressed - not since The Time Monster have we seen this sort of risking of the TARDIS itself. Eventually this sort of thing becomes a standard arrow in the show's quiver, but at this point it's an enormously credible upping of the stakes. (And the final denouement - suddenly shrinking from the scale of TARDIS vs planet to having the Mentiads just hit something with a wrench - is a delightful moment of Holmesian logic; just as the scale becomes epic, the power of the mundane reasserts itself)

The effect is a classic case of the old absurdist technique of slowly turning a joke from funny to horrifying - the sort of thing that Beckett, Ionesco, or Albee just do for sport. And any criticism of the story as silly has to reckon with that fact, in no small part because to suggest that a comic writer of Adams's skill who came up through Monty Python (Adams had two bit appearances in the fourth and tragically John Cleese-free season of Flying Circus) wouldn't have known exactly what he was doing in making an absurdist turn towards darkness is just ridiculous. This is obviously what Adams intended the script to be.

There are flaws. Purchase's rendition of the Captain is weak not because of how ridiculous he is in the first three episodes - in fact, he's about the right amount of ridiculous there - but because he fails to stick the horror in the fourth episode, making the shock turn a conceptual twist as opposed to a visceral one. The sheer darkness of the Captain's situation is left just a little too vague.

It is, of course, a delicate balance. This particular absurdist turn is delicate to begin with. In most proper absurdist cases there's not a definitive turning point so much as a slow shift. (The textbook example, and I use this phrase in the quasi-literal sense of "the example I use to teach this" is Edward Albee's sublime Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in which there is no particular moment where the intoxicated banter of the beginning of the play gives way to the horrifying attempts to ruin each other's lives that characterize the ending. Instead the audience is slowly moved from point A to point B, with the laughter gradually dying down to uncomfortable silence.) On top of that, dark comedy like this is tricky in Doctor Who in the first place. The Captain needs to not be horrifying to children who, as a general rule, are not the ideal audience for existential horror. With scarring children for life still off the menu following the Mary Whitehouse debacle, the show had to go for a sort of reversal of the formula for the old Adam West Batman series - a show that kids would think was funny but that would horrify adults.

All of which is to say that I think the criticism of this story is frankly bewildering. It has a complex and effective structure, even after Anthony Read simplified it, and its humor is in pursuit of a wicked purpose. On its own it would be a solid story and one of the best of the Williams era thus far. From a personal perspective, I'm not sure there are any stories in the classic series that I have been looking forward to quite as much as I was this one. I had a bewilderingly cursed run of luck with this story. Starting from the previously discussed problem that my parents' Tom Baker holdings consisted only of his first two stories, this story had the further distinction of not being novelized because Adams and Target couldn't agree to terms. Then when the VHS version came out, my copy of this story - and only this story - was defective, which is a tricky problem to fix when importing PAL tapes from the US. On top of that, the Romana era of Doctor Who was a massive favorite of my parents, and this was a story by Douglas Adams, so the repeated failures to get access to it were particularly agonizing.

It's not as though it was hard to get for the last while - it's been out on DVD for an age, and very little is hard to find anymore. But my interest in the classic series had waned by the time of those developments. (Part of why I decided to do this blog was to return to the classic series) So I never saw the thing until watching it for thsi blog. And all I can say in terms of its base quality is that it was more than I'd ever hoped. I'd expected intelligent and funny. I didn't expect a wickedly dark turn.

All of which said, everything this season has to be taken not only on its own terms but in terms of the larger Key to Time arc. At first glance this seems likely to be rough on most of the stories. The Key to Time arc is notoriously thin, and the stories don't really form together into an overall narrative so much as serve as six disconnected stories with a common MacGuffin. Certainly it is the case that everything this season could have functioned as a Doctor Who story outside of the Key to Time structure. But that's hardly a fault. Williams would have been insane to discard the basic format of Doctor Who.

The more interesting question for any given story is how it intersects with the philosophical concepts of the larger arc. With The Ribos Operation this was largely straightforward, as that story wore its philosophy on its sleeve. Here the matter is somewhat more complex. There are no obvious balances of competing forces or dualisms at play in this story, after all. Instead this story starts to look at the one thing that, in hindsight, was conspicuously absent from The Ribos Operation: the Key to Time

As described in the Ribos Operation, the Key to Time allows the universe to be paused and adjusted. Furthermore, its segments are scattered through space and time. These two facts are both, upon reflection, tremendously strange. The idea of stopping is, after all, a temporal concept. If the universe must be stopped at a particular point in order to maintain balance then there must be an inherent concept of "now." But in the context of beings that reign over even the Time Lords, that's at best dodgy.

Even stranger, though, is the idea that the segments are scattered across space and time. The second segment, for instance (and it's also strange that the segments appear to have a real order as opposed to the incidental order by which the Doctor finds them), is a planet. Planets have lifespans measured in the billions of years. To arrive upon Callufrax at a moment as significant as the Doctor does is far beyond the plausible realm of coincidence. And something like this happens with every segment. Despite the objects in question generally existing for thousands or millions of years, the Doctor somehow manages to turn up at moments when the objects are also at the heart of some other crisis.

Several possibilities exist, but ultimately all of them end up with some form of the conclusion that a segment of the Key is not merely an object but an object in a specific situation - i.e. that at any point prior to the Doctor's arrival Callufrax was in some sense not ripe yet. In which case it appears to be that a segment only properly becomes a segment in the midst of some crisis. But all of this just begs the question - what sort of crisis? Is there anything that distinguishes or defines a segment of the Key to Time beyond its status as a MacGuffin in the plot?

Well, there are some similarities to be drawn. Most obviously, five of the six segments are in some fashion stolen. Furthermore the theft of a segment usually, in some fashion at least, throws a more or less stable situation into chaos. This all makes thematic sense. Segments of the Key to Time maintain balance on the small scale just as the entire Key maintains balance on the large scale. And just as the large scale is in crisis, so is every segment in crisis. It borders, in fact, on the neat and tidy. Except that for two stories running we have writers who are taking the piss out of it. First Holmes decimated the notion of binary oppositions in The Ribos Operation. Now Adams decimates the basic idea of balance.

Because make no mistake, the theme of balance is still completely in play in this story. The shrunken remains of planets are in a delicate and perfect balance within the Captain's collection. Queen Xanxia herself is at a balancing point between life and death, and there's a clear theme of balance between the destruction of planets and the luxuries of Zanak, with the growing power of the Mentiads reflecting the shifting nature of that balance. All of those themes are absolutely there.

But Adams puts those elements there in part to be blown away by the sheer and horrific depravity of what Zanak is. This is the first time in some time - I can't even think of the last time, actually - that we've found genocide in practice. Sure, the Doctor has defeated genocidal tyrants before. (Finally, a joke so obscurantist I felt the need to add an explanatory link) But generally they're either washed up vegetable-enviers or mediocre wannabes. It's unusual for the Doctor to encounter a vast planet-decimating monstrosity (and let's note that Zanak is the Death Star done more cleverly) in its prime. And this is the obvious source of the Doctor's moral outrage in this story. We haven't seen someone so freshly responsible for the annihilation of entire species and cultures in Doctor Who in a long time. When the Doctor tells Romana that they've stumbled upon one of the biggest crimes in history, he's not lying. This isn't a business as usual scheme for Doctor Who.

And that, I think, is Adams's point. That this abstracted philosophy about balance badly misses the point, and that there are real moral horrors in the world. It's a staggering one-two punch from two writers both of whom surely make anybody's list of the ten best writers in Doctor Who. (And seriously, is there anywhere in the classic series where we get two writers of this quality in a row? Barring idiosyncratic though not unjustifiable choices like Shearman or Cornell, surely not until Moffat and Davies pen consecutive stories in 2005 does the series see anything quite like Douglas Adams following Robert Holmes in the running order.) First Holmes knocks down the idea of binary oppositions with his usual "the personal is political" move of reducing everything to the mundane human level. Then Douglas Adams knocks down the idea of "balance" as a fundamental moral good by reminding us of the existence of atrocity. And both do it with wicked senses of humor, jaw-droppingly baroque scripting, and a sense of flamboyant anti-authoritarianism.

The effect is that, two stories in, the Key to Time has magnificently collapsed from an epic Doctor Who story to an anti-epic - a story arc that subverts and mocks the very idea of the epic. This is as good as the show has ever been.