A Space Helmet For a Cow (The King's Demons)

At least someone stepped in and stopped Nathan-Turner
from his original plan of using Twiki.

It's March 15th, 1983. Bonnie Tyler remains at number one with "Total Eclipse of the Heart," with The Eurythmics "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" nipping at its heels, and the rest of the charts being a similar burst of pure and unadulterated 1980s of the sort that you really probably need to cut with some do-wop or something lest you risk an overdose. Also in music news is the debut of Michael Jackson's moonwalk dance two days prior to this story beginning transmission. In real news, Thatcher's government passes massive tax cuts. That's about all we've got.

Speaking of not having much, it is difficult to say anything about The Kings Demons, which stands as one of the most strikingly unambitious scripts of the Davison era. It was, admittedly, not supposed to be the season finale, so we can at least give it a break on those grounds and acknowledge that this is not another case of the foolishness that led to things like Time-Flight and The Twin Dilemma being used as finales. But it does represent the degree to which the two-episode stories that every season of the Davison era is saddled with are unfortunate at best.

One gets the intense sense that this script is a dumping ground. Terence Dudley, with whom Saward did not get on, is brought back and given the short script. Anthony Ainley’s Master, who here becomes nearly impossible to take seriously, gets abandoned in it. And so too is the introduction of Kamelion. To be fair, not all of this is intentional. The degree to which Kamelion was not going to prove at all workable was not really clear until the story filmed, and the decision to keep bringing Ainley back demonstrates that he was not intended to be snubbed with this assignment. But intentionality counts for less than one might hope in these things. Shoved after the Black Guardian trilogy, at the end of the season, and a two parter to boot, this story gives nothing so much as a sense of all the steam going out of Doctor Who.

For the most part the “something old returns in every story” idea this season has not been the disaster it could have been. Everything, at least, had a fresh take on its returning concepts, even if, in the case of The Arc of Infinity, that fresh take was to abandon all notion of the concepts themselves in favor of soul-crushing tedium. But here we’re back to the awkwardness of The Visitation’s redoing of The Time Warrior - an ugly case of everything in this story having been taken from other stories and just redone with an “it worked before so it must work again” attitude.

This contributes to something I’ve been accusing Doctor Who of for a while now, which is the use of simulacra of actual content. Whether it be Earthshock’s hollow aping of the form of a dramatic death, Arc of Infinity’s empty recitations of past concepts or, really, several other bits over the past two years. Here, though, we get at something that starts to tie this in with the 1980s at large, and harkens back to what we talked about back in the entry on The Cleopatras, which is that this is part and parcel of what the 1980s were doing. The focus on artificiality that underlaid so much of 1980s popular culture is inexorably connected with the collapse of things into hollow recitations.

This pulled in multiple directions. On the left you had a growing critical discourse that was capable of articulating the ways in which the establishment used the contentless forms of ideology to advance their causes. A perfectly textbook example is the way in which the Thatcher government objected to the BBC’s declining to cover the Falklands War with naked jingoism, and further how effectively The Sun was able to use a sense of patriotism for nakedly propagandistic ends. There was, in the 1980s, an increasingly mainstream awareness of the idea that there is something inherently unreal about the corporate. To use just one example from Doctor Who, in 1970 the Autons were scary because they were plastic people. But in 1980, when Alan Moore did an Auton story, the idea was that Autons were the perfect image of business in general. They weren’t just the product gone mad, they were the entire teleology of the economy gone mad.

But this was contrasted with the open fascination with the artificial discussed in The Cleopatras entry. Or, rather, it laid right alongside it. The result of this was that there was continually a very, very fine line between postmodern subversion and a garish and ill-advised travesty. Which goes a long way towards explaining how Doctor Who finds itself lurching back and forth between stories like The Arc of Infinity and Snakedance, or, for that matter, Enlightenment and this. (Or, to fess up and admit where this line of argument eventually lands us in a few week’s time, between The Caves of Androzani and The Twin Dilemma.)

I don’t want to follow the argument of Miles and Wood too closely here, but it is worth remarking specifically on the way in which this story relates to history. Miles and Wood make much of the fact that this story comes from the history books, rather than from actual history. It presupposes in a way that was terribly untrendy in 1983 that disrupting this history of Britain is coextensive with disrupting the history of the world. This was, admittedly, the point behind The Time Meddler as well, but there’s a difference. In 1965 when the national myth (like any national myth, based largely on truth) of Britain standing alone against the Germans and holding them back long enough for the rest of the world to get its act together was still relatively recent it was one thing to position the idea of undermining Britain as being the same as undermining the planet. Nearly twenty years later, in a world where a great military victory for the UK was beating up Argentina over some islands, there’s just not the same punch. It’s a bad sign when even the Doctor has to admit that the Master’s scheme is naff this time around.

Instead we have the program setting something in what Miles and Wood slyly describe as “Heritage Themepark Britain.” This story represents Britain for the export market - a stitched together checklist of period details, at times assembled with essentially no care for piddling little questions like whether all the details are from the same period. It’s a story entirely of willful quaintness - the sort of British-esque stuff that sold well abroad, particularly in the United States (where, of course, the program was becoming increasingly popular). The problem, of course, is that Doctor Who may function for the export market, but it’s still first and foremost a BBC program sent out in a rather nice timeslot on BBC1. And this sort of “look at us, we’re being terribly British history here” approach is just... dull in that context. (It’s notable that in the Hartnell era the only two historicals to draw primarily from tourist-friendly British history were The Crusade, which cut it heavily with its Middle Eastern material, and The Time Meddler, which subverted its entire genre.)

It’s a sign of just how uninspired this approach is that Dudley is able to get away with just reversing the trick he used in Black Orchid. There the first episode is spent making everything look like it’s going to be a standard Doctor Who story only to have it turn out to be a historical. Here we’ve just inverted it - everything in the first episode save for the mystery of who’s impersonating the king gives the appearance of being a historical, then the bottom is pulled out at the end it turns out to be a sci-fi explanation. That this reversal is even possible when Doctor Who has done only one “pure” historical story in recent memory shows just how crushingly flaccid all of this is. The fact that the show can play off of these conventions when it hasn’t done any work establishing them as Doctor Who conventions suggests that they are beyond commonplace. We’re in a version of history here that’s so utterly and vapidly familiar that it doesn’t even need to put effort into itself.

Unfortunately, any hope that this one feeble twist might be pulled off is extinguished by the unfortunate decision to have James Stoker, who plays Sir Gilles Estram, self-evidently be Anthony Ainley. Whatever one might say of the idiotic Kallid revelation in Time-Flight, at least the makeup Ainley was wearing that time around successfully obscured his identity. This time you have someone who is obviously Anthony Ainley gone ginger doing an appalling French accent. Never mind the theme of returning villains in this season. Between this, Michael Gough, and Mawdryn’s rather spectacularly poor Doctor impression the theme of the season is, at this point, utterly rubbish revelations of the secret villain.

Of course, it doesn’t help that it’s the Master, who has, over his last three appearances, been systematically undermined as a character. The Delgado version of the character was the Doctor’s equal and opposite number - a charmingly perverted parody of the Doctor. But Ainley, while perhaps a plausible choice for an inversion of Tom Baker, isn’t close to a viable inversion of Peter Davison’s comparatively staid Doctor. But on top of that, the Delgado version only became a tacky plot extender in the dying embers of his eight story run. The Ainley Master, on the other hand, basically started that way after a compellingly menacing turn in Logopolis.

Much of this comes down to the irritating practice of disguising the Master. Miles and Wood observe the way in which this speaks volumes as to the difference between Ainley and Delgado as actors, remarking on the degree to which “hiding” Delgado in a story would have been impossible. This is slightly unfair - the elaborate makeup job in Time-Flight, for instance, would have hidden just about anybody. But it does get at the degree to which there’s a real lack of confidence in the ability of the Master to actually hold down a scene or justify himself on his own terms.

Put this way it becomes possible to see the real problem with the Master over these last three stories, which is that he’s only being used to stretch out other stories. When Castrovalva runs out of things to do with its actual concept of eccentric geography it wheels the Master back out to extend things. Time-Flight gets an extra two episodes in after defeating Kalid. And here the Master gets wheeled out dutifully at the halfway point in order to spice up a historical gone flat. In none of these stories do we get a situation where the plot is actually about the Master in any meaningful sense. The Master is nothing more than a device to salvage a plot gone wrong. Here he nearly gets upstaged by a robot.

This is unfortunate, especially as Ainley does eventually show - even if it takes until Survival by some arguments - that he can do the part. Just as, actually, he showed he could back in Logopolis. But the damage done by the series’ supreme lack of confidence in the character over his first three Davison-era appearances is difficult to shake off. This is, admittedly, where the idiotic “disguise and anagram” era of the Master ends, at least until Russell T. Davies does his little homage to it with Mister Saxon/Master No. Six. But that homage works because it’s not about trying to hide the Master - it’s an easter egg for the bulk of fandom that figured out that Season Three was going to end with the Master somewhere around Rise of the Cybermen. But as with much of the Cartmel-era renaissance, it's too late. The character has already been revealed as one not even the series is taking seriously anymore, and for at least the next three times he shows up there’s going to be a sickening sense of “goddammit, it’s him again” that takes hold before he even does anything. It’s a terribly unfortunate circumstance for the character to be in. And while Ainley’s performance does the character no favors at times, he is capable of doing worthwhile things when he’s actually given the material.

But he’s not, nor is anyone else. Instead we get an EPCOT Center version of British history and a sense that this is two episodes mostly as mercy. And with that our anniversary season comes to a premature end, the closing Dalek story felled by a union dispute. There is, of course, still the small matter of the actual anniversary story, which we’ll come to in two entries’ time. But on the whole, there’s an awful sense that this has been something of a drab affair. It’s not that the season has been bad - three of the stories are quite good, two are utter train wrecks, and one is Terminus. But there is the sense that the series doesn’t know what its strengths are - that it seriously thinks that bringing back Omega, the Master, and the Black Guardian were the high points of the season and not the fragmented dream-myths of Snakedance, the Teutonic grandeur of the Terminus that might have been, or the combination of the epic and familiar in Enlightenment. It’s not that it’s difficult to love Season Twenty. It’s really not.

It’s just that the show doesn’t seem to be among those loving it.

He's Gay and She's an Alien (Enlightenment)

Yes. Total Eclipse of the Heart really was at number one
when this image was on television. And you thought
Doctor Who had lost touch with the zeitgeist.

It’s March 1st, 1983. Michael Jackson is at number one insisting that Billie Jean is not his lover. Lower in the charts are the Eurythmics (with “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” of course), Bananarama, Toto, and Tears for Fears. But for the purposes of this entry perhaps the most significant fact about the charts is Bonnie Tyler hitting number one in the second week of this story with “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which is notable for several reasons, one of which is that it is one of the gayest songs ever written, so, you know. Thematically apropos, that.

In real news, there’s not a lot. The compact disc goes on sale in England sometime in March, so let’s give that to this story. The final episode of M*A*S*H aired between Terminus and this. Bob Hawke becomes Prime Minister of Australia, and the IBM PC/XT is released.

So on television we have Enlightenment. Which is a fantastic little story with one of the most wonderfully captivating central images in Doctor Who. Barbara Clegg is, of course, not the first person to put tallships in space, but it’s such a reliably wonderful image that she really ought to get proper amounts of praise for it. On top of that you have a story that effortlessly moves from historical texture to science fantasy in a way that offers one of the most thorough blurring of genres in Doctor Who, has a bunch of clever ideas and good characters, and is all around one of the gems of the Davison era. None of which I want to talk about today, because it's well covered by other sources and I don't have a ton to add to the discussions of why this is good. I want to talk about Turlough.

The first thing we should establish is that Turlough is the first companion that it is overwhelmingly easier to read as homosexual than not. There have been homoerotic undertones to companions before, and there’s been the unfortunate consequence of being played by Richard Franklin, but there’s never before been a companion who is so consistently and from the top down conceptualized in gay tropes. It’s not, in the case of Turlough, a subtext. Turlough is gay. Through and through, Turlough is gay.

For the sake of completion, let’s enumerate the various ways in which this is coded. Turlough is overtly “cowardly,” deliberately played as an unmasculine character. He’s repeatedly shown to be delicate and fragile. He’s introduced in the context of an all-boys school, and seen leading another boy to temptation and ruin. And that’s before you get to moments like his first scene with Captain Wrack in episode three of Enlightenment. He’s thrown to the ground by strapping young men and told to “crawl.” He slowly makes his way across the floor to come to the leather boots of an unseen figure. And who, exactly, is this figure that Turlough looks up at in sheer and unbridled terror? A female pirate queen who, in staggeringly camp fashion, declares him “just what I’ve been waiting for” before swinging a sword around cavalierly. Not until Terror of the Vervoids will the vagina dentata be quite so blatantly literalized in Doctor Who.

(It’s worth pointing out that Captain Wrack is as consciously designed as a gay icon as any female character in Doctor Who not to be the Rani is - the overpowering man-eating woman who visibly wears the pants and is more masculine than any of the lumbering pieces of manflesh who follow her is archetypal. Think of her as a drag queen who happens to be played by a woman. Not for nothing was the woman in question, Lynda Baron, brought back in Closing Time to riff on the notion that the Doctor and Craig are lovers.)

There’s also a degree of authorial intent that can be applied here. John Nathan-Turner was himself gay. Although I am sharply disinclined to use this as prima facie evidence that there is a queer subtext to the Nathan-Turner era, especially because there’s a whole ugly tradition of homophobic attacks on Nathan-Turner (though as Tat Wood points out in About Time the most high profile of those attacks came from a fanzine with a gay editor, so that’s all somewhat more complex than it appears and I’m not going to touch it with a forty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole). But even if Nathan-Turner is not taken as the author for the purposes of the queer subtext it is difficult not to take him as party to it. Simply put, there’s no way in hell anyone who was even remotely aware of gay culture couldn’t have noticed that Turlough was being presented as gay in these three stories. For better or worse, there’s no plausible deniability here.

But it’s worth remarking on exactly what sort of homosexual Turlough is presented as being. Here I should offer a hat tip to Meredith Collins, whose dissertation on the subject of the aesthetic novel provided me with invaluable background for making this argument and who, perhaps more importantly, is awesome. Which I suppose also sets up the sort of homosexual I’m arguing Turlough is presented as being, namely that of an aesthete.

Certainly the tropes are all there. Turlough is exceedingly cosmopolitan in his tastes, in particular in Mawdryn Undead where his knowledge of alien technology is constantly played off of the “provincial” nature of contemporary Earth. But more striking is his first appearance, admiring a classic car. This sort of appreciation of the beauty of mundane objects is textbook aestheticism (which was, in a particularly famous Punch cartoon, parodied as worshipping teapots). Add to that his seducing another young boy to ruin, a textbook aesthetic plot, and you have the general shape of the character fairly well pegged. (The aesthetic movement, to be clear, is intimately connected with homosexuality, with same-sex attractions, both spoken and loudly unspoken, permeating the movement.)

But what’s particularly interesting about the aesthetic structure is a focus on the lengthy exploration of a moral choice in which the negative choice is explored at length. Which is exactly what we get for the twelve episodes of the so-called Black Guardian Trilogy (though he’s an exceedingly minor character in the trilogy - the Turlough Trilogy would be wholly more apropos). Or, at least, what we get for eight episodes with four episodes of him crawling around some ductwork shoved in the middle. Turlough is given a moral choice - betray and kill the Doctor or not - and spends the whole of the trilogy dithering over it, generally committing to the idea that he will kill the Doctor but not actually ever doing much of anything to accomplish it.

All of this could basically be written off as peculiarities of Mawdryn Undead if it weren’t for the fact that the story arc is book-ended on the other side by Enlightenment, a story about a bunch of bored decadents who like dressing up in the trappings of various exotic cultures and having yacht races. Which is to say, more aesthetes. At this point the series is practically begging for it.

But if we take this as the setup for Turlough, what do we make of the endpoint of this story arc? After all, the point of dallying with the negative choice in aestheticism is, ultimately, the idea that there is beauty in what is forbidden and profane. In which case Turlough’s wholesale rejection of the Black Guardian at the end of this story seems to be in part a repudiation of his coding as homosexual. This is an unfortunate endpoint, to say the least.

Several alternative ways to argue through this do seem to present themselves, and it’s worth exploring them quickly. First and foremost is the fact that the usual hullabaloo about the ambiguously oppositional relationship between the Black and White Guardians is on display here, cutting against the idea that the Black Guardian is evil. The problem is that this means taking one scene at the end of Enlightenment as more central to the understanding of the Guardians than all the moments where the Black Guardian shows up shouting things like “In the name of all that is evil, the Black Guardian orders you to destroy him now!” and cackling like he’s played by Valentine Dyall or something. The Guardians have been impossible to take seriously as a concept since their debut, where they came pre-skewered by Robert Holmes.

A second, somewhat cheekier approach would be to suggest that Turlough is only trading one model of queerness for another. Certainly, as I’ve already argued, Davison’s Doctor is a strong contender for the most slashable Doctor in the classic series. So Turlough breaks up with his abusive boyfriend and goes with the Doctor. But if we’re being honest there’s a circularity to this. Davison is slashable as much because he’s surrounded by at least one of Adric, the Master, or Turlough in all but three stories of his run. And one of those is Snakedance. He has, in other words, the incidental combination of being young, played by a television star known for more feminine series, and being the only Doctor since Pertwee to have a male companion in a majority of his stories (though at present Smith is at 17/22 stories featuring a male companion, with next season not set to send him below a majority). I’ll readily grant that the show is overtly coding Turlough as gay. Davison’s Doctor, not so much.

A third defense, which is at least slightly more satisfying, comes by just trying to deconstruct the ending. The declaration that “enlightenment was the choice” is obviously supposed to indicate that for Turlough enlightenment was the act of escaping the Black Guardian’s control. But if we take the long view of the choice, treating it as the entire twelve episode arc, then enlightenment is the same extended dalliance with corruption that is partially responsible for coding Turlough as gay in the first place. But while this works, it just feels smugly clever.

No, let’s go with a fourth defense, which is that the deferral of and stepping back from same-sex desire is part and parcel of what aestheticism does. Aesthetic novels are awash with points at which potentially scandalous details are visibly elided, the most famous of which is probably the moment in The Picture of Dorian Gray in which Dorian is told, “your name was implicated in the most terrible confession I ever read,” but no information about the content of the confession is actually forthcoming. In other words, aestheticism constantly performed precisely this double gesture of alluding to some scandalous content - generally implied, if not outright said, to be homosexual - and visibly obscuring it.

This is, of course, a subset of the larger category of the closet, with which gay culture at large has an ambiguous relationship with to this day. But in 1983 it was still a fairly straightforward one. Homosexuality may have been decriminalized, but it was nowhere close to destigmatized, especially in the face of the dawning AIDS crisis that was in the midst of decimating the gay male community. Clause 28 looms over 1983 as surely as the hiatus looms over Season 20. The consequence of this is something we talked about the last time the series was getting fabulously gay, which is that gay culture became defined in part by the ways in which it hid itself. This has been tacitly clear through the whole of this post, where I’ve been using words like “coded” to describe how we know Turlough is gay. Because coding was, in 1983, still a huge part of how gay culture self-identified and how people in the gay community successfully identified each other. It’s misleading to talk about Turlough’s homosexuality as subtext in this regard. Yes, it’s never explicitly stated. But that doesn’t mean it’s not completely explicit - homosexuality, in the culture of the time, always existed in code and subtext.

(The nature of the closet in the present day is tremendously conflicted, I should note. On the one hand, major battles have been won in terms of acceptance of homosexuality that obviate the need for the closet. On the other hand, gay culture has existed for decades with the closet as a major force, making its removal the occasion for some real ambivalence and anxiety due to it threatening the makeup of the culture. The debates within the gay community over gay marriage, with a small but significant section of the community arguing that gay marriage serves to functionally “straighten” their relationships are one of many, many examples.)

So if we treat Turlough’s storyline as a mirroring of the classic aesthetic structure then the fact that it ends with a phoned in attempt to defuse it and take Turlough out of his decadent gay lifestyle is hardly a big deal. It’s exactly the sort of closeting move that defines aesthetic literature and the gay community more generally. The fact that there’s an overt turn away from some of the tropes that code Turlough as gay really can’t be fairly taken as a rejection of homosexuality in a meaningful sense. Anyone who was aware of the coding up to that point would also have seen it as an inevitable and necessary part of grappling with the subject on a BBC1 family program in 1983. It doesn't change the basic fact that the series, at this point, would have been visibly gay-friendly.

(Note: The following paragraph was added a few hours after the entry posted. Hat tip to Alex Wilcock and William Whyte, who's comments inspired the central insight.)


Indeed, the ambiguities of the ending need not be taken as undermining the point at all. A somewhat tortured relationship with the tropes of homosexuality is itself a useful commentary on them. The extended meditation on a negative moral choice that the Black Guardian represents is part of Turlough's gay coding. So, of course, are many of his more villainous traits. But does anyone seriously look at post-Enlightenment Turlough and stop seeing the gay coding? Of course not. He's gay through to Planet of Fire. His rejection of the Black Guardian, in that case, is not a rejection of homosexuality, but of a particular subset of stereotypes about homosexuality. Taken this way, "enlightenment was the choice" takes on another meaning, given that this scene also marks where he "comes out" to Tegan and the Doctor as having been an agent of the Black Guardian. (And the implication, of course, is that the Doctor knew all along. As did Tegan, who long suspected that there was "something funny" about Turlough, so to speak.) By rejecting the Black Guardian and making an affirmative claim to his identity Turlough comes out instead of just being outed. The choice thus consists of him having his cake and eating it too - he remains situated in a long tradition of gay culture while at the same time vocally rejecting those aspects of the culture that are negative stereotypes.  Turlough's arc, in this reading, is about a broader question of what gay culture is. And its very existence on BBC1 demonstrates the relevance of this - gay culture clearly was emerging into the mainstream, and its emergence raises the exact questions this reading situates the story as answering.

As I’ve noted, the prominence of various sorts of homosexual coding in the John Nathan-Turner era in no way begins with Mawdryn Undead, and we’re still not up to either of the two most overt engagements with a gay audience in the classic series (Time and the Rani and The Happiness Patrol, since someone is going to ask). But the Turlough arc marks what is probably the most extended treatment of the issue in the classic series. And, of course, all of this is worth discussing in part because Doctor Who’s engagement with the gay community is a fundamental part of its revival. This may not be the era of Doctor Who that Russell T. Davies grew up with, but there’s no mistaking the fact that there’s a coherent line of influence from the homosexual coding that takes place under Nathan-Turner’s watch to the nature, if not the very fact, of its return in 2005.

The Original Viking Settlers (Terminus)

A frame from the recording of the commentary track
this time.

It’s February 15th, 1983. Kajagoogoo are finally at the top of the charts, prancing about for both weeks of this story with one of the great pieces of 80s trash. Michael Jackson and Tears for Fears also chart, making this perhaps the single most 80s chart we’ve dealt with yet. Fitting, that.

News is relatively quiet. Some particularly bad fires in Victoria and South Australia, a multiple homicide in the robbery of the Wah Mee gambling club in Seattle, and the Environmental Protection Agency announces plans to completely and permanently evacuate Times Beach in Missouri due to an excessive amount of deadly poison in the soil.

While on television, Terminus. There was, in the drawer of VHS tapes that constituted the initial guiding principles of my Doctor Who fandom, a tape on which the words “Terminus” and Enlightenment” were written and crossed out. The tape now contained a track meet. This is one of several standing grievances between my parents and me, along with my not being allowed to trick or treat when I was a child and their failure to buy a life-size Dalek when they had the opportunity. Some day I will put them in homes and laugh at them.

The result of this is that when I finally got my hands on a copy of Terminus I was positively chomping at the bit to watch it. The fact that I remembered virtually nothing about it going into rewatching it for the blog, then, was a bit unnerving. As I’ve noted, there are few worse omens when talking about a Doctor Who story than to say that it was forgettable as a child.

And this is doubly true of the Nathan-Turner era. Every era of Doctor Who has its poor stories. The realities of BBC production mean that sometimes Doctor Who has no choice but to go to air with a story that self-evidently sucks. And there’s an inverted history of Doctor Who from the one we’ve usually followed, in which eras are described and understood by the best of what they strove for. We could instead ask what various eras do when it’s clear they have a turkey on their hands. And it is, in many ways, just as revealing as the optimistic history of the show. Verity Lambert, for instance, tries with a sort of manic desperation to do something interesting. The Lloyd/Bryant/Sherwin era just grimly grinds out the story figuring that the audience doesn’t actually care what’s on screen, leaving Patrick Troughton to shout “oh my word” a lot. The Pertwee era tries desperately to avoid ever making a turkey, slowly sacrificing quality at the altar of not fucking up until they make a horrific string of turkeys as a result. The Hinchcliffe era maintains reasonable production standards throughout, and its turkeys are defined almost entirely by whether or not Robert Holmes could be bothered to even try to fix the script. And the Williams era just dials up the charm in a frantic effort to salvage script after script that goes wrong.

The John Nathan-Turner era, on the other hand, has just about the most depressive relationship with its own failures imaginable. Whereas the Williams era, for the most part, is spurred into action when it’s clear that circumstances are conspiring against them, the Nathan-Turner era goes into the grimmest sort of autopilot imaginable, essentially just depressedly going “right, we’re doing a poorly made runaround on a generic space station and we really don’t care.” With Nathan-Turner himself never moving out of the first stage of grief and just grinning maniacally as he insists that the story worked and was good and the memory cheats and please please love me.

What makes this really weird, though, is that for most of the Nathan-Turner era this process is almost but not quite entirely unrelated to the quality of the script. The Nathan-Turner era will periodically go to the mattresses trying to make a classic out of a story with a script that is never going to make one and, equally, will occasionally just decline to lift a finger to help a brilliant script. Which brings us to Terminus, which is tedious, poorly made, clearly as boring to everybody in it as it is to anybody watching it, and by one of the best writers to work on the classic series. Perhaps the most shocking thing, when watching Terminus, is trying to figure out how this could come from the pen of the man who’d written Warriors Gate, and who is one of a handful of classic series Doctor Who writers to have a writing career that spans functionally into the present day. The answer, of course, is that it didn’t. What this story appears to be is not at all what is actually going on in the script.

Lawrence Miles, defender of the Davison era that he is in About Time, gives the start of an explanation, which is that this is meant to be Wagnerian space opera. This is not, in and of itself, a winning concept, but it’s at least an intriguing one. Miles suggests that the story should have been played entirely in sweeping, epic gestures, with everything overplayed and shouted thunderously, preferably made with a cast consisting of an endless sequence of clones of Brian Blessed.

It’s a start, certainly, but only a start. Miles’s vision of what this story could have been is intriguing, and it’s certainly true that there are occasional flashes of that sort of epic glory. The skull image that appears within the TARDIS to provide Nyssa her way off the ship is one of the most chilling images in the series, and the crowd of Lazars clawing and milling around everybody is one of the best efforts at straight scares since the Hinchcliffe era, although let’s be fair, that is a relatively small pool to be swimming in, and has Mandrels in it.

Equally, it’s true that the things that fall short of the epic fall short with an unfortunate vigor. The degree to which the Vanir are bored middle-aged men arguing with each other is deeply unfortunate, as is the failure to choreograph any of the fight scenes with even a modicum of quality. And it’s tough to muster any love for the casting of the space raiders, who are so 1980s that it causes physical pain even if you’re enormously fond of the decade, as I am. It’s also frustrating that Nyssa is left to simper and be abused through so much of the story, again in a story that was ostensibly meant to focus on her. Tegan and Turlough spend the majority of it crawling around in ducts, but for all that she actually does in the story Nyssa might as well have been there too. Her actual departure is handled with pleasant dignity, but as usual Sutton mostly demonstrates how frustratingly wasted she was on the part, and thank god for Big Finish so that we have an idea of just how much that’s true. All three companions seem to shrink in the face of the story just as much as the story’s supporting cast does. But Miles’s account isn’t the full account of it either.

Still, let’s start with what Miles does say and is right about and build off of it. At the heart of this story is a sense of cyclical cosmology built on the idea of ancient orders of things that have survived in partial forms. Miles makes much out of a concept that is elided in the televised version, which is that the space ship is a relic from a previous universe whose destruction brought about the creation of our universe. In this reading the end solution of the Garm managing to hold back the lever and reverse the explosion is not, as it initially appears, just about a superstrong wolfman. It’s about the idea that only something from the old universe can properly interact with the ship. It’s not supposed to just be a question of strength, but of a sort of narrative teleology - the fact that the old universe has its own rules separate from our universe.

It is worth reflecting, then, on the Doctor’s role in this. Unlike Warrior’s Gate, it is not true that his role is one of strategic inaction. But it’s also true that the Doctor does relatively little here. This is, of course, not that unusual for Doctor Who, where the plot often consists of the Doctor figuring things out so that other people can do things. But it’s still worth making the exact format of this within Terminus explicit. The Doctor is a wandering outsider who gains knowledge about the fundamental workings of the universe and uses it to preserve the order of things. Within the Norse context of the story at large, the correct term for this person is “Odin.”

I mention this because there’s a train of thought that really peaks in the late McCoy era and into the New Adventures (particularly those written by Paul Cornell) in which the Doctor becomes an overtly Odinic figure. It is an interesting role to cast the Doctor in. Certainly Odin is a mercurial figure - indeed, he’s rather unique as gods go in that he is at once a martial, patriarchal figure and, for the most part, a trickster archetype. He is still defined first and foremost by cleverness and an ability to outfox people. And he is in many ways a natural fit with the idea of the Time Lords, particularly those of The Deadly Assassin. His ravens, after all, are named thought and memory.

There is an important transformation that happens here - a sort of steady refocusing of the lens of the series made necessary by time. Early on the Doctor is most visibly allied with some form of Hermes. But as he becomes increasingly entrenched in culture this changes. (Indeed, one theory, admittedly based largely on Tacitus making shit up, casts Odin as being derived from Mercury. But even this fraudulent theory carries some potency - a sense of the Roman pantheon slitting its own throat in a desperate bid to evolve into something weirder.) Even as the actors playing him and his superficial tropes become progressively younger he gets played as an older and older figure. Hartnell may be the most “old man” Doctor, but he plays the Doctor as a sort of giddily mercurial patrician. Davison, on the other hand, plays him as a weary young adventurer.

But more to the point, when the program is facing its twentieth anniversary there is an extent to which the Doctor cannot help but be a figure of the establishment. Once you’re the longest-running science fiction show in the world you are, in a necessary sense, an institution and a part of the establishment. That doesn’t mean that the Doctor has to abandon his sense of the anarchic. But it requires a change. To some extent this has been lurking since the Pertwee era, as the Doctor has become increasingly sage. It’s not until the 1970s that it becomes the norm for the Doctor to know a lot about a given situation before he arrives and to be able to rattle off extensive facts about settings off the top of his head. Indeed one of the interesting things about Davison’s Doctor is that this sort of extensive foreknowledge is temporarily and partially stripped away again (particularly in the two Bailey stories, which overtly hinge on the Doctor’s lack of knowledge in a way that would never have happened in the Baker era).

But Davison’s Doctor, equally, is not a return to the Hartnell/Troughton mould. He may be without extensive knowledge, but he’s also wearied in a way that Troughton never was and Hartnell rarely was. And if one extends the scope out from Davison, treating him as the model for future Doctors (and it’s fair, I think, to say that his approach defines how at least five of his six successors play the part), he rapidly starts to look like a reconceptualization of the Doctor as an Odinic figure instead of a Hermetic one. In Davison he is overtly a “young” Odin - the wandering figure gathering wisdom and knowledge. But this merely prefigures the more explicitly Odinic natures of McCoy and all three of the new series Doctors. And Terminus, spiritually, marks that transition point.

But Terminus, as written, has depths beyond what Miles points at. Yes, it’s Norse space opera, but that’s just a cool style. Oddly prescient in its casting of the Doctor, yes, but on its own it’s not entirely functional without slathering of “sentient metafiction” more liberal than even I’m eager to lay down. It’s enough, perhaps, to elevate it to Time Monster territory - brilliant ideas that just go terribly, terribly wrong. But there’s a second layer to Terminus that Miles doesn’t pick up on.

The clue actually comes in something Tat Wood points out when he snarks about Saward’s tin ear for dialogue, complaining about how the line “do they think we’re stupid or something” got changed to “they must think us fools!” It’s a poor rewrite, to be sure, but the most striking thing about it is that it does actually completely meet Miles’s assertion that everything is supposed to be overplayed as if by Brian Blessed. What’s more telling, though, is what it replaces - a line of frustration that is framed and played as working class employees grousing angrily.

This is something Gallagher has played with before. Warrior’s Gate also featured a spaceship crew that was visibly coded as working class. But that was under Bidmead, and now we’re under Saward, who scuppered a script by Pat Mills in part because Mills wanted to do the story with a visibly working class captain whereas Saward wanted to portray only classless futures. So all of the class issues that Gallagher put into the script are systematically removed. The Vanir were, in the original conception, working class gods. On the one hand given names of Norse myth and made to stride around in armor and on the other hand tired, worn out, and screwed over wage slaves. This cuts right to the core of them as designed. They’re literally living paycheck to paycheck - actual wage slaves dependent on the Terminus Corporation’s shipments of Hydromel to survive. They have no choice but to work, and the need for them to do their work obliges them to be completely blind to the needs of the sick people in their care.

Likewise the Garm turns out to be a wage slave from a previous universe, bound into servitude and finally set free from his wage slavery when he saves the universe by waking up and doing something for the sake of it instead of because he’s ordered to. Or, to put it in blunter political terms, the Garm attains class consciousness and is freed by it, thus facilitating the subsequent freeing of the Vanir. The cyclical structure of mythic history is explicitly wedded, in other words, to a sort of Marxist dialectic of history. Only Saward, in his infinite wisdom, preferred a depiction of a classless future and took it all out.

So we’re left with two Terminuses. One is a Marxist Norse space opera that clearly flags the transition of the Doctor from a Hermetic figure to an Odinic one while maintaining an explicit connection to the idea of alchemy as material social progress. The other is a poorly paced story about bunch of middle aged men grousing around a shoddy space station in silly costumes. Unfortunately, of course, it’s the latter one that actually aired. And unlike something like Creature From the Pit, where the fault is fairly concretely pinnable on one person’s head, here it’s a systemic failure - a case of nobody bothering to give Gallagher - whose previous effort had been good in part because of the striking visuals - the sort of production attention he needed. But through the horrid pallor of neglect and tedium the last remnants of Terminus's old universe still rage gloriously. The result is one of the odder critical endpoints I’ve found myself resting on - a story I absolutely despise for the way in which it serves as an effaced memorial to one of my favorite Doctor Who stories ever.

And He's Just Wiped Them Out (Mawdryn Undead)

Red velvet lines the black box...

It’s February 1st, 1983. Men at Work are at number one with “Down Under,” remaining there all story. Kajagoogoo, U2, and Echo and the Bunnymen also chart, which starts to look like one of the best charts we’ve seen until you look a the second week when it’s Joe Cocker, Wham, and Fleetwood Mac charting. Bauhaus, however, are in the lower reaches of the chart, and a post-breakup rerelease series means that The Jam occupy fifteen spots of the top hundred. So that’s nice.

In real news, unemployment in the UK reaches its record peak. The Australian parliament is dissolved in preparation for elections. Klaus Barbie is actually charged with war crimes. And that’s about it, I’m afraid.

On to television, then. Mawdryn Undead is another one of those stories that I was unaware was controversial and not widely liked until well after I’d seen it, and where I am thus unable to quite dislodge the way in which I was initially taken by it. I quite liked this story on the VHS tape, and was gutted that the back two parts of the Black Guardian arc had been taped over with a track and field meet by my parents, leaving me unable to watch them for a good two years or so after becoming a Doctor Who fan. Rewatching it, as with most classic Doctor Who, its flaws are evident, but as with much of the Davison era its virtues are evident as well, with the embryonic forms of what Doctor Who could and would become on plain display throughout the story.

Let me first say that I am mostly going to set Turlough aside until Enlightenment. I have a lot to say about the character, but I don’t think it’s going to be well-served by being split among three entries or by treating the early scenes of his character without reference to the later ones.

Second, let me deal very efficiently with the Brigadier. He’s obviously not the right character for this story, but in this story’s defense, he’s also the third choice character. The correct character is, obviously, Ian. They wanted to do the story for Ian. But William Russell wasn’t available and they had to do fallbacks, and ended up with the Brigadier. Nicholas Courtney is, of course, wonderful, but the fact of the matter is that this is to the story’s detriment and that very little about the story is meaningfully about the Brigadier. He is serving here as a stand-in for “generic past companion” and I’m mostly going to treat him that way, especially since there actually is a story in the future that deals with the Brigadier as the Brigadier and that, furthermore, is just as much a work of flawed genius as this one, so I’ll just hold all of that for Battlefield. (As for UNIT dating, I don’t really have anything to add to what I said on the subject in The Invasion.)

Those set aside, then, let’s start with Peter Grimwade, a strong contender for the most underrated writer in Doctor Who’s history. There are reasons for this - he only has three stories, none of which are exceptionally strong and one of which is Time-Flight. But his CV is deceptive here. All three of the stories he wrote were nightmare briefs in which Nathan-Turner saddled him with a metric ton of things to shoehorn in. Any scriptwriter is going to suffer from this. Just look at how Johnny Byrne was snowed under two stories earlier. Byrne is not a great writer, and it turns out that his best story, The Keeper of Traken, was heavily rewritten by Bidmead, but he’s still a better writer than Arc of Infinity made him look. Even Robert Holmes finds himself staggering under the weight of The Two Doctors.

Given that, it’s surprising just how well Grimwade’s work survives the seeming onslaught of requirements. I mean, we’ll never really know what “pure” Grimwade would have looked like. But on the evidence he was a reasonably deft writer. First of all, let’s point out that he’s surprisingly deft at characterization. That’s on particular display in this story, where he manages the non-trivial feat of having the two versions of the Brigadier tangibly feel like different characters. (And a hat-tip to Tat Wood for pointing out some of the subtler ways I’d have missed, such as the 1983 Brigadier using post-Falklands slang) But it’s true even in Time-Flight, where even if the actors disappointed painfully all of the various characters, even those with similar jobs and stations in life, sounded and acted visibly different

The other thing he doesn’t get nearly enough credit for is the fact that he, better than any other writer in the Davison era, gets the soap opera structure. Miles compares the structure of this story to how The Amazing Spider-Man typically works, and he’s spot-on. The biggest weakness Mawdryn Undead has is, as with much of Doctor Who, being sold as a TV Movie instead of as four parts of a serial. If this had been the Hartnell era and stories had been going out under individual episodes instead of pretending this was a uniform and monolithic block of story its reputation would rise almost immediately. Grimwade is remarkably deft at a structure whereby every episode introduces a new complication and moves the characters to a slightly new situation.

This is how the Davison era should always have been working - a series of definable encounters that move characters from one point to another and that work meaningfully as serials within each encounter as well. This is consistently sandbagged by two problems. First, seemingly nobody but Grimwade gets how to write these sorts of stories. Second, the writers are largely incapable of communicating among each other. A scene about the Mara gets tacked onto the head of this to provide continuity, just as a scene about Adric got tacked onto the head of Time-Flight. But in both cases nobody bothered to give Grimwade “deal with the fallout of this” as part of his brief. The hanging plot threads are gone by the five minute mark. But it’s clear that Grimwade understands how to do this sort of thing because everything within the story points to a writer who gets that sort of structure.

But this gets at a line of criticism of this story - and, correspondingly, a line of praise for this story - that are both alarmingly wrong-headed. There’s a debate about this story that goes roughly like this. Critics of the story complain that it is small and boring and not enough happens. Then defenders come up with an elaborate reading of the story based on a theme of lost innocence and retro-nostalgia where the point is the collapse of the big exciting UNIT days into the petty and soul-deadening mundanity of the domestic.

The two sides of this debate share a problem, which is the assumption that the small scale is in some sense a problem for Doctor Who. We talked back in the Black Orchid entry about how, for the most part, Davison’s Doctor works very well on the small scale, and this is no exception. Particularly adroit is the choice of villains - a bunch of guys who just want to die. The Doctor’s life is never in danger as such - only his ability to regenerate. This means that the conflict is taken to the personal level, with Davison getting to play with the limits of the Doctor’s kindness, with his refusal to help being, in this case, an unwillingness to sacrifice his life for mere “fools who tried to become Time Lords” combined with a willingness to do so for Nyssa and Tegan. The smallness of the scale lets Davison actually have a story in which the Doctor has decisions to make and an opportunity for priorities, as opposed to one in which huge swaths of lives are at stake and the choices in front of him are straightforward.

But more troubling is the idea implicit in both ends of the discussion that the Brigadier’s life of domestic teaching in in some sense a falling off or lessening of the character. Setting aside my immediate antipathy for the idea that teaching is in some way a lesser profession than shooting things, and remembering that as originally conceived this was not a falling off of the Brigadier but a return to first principles for Ian, let’s get at the real issue here. There’s a shockingly cavalier judgment here about the inherent superiority of having adventures to having a normal life. One that, if we take the Brigadier’s role as “generic companion” here, treats everyone who has ever chosen to leave the Doctor as wrong or weak for doing so.

This is, admittedly, an issue that really does run through Doctor Who, and one that Russell T. Davies eventually plays with overtly via both Rose and Donna. But by any standards, this is a particularly nasty flare-up of it. I’ve been trying, for the most part, to avoid letting too much criticism of Ian Levine slip into the blog at this stage. There are a couple of reasons for this, among them being that Levine has publicly told me to go fuck myself and I am mindful of being perceived as having some sort of grudge. But more important is the fact that at the end of the day Levine is a fan with an only partially public role in the show and I think there’s something jarringly unfair about making him into the emblem of the show’s frailties. He’s not. He’s an emblem of fandom’s frailties, and that deserves a different sort of attention. So while there are two entries in the Colin Baker years in which I think it’s impossible to avoid Levine, I mostly want to leave him out of the Davison years.

That said, he’s too good an example here to pass up. Back around the 2010 general election there was a thread on whatever Outpost Gallifrey/Gallifrey Base was that year in which Levine explicitly discussed basing his vote entirely around the question of what party would be best for the BBC’s continued funding of Doctor Who. To say that this is deeply unfortunate is an understatement, but it’s exactly the sort of understatement I love, so let’s go with it. I bring this up, though, because I think it’s worth drawing a direct line from that moment to the treatment of the series’ past in 1983 and the reading of that past. Because the logic that says “exciting science fiction adventure is inherently superior to the domestic sphere” and the logic that says “having more money for Doctor Who is more important than the future of the NHS” are, in essence, identical.

And this is my rather stark problem with that defense of Mawdryn Undead. If it is in part an act of mourning for the program’s past in which the adventuring days of UNIT are preferred to the soul-crushing domesticity of a public school (American readers - please be aware that this term does not mean what you think it means) then in essence the past is being mourned because of its anesthetic qualities. The UNIT era is, in this reading, valorized for its rejection of worldly concerns. A cursory rereading of my posts from the late Troughton era and the Pertwee era will reveal how shocking a misreading I find this to be. This is exactly counter to what I view the fundamental purpose of Doctor Who as being - the claim that material social progress is the solution to alchemy, and, to my mind, borders on overt sociopathy.

But crucially, I don’t actually think that’s what’s going on in Mawdryn Undead at all. I think it’s almost a complete 180 from the correct reading of the Brigadier’s emotional arc here, which is not about his fall from grace but rather about his recovery from the Doctor. Because everything about his amnesia is, at first, played as post-traumatic stress disorder. The implication isn’t some “you’ve grown up and can’t go to Neverland anymore” bit of fairy-tale. It’s that the Brigadier has blocked out the terrible and traumatic things that happened to him when the Doctor was around and now the Doctor has gone traipsing back into his life and upended it again. (In this regard it’s a return to the actual original version of the Brigadier - the Colonel who was left shell-shocked when his attack on the Yeti went disastrously and he lost his entire squad.)

Unlike the appalling “faded glory” interpretation, this interpretation has the benefit of integrating the various parts of the story. The Doctor finds himself facing down a narrative collapse that is averted by the Brigadier’s acceptance and reintegration of the past he’d rejected. The central antagonists have turned away from wanting to be Time Lords and now want only death as a result of how traumatic trying to be Time Lords was. The possibility of an endless life of adventure is treated with considerable anxiety throughout the story.

Taken in this light the story clearly isn’t about the faded glory of the Brigadier, it’s about the need to integrate the mythic realms of science fiction with the mundane and about the fact that they’re not antagonists at all. But this also gets at the thing I will concede is a problem with the story, which is the same thing that’s a problem with most of the drama in the Davison era - it’s not there. The story desperately needs a real confrontation between the Brigadier and the Doctor instead of a simulacrum of one about the Brigadier’s mental health. It needs the Brigadier to accuse the Doctor of being a danger to everyone around him so that the Doctor can successfully answer the charge and get the Brigadier to accept the moral validity of the Doctor. But these sorts of scenes in which the drama is actually pushed to a breaking point just don’t happen in 1983.

There’s a school of thought, of course, that says that this is a good thing and that contemporary drama likes to hammer home its moral point so as to shred any ambiguity. I’m not wild about this line of reasoning, mostly because I think that the “there’s so much depth to what’s implied” defense really amounts to “but if we imply it we don’t actually have to deal with the consequences of saying it out loud and confronting it.” But if you’re going to give a story a pass on grounds along those lines it’s tough to find a better candidate than Mawdryn Undead. Here we have a story where there’s meaningful emotional subtlety up and down the story - where even the villains aren’t straightforward moustache twirlers and where Mawdryn gets a sympathetic and tragic final line. In an environment like that, at least, there’s room for implication like this.  It’s worth contrasting that to Tat Wood’s attempted praise of the Brigadier’s salute to the Doctor in The Three Doctors, in which he tries to suggest that it’s more powerful because it’s understated. Which is nonsense. I adore The Three Doctors, but nothing about a Baker and Martin script gestures towards understated and subtle emotional resonances.

But here at least there’s room for it. The story is so densely populated with concepts (an actual benefit of Grimwade getting the nightmare brief) that the idea that things are pushed into the subtext doesn’t jar. Especially because it’s a story that treats the audience with such genuine respect (some of the Black Guardian’s lines aside). This is a story playing with timey-wimey plotting a quarter century before Steven Moffat got around to it, and doing so almost casually and incidentally. It’s a story that has absolute faith that its audience is going to stick with it and wait to see how the disparate strands eventually entwine, and one that actually pays it all off as well. The degree to which it assumes that the audience will be primed to accept Turlough simply because he’s clearly an announced event and will thus be read straightforwardly as “the new and untrustworthy companion” from his first scene is a triumph of narrative efficiency - a fantastic example of how to use familiar structures as shorthands to tell stories. Yes, it would be better if it actually did something with its returning companion premise and foregrounded the emotion. But when the series is actually treating its audience with respect and assuming maturity in them it can at least get away with sublimating some of the emotional commentary, if not benefit from it. Indeed, the last time the series was regularly assuming an intelligent audience - the Williams era - was also the one in which it managed to build tremendous sexual chemistry between its two leads without putting a single moment of actual romance on the screen. Mawdryn Undead marks a return to that, and is one of the most overlooked gems of a Doctor Who story in the classic series.

Time Can Be Rewritten 18 (Goth Opera)

The July 1994 launch of the Virgin Missing Adventures line was a strange moment in Doctor Who history. It’s not as though it was the beginning of adding in extra adventures for past Doctors - that was in 1973. But there was an odd dissonance to the basic idea of it. The Virgin books were certainly not exclusively experimental works that tried to push the limits of what Doctor Who could do, but they were certainly well enough known for it. And so the turn towards the Missing Adventures was, for the most part, a bit strange and uncertain. This level of actively rewriting the past had never really been tried before, and to have it done by a company with as much of a reputation for the avant-garde as Virgin seemed pregnant with possibilities, both good and bad.

In practice it rapidly became clear that the Missing Adventures, at least to start, were Virgin’s attempt to better appeal to the so-called “trad” audience who were left cold by their more adventurous New Adventures line. (Or, as Paul Cornell put it in an interview from his “hilariously bitchy” days, to write for the line “you had to abandon any thoughts of originality.”) But the launch of the line was interesting in this regard. July of 1994 had two releases - the debut Missing Adventure Goth Opera by Paul Cornell and a New Adventure called Blood Harvest by Terrence Dicks, with Goth Opera serving as an ostensible sequel to Blood Harvest.

What’s interesting about this is that Terrence Dicks is, for obvious reasons, the very definition of the “traditional” Doctor Who writer, whereas Paul Cornell was one of the leading lights of the New Adventures range. And, of course, they were flipped. Terrence Dicks - who had actually written the Fifth Doctor on television - wrote for the ostensibly weirder line while Cornell wrote for the ostensibly traditional line.

Superficially, at least, the result of this was that both books were fairly traditional, with the Terrence Dicks aesthetic winning out over the weirder one. Certainly Goth Opera has its share of traditional moments, including a chapter that serves mostly to do some of the connective work between the two books. The chapter a beautifully fast-moving bit involving Romana that manages to, in rapid succession, heavily reference The Five Doctors, Carnival of Monsters, and then insert a cameo from Sabalom. It so perfectly nails Dicks’s style that I actually momentarily found myself composing a bit of this post in my head before having to abandon the line of argument I was imagining due to my remembering that it was actually Cornell who’d written this book.

But this is unfair to what Cornell does here. Cornell’s reputation in 1994 may have been for formal experimentation and “difficult” books, but this reputation was, if not misleading, at least only part of the picture. Cornell was, we can safely say at this point, one of the best writers to make their debut in the Virgin line. And more to the point, he was the earliest of them. His first novel was the fourth book in the line, he was the first writer to do a second book, and then he made it to three before any other writers had made it to two solo books.

But the formal experimentation isn’t what set him apart from the other writers around him. Not really. It was there, and he used it well, but in hindsight, looking at his work past the New Adventures, it’s relatively clear that his real talent lay in his character work all along. It’s just that that wasn’t nearly as flashy as his more experimental aspects. And it meant he was better suited to an assignment like this than he looked at first glance.

It’s also the case that the assignment isn’t quite as straightforward as it appears. The idea that this could “fit seamlessly” between Snakedance and Mawdryn Undead is nonsensical in practice. First of all, it’s set in 1993 and relies on the culture of the time. There are references to Morrissey, for instance. The Smiths, on the other hand, had yet to release an album in 1983, nor, at the time of this story’s pseudo-transmission, a single. More broadly, the entire book depends on the existence of goth subculture. It’s a mashup of Doctor Who and Anne Rice, and though Interview with a Vampire had been published by 1983, it wasn’t the big deal it would later be. By 1994, the film version was on its way and Anne Rice was nearing the height of her popularity.

In other words, the book is unmistakably a product of its time. As, of course, all the Missing Adventures are. Similarly, proleptic references to The Five Doctors, Sabalom Glitz, and, oh yes, Blood Harvest make it inevitable that this couldn’t “really” be a 1983 story. But it’s the content that is most significant, and it’s here that it’s worth thinking a bit about what the point of “missing adventures” actually is. I talked about this a little in the Cold Fusion entry, but that was more about why I care about missing adventures and do the Time Can Be Rewritten entries. From an artistic standpoint, what’s the point of a missing adventure?

The answer, to some extent, has to be reparative. Gareth Roberts -  probably the best writer to spend a lot of time on the task of missing adventures - is a useful illustration here. His pseudo-Graham Williams novels are overtly reparative. They’re attempts to show how the Graham Williams era could have done. Similarly, his Hartnell-era novel The Plotters is, in part, a deliberate queering of the Hartnell era - a historical that does the things that, thematically speaking, Hartnell-era historicals were perfectly suited to but that, for cultural and personal reasons, could never have been done at the time.

It’s important to be clear about what this does and doesn’t mean. Yes, missing adventures are inevitably about “fixing” past eras of Doctor Who. But this is a critique of the past, not a rejection of it. You don’t write a novel queering the Hartnell-era historical on its own terms out of anything other than a genuine love for those terms. And indeed, in the same interview in which he snarked about the lack of originality in the Missing Adventures he also noted that the Davison and McCoy eras were the only two that he could really write for because they were the eras he loved.

Another way to look at the Missing Adventures, then, is as attempts to complete the era they ostensibly belong to. As attempts, in other words, to take what the eras do and go further with it, capturing the sense of an era that can only be clear in hindsight. In this regard the claim that they fit “seamlessly” into the gaps of their eras is almost the exact wrong phrase to use. They fit into the era precisely because the past of Doctor Who isn’t seamless to begin with. Any era of Doctor Who that progresses from Arc of Infinity to Snakedance necessarily forgoes seamlessness. Adding these anachronistic texts that understand the era better than it can understand itself does not, obviously remove the seaminess of the era. But it fits. At their best, the Missing Adventures are faithful to the era they are set in precisely by betraying those parts of the era that were already betraying the era.

And so the Davison era, in its high soap days, is the perfect place for Paul Cornell, eventual writer of Casualty, to be plying his craft. Here we have a writer who actually knows how to do soaps inserting a story into a soap era. We have a writer who gets that drama is defined by intensity, not by mimicry of the superficial form of drama, and who puts Nyssa through a properly epic emotional wringer. The idea of having Nyssa turned into a vampire is absolutely phenomenal. Nyssa lends herself to this sort of thing, which is an odd thing for me to say in some ways since I’m usually not the type to go “rah rah let’s put female characters through excessive torture so we can watch them suffer.”

But in Nyssa’s case it makes sense. Her first storyline was about a man wearing her father like a skin-suit and exterminating her entire race, and her reaction was the single biggest keeping of a stiff upper lip in Doctor Who history. Yes, as I’ve said, there needed to be some sort of later reaction in a subsequent Master story, but Nyssa’s character arc is, basically, that absolutely terrible things happen to her and she nobly endures them and then kicks ass. Nyssa is Doctor Who’s version of Chuck Norris. In a velvet dress.

So the idea of making Nyssa into a vampire is perfect. It’s exactly the sort of plotline the character deserves. She spends virtually the entire book simultaneously as an active character who does things and having absolutely terrible things happen to her. Other than a somewhat unfortunate bit in which she apparently loses her cognitive function and decides trusting vampiric lords is a good idea because they’re noble so they must be good (I’d ask if she was asleep during Arc of Infinity, except frankly, who could blame her), she’s absolutely on fire in this book largely because the book is willing to actually push her character instead of blandly pretend to push it.

The Doctor does similarly well. The main antagonist in the story, Ruath, is a perfect sort of villain for Davison’s Doctor - someone he left behind who, in their own view at least, has suffered for it. In the aftermath of Adric this cuts nicely, and it sets up a solid ending in which the Doctor’s desire to try to let everyone save themselves and give everyone a chance is undercut by Nyssa spacing Ruath and the Doctor grimly admitting she was right.

As for Tegan... well, if nothing else, the image of Tegan having true faith in the words of Primo Levi is very possibly the most unintentionally hilarious thing I’ve read in some time.

But all of this works in no small part because it’s wholly consistent with how the Davison era is anyway. This was an era that was trying to create soap opera like storylines for characters and built a TARDIS cast that was suited to emotional storytelling. Davison serves as the flawed patriarch, Tegan is Doctor Who’s attempt at Hilda Ogden (this being Doctor Who, a middle class Hilda Ogden), and Nyssa is a phenomenal soap character, as discussed. The era really does set the pieces out for the sort of thing that Paul Cornell does well. It just has an unsettling tendency to abandon them in favor of faffing about with Omega or something equally dumb.

There’s a second aspect to Goth Opera that needs to be commented on, which is that Cornell goes to some length to work in an overt attack over the issue of satanic ritual abuse. This is an upsettingly dark period in the history of moral panics and psychology. In the mid-80s there was a fervor about the possibility that satanic cults were sexually abusing children as part of their rituals. They weren’t, in no small part because satanic cults barely exist as a phenomenon in the first place, but this didn’t stop the ensuing moral panic.

This is also not something that could have been commented on in 1983, in no small part because 1983 was roughly ground zero in the issues. Whereas by 1993 the tide of public opinion had mostly shifted and the consensus, not universally held, was that satanic ritual abuse didn’t happen. But in this case the shift is subtler. Whereas doing  story steeped in goth culture set in 1983 is winkingly proleptic - goth culture existed in 1983 but was largely invisible to the mainstream - doing one about ritual satanic abuse is a different sort of commentary.

The reason is that even if the ritual satanic abuse scandal had been shifted a decade in the past so that by 1983 it was widely known to be a hoax, the John Nathan-Turner of 1983 would never have touched it. It’s not fair to say that John Nathan-Turner was opposed to political Doctor Who - he did, after all, oversee Saward’s fumbling efforts at it in Season Twenty-Two and the Cartmel era. But it’s equally true that Doctor Who in his first three and really four seasons in charge was maddeningly apolitical. And as I’ve said before, to be apolitical is to be in support of those in power.

Cornell, on the other hand, is firmly a post-Cartmel Doctor Who writer who is thoroughly invested in the overtly political work that characterizes the classic series’ last and greatest days. And so to write a Davison story that is ahead of its time on a Davison-era political issue is, in this regard, a particularly pointed reparation of the era.

With Spare Parts we talked about the way in which it seemed to suggest an era that almost happened. (Indeed, I can find at least some references to Platt having a script co-authored with Jeremy Bentham rejected for Season 20, showing just how narrow the gap between Spare Parts and reality was.) Here, however, we have a slightly different issue. Goth Opera could never have worked in 1983. It doesn’t even pretend to. Instead, it demonstrates the way in which even in this period in which Doctor Who is ostensibly a terminal decline that it won’t pull out of in time things are being done that are unmistakably progress for the future.

For all its faults, the Davison era lays crucial groundwork for what Doctor Who eventually becomes. It is difficult to imagine this book working in any era of Doctor Who prior to 1983. That, in and of itself, is an important statement of faith in the Davison era. Whatever its faults - and let’s be honest, even the much-vaunted Hinchcliffe era had tangible faults and face-palmingly bad stories - it is manifestly the case that it developed the show in ways that were crucial to its survival. Yes, we all know what goes wrong at the end of Season 21. And we’re all capable of seeing the antecedents of that all the way back into Season 18. But none of that means that the Davison era didn’t, on the whole, work. It made Paul Cornell’s work possible within the context of Doctor Who. That, by any reasonable measure, is working.

The Void Beyond The Mind (Snakedance)

"I'm sorry, Ms. Jovanka, but the passengers have been
complaining that instead of directing them to the toilets
you send them to a chamber occupied by a horrifying snake
god. We're going to have to let you go."

It’s January 18, 1983. You can’t hurry Phil Collins off the number one spot, but given time Men at Work dispatch him, replacing him with “Down Under.” The lower portions of the charts are somewhat more optimistic, with Madness’s “Our House” and Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy” both appearing. OK, optimistic might be selling that one a little too strong. But both are, at least, wholly valid guilty pleasures.

In real news, Klaus Barbie, who represents what is possibly the biggest disparity between quality of name and quality of human being in history, is arrested in Bolivia. And hey, I totally just found a Wikipedia page for years in history that’s specific to the UK, so that’s useful. Between the end of Arc of Infinity and this story the police manage to shoot a perfectly innocent man named Stephen Waldorf, seriously injuring him. The police officers involved are eventually cleared of attempted murder despite, having shot Waldorf five times out of the thirteen times they’d fired at him, holding a gun to his head and calling him a cocksucker before finding out that they were out of ammo and just pistol whipping him a bunch. Oops. In cheerier news, Breakfast Time debuts on the BBC, their first attempt at a morning program. The first broadcast passes without anybody being shot or called a cocksucker.

Snakedance, I can vouch first hand, is one of those bits of Doctor Who that properly gets into your head and unnerves you. I’ll admit to a longstanding distaste for mind control plots, simply because I tend to just not like stories in which people are out of character - I tend to have a similar lack of enthusiasm for body swap plots and the like. But as mind control plots go, Tegan’s possession in this story is particularly creepy and memorable. And though the rubber snakes in it are still not great the image of snake tattoos that crawl off of your flesh are downright fabulous.

It is, in that regard, one of what, as an adult, I recognize as perfect pieces of childhood Doctor Who - a story that is remembered vividly without being loved (and, of course, without being hated as well). Though it’s by no means universally the case that these are the stories that then grow into beloved classics in adulthood, they’re certainly prime candidates for it. And Snakedance is certainly an example of this. As a child, it gets in your head. As an adult, you see why it got in your head in ways that make it even more compelling.

Much of Snakedance involves taking conventions of Doctor Who and looking at them from slightly oblique angles. (A suitable hat tip here to Lawrence Miles, whose analysis of the story in About Time underpins much of this) The story essentially takes what The Daemons tried and almost but not quite succeeded at and inverts it. The point of The Daemons was, ostensibly at least, that the Doctor was acting against type - that the character who we would usually expect to be haranguing superstitious people was instead running around talking about how they can’t open the crypt on Beltane. What Letts was trying to go for there was to make the Doctor seem at least partially unreliable or suspicious. It doesn’t quite work, simply because using Jon Pertwee’s Doctor as an unreliable character can’t possibly work, but the idea is sensible and a variation on what the show frequently does, namely have the Doctor run around trying to convince everyone of terrible danger while nobody listens to him.

On the surface, at least, Snakedance appears to be a fairly standard execution of the trope that The Daemons is trying to play with - the Doctor runs around trying to convince everyone that there’s terrible danger and nobody believes him. But under the hood there are some subtle changes. First of all, Manussa is, as Miles and Wood point out, unusually well developed as alien planets go. The script goes out of its way to give it little bits of character and color, and to make it feel like it has real history. Second of all, everyone’s performance is tuned in particular ways. Davison plays the part with just a little more franticness so that we can see better than usual why people think he’s crazy. Wheras the Mannusans get outfitted with the set of tricks that smart people in science fiction get - they’re far advanced beyond believing in the superstitious mythology of the ancient past. So a bunch of rationalists who act the way smart people in science fiction are supposed to are taking on the Doctor, who is acting just a little crazier than usual.

The third change, and this, as Miles points out, is the kicker, is that the monster isn’t a familiar part of mythology that turns out to have a Doctor Who explanation, it’s a known Doctor Who monster who turns out to be a mythological figure. The combination means that we have a sort of double vision with regards to the plot. On the one hand we can see better than usual why the Doctor is mistrusted on the planet. On the other hand, our knowledge and the Doctor’s knowledge coincide very well for this story. We know the Doctor is right, and we know a fair amount about the Mara. But we don’t understand Manussa as a culture quite - we learn about it at the same speed the Doctor does. And so we’re left seeing the Doctor’s arrogance and naiveté while simultaneously knowing that he’s right.

Much is made of the way in which the Season Twenty has a recurring villain in every story - though to be fair, as I noted, it’s actually every story from Earthshock through Warriors of the Deep that does that, not just Season Twenty. But if Season Twenty is read as an active effort to engage with the series’ past, this, at least, is an example of how to do that right - a story where the past history of Doctor Who is used to do a story that couldn’t be told without it. It’s the fact that we as viewers are already familiar with the Mara that provides the counterweight to the way in which the Doctor is made to seem hysterical and crazed. The viewers don’t just have to trust that he’s not, a la The Daemons. The fact that this is a known Doctor Who monster means that the viewers know the Doctor is right, which frees the story up to be almost completely unrepentant in making him look wrong. (Though the one real moment it gives him counter to that, the figuring out of the Six Faces of Delusion mask, is absolutely delightful.)

This allows Snakedance to be something no previous story has ever really managed to be: a character piece for the Doctor. Not a thematic commentary on the Doctor - those are a dime a dozen. But a story in which the Doctor’s character - who he is and how he acts - is central to the resolution of the story. Not surprisingly given that they share an overt Buddhist inclination it’s the Pertwee era that works best to compare this to, most obviously Planet of the Spiders. Not because of the obvious points of similarity like magic blue crystals, but because both stories work on a structure whereby the Doctor’s attempts to defeat the villain throughout the story are fundamentally wrongheaded even though they’re unquestionably right.

But again, where Planet of Spiders did this in a superficial way, eventually inventing a rather glib explanation about “greed for knowledge” to explain why the Doctor was doing it wrong, Snakedance manages to build it into the character. Davison’s Doctor is intensely sympathetic, but is also typically written with a sort of exasperated impatience. By removing Tom Baker’s overt bluster and scene-stealing from the role Davison, in an odd way, makes the Doctor even more arrogant by opening up a larger gap between what he does and how he acts. Combined with Saward’s addiction for “I’ll explain later” as a line of dialogue this makes Davison a Doctor with something approaching a real flaw.

And, of course, the crowning element here is Adric’s death, coming as it does in part out of the Doctor’s ineffectual standing up to the Cybermen (followed by his resorting to brute force). The sort of ineffective bluster that the Doctor spends the majority of this story conducting is, in other words, recognizable to the audience a genuine failing on his part. But, crucially, and this is what makes Davison’s Doctor such a good character, it’s also still part and parcel of why we love the Doctor. Which is the heart of what’s played on in Snakedance. We’re on the Doctor’s side. We want everyone to listen to him. But the nature of the story is that what he’s doing just isn’t going to work.

Out of all of this Bailey is able to do what he couldn’t in Kinda, which is to make the Buddhist aspect of the story sensible. However much the Mara parallels the devil, and as we talked about in the entry for Kinda it was inevitable that it would, here the Doctor beats it the way he should have back in Kinda - by meditating and acknowledging but refusing to yield to it. Thus the Doctor wins not through bluster but by perseverance. It’s exactly how a story like this is supposed to work - a much stronger execution of the approach than Kinda - and, more to the point, done with more ambition. Making Tegan into the vehicle of a character arc is, frankly, somewhat easier than doing it with the Doctor, particularly less than two years after Tom Baker left the part.

That’s not to say that the story is flawless. It illustrates better than any story to date why ditching the sonic screwdriver was a mistake with a third episode in which the Doctor is locked up for the entire thing. Yes, he still manages to find things to do by solving mysteries and putting together pieces of plot, but it amounts to a flagrant effort to keep the Doctor from getting too close to actually resolving the plot before the big climax. This is the sort of laziness that the removal of the sonic screwdriver overtly encourages. (And to whichever commenter suggested that a solution to this would be to tell writers to stop using tricks like that, you are, I think, underestimating the temptation to find ways of stopping writers from doing dumb things in the first place. In effect giving the Doctor a sonic screwdriver is telling writers not to lock him in prison cells for an entire episode. Just like taking it away is giving a green light to these kinds of stalling tactics.)

And Nyssa continues her staggering run as the best companion that nobody knows what to do with. To date, in her eleven stories as a companion, she’s been stuck in the TARDIS all or virtually all story three times, and introduced over halfway through another time, and possessed once. This time she gets to do things, but it’s mostly straightforward “follow the Doctor around” duty of the most banal sort.

This gets at another problem that the Nathan-Turner era is increasingly running into, which is an overt aversion to competence. It’s telling that of the three companions who came into Season Nineteen the first two that Nathan-Turner gets rid of are the two who are capable of doing more than getting in trouble and complaining loudly. This is not a knock against Tegan, who I largely like as a character, but the degree to which the show is having to actively keep its characters from being too competent is troubling. In many ways Snakedance is not the real offender here - I should have railed against this back in  Arc of Infinity, which has an entire plot thread that depends on the Time Lords themselves being complete idiots, but the real problem is how entrenched it’s becoming in the Nathan-Turner era and how much trouble it has with characters who are actually competent. Nyssa is the last gasp of the idea that companions might be in some way competent or useful in their own right. Instead Nathan-Turner decides that he prefers companions who are “feisty.” And so near to the end of her tenure it’s just painful to see her underused like this, particularly in a story where her role has apparently been bolstered on her request. (As it happens, I've banked entries such that I've written both Mawdryn Undead and Terminus before this posted, and know that I don't talk that much more about Nyssa, so let's use this as her de facto farewell post. In her next story she takes stupid pills in a desperate attempt to draw out the Mawdryn plot. Then she gets to be a whimpering leper in a story that is ostensibly about her. Then she's gone. Pathetic, but in no way the fault of Sarah Sutton, who deserved so much better.)

But on the whole it’s the good side of the John Nathan-Turner era that shows up over these two weeks. A story that befits the occasion of the anniversary. Arc of Infinity is an ominous harbinger of how things are going go terribly, terribly wrong. But on the whole, they haven’t yet.

You Ask Me To Appreciate It? (Arc of Infinity)

So that's what Stephen Thorne looks like.

It’s January 3rd, 1983. Renee and Renato are at number one with “Save Your Love,” which is... a song. Phil Collins removes it from number one in the second week of this story with “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Culture Club, Men at Work, Madness, Malcom McLaren and the World’s Famous Supreme Team, and David Bowie and Bing Crosby also chart.

In real news, ooh, we get to do a big wrap-up since last time, don’t we. OK. So there’s the Falklands, obviously. Canada fully patriates its constitution and achieves full political independence from the UK. Ronald Reagan addresses a joint session fo the British Parliament. There’s a World Cup. England does well in its first group stage, then manages a series of two 0-0 draws in a second group stage, knocking it out of the tournament. The Equal Rights Amendment fails, to the delight of Phyllis Schlafly, who is basically the American version of Mary Whitehouse. Like all American adaptations of British source texts, she is bigger, louder, and stupider. The queen’s bodyguard, Michael Trestrail, resigns over excessive use of male prostitutes. The first lethal injection is carried out in Texas, the first emoticons are posted, and Time Magazine’s Man of the Year is the computer.

Also, at this particular moment in time I am exactly one hundred and sixteen days old, and this is the first episode of Doctor Who to air in a world I exist in. So I guess this is all my fault. Really, really sorry.

I talked, last time we did a television story, about the way in which it is at times helpful to watch Doctor Who without remembering actively that there is such a thing as a bad story. And that’s true to an extent. But another aspect of childhood watching of Doctor Who - or of any television series, really - is that rubbish episodes pass you by forgettably. Time-Flight, for all its flaws, was oddly memorable. Arc of Infinity, on the other hand? Here are my childhood memories of Arc of Infinity: it had Time Lords, it brought Omega back, and it had Colin Baker being as horribly unpleasant as I assumed his eventual Doctor would be. I remembered virtually nothing else about it. This, as it happens, is a very bad sign. While not every story that fails to make an impression as a kid is, in fact, wretched it is striking just how often a failure to remember a story at all on my part coincides with it being a truly and epically awful one.

To be fair, of the things I did remember, I was not quite right about any of them. My initial dislike of Colin Baker was motivated purely by my parents badmouthing him on the grounds of his strangling Peri in The Twin Dilemma. In truth the character improved and was not as wretched as Commander Maxil, and it is by now clear that the problem with the character was not, in fact, Baker himself. On the other hand, good lord, Maxil is a wretched character. As for the Time Lords and Omega, well, we’ll get there.

But other than that, this story left very little impression on me on first watching. Which means that whereas I could attempt a redemptive reading on Time Fight, which I’d had a vague sense of it having been interesting, and spent much of the time watching it going  “oh, yes, I remember this bit” in a vaguely satisfied way despite its glaring flaws, here I found myself with very few options. Arc of Infinity isn't even bad for interesting reasons. It's just bad. I said one ought do a redemptive reading if one can. But I can't. I just can't.

It is, at least, and this is about the extent of the defense I can muster, not awful in the way that Earthshock is awful. It’s not a betrayal of moral principles underpinning Doctor Who or anything like that. It’s just thoroughly misconceived and badly done in a way that it is difficult to even take seriously.

There was an interview with Gareth Roberts a few months back in Doctor Who Magazine in which he suggested that there are no stories in the classic series that couldn’t be saved by a good rewrite, using this as his limit case scenario - he suggested that even this story could have been saved by a Russell T. Davies rewrite and that the audience would be crying for Omega at the end. (Roberts tends to single out this story for particular criticism, and I suspect it of being his all-time least favorite Doctor Who story.) Which gets at about the one interesting thing I can think of to focus on with Arc of Infinity, so let's do it. Simply put, is there anything that is even remotely a good idea here? Not being one for suspense, I'll suggest that the answer is "yes, but barely."

Much like Time-Flight before it we have a case of the program constructing what is, if nothing else, a unique set of genre tropes. The Amsterdam sections through the first three episodes are firmly in an exploitation horror genre about the terrible things that happen to tourists abroad - I think Hostel is roughly the most recent movie of significance to mine this territory, though horror isn’t really my bag, genre-wise, so I may be missing something obvious. The Gallifrey sections are palace intrigue. And then there’s a big cosmic events gloss on the whole thing that’s all very mythic sci-fi. These three things do not go together. And yet here they are, all piled on top of one another.

The thing is, this is what Doctor Who does. This is the very definition of what the program is for, at least on the surface. But this raises a question - why put those three things together? What is the point of that juxtaposition? Or, more broadly, what’s the point of using juxtaposition in the first place in Doctor Who? Because this story seems to demonstrate that it’s not simply to put things together for the sake of it. In 1983 it can’t be anymore - everything, as we saw last time, is doing that. The mere spectacle of juxtaposition doesn’t cut it. So what does Doctor Who bring to juxtaposition?

The easiest way to answer that, of course, is to turn to the past. Which is exactly what Arc of Infinity does. To kick off the big 20th Anniversary celebration it goes and begins mining the series past. Which, again, isn’t the wrong decision. The 20th anniversary is a perfect occasion to do the “here is what the program was and here is why that is still relevant today” moment. The problem is that Arc of Infinity gets it appallingly wrong. It thinks that the thing Doctor Who brings to the work of juxtaposing genres is Doctor Who itself. That the value of Doctor Who is that it’s an effective frame for genre juxtaposition, so that’s its point. So to bring three totally disparate genres together all you do is layer on a big, fat slathering of Doctor Who.

Whereas the position of this blog, of course, is that the thing Doctor Who brings to genre juxtaposition is alchemy. And in Arc of Infinity, that, above all else, is exactly what’s required. Specifically the principle of “as above, so below.” The reason you peg together a mundane horror genre like “terrible things happen to tourists in Amsterdam” with the absurd pretension of a phrase like “the arc of infinity” is to show a fundamental equivalence between them. You do the vast shifts of universes and ancient Gallifreyan history alongside tourist horror in order to show that the stories, at every level of the structure, are identical. You’re going for The Ribos Operation here. That is straightforwardly the correct choice.

So what the story needs, more than anything in the world, is a dramatic hook that allows  its three narrative levels to function in parallel. There needs to be something that operates similarly in the tourist horror, the political intrigue, and the basic cosmic arc of the universe. You can take your pick on what. It barely matters, just so long as there’s something. The one that springs to mind for me as an obvious choice, at least, is the callousness of deflected responsibility. Because that’s at least a theme that’s just about there at every point in the story already. At the bottom of the totem pole you have the lack of interest or concern in Colin’s fate on the part of authorities who see him as just another careless tourist. On Gallifrey you have the callous willingness to let the Doctor die simply because it’s more convenient than other options. And on the grand scale you have the basic failure of the Time Lords to ever take responsibility for the sacrifices involved in their own creation vis-a-vis the abandoned Omega. And the way you end it is by having the people at the bottom of the chain finally take some responsibility for the situation at the top. You have the characters at the Amsterdam end of the story stepping up and doing what nobody else in the universe has been willing to do.

What you don’t do is just anchor every piece of the story on nostalgia for its own sake. Actually, no, let’s be fair. The Amsterdam section isn’t based on nostalgia. Its entire emotional hook is based on Tegan asserting that some dude who gets a grand total of twenty-one lines before being possessed is her favorite cousin. So that one is more emotional hook by fiat. The other two plotlines? The Gallifreyan politics matter purely because they’re Gallifreyan politics, and the overall cosmic scheme of things matters entirely because it’s Omega behind it.

Let’s be clear here. I’m not saying these things matter for the same reasons that Gallifrey and Omega mattered in the past. I’m saying they matter purely because they are Gallifrey and Omega. And that’s in many ways the most obnoxious problem with this story. I’m not going to bitch about dense continuity. I love references to past stories. The problem here is that there’s not any actual references. I mean, just look at the scene where Omega’s backstory is explained so that viewers know who he is and why they care.

Oh right. There isn’t one. There’s one line from Chancellor Hedin about him, and that’s it. It’s difficult to stress just how idiotic this is. This is a character who has appeared once before in the series, a full decade prior to this story. Yes, that story re-aired a little over a year ago on BBC2, but that is not sufficient to just drop him in and expect that anyone in the audience is going to care. The show spends more time doing exposition dumps to help people that might have missed the Monday episode get up to speed with the Tuesday episode than it does catching up viewers who might have missed the episode that aired over a year ago on a different channel. And the fact that it’s Omega is the only thing that holds this part of the story together. One of the major throughlines of the story is “who is this mysterious figure trying to use the Doctor to break into our universe.” The answer isn’t just underwhelming, it’s pointless.

And the problem isn’t that the answer is Omega. A story bringing Omega back makes, if not perfect sense, at least some sense. But they didn’t bring Omega back. Omega was the original sin of the god-like Time Lords - the cast out inversion of all that the Doctor and his people were. Omega was an unthinkable menace that negated the very fabric of Doctor Who. This is just a pub quiz answer - “who was the masked villain in The Three Doctors?”

The same problem applies to the Time Lords, brought back here only in their most abstract sketch of a form. They wear the right robes, have the right names and positions, talk about the right things like the Matrix. But not only are these not the Time Lords of The Deadly Assassin, they’re not even the Time Lords of The Invasion of Time. What is the Matrix in this story? What is a biodata extract? They’re nothing more than Macguffins with familiar sounding names. The show is trusting absolutely that setting a story on what they call Gallifrey will lend it dramatic weight, but nobody involved in this has even begun to think about what that means. Much like the death of Adric, this isn’t drama, it’s the desiccated corpse of drama. The vaguest shell made to look like drama but with no actual thought to what is going on or what reasons there might be to care about it. There’s no concept to Gallifrey. It’s just a set of funny robes assumed to matter intrinsically. And it doesn’t. It can’t. Not like that.


There’s a line of critique against Monty Python’s musical Spamalot - really just Eric Idle’s musical - that amounts to the accusation that a troupe whose comedy was once about transgression and surprise now amounts to nothing more than delivering lines that the entire audience has memorized and calling it comedy. Here we have Doctor Who doing the same thing, celebrating the abstract form of the past with no attention to what the past actually was.

Or more basically, this is the problem with the faux-drama of Earthshock extrapolated out to the entirety of the series. In Earthshock, at least, there was an attempt to provide the abstract shell of other things. Doctor Who was providing ersatz drama and ersatz action. But here we have that approach taken to its logical and horrific end: Doctor Who is now providing ersatz Doctor Who. It's no longer a show that's valuable for what it can do. It’s not even valuable for what it once did. It’s valuable, apparently, amounts to nothing more than its ability to quote itself without remembering what it was it meant.

Happy anniversary.