Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 29 (Max Headroom, Tripods)

So what went wrong? I mean, the flaws are obvious enough in The Twin Dilemma. And it's easy enough to pin the blame. But what's the alternative? Throughout the Davison era, even when it was having its biggest disasters, it was at least relatively clear what the good parts of the show were. They may have frequently struggled to break through, but we could usually tell what good Doctor Who was supposed to look like. But the highlights of the Colin Baker eras, though existent, are so few and far between that it's difficult to say what they should have done. For a long time the conventional wisdom was "not cast Colin Baker" or "have a different concept of the Doctor," but as we'll see Big Finish proves that Baker's Doctor could have worked. Still, the advance in storytelling techniques over the nearly 30 years since this era aired mean that we can't just say "they should have done what Big Finish did." The question is what Doctor Who in 1985-86 should have looked like. 

The usual technique would be to look at what else was going on in TV sci-fi in Britain. But we have slim pickings for this era, so in this case that becomes where we start. Or, rather, in the difference between them.

See, Doctor Who has always existed in a liminal space between children’s television and science fiction. This may seem a bit of a strange claim given the rather obvious fact that there’s a good deal of children’s television is science fiction, but it’s important to realize that these are two distinct traditions with a subtle but significant philosophical difference at their heart, and that Doctor Who has always had to do at least some active work to bridge them.

If one were to make a horrific overgeneralization about children’s fiction then one of the least inaccurate ones available would be to observe that children’s literature tends to focus thematically on the existence of a threshold between two worlds, whether they be mundane and fantastic or otherwise. The logic of this is not difficult to figure out - it’s as sensible a metaphor for coming of age as exists. But at the heart of this approach is the fact that a children’s story tends to be about obtaining some degree of mastery and sense over the strange second world. Put another way, the basic arc of children’s fiction is that it makes the strange familiar.

Science fiction, on the other hand, when considered as a genre instead of as an iconography, does almost the exact opposite. Science fiction’s main trick is to use the expanded possibilities of its iconography to reflect our own world back at us from an odd angle. So science fiction goes not for making the strange familiar, but for making the familiar strange.

These ideas are not impossible to reconcile, not least because science fiction can serve equally as a vague iconography that is easily made familiar, and because children’s literature often involves making the world that its protagonist starts in strange along wiht making the new world familiar. But there is a difference in approach here, and it’s well illustrated by looking at the two of the major bits of British science fiction television going around these days.

In one corner we have Max Headroom, which, prior to being a short-lived but well-remembered American sci-fi series in the late 1980s was an hourlong TV movie on Channel 4 in the mid-80s. Max Headroom is an exceedingly early example of cyberpunk, a short-lived and hugely influential subgenre of science fiction that took the possibilities of technological progress extremely seriously while completely rejecting the idea that they would be connected to social progress. Focusing particularly on the rise of computers and information technology, cyberpunk tended to be at once high-tech and grungy. (Another way to phrase this is that the rest of the world abruptly realized Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard existed.)

In practice, though, the original Max Headroom, entitled Max Headroom: 20 Minutes into the Future, which barely features Max Headroom at all, is basically an attempt to do a television version of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. The giveaway is the sequence in which we see someone explode from watching TV commercials, but the whole thing has similar themes. Both are centered on the physicality of the media - a sensible enough extension of the interminable debate about sex and violence, given that both sex and violence are intensely visceral acts. They imagine a world in which, essentially, media has won - where sexual extremity and extreme violence are widespread aspects of society, and where the mass media itself has gained more physical and visceral aspects. And they end up creating a sort of oddly double-edged world - a “cool” dystopia  that is at once nightmarish and oddly sexy.

In the case of Max Headroom, this seems exceedingly deliberate. Watching the pilot episode one is struck by the difficulty that there’s very little of the title character in it, and he’s barely relevant to the plot. But that’s because the TV movie isn’t actually his debut. He was originally the host of a music video programming block on Channel 4, and was wildly popular, hence the idea to make an origin story. And even between his origin story and being picked up as a TV series in America he made appearances here and there in the popular culture. In other words, For all its dystopic trappings, it’s clear that everyone involved in Max Headroom knew that their job was to make a character everyone was going to think was cool.

(Indeed, if you want to be one of those people who insists that only televised Doctor Who is canonical then it is notable that Max Headroom is canonical. Just ask anybody who was watching The Horror of Fang Rock in Chicago in 1987.)

Implicit in this fact that any of this worked is the fact that we have clearly, in the background, made the switch to where postmodernism is completely mainstream. That’s not to say the point where postmodern things can be popular, which has been true at least since David Bowie, but rather the point where the postmodern doesn’t need any justification or explanation and can simply stride calmly onto the public scene without anyone noticing. (If you really want to dial it in, the switch is somewhere between this entry and The Cleopatras.) Suddenly the blending of different codes of reference and commentary on those codes of reference becomes something everyone can do.

Or, at least, everyone who’s grown up. The rise of postmodernism left children’s media relatively untouched, and to some extent continues to do so. This is on the one hand not surprising. There is an earnestness to children’s media that cuts against postmodernism. And so in some ways nothing illustrates the gap that was opening up than comparing the BBC’s only non-Doctor Who sci-fi program in 1984 with Max Headroom. That program, of course, is Tripods.

Tripods, I should stress, is not a bad show. Indeed, one can fairly reasonably call it timeless, in that its look, feel, and storytelling are almost but not quite impossible to distinguish from children’s television for years on either side of it. It is an earnest action-adventure show about plucky youths and Orwellian mind control that, production values aside, could have fit into the 1970s or the 1990s.

That’s not to say that Tripods is an overly simple show. It does a really nifty job of starting with a very pastoral view of the world and steadily making it a source of horror. It’s a clever inversion, particularly given the fact that the idyllic pastoral world is, as a concept, intimately connected to idealizations of childhood. It’s quite a good show, and clever. The fact that it’s a fairly linear adaptation of books means that the transformation it makes between seasons is big and striking. One can absolutely understand why this was popular.

But look at the last time we looked at children’s drama (as opposed to The Adventure Game), which was Children of the Stones. There what was striking was how astonishingly complex and intricate the children’s show was. And if I’d compressed entries a little and done it alongside an adult sci-fi show, namely Survivors, what that entry would have been talking about would have been just how much more sophisticated the supposed children’s show is.

Yes, this is a matter of selection bias - had I compared The Tomorrow People with Survivors the results would have been different. The big difference is that by 1985 Tripods was the only other piece of science fiction on the BBC besides Doctor Who, and so there’s not any selection bias to be had anymore. There’s just the uncomfortable gap that’s visibly opening up between what children’s science fiction can do and what adult science fiction can do.

And this gap poses real problems for Doctor Who because, as I said, it has a foot in both worlds. On the one hand, Doctor Who has always been firmly science fiction with a clear mandate for estrangement. It’s supposed to be a show about making its audience uncomfortable. On the other hand, its basic iconography is, as we’ve discussed, steeped in a vast history of children’s literature. And this has always been reflected in its somewhat odd audience. It’s not a children’s show, nor is it a family show inasmuch as that term is defined as “a children’s show adults don’t hate to watch.” It’s a show that functions not just satisfyingly for both children and adults but independently for each population.

For much of its run this isn’t that hard a balance to strike. The fact that adults like good children’s television is well documented, and Doctor Who’s tricks in terms of actively bridging the gap are relatively narrow - it mostly comes down to the fact that melodrama is a really effective way to suture the two audiences together. But around this period the gap starts to become very big. And this is something we’re going to see with troubling vividness in the next season.

Simply put, on the one hand Doctor Who’s cultural reputation is as a show for children. This is a problem for it in two ways. First of all, it may be thought of as being for children, but a substantial number of the people writing for it want it to be a serious and often satirical drama. This eventually leads down a rabbit hole of perversity when you have serious actors agreeing to appear in Revelation of the Daleks for their children. Second of all, the program’s self-justification increasingly hinges on its fans, with stars and the producer alike milking the convention circuit. When these fans are easily caricatured as grown men who are obsessed with a children’s program then you find yourself facing a bit of a PR problem.

On the other hand, the fact of the matter is that the next two seasons are going to work far better when they try to work for adults than when they do for children. Doctor Who may be seen as a children’s program, but that’s a misperception. It’s more than that. It’s telling that in some accounts it was the cancellation of Tripods that justified bringing Doctor Who back. Because watching them, the two shows aren’t even trying for the same audience. And the “for children” bits of the next season are by and large the most cringeworthy, which is comparatively terrifying.

But equally, Doctor Who trying to be grown up is, if not cringeworthy, at least a bit embarrassing. In many ways the grotesque failures of The Twin Dilemma come from the series making a hash of an attempt at adult drama. This whole “make the Doctor abrasive and mellow him out” idea, even if taken seriously (and it is, I’ll grant, the most sympathetic reading of the trainwreck), runs into the problem that you’re trying to do angst-based character drama about a man wearing a willfully tasteless costume that was apparently designed to serve as an Edwardian Hawaiian shirt and is fighting giant slugs with deely boppers on their heads.

To put it another way, one of the problems the show is having in this period is that its gestures towards children and its gestures towards adults are becoming completely separate. But, crucially, so was the culture at large. Doctor Who is in a bizarre position of, between its ambitions and the expectations of it, trying to compete simultaneously with Max Headroom and Tripods. And it fails spectacularly.

Or, rather, it doesn’t fail because it doesn’t bother to try or to recognize that this is what it's supposed to do. More than anything what the show needed right now was someone to come at it with a bit of distance and see a structural issue like this. The current production team has been around for three years, and, more troublingly, this is for Saward his second reinvention of the show and for Nathan-Turner his third. It barely matters how good you are at that point - you’re almost certainly too close to the show to be able to see what the show needs to change. When you’re reinventing your own reinvention you run into the basic and unavoidable problem that all of the flaws you’re reacting against are ones you introduced, and thus ones you’re the least likely person to be able to see.

The reality is that this needed to be when Saward and Nathan-Turner stepped aside, leaving Doctor Who’s reinvention for the mid-80s to people with fresh ideas. If they had the Nathan-Turner era would be remembered at least as well as the Letts era. For all that I pummelled them during the Davison era the fact of the matter is that the slow motion disaster that's going to unfold over the next two months of the blog looms unfairly over the rest of their era. It's been pretty good for the past four seasons.

But four years on a program and two reinventions is a long time, and after it the fact is that one probably ought move on. But it seems as though nobody seriously considered this. Nathan-Turner talked a little bit in interviews in the early 80s about wanting to move along after another year or so, but nothing came of it. And so you had a program that tried to keep one foot in two very different traditions without any real awareness of how they were diverging. The problem isn’t even that Saward and Nathan-Turner are out of ideas. It’s that the ideas they have are solutions to problems that don’t exist and they seem to genuinely not see the problems that do exist. They're trying to recapture the nostalgic past of the show while television is pulling itself apart around them. If ever there was a moment in Doctor Who's history where "sod the past, whatever you do come up with something new" was a good idea, it was 1985.

Equally, though, they have the misfortune of facing what is a genuinely hard problem in terms of coming up with something new. It would take a very, very good writer to figure out how to bridge the widening gap at the heart of what Doctor Who was. Even Robert Holmes, fresh from a classic, doesn’t have the answer this time, as we'll see. It’s easy to criticize the decisions made in the mid-80s and to pick over the gossip and assign the blame. What’s harder is coming up with a realistic model of a show that can look like a stablemate to both of these shows that doesn’t rely on production and writing techniques from decades in the future. Just because the production team failed spectacularly doesn’t mean that the problem of how to make good Doctor Who in 1985 and 1986 was easy in the least.

Does It Offend You? (The Twin Dilemma)

What do you tell a companion with two black eyes?

It’s March 22nd, 1984. Lionel Richie is at number one with “Hello,” and remains so for the whole of this story. Sade, Culture Club, Bananarama, and Depeche Mode also chart, along with, at number two for the second week of this story, the Weather Girls with “It’s Raining Men.” Hallelujah. In real news, the heyday of the Satanic ritual abuse panic begins in sync with the Colin Baker era as teachers at the McMartin Preschool are falsely accused of it. Speaking of Satanic ritual abuse, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Starlight Express opens in London.

While on television, we go from the supposed best Doctor Who story ever to the supposed worst. Unlike The Caves of Androzani, The Twin Dilemma made it as the worst story for two polls running. On basic quality, this might not be quite fair. It's very bad, but as a matter of competent production and provision of a modicum of entertainment it's not demonstrably worse than many others. If you were to show someone a selection of this, Warriors of the Deep, The Horns of Nimon, Mark of the Rani, and The Monster of Peladon and ask them to pick the worst of them I don’t think you’d see this one picked in particular excess to the others. There are actually moments of it that border on the compelling. I mean, this is praising with faint damnation, but it’s still worth noting that, taken on its own and out of context, and judged purely on its storytelling merits, this is merely among the worst stories ever made, but it's not clear that it's the worst story ever by any means.

But, of course, when have we ever taken things out of context here? Yes, the biggest problem with this story is its context in Doctor Who, but the thing aired on television in a context everyone involved knew about, so really, that criticism sticks pretty well. Because what this story does is doom Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor and, in doing so, ensure the show’s cancellation. In this regard it is the single story most destructive to Doctor Who. Never mind Michael Foot. At 100 minutes, this is the longest suicide note in history.

There are, of course, self-inflicted wounds prior to this. If the past two seasons hadn’t started with pieces of utter crap like Warriors of the Deep and The Arc of Infinity, if the Peter Davison era hadn’t been a monument to wasted potential, et cetera, et cetera. The Twin Dilemma’s spectacular faceplant and sabotaging of the series didn’t happen in isolation. On the other hand, it’s also not the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s the entire bale of hay flung at high velocity towards the camel’s back. Doctor Who was vulnerable coming into this story, yes, but even if the Davison era had been a consistent triumph it would have been, at the very least, in serious trouble coming out of this story.

The core of the problem was the decision to put so many eggs in one basket. Nobody has ever really offered a clear explanation for why Nathan-Turner decided that Colin Baker’s debut should be moved up to the end of Season 21 instead of the start of Season 22. It’s a strange idea, particularly in contrast to how Davison was introduced. With Davison they went out of their way to give him three stories to practice before his debut so that he’d know where he was going with the character. Now, with Colin Baker, who, while not the crap actor he’s belittled as by some, is not as good as Peter Davison, they dump him in the role with less prep time and expect his first time out of the gate to set the tone of the character for nine months.

There’s really no explanation for this. It’s a dumb idea on the face of it. At the start of a season if the new Doctor is wobbly coming out of the gate it’s not a huge problem simply because there’s a level of momentum carrying you from story to story. It’s easy to tune in next week after a rough story. But this asks people to tune in nine months from now and in a different timeslot. There’s much less insurance for a rough start. If Castrovalva had proven to be a turkey they had the opportunity to turn things around next week, as they did back in 1975 when Tom Baker’s debut was, let’s face it, not exactly inspiring but the next story was legendarily good. This is common sense - putting the debut of a new character at the start of the season gives you more than one chance to win the audience over. Putting the debut of a new character at the end of a season means that if you give a bad first impression that impression has lots of time to settle in.

So faced with that problem, at the very least, one assumes, you throw away the old “regenerative trauma” structure and have the Doctor start with his feet on the ground. I mean, OK, if you’re going to use one story to form the impression of your new Doctor then you at the very least have to actually show what your new Doctor is like. You can’t spend episodes mucking around with post-regenerative trauma when you’re trying to cement your new lead in the audience’s mind such that they’re excited to come back next season. In this regard, at least, The Twin Dilemma deserves some credit, in that Baker settles into his default mode reasonably quickly. But any points it gains are more than undone by the fact that they not only decide to introduce the Doctor in regenerative crisis, they do so by having him try to strangle Peri. In the best of circumstances this would be an unwise way to introduce a new lead character. In these circumstances it is difficult to understand how the idea even got approved.

More broadly, if giving yourself one shot to introduce your new Doctor is unwise, to do so when your concept for the new Doctor is that he’s an unlikable character who the audience slowly grows to trust and like is simply farcical. The two ideas are completely incompatible. Even if we grant that one of them is good - and I don’t really think “make your lead character unlikable” was ever going to be a winning strategy - “make your character unlikable and then put yourself in a situation where the first impression matters more than ever to the success of your show” is an idea that almost weaponizes stupidity.

Of course, the Colin Baker era is also shot through with dodgy post facto justifications. For instance, the new party line is that Colin Baker’s Doctor was supposed to have a shameful secret that would eventually be revealed so as to explain his hostile demeanor and make him palatable to the audience. I don’t doubt that this idea came up in conversation at some point, but there’s a fairly easy way to check if this was actually a plan that people had or just something that was mentioned as an idea once that later got seized on to explain what they were really doing. What was the secret? Anybody? Have any of the people who allegedly crafted this idea of a multi-season “peeling back the layers of the onion” arc for Colin Baker’s Doctor ever actually indicated what the big secret at the heart of his character was?

Of course not. Because there wasn’t any. This was never an actual storyline that was being written into the series. And who would seriously think it might be? This was a production team that couldn’t remember to have Tegan and Nyssa be upset with the Master over things that actually did get onto screen, and we’re seriously expected to believe that they had some idea for deep motivations for the Doctor that never made it to screen? When nobody has even come up with a suggestion for what it might be? Or, for that matter, how it might work? I mean, how exactly does Colin Baker’s Doctor suddenly acquire a dark secret that hadn’t affected any of his predecessors?

No, the far more likely explanation is the one that occurred to everybody at the time - that every Doctor is a reaction against the previous one, and that they decided to follow “nice” and “bland” with “nasty” and “loud.” Then decided to give audiences one shot at this deliberately hard to like Doctor and see if they’d tune in nine months later. Given this, it’s a wonder that so many people were even around to be driven away by the first episode of Attack of the Cybermen instead.

But fine, let’s accept that, against all logic, we’re going to attempt this piece of madness. In that case we should, at the very least, make sure we have a solid writer. Not just someone with television experience, but someone who’s got a proven track record of working with Doctor Who.Instead they pick someone with extensive television experience who’s never done Doctor Who before. He turns out to be dangerously slow and prone to claiming that his typewriter has exploded, and his script needs a complete overhaul. Again, one wonders why they even put themselves in this position. In the past new Doctors were debuted by old hands - Bidmead, Dicks, Whitaker, even Holmes had ten episodes under his belt prior to Spearhead From Space. And yet instead of asking Bailey, Clegg, Gallagher, or even one of the writers they mistakenly have been putting so much faith in like Byrne or Dudley they take a risk on an untested writer. Heck, have this be the story where Eric Saward writes it under his ex-girlfriend’s name so that at least it’s from the start overseen by someone who knows how this is supposed to work. Any of these ideas are smarter than letting the new Doctor debut under an untested writer.

To continue to check off obvious things this story should have done, if this is the story you want to make a big impression, you want to put some time into it. As Tat Wood points out, when you have three stories - a regeneration, a debut, and a bit of transitional loose-end tying that shuffles the companions, you don’t blow the budget on an expensive location shoot in Lanzarote for the transitional piece and have the season-ending debut be the piece of cheap comedy. This is a story that absolutely has to be big - on which they’re openly and deliberately having everything ride - and they don’t even bother to try to make it big.

Instead we get poorly cast twins (that the director tried to cast with better actors only to be vetoed because Nathan-Turner, for no discernible reason, decided it was crucial that the twins be boys), poorly cast everyone else, wretched sets, a stupid monster, flat direction, and a paper thin plot. The story looks like its aspiring to the Graham Williams era. Which is improbable given Nathan-Turner’s views of that era, and anyway, the script completely lacks the self-awareness that the Williams era had. Say what you will about the Graham Williams era, but it knew enough to wink at the audience when it was being crap. Its only problem was that circumstances conspired to make it crap far too often.

Here, on the other hand, we have the show being crap without seeming to realize it, and on a story in which it’s vitally important that the show not be crap. Miles and Wood offer the diagnosis that Nathan-Turner has, by this point, come to completely misunderstand how the series works. Certainly he seems to have simply internalized the assumption that “doing Doctor Who-like stuff” is the sole purpose of Doctor Who such that he hasn’t bothered to think through the interactions of the material reality of production and transmission and the standard tropes of the series. That much is clear from the fact that he simultaneously went with giving Baker an orphan story to establish himself and using the post-regenerative trauma angle when one should have precluded the other.

But that doesn’t explain the more fundamental errors. It doesn’t explain how Nathan-Turner thought end-of-season filler was compatible with launching his new Doctor. Nothing does, really, save for incompetence - a complete failure to meaningfully think about how things were going to come off to the audience. And that’s the really stark thing. I mean, let’s imagine that we were to allow for everything we’ve already diagnosed. Let’s allow that we’re going with a deliberately unlikable Doctor, that we’re going to have one story set the audience’s impression of this Doctor for nine months, that we’re going to have him act worse than normal in that story, and that we’re not going to try to make it be good. I have no idea why we would allow all of these things, but let’s do it, just for fun. If we accept that a cheaply made piece of fluff about an unlikable Doctor might somehow hook people and make them excited about the series, can we say that this might work?

No. We can’t. Because even given all of that it’s impossible to suggest that this is a workable setup. Because Baker’s Doctor isn’t just unlikable here. He’s intolerable. He’s an overtly bad person who any reasonable audience should actively dislike and want to see get his comeuppance. Whereas the series still visibly thinks he’s the hero. It’s not just that Baker’s Doctor is prickly and hard to like, it’s that he’s a bad guy.

And I’m not just talking about the scene in which he strangles Peri. I mean, that’s an appalling bit of bad taste. No, I’m talking about everything that comes after that. The Doctor reacting to it by declaring that he’s going to be a hermit and effectively kidnapping Peri to spend the rest of his life tending to his needs. The Doctor’s complete failure, at any point in the story, to actually apologize to her for it. To, in fact, declare that he’s an alien bound to different values and customs and that he’s who he is whether she likes it or not. And her grinning broadly at him as he says it, clearly OK with this abusive bastard who tried to kill her not even caring about it.

Even if we do hold rigidly to the “no hanky-panky in the TARDIS” rule this is difficult to accept. The Doctor attempts to choke his heavily sexualized female companion. He physically and violently assaults her in a manner that is chillingly familiar as a real-world phenomenon that happens to women at the hands of their male partners. Then he drags her against her will to what he says could be an entire life in which “it shall be your humble privilege to minister unto my needs.” She readily forgives him and grins stupidly at his charms. It’s not Nicola Bryant’s fault - she plays the material as well as it can be played. Nor is it Baker’s fault. They try to make the scenes watchable, but nobody could possibly make this work. Peri is violently assaulted by a man who overtly sees her only purpose as being to serve him, and chooses happily to stay with him. The show treats this man as its hero and expects the audience to tune in nine months later to watch his continuing adventures.

Of course they declined to. Baker’s Doctor is completely poisoned here. There’s nothing whatsoever that can be done to make this character watchable to anyone who has seen this. And I speak from experience here. This is the story that killed my parents’ interest in Doctor Who. To this day my mother refuses to accept the possibility that Baker might be good on the audios simply because of how much this story made her hate him. That’s how bad this played to people. That’s how you kill Doctor Who in under a hundred minutes. You make it about a battered woman idolizing her abuser.

Yeah, OK. I take it back. This is the worst fucking story ever.

One Day Sale at Big Finish on Jubilee and Ish

Big Finish has two of the three audios I'm covering in the Colin Baker era (...Ish and Jubilee) on sale today and today only for just five pounds each. Those interested in listening to them along with the blog might want to grab them. Right now ...Ish is set to be covered on June 4th and Jubilee for June 15th.

They also have Spare Parts, previously discussed on this blog, on sale.

The Grinding Engines of the Universe (The Caves of Androzani)

Don't worry, Peri. It's just a Voord.

It’s March 8th, 1984. 99 Red Balloons continue to float along atop the charts, and will play out Peter Davison. Also in the top ten are Van Halen with “Jump” and Billy Joel with “An Innocent Man,” while lower in the charts are King Crimson and the Fraggle Rock theme, a trivia fact I included just to use the phrase “King Crimson and the Fraggle Rock theme.” Top albums are Into The Gap by The Thompson Twins and Human’s Lib by Howard Jones.

In the news, Gerry Adams and three other Sinn Féin members are injured in an attack by the Ulster Volunteer Force, and the other William F. Buckley is kidnapped in Beirut. But the real news and, in many ways, most crucial backdrop for this story comes with the start of the miner’s strike.

It is difficult to come up with a better illustration of the idea of a “clusterfuck” than the 1984-85 miner’s strike. As a pragmatic issue, the strike consisted of Thatcher’s government running rings around the National Union of Miners so as to humiliate them and break the back of what had previously been the most powerful union in the country. Thatcher’s government stockpiled coal prior to announcing the pit closures that sparked the strike, thus blunting the immediate impact of the strike and preventing the calamity of the Three Day Week. Meanwhile Arthur Scargill, head of the NUM, made an egregious political miscalculation. Faced with an accelerated schedule for closing the pits and afraid that he’d lose the vote, Scargill declined to submit the strike to a national vote. This was against NUM rules and allowed Thatcher to delegitimize the strike, which she wasted no time doing, comparing striking miners to Argentina in the Falklands.

The resulting PR coup was, quite literally, literally bloody and brutal. Backed by the redtops Thatcher unleashed the police force, which was spectacularly violent and corrupt. Indeed, the extent of the depravity is still coming out. Only a few weeks ago The Guardian ran a story observing that the South Yorkshire police, who arrested 95 people at the so-called Battle of Orgreave before having to drop prosecution on all of them due to having fabricated the evidence, would five years later be largely responsible for the Hillsborough disaster and the appalling attempt to blame the incident on Liverpool supporters. In both cases, of course, the police and government were aided and abetted by Murdoch and The Sun. The propaganda war, combined with Scargill’s inept politicking, kept the strike from gaining broad support with the public, and it ended in failure a year later, leaving the mining industry and union a shadow of its former self.

In more fundamental terms, of course, the strike is a classic example of the false opposition. Of course closure of collieries had to happen. The coal industry was increasingly unprofitable, and even in 1984 it was clear that in the medium to long term a transition away from coal mining and towards other forms of energy was necessary. Equally, however, closing the pits devastated local economies and communities. The unexamined assumption here, however, is that economic progress and development has to carry a human price. Thatcher’s government was never going to seriously consider coupling the pit closures with efforts to provide new economic stimulus to the affected regions, and Scargill opted to defend the moribund coal industry in the general case. In the end, every side was mercenary and aiming primarily to protect their own wealth.

The Caves of Androzani was written before any of this happened. Indeed, it was transmitted before most of it happened. And yet it is almost the perfect Doctor Who story for this - a bitter tale of profiteering rivals savagely cutting each other’s throats to everyone’s harm. In this regard it’s Robert Holmes at his most gloriously cynical, portraying a world where every system is rotten and degenerate, run by psychopaths with eyes only for their own wealth. Even the comparatively noble characters like General Chellak are ruthless and callous, calmly sentencing the Doctor and Peri to death despite believing their innocence.

The Mighty 200 poll, of course, declared this the greatest Doctor Who story of all time. This cannot be taken entirely seriously - in the previous iteration of the poll it was third, beaten by both Genesis of the Daleks and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. None of these three stories changed over the ensuing decade. But it is, by any measure, one of the major classics of Doctor Who. And deservedly so. It’s gorgeously tense, better directed than anything else in the classic series, well-acted, and has a razor-sharp script. Combined with the natural tendency to favor “event” episodes the idea that Caves of Androzani represents a high point for the series should be thoroughly uncontroversial.

But there’s something just a little bit odd about its reception. For all that it is hailed as the greatest Peter Davison story and one of the greatest ever, almost nobody suggests including it as the representative story for the Davison era. The consensus seems to be that its greatness is only properly appreciated when you’ve seen the rest of the Davison era, seemingly on the grounds that in order to appreciate how Davison’s Doctor is put through the wringer here you have to see him in more normal circumstances.

On the other hand, it appears that Holmes, largely unfamiliar with Davison’s portrayal, just wrote the script with Baker in mind. Lawrence Miles suggests that this fact means that the resulting episodes are darker than what Holmes had in mind, but I think this is slightly off. Yes, almost all of the banter that Davison gets and mocking of his guards and captors is Baker-esque. But on the other hand, everything about the story is set up as an inevitable march towards destruction. The Doctor gets himself killed in episode one by getting into the Spectrox nest to save Peri. This is a delightfully bitter piece of Doctor Who irony - what kills the Doctor, at the end of the day, is the fact that his companion trips and falls down a hole. Everything after that is just the unspooling consequences of the Doctor’s landing on Androzani Minor.

So the entire piece is, from a writing perspective, set up to be doom-laden. The Doctor is throwing his witticisms in the face of events so brutal that they’re going to kill him. Indeed, in the first draft the Doctor was just going to die from the sheer brutality of it all, just from the sum total of all the punishment and injuries he’d sustained. It’s difficult to imagine Tom Baker in a story like this - one where his number is up from episode one. Or, rather, it’s difficult to imagine the imperious, wisecracking Tom Baker that would be spouting Holmes’s dialogue doing it. The idea of Robert Holmes trying to write Logopolis is jarring in the extreme.

I’d suggest that while Holmes is writing for Baker here, he’s writing for Baker with the knowledge that it’s going to be Davison delivering the lines, and thus that there’s not going to be the imperious confidence of Tom Baker shining through every line. The script depends on the fact that Davison is taking a risk with every wisecrack - that he’s provoking dangerous psychopaths and that this could all blow up in his face. The episode three cliffhanger seals it. The Doctor’s mocking responses to Stoltz are pure Tom Baker - “sorry, seems to be locked” and the bit about not having much experience with the controls. But the overall content of the scene - the Doctor with nothing to lose crashing a spaceship into the planet because he no longer cares if he lives or dies - is completely beyond anything Tom Baker ever did. Holmes is giving Davison lines written for Baker, yes, but he visibly knows enough of Davison’s portrayal to know that the lines are going to turn into quips borne of a desperate mania. Whereas when Holmes wrote Baker as desperate and on edge the result was the almost humorless Pyramids of Mars. Baker’s Doctor played desperation as fear because manic joking was the normal order of things. Holmes’s script relies entirely on the fact that he knows Davison’s normal order of things isn’t this.

But that’s not quite right. It’s not that this isn’t the normal order of things for Davison. It’s that this isn’t how Davison’s Doctor acts when he’s comfortable with the situation. And this gets at why the idea that Caves of Androzani ought not be watched as one’s first Davison story is a little weird. Because what the script requires isn’t that Davison’s behavior be different from other episodes, it’s that Davison’s behavior displays discomfort. But that’s a function of Davison’s acting, not of comparison of this story with previous ones. The fact that the Doctor is hurling wisecracks at people who really might shoot him in the head and be done with him is visible from what’s on screen here alone.

On the other hand, as we talked about with Planet of Fire, people are better at identifying what they like than they are at explaining why. Which is to say that just because the explanation of why this is better if you’ve watched other Davison stories doesn’t quite wash doesn’t mean that it isn’t improved by the context of other Davison stories. Of course, as Miles points out, it’s even more improved when you don’t know that Peri is the companion for nearly the whole of the Colin Baker era. Then, given the brutal dispatching of Kamelion and the death of Adric, you can get something very rare indeed in Doctor Who - a moment where it’s genuinely uncertain whether everyone is going to make it out alive.

But even without that something about this episode shines a little brighter when put in context with the era. To some extent this is just the standard structure of a regeneration story. Given that every Doctor is in part a reaction against his predecessor, and given that a regeneration story is by definition a narrative collapse, it’s very easy to read regeneration stories as rebukes of their eras. We did so with both The War Games and Planet of Spiders, and it’s worth remembering that even if he didn’t write either, Holmes was around for both.

And it’s easy to read The Caves of Androzani this way. Davison’s portrayal doesn’t gain much in contrast with past stories, but the apocalyptic tone of the story still resonates in contrast with past stories. The story sticks out vividly in part because Davison’s Doctor hasn’t ever been pushed like this before. He’s way past talking about the pleasures of a well-cooked meal here, and he’s more likely to be in the pile of bodies than standing above it fretting about other ways.

The problem is that so many previous stories have used Davison’s Doctor as a moral contrast instead of as an agent in the story. He doesn’t have to actively overthrow the fanatical regime of Sarn, he just has to point out that they’re intellectually bankrupt. He doesn’t have to stop the Daleks, he just has to inspire Stein to blow himself up. Even in the hands of quite good writers like Gallagher and Clegg the Doctor serves to point out the situation to other people so they do the right thing. He’s been used to pass judgment on genres instead of to destabilize them and subvert them. There have been exceptions, most recently Frontios, but the bulk of the time the Doctor has been restricted to inspiring other people to act. Here, however, the Doctor is in a situation with real teeth and he’s forced to act.

The heart of this change, of course, gets back to where we started - the fact that this is an exquisitely political story. But note that it’s clearly not political in an allegorical sense. This isn’t the crass “Arthur Scargill as angry badger person” politics of The Monster of Peladon. No, this is political for the simple reason that it’s material, and that’s what makes the situation so fraught with danger for the Doctor. It’s not some facile fable that exists primarily to illustrate an abstracted moral point. This is a situation that is designed to look like real situations with the volume turned up to melodrama. And that is what makes this story spark so gloriously - the fact that for the first time since taking on the part Davison is shoved into a situation that acts like a world.

The secret to alchemy is material social progress, and the fact of the matter is that the show has been very, very far away from the material. For all its violence the viscera of history have been dangerously absent. Despite this there have been flashes of quality - we’ve known since Davison’s first few stories that his Doctor could be at the heart of a truly great story. But now we see the secret - now we see how well he could do when put into a situation that required more than symbolizing a moral point.

In entries past, this would be where I transition to the glorious conclusion - a carefully cadenced bit about the Doctor facing an inevitable destruction. Themes of narrative collapse would intertwine with proleptic allusions that start to form the basis of the next act of the narrative. The act of recognizing this era’s failings would be read as exorcism, the pathos of the Doctor dying in the dirt used as a lead-in to a glorious rebirth, a gesture towards the endless possibility of the series.

It’s a pity, then, that I’m doing The Twin Dilemma on Friday. Much has been made of the terrible gulf of quality between these two stories - the fact that the best and worst stories on the Mighty 200 poll are, in fact, consecutive. But let’s be real here. It would be one thing if The Caves of Androzani was an earned conclusion to the entire run of the Davison era. But it’s not. Everything here could have been done before. The fact that the Doctor does die at the end of this story doesn’t mean that a high-tension story where the Doctor has his back against the wall could only be a regeneration story. And who seriously thinks it could be? Are we just pretending Pyramids of Mars and The Seeds of Doom don’t exist now?

As we saw, the problem this time isn’t a failing in the conception of the Doctor. It’s not the logical endpoint of a phase of the series history where we see that something has to change. Yes, the story looks great in contrast with everything around it, but that’s not because it pays off any buildup from them. It’s because they were often a complete mess and this story isn’t. Yes, this story looks like an absolute giant compared to the rest of the Davison era, but that’s as much because of their flaws as its merits.

The fact of the matter is that they couldn’t get the Davison era to work until his last story. They drove the best actor they’d had since Troughton away with the crap scripts of Season 20, and by the time they gave him a truly brilliant script he’d already decided to leave. And they only got the era to work by turning back the clock and hiring Robert Holmes to do it. Yes, he outdid himself, and yes, the production work here is phenomenal, but the fact of the matter is that this is the de facto director of swaths of Warrior’s Gate and a writer who’s been on the show since 1968.

No, this could have been done in 1981. It isn’t some earned capstone to an era. This is the production team taking three years to get the show to work despite having a phenomenal lead actor. This is what the era should have been all along. The fact that they finally got it right after three years shouldn’t have inspired any high hopes that they’d get it right out of the gate with the next version.

Speaking of which...

Time Can Be Rewritten 20 (Warmonger)

Given that none of the BBC Books novels featuring Davison’s Doctor are particularly beloved, the pick of a novel was always going to be one of the two golden turkeys - this or Gary Russell’s Divided Loyalties. I picked this for two reasons. First, Divided Loyalties was a Season 19 book and having just come off of a host of non-televised entries at the end of the Tom Baker era I didn’t want to do two novels in Season 19. And I was pretty firmly committed to Cold Fusion. But the second is that Divided Loyalties received mostly scathing and truly outraged reviews on the Doctor Who Ratings Guide, whereas nearly every review of Warmonger consists of several paragraphs of admitting that the novel is unfathomably awful before the author sheepishly confesses that they loved it. (Of course, several of those exist for Divided Loyalties, and more than a few outright pans of Warmonger exist as well)

For those who have never heard of this... interesting book, allow me to provide a basic plot summary. Peri inadvertently gets her arm ripped off by a pterodactyl, so the Doctor rushes her to a pre-Brain of Morbius Karn in the hopes that Dr. Solon will reattach it. He does, but unfortunately the Doctor and Peri get caught up in galactic politics and the rise of Morbius such that Peri is stranded on an alien world as a fierce guerilla warrior against Morbius’s galactic army and the Doctor is rechristened the Supremo and leading an army of Draconians, Sontarans, Cybermen, Ogrons, and Ice Warriors against Morbius in what is, we are repeatedly assured, a terribly dire, ugly war. Eventually he rescues Peri and she makes a drunken pass at him, then they defeat Morbius, the end.

If this sounds like a hot mess, you are underestimating things. But let’s pause for a moment and note two things. First, Terrance Dicks’s gloriously readable prose continues to rescue him. As preposterous as this book is, Dicks is able to make each fresh absurdity another step in a standard plucky adventure, marching cheerily through the action with a horribly compelling glee. Second, Terrance Dicks is surely way too smart a writer to pen a book this bad by accident. In fact, it is my firm conviction that this book consists of Terrance Dicks, elder statesmen of the Doctor Who world, in his 34th year of working professionally with Doctor Who, just unrepentantly screwing with the audience.

Let us boil this question down to its barest essentials. There is a moment, fairly early in the book, in which guerrilla warrior Peri, the Scourge of Sylvana, is captured along with some other guerillas. One begins to shudder as their captor, Lieutenant Hakon, ogles her. The following bit of prose then happens:

Puzzled and repelled, Hakon released her. “What’s the matter with her?”
“She can’t stand to be touched,” said Peri.
“Why not?”
“She was gang-raped by some of your troops when the first wave landed.”
“Some girls have all the luck,” said Hakon.

At this point we are forced into one of two possibilities. The first is that Terrance Dicks, Uncle Terrance himself, writer of the Target novelizations we adored as children, has, in fact, just written a character who jokes about how he likes to gang rape people. The second is that the dedication to Robert Holmes was serious.

If we’re being honest, this does seem probable. Terrence Dicks commissioned Holmes’s first script, and script edited four more after, novelized all but three of Holmes’s stories, and wrote three scripts under Holmes. When Dicks says, as he does in the dedication, that Holmes was the best Doctor Who writer, he’s not saying that from a position that doesn’t understand exactly what Robert Holmes was good at. And one thing that Robert Holmes was very, very good at was bitter and cynical satires. My contention, then, is that Warmonger is Terrance Dicks offering a bitter and cynical satire of Eric Saward.

Doing this in the name of Robert Holmes is, of course, a complex proposition, doubly so when you set the book immediately prior to Robert Holmes’s debut in the Saward era. But Holmes, as we’ll see, tried to make the Saward era’s approach work, at least in his first story. (Subsequently things got more complex.) So Dicks steps in and writes the other thing Holmes could have written for the Saward era.

This explains one of the things that people bring up when talking about this book, which is that it’s far easier to imagine the book working with Colin Baker than it is with Peter Davison. And of course it is. That’s the point. What Dicks is doing, in effect, is taking the Saward approach to its most horrific conclusions while remaining totally faithful to the basics of the approach. So since Saward covered both Davison and Baker, Dicks picks Davison, since that’s by far the more extreme and absurd angle.

And then he goes to town. Saward likes militaristic sci-fi? Fine, Dicks gives him the most militaristic book imaginable - one where the Doctor doesn’t just work with a bunch of space marines, but where he’s the leader of an entire galactic army. Saward favors continuity fetishism? Fine, we’ll make a needless sequel to a story that makes a complete hash out of dozens of other stories in the name of referencing them. Since Peri gets ogled by the camera repeatedly in both Planet of Fire and Caves of Androzani, Dicks takes every opportunity to have characters leer at her and ogle her.

It’s sublime in its willful wrongness, and not just in the scene I’ve already quoted. Thrill as the Doctor rescues Peri from the pterodactyl: “Leaning forwards, the Doctor fastened his teeth into the creature’s neck, jaw muscles bulging as he clamped down hard.” Laugh uproariously as Peri attempts to explain the Gaztaks (that would be the space mercenaries from Meglos, by the way) as having the look “you see in American cities - in the dangerous parts. Places where everyone who looks at you seems to be thinking, ‘Do I mug this one or that one?’” Clearly some American conventions have not been taking Mr. Dicks to the right parts of town. Or go with my personal favorite moment, in which the Doctor, after getting his uniform as the Supremo, is sadly informed that his jackboots aren’t quite ready yet.

All of these moments are not merely utterly wrong, they’re almost meticulously crafted to be wrong. It would be difficult to actively shape bits of prose that feel more wrong in a Doctor Who book. And yet every reason these moments feel wrong is a description that’s routinely laid at the feet of the Saward era. There’s an impeccable sort of precision here - a sense that the book is too perfectly wrong to be anything short of deliberately so. And, I mean, if nothing else, the choice to have the Doctor’s nickname be the Supremo, as in “The Lair of the Zarbi,” seems to tag this book as not entirely serious.

And, of course, this willful wrongness is paired with Terrance Dicks’s usual sense of straightforward action-adventure. Which is to say that it’s consistently good fun and moves along. There are no obvious structural or storytelling flaws here. So in this regard Dicks is outdoing the Saward era on two fronts - he’s taking the era’s tendencies to their logical extremes and then telling a better crafted story than most of the writers could manage. That it feels so wrong and yet so fun is, in many ways, exactly what Resurrection of the Daleks tried for and missed.

I mean, this is the thing that nobody reviewing the book really admits. No, this could never be made in Season 21, but the reasons aren’t the perversity of the Doctor as a military leader or that it’s fanwanky. The problems are that it would explode the budget, that it’s not a four-parter, perhaps even that there’s a bit too much sex and that the nonlinear storytelling wouldn’t wash. But anybody who says that the violence of the Doctor or the absurd continuity are a problem while saying this novel doesn’t fit between Planet of Fire and Caves of Androzani is ignoring the reality of the era. In an era that brought us Earthshock, Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the Daleks, and the Doctor’s killing of Kamelion, the idea that the content of this book would have posed a problem is dubious at best. This is exactly what the Saward era on an unlimited budget would be. It fits its era perfectly. That’s the cruel joke of it. It fits its era too perfectly. For all that this isn't Davison as we like to think of him, it's alarmingly close to the sorts of things that routinely made it on screen in Season 21.

The problem, though, is that Terrance Dicks is just too nice for this. He’s the sort of person who genuinely believes that war is a noble tragedy, and whose main view of war and the military remains the Napoleonic Wars with a side of Hitler. And so he spends heartfelt chapters on the brutal tragedy of the war and the “Butcher’s Bill.” One gets the sense that they’re sincere - that they really are Dicks setting aside the jokes and trying to deliver sobering messages about how serious all of this really has been, but it doesn’t work at all. The earnest nobility of it - a tone Dicks is actually quite good at - just cuts awkwardly against the perverse horror that precedes it.

The second point where Dicks really just seems too nice for his won book, and the one I imagine everyone is going to disagree with me on in the comments, comes with Peri’s drunken pass at the Doctor. The Doctor turns her down, comparing it to incest. The problem, frankly, is that this is just kind of an oddly prudish line for Dicks to draw in the sand - and it very much comes off as the one thing that he’s just not willing to do. I mean, I’m not arguing for the Doctor to be shagging companions in the general case by any measure, but if you’re writing a story that’s deliberately kicking sand in the faces of taboos, raising the issue of Doctor/Companion sex just to have that be the thing you shoot down as beyond the pale is a bit much. Just go for it and make sure you piss everyone off, really.

Still, the book is terribly clever, and shows a vicious sort of humor that many would have thought beyond Terrance Dicks. And if it is a golden turkey, well, it accomplished exactly what it set out to do.

Finally, then, some business, as we’re nearing the Colin Baker era. First, the traditional novel clues: there will be four novels covered in the Colin Baker era. The first is from Target Books. The other three will be covered on three consecutive posts, in the order BBC Books, Virgin, Other. Furthermore, someone sensibly requested more precise lists of Big Finish audios, which I’m more than happy to provide since those are in print and buyable and people want the chance to listen to them before I cover them.

I’ll be doing three. The dates are approximate and assume I don’t fiddle the schedule and didn’t accidentally count wrong, but right now it looks like The Song of Megaptera will be done on the 28th of May, ...Ish on the 4th of June, and Jubilee on the 15th of June. A final fun fact, there will be eight posts between Revelation of the Daleks and the start of Trial of a Time Lord, and five between the end of Trial and Time and the Rani. There are no posts not on standard issue television episodes that will interrupt either of Colin Baker’s two full seasons.

Burn With Me (Planet of Fire)

See, Peri? Kamelion, lying there in the sun. He can change
shapes, you know, and be all things and everyone. Now
run, Peri. Run, run away.

It’s February 23rd, 1984. Frankie Goes to Hollywood is still at number one, but they’re finally unseated by Nena’s “99 Red Balloons.” Lower in the charts is equally satisfying - Rockwell’s beautiful bit of paranoia “Somebody’s Watching Me” and Slade’s “Run Runaway” chart, though to be fair, the latter is far better when Great Big Sea does it as an overly fast paced fiddle orgy. Also, The Smiths have their first full-length album out, and it debuts at #2. In real news, the US pulls out of Beirut, Pierre Trudeau retires as Prime Minister of Canada, and, four days after this story wraps, the miner’s strike to end all miner’s strikes begins.

While on television, Planet of Fire. Peter Grimwade is nobody’s favorite writer of the Davison era, and Planet of Fire is nobody’s favorite story of the era. Neither of these judgments is necessarily unfair - I think you’d have a hard time arguing Grimwade as superior to any of Holmes, Bidmead,  or Bailey, and arguing Planet of Fire as a classic of the era crosses the line from redemptive readings to outright psychosis. But in an era with Eric Saward, Terrence Dudley, and Johnny Byrne submitting multiple scripts treating Grimwade as one of the era’s lowlights seems equally strained.

But there’s always a complexity to flying in the face of critical consensus. This gets at one of the fundamental tricky bits of understanding audience responses, which is that audiences are very good at identifying whether they like or dislike something, and very bad at explaining why. When it comes to making art, giving people what they say they want is almost always a disaster, particularly when those people are a self-selecting group of hardcore fans who are volunteering their opinions. (This is not to say that populism is a bad thing, but there’s a difference between giving people what they like and giving them what they say they want. In one you attempt to reproduce what has been successful. In another you base your aesthetic and goals off of what people say they like. The issue is letting the audience’s self-description and interpretations play in as opposed to using data like what they actually do.) For example, I would argue fairly readily that the complaint that Davison’s Doctor was “bland” at Longleat and the resultant attempt to correct it via Colin Baker’s portrayal was a case of misunderstanding that the writers weren’t giving the Doctor good stuff to do and not a reflection on Davison as such.

So we’re faced with a bit of a puzzle. Grimwade’s scripts are clearly jarring in some sense, but the degree of judgment against him seems in excess of the observable flaws in his scripts. What’s the actual flaw here?

I dealt with this a bit in the Mawdryn Undead entry, where I observed that Grimwade is the one writer who’s actually capable of working in the soap opera style that the Davison era half-heartedly aspired to. And Planet of Fire is a prime example of this. It’s a four episode story in which several plot threads at various levels of development coincide. There’s the short and self-contained plot arc of Sarn, the end of the plot arc of Turlough, the end of the plot arc of Kamelion, another step in the Master’s plot arc, and the start of a plat arc involving Peri. These are sufficiently unified to make sense, but this is unusual for Doctor Who in that the series is approaching the structure of a show with A, B, and C plots in a given episode. Which is to say, this is how soaps work. And it’s how you have to structure plots to manage long-term storytelling with a cast of larger than about three. (And the Davison era usually has a cast of about five, with the Master as a recurring character and Kamelion making it so there are at least three companion plots)

But it’s not how Doctor Who usually works. Including how it works under the other writers of the Davison era, which is why the long term arcs of Nyssa and Tegan never really materialize. Despite setting itself up to be a show that could work as a sci-fi soap, every writer other than Grimwade has stuck to the traditional Doctor Who model of having a single storyline in any given story. Which means that when Grimwade shows up and does an incremental advancement of a bunch of different plotlines it doesn’t quite work in the context.

But this ignores the fact that what Grimwade manages to juggle here is solidly impressive. He manages to relegate to pure refrigerator logic the fact that the side trip to Lanzarote to pick up Peri makes no sense, and while the chain of coincidence that has the Master trapped on a planet that also happens to house Turlough’s brother is relatively ludicrous the fact that the two plotlines rarely affect each other keeps this from feeling excessive.

And we shouldn’t ignore the extent to which Grimwade is set up to fail here. Faced with the need to do a triple replacement of Turlough, Tegan, and the Doctor along with the introduction of a new companion and a new Doctor, plus the need to tie off Kamelion and provide a potentially permanent end for the Master, Nathan-Turner elected to stagger their departures. The word “stagger” is a bit of a massive misnomer, though, for what is in practice a sixteen episode run of continual upheaval in which four episodes bear the weight of four of the seven changes. This is a ridiculous structure and someone should have pointed out that it might be a good idea to deal with the Master or Kamelion in one of the first three stories of the season instead of embarking on a massive block of changes. (Or to give the show another story to breathe and not decide to throw in Colin Baker’s introduction on top of an already overstuffed season)

The last time the series was looking at this large a mass of changes - a new visual style, two companion departures, three companion introductions, and a regeneration - it actually did stagger them, with Meglos, State of Decay, and (with its feint of leaving Nyssa on Traken) Keeper of Traken all serving as stories that maintain the state of play from their predecessors so that it’s only every other story that the structure of the show gets upended. And if they hadn’t done this and had just pulled the rug out in all likelihood the show would have died. And indeed, when they don’t do it the next time the show goes under a year later. (Though even that could have arguably been avoided had  it not been for the poor decision making involved in introducing Colin Baker)

But the irony is that Grimwade’s approach here, had it been followed by the rest of the show, would also have worked. The writer who gets the lion’s share of Nathan-Turner’s massive miscalculation to clean up actually does it the only way that possibly could have worked. But when everyone else is pulling against this and insisting on being relentlessly high concept Grimwade’s approach runs aground because suddenly he’s the one story of the season that you can’t summarize in a one-sentence pitch and so looks like the boring one.

But so much of what Grimwade is doing is exactly what Davison’s Doctor needed all along. The argument I made last time about how making the Doctor at times relatable doesn’t undermine his otherness as long as there are clear-cut times in which he is starkly alien plays in perfectly here, and the death of Kamelion, with the Doctor at once utterly ruthless and unhesitating in ensuring it and still clearly hurt by it, is a prime example. Similarly, the Doctor standing icily by as the Master burns, or his rebuke to Turlough that if Turlough is keeping a secret the Doctor needs their friendship is at an end are fantastic moments that give Davison an opportunity to move between the warm, kind version of the Doctor and one that is quite a force to be reckoned with.

The problem is that those moments are building off relationships that were never established. As easy to slash as Ainley’s Master and Davison’s Doctor are, one has to pour on the extra-diegetic readings to get that pairing to work. Instead we get a teasing “won’t you show mercy to your own...” as he burns, but nothing that it connects to. Nobody has been trying to write stories that lead up to an eventual denouement, and so there’s no drama. What really needed to exist somewhere in the Davison era is the Doctor trying to save the Master from Castrovalva or Xeraphin and being betrayed so that his standing by as the Master burns is a moment of him being once bitten, twice shy. But the Doctor has never looked at the Master as anything other than a villain to defeat, so there’s no impact.

Likewise, Kamelion has had all of seven lines of dialogue in which he’s not being actively used as part of one of the Master’s schemes. The Doctor having to kill a pseudo-companion is a moment of drama, but Kamelion never got the chance to be one. Yes, there were technical problems with him, but as has been pointed out in comments, he’s a shape changing robot. Have him take a human form and choose to stick with it and actually build the character. Grimwade is right that a scene in which the Doctor is pained to have to sacrifice his friend (but willing to do it anyway in this case) is a fantastic one. But nobody has bothered to help Grimwade set that scene up.

And, of course, there’s Turlough. The exchange I noted in which the Doctor rebukes Turlough for still keeping secrets is a fantastic one. But of course it is, because Grimwade is the one who actually understood Turlough as originally conceived - a companion you can never quite trust. Everyone else just went with a generic “ruthless coward” characterization, whereas Grimwade is, in having the Doctor make the active but wary choice to let Turlough have his secrets, is actually thinking about the relationship. And as it turns out, Mark Strickson can act and would have benefitted nicely from, you know, actual material.

Similarly, Ainley suddenly reveals himself as being quite good at his job here, finally getting a script in which the Master gets to do Mastery things and play the Doctor role in reverse instead of just getting to be unmasked halfway through with a dramatic synth stab. It’s too little too late for his version of the Master (and the revelation that the real Master is a tiny little man flailing about in a box is a depressingly apropos metaphor), but again, with Grimwade actually giving him decent material, Ainley shines.

In this regard Grimwade goes on the list, along with Strickson, Ainley Fielding, Sutton, and, most damningly, Davison as creative figures who were wasted by their colleagues. Grimwade’s vision of Doctor Who would have worked beautifully over a twenty-six episode season. But as four episodes of a twenty-six episode season where the other twenty-two had no interest in contributing to the same goals (despite those goals ostensibly being the goals of the production staff) they don’t work.

Which is not to completely exempt Grimwade from the blame. Grimwade writes as though his plotlines have the support of the episodes around them when they don’t. Yes, there’s not enough buildup to make the plots with Kamelion or the Master or Turlough work. But the way to respond to that isn’t to pretend that the rest of the show was behaving like it was supposed to if your brief was ever going to work. It’s to crank up the volume and go all-out with the emotional storytelling. Instead we get a bunch of good ideas - Turlough following the course the Doctor did in The War Games (his beginning having been as an Unearthly Child), Kamelion having to be sacrificed, the Master begging the Doctor to save him - that are all underplayed as if they’ve been built to.

Even the Sarn storyline is flaccid. Grimwade's break from the high concept obsession of the rest of the season is in some sense refreshing, but this goes a bit too far in its lack of idea. A critique on religious dogma is all well and good, but why the heck is he blatantly targeting Islam with it? For all the world it looks like the main idea this story has is to go and pick a fight with another culture’s supposed extremism. Sure, the pick of Islam isn’t incidental - the 1980s were a classic era for depicting Muslims as dangerous extremists. But the fact that such xenophobia existed isn’t a justification in and of itself. Particularly because Grimwade had a more domestic target available, indeed, Miles and Wood suggest he had one in mind.

This suggestion seems to me largely credible. This is 1984. The AIDS crisis is decimating the gay community and nobody is paying attention because it primarily effects gays and drug users. Instead they were at best ignored, and at worst accused of things like, as James Anderton, Chief Constable of Manchester's police, would put it, "swirling in a cesspit of their own making." And Grimwade was well aware of the way in which this moral judgment, based primarily on appeals to traditional and religious values, was killing people. He couldn’t not be. But instead of pointing his critique at the domestic level he goes with the xenophobic attack on other people's fanaticism and blindness instead of using the exact same themes to make a commentary that had some teeth. It’s at best a missed opportunity, and at worse just crass, and it's no wonder Saward toned it down.

Which actually serves as an epitaph for the Davison era in many ways. And, having finished the watching of it now, captures my feelings on it well. Throughout it the possibility of what it could do and of how great it could be is present, crackling under the surface. At moments it breaks through. Or, as the joke goes, parts of it are excellent. Rewatching it was an extended process of wondering where the spark and wonder I knew I’d seen as a child was. And in the end, I realized that as a child I just didn’t see the mess the spark was fighting to get through quite so clearly. But the ability to see the flaws doesn’t mean that the brilliance of the era didn’t exist. Just that it wasn’t always the case that anybody knew what to do with it.

Time Can Be Rewritten 19 (Time Crash)

Convention, apparently, is to place these things in the midst of the end of Frontios while the Doctor is depositing the Gravis, a convention seemingly begun by Paul Magrs’ Excelcis Dawns. Magrs, of course, in typical fashion introduces far more continuity problems than he solves doing this, given that Tegan is on the TARDIS at the time, and anyway, I forgot to write this entry instead of Resurrection of the Daleks at the end of my last stretch of doing this blog, so we’re doing it here.

This also, of course, marks the first time I have to deal overtly with the new series instead of in passing reference. So time to obliterate all notion that I can stitch together some sort of consensus about the series and just start pissing off large sections of fandom, I suppose. I won’t bother playing about - as I’ve said before, anyone expecting the blog to turn sour on the new series is going to be sorely disappointed. Even when I agree with those who criticize it - and I’ll grant that there are deep flaws in the Davies era and fault lines that could turn into deep flaws in the Moffat era - the fact remains that making redemptive readings of the new series is not even remotely difficult. Disliking it frankly requires more effort than liking it, and I just can’t be bothered. If you can, well, I win, because I get more television to enjoy than you do, so there.

But on top of that basic issue there are a few more substantive issues I have with critics of the new series, and Time Crash serves as a bit of a ground zero for them. There’s an objection to Time Crash that gets voiced with some frequency on forums that serves as a perfect moment to repel a general critique of the new series, namely that there’s something wrong with the sequence at the end in which Tennant’s Doctor proclaims Davison’s Doctor to be “his” Doctor. In fact, I’m going to have my Ian Levine moment here and simply declare this objection to be evil.

To be fair, the problem with it is not quite that it doesn’t make sense on its own terms. If you are invested in the idea that the Doctor has a coherent “life” and that he is always the same character then, indeed, the idea of him picking favorites among his past selves is absurd and jarring. I can and will readily grant that. What I not only won’t grant but will remain openly hostile to is the idea that because there’s a context in which that exchange doesn’t make sense this constitutes a problem. And this encapsulates a great number of complaints about the new series, as a strange alliance of people who adore what they think the classic series was and people who just hate Doctor Who in general insist that there are things that don’t make sense or don’t parse, as though their inability to understand something makes them intellectually superior to the overwhelming majority of the audience who has no problem comprehending things.

Because to an overwhelming majority of the audience what happens at the end of Time Crash is perfectly blatant. The fourth wall is not so much broken as made porous and we get a sequence in which both David Tennant and Steven Moffat address Peter Davison and his version of the Doctor. Nobody who was watching the Children in Need telecast for any reasons that extended beyond catching the Doctor Who bit had any difficulty with this. This sort of fourth wall breaking and winking at the audience is, after all, par for the course for a charity telecast. One might as well begin having trouble with “A Fix With Sontarans” or something at that point.

But more to the point, this is a basic comprehension skill for contemporary television. Frames of reference switch rapidly. The postmodernism that we traced the early days of in the Hinchcliffe era is now the default mode of how television works. If you can’t seamlessly and without having to think about it go “oh, this bit is really the show talking about itself and not an attempt to provide a naturalistic depiction of how a quasi-immortal time traveler lives his life” when the show wants you to, you’re just out to sea on the new series. And being out to sea in this way is not a virtue. “I’m not televisually literate” is not a valid objection to anything but yourself.

No, what we have here is an exquisitely crafted eight minute sketch that works well both for people who remember the Davison era and for people who don’t give a crap about Doctor Who and who are watching Children in Need - a portion of the audience that, during Children in Need, one can safely assume is substantial. Everything in it is profoundly influenced and shaped by the past of the series and Peter Davison’s time as the Doctor (right down to the wonderful happenstance of Graham Harper being the director), and, equally, is perfectly suited to its task.

The first half of the piece, for instance, which consists mostly of an extended comedic misunderstanding as Davison’s Doctor fails to grasp what’s going on while Tennant’s (and the audience) are well aware of what’s happening, is gorgeous. Particularly worth noting is Davison’s acting, which is on the one hand spot on for his portrayal of the Doctor (it helps, of course, that he’d been reprising the role for eight years due to Big Finish), and on the other allows him to show off his comedic skills. These skills are worth highlighting specifically, since one of the enduring puzzles of the Davison era is that they hired an actor known for his sitcom roles and then gave him three years of scripts with virtually no comedic material at all.

This gets at one of the things I’ve been meaning to deal with in one of these posts, which is, roughly, why people who think Davison’s Doctor was rubbish are wrong. The usual criticism of him has shifted over the years. During his era the complaint was that he was “bland,” but over time the complaint has turned to the idea that he’s “weak” and “ineffectual,” or, occasionally, “too fallible.” And to some extent Time Crash would seem to nail that, spending half of its runtime with him failing to get the plot. But, of course, the end point of Time Crash is Tennant’s effusive praise for Davison and his “dashing about” and ability to “save the universe with a kettle and string.”

This captures an important divide about Davison - one we’ve already seen in the dismaying failure to give him any decent comedic scripts in his tenure (with Black Orchid being about the nearest attempt). Davison’s Doctor and the writing he got were two different matters. Yes, the writing in the Davison era is too often disappointing, and often strays into grotesquely cynical pieces like Earthshock or Warriors of the Deep. But Davison’s conception of the character isn’t responsible for that. Davison manages a character who is mercurial, tempestuous, and breathtakingly quick-witted. As his ability to squarely hit the characterization of an over twenty-year-old role when put in a comedic context that the original role was never put in demonstrates. He’s the only actor other than Troughton in the classic series who has a version of the Doctor that is this flexible. And like Troughton, he had writers who had little to no interest in using that flexibility. The difference is merely that Davison’s era post-dates organized fandom and all of his episodes are not only surviving but were widely disseminated on videocassette not long after they aired (even if not in official versions). Were Season Five as widely dissected by fandom as Season Twenty, the truth is that their reputations would be similar.

The big advantage of Davison’s approach to the role is that it marked the first time since the 1960s that Doctor Who has actually been a show that, conceptually, could do anything. Given that Doctor Who has long been about injecting the TARDIS into an existing narrative structure, this is important. Davison has enough presence to deform and transform whatever narrative he’s injected into, but he’s capable of doing it in a way that amounts to more than just running around mocking it. (In this regard he largely exceeds the ability of his costar here)

And Time Crash gives him the opportunity to do this to the future version of his own show. It’s worth noting that through the comedic first half, as Tennant goes around making all of the obvious jokes at Davison’s expense (“decorative vegetable”), Davison takes only one real shot at Tennant, but it’s an absolutely scathing one - pointing out that Tennant’s patter really just amounts to describing everything in front of him. Obviously the story isn’t anti-Tennant by any measure, but it’s telling, I think, that it does give an actual critique of Tennant’s portrayal. Even when playing the comedic fool - at his most seemingly ineffectual and fallible - Davison quietly centers the narrative on himself.

Which, of course, sets up the finale, in which Tennant effusively praises Davison’s portrayal. Obviously this moment is meant to work primarily on registers other than as an account of the Doctor’s own psyche. It is an instance in which the Doctor becomes an authorial/actor mouthpiece. But this is still remarkable in that they are serving as mouthpieces for commentary on the classic series - something the new series has done very, very rarely. And what we get is historically interesting, in that it cuts against the received wisdom of fandom without being a flagrant erasure of history. Tennant and Moffat are real and documented fans of the series, but the opinion they give is miles from the documented consensus of fandom.

Of course, the documented consensus of fandom is, for most of fandom’s history, the consensus of a fandom that played a significant if inadvertent role in the series’ cancellation. The fact is that much of what can and should be concluded about the John Nathan-Turner era changes dramatically when it is the lead-in to a lengthy break in the series instead of to the death of the series. Its teleology shifts from the well-worn “death of the program” to the much more interesting “survival of the program” we talked about in the Frontios entry.

And in this regard, Davison’s portrayal of the Doctor is, in fact, absolutely crucial. Because Davison, as Tennant observes, inaugurated the idea of a young Doctor. Previously the role had derived a non-trivial portion of its otherness from the fact that he’s been played as an older male who is iconographically off for the leading man and who derives most of his immediate connotative effect from being “the wise old man.” But Davison throws away all of that and gets by on actually being mercurial clever instead of on the fact that he’s self-evidently the elder statesman in almost any circumstance he can find himself in.

The result is, in some criticisms, a more human Doctor who is too relatable, but I think this misses the point somewhat. First of all, making the Doctor more relatable introduces an interesting alternate mode of engagement with the series. The idea of the companion as “audience identification figure” is deeply entrenched in the series’ logic. It’s been flawed for some time, though it remains the case that the companion is largely there to ask the questions the viewer wants answered. But the relative relatability of the Doctor (and it’s telling, I think, that Davison still excels at moments of being alien and eccentric - he’s majestic at the start of Frontios when Bidmead is writing him eccentrically again) opens the possibility of the audience relating primarily to the Doctor. This seems to me wonderful. The show is, to my mind, wildly more interesting when it suggests being an anarchist alchemist instead of admiring one.

But secondly, I have trouble with the notion that the existence of relatable moments for the Doctor invalidates his alien moments. Indeed, I think the fact that the Doctor can seem relatable one moment and utterly alien the next makes him, on aggregate, more unfamiliar than a character who is predictably alien. The Doctor’s otherness comes not from the fact that he’s consistently inscrutable but from the fact that he flits between a known type of character and a cipher. And swapping the known type of character from a straightforward archetype (grumpy old man, dashing action hero, witty bohemian) to a complex character with relatable traits makes the moments when the Doctor is starkly inhuman far more offputting.

But much of that is an argument for the future. For our purposes at the moment the fact remains that Davison’s Doctor, in hindsight, proved to be as much of a template for the future as Troughton’s did, and that, like Troughton, this is due to his capacity as an actor. The Nathan-Turner years are among the most critically well worn section of the program. Time Crash is a compelling argument that this consensus has become secondary in importance to a new reading. Regardless of what one thinks of the future, the Davison era ought be understood more in relation to the future we have now than the one we had in the 1990s.

Little Green Blobs in Bonded Polycarbite Armour (Resurrection of the Daleks)

Of all of the silly set design elements of the Nathan-Turner
years, the tendency to make surfaces more "spacey" by
covering them in bubble wrap is, in fact, my favorite.

It’s February 8th, 1984. Frankie continues to relax in Hollywood, with Queen lurking just below. Duran Duran and The Eurythmics also chart, and The Smiths have one of their biggest hits during their actual career with “What Difference Does it Make” just barely missing the top ten and peaking at #12. But perhaps most significant is Madonna making her chart debut with “Holiday,” which peaks at #6.

The Winter Olympics run through this story, necessitating the merging of episodes into two 45-minute episodes, an experiment that becomes the norm in the next season. Konstantin Chernenko becomes the head of the Soviet Union.

While on television, Davison gets his obligatory Dalek story. There is no such thing as a great era of Doctor Who that has ended without a great Dalek story. The Pertwee era’s inability to quite stick the landing on any of its Dalek stories is emblematic of the nagging doubts plaguing that era. The fact that the Williams era went to pieces on its Dalek story is almost a perfect metaphor for its failings. And on the other extreme, however good - and indeed better - stories like The Brain of Morbius are, it will always be Genesis of the Daleks that is the defining moment of the Hinchcliffe era, and all the various weak spots of the Troughton era can be forgiven in a heartbeat in the face of his two Dalek stories. But perhaps no stories exemplify the way in which Dalek stories serve as the defining metaphors of their eras as the two Saward-penned Dalek stories.

For all the stick I’ve given him, John Nathan-Turner was not untalented. The quality of work at the beginning and end of his tenure makes it very clear that he was capable of producing some phenomenally good television. But it is equally telling that he is by miles the least writerly Doctor Who producer. He is the only post-Innes Lloyd producer of the series to have no significant writing credits to his name. Bryant and Sherwin both served as script editor, Letts wrote several scripts, Hinchcliffe started as a writer, wrote three novelizations, and submitted scripts after his departure, and Williams stepped in on scripts in his era and was set to write one for Season 23. Nathan-Turner, however, was not a writer.

This is not an insult, I should stress. The producer’s job is not first and foremost a writing job, and writing is only one path to the chair. Nathan-Turner has a strong sense of publicity, is savvy about stretching the budget, and is attentive to the visuals even if his aesthetic is at times exceedingly dodgy. But it does explain a fairly basic truth about Nathan-Turner’s tenure, which is that he is more dependent on the quality of his script editor than almost anyone else. (Of course, with a nine season tenure and three script editors, there’s considerably more data available for Nathan-Turner) When he’s paired with a writer who has a strong creative vision for the show he’s able to get that vision to execute successfully and compellingly week in and week out.

Unfortunately, for the better part of five seasons Nathan-Turner was paired instead with Eric Saward. Saward, as we discussed on his first appearance, is a writer with a profound gap between his ability and his taste. And in Resurrection of the Daleks we get  a very pure Saward script - one that is has a lot to say, is profoundly concerned with the series history, is constructed as an ambitious, exciting script, and doesn’t quite come off.

Let’s start with what Resurrection of the Daleks isn’t, which is an indiscriminate festival of violence. It is violent, yes, but to read the violence as the point of the exercise requires almost completely ignoring the fact that the story ends with Tegan appalled at the level of violence and leaving the Doctor with the declaration that it’s not fun any more. Given that Tegan has fairly reliably been used as a moral mouthpiece in the series, and given that the Doctor is shown to be very much shaken by her departure, it’s clear that we have to take this seriously as part of the point of the story.

Given this, the structure that Saward is going for is clearly one of a sucker punch. After a lengthy story in which it appears that the story is about the pleasure of fast-paced action and space adventure the rug is suddenly pulled out and the story critiques what we’ve been ostensibly enjoying for the past eighty minutes or so.

Not only is this a perfectly valid structure and approach, it’s a damn good one that’s considerably savvier and more interesting, structurally, than Doctor Who has been in years. On top of that, there’s actually a savvy and interesting engagement with the past. Not only is this story drenched in Dalek continuity - gratuitously picking up from the Movellan war exactly as absolutely nobody wanted - but the story’s iconography is a loyal execution of the Terry Nation style. By situating itself loyally as the extension of Nation’s style of storytelling and then pulling the rug out, we finally have what all of these engagements with the past should have been from the start - an actual commentary on the past that’s interested in it as something more than cheap nostalgia.

It also marks a maturing in Saward’s use of action set pieces, of course. Earthshock was easy to criticize, not because of its violence but because of the complete lack of any engagement with it and its clear belief that men in uniforms shooting things were just plain cool. And Warriors of the Deep repeated the error, treating massive casualties as an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of the need to have cool men in uniforms who shoot things. But here we get something that actually holds its action heroes up to some inquiry. And not just in the end. The whole of Resurrection of the Daleks plays an ongoing game with its mercenaries and soldiers, making them just a bit too ruthless and psychopathic to enjoy. The main example, of course, is Lytton, who plays a clear villain role, but who the story is visibly fascinated with.

Lest we assume because of the more problematic aspects of his tenure that Saward was not a savvy enough writer to attempt something like this, let’s not forget that the writers Saward was most visibly fond of while working on Doctor Who were Philip Martin and Robert Holmes. That Saward had tremendous respect for social satire and structural complexity is evident. The idea that he would attempt it himself is surely uncontroversial. It seems to me difficult to argue seriously that this isn’t what Resurrection of the Daleks is trying for.

And many aspects of it are quite solid. The direction is quite strong (no surprise that the director was tapped to launch Eastenders), and the action sequences come off better than they ever have before in the series. The acting is solid, and there’s several moments where the violence really does successfully tick over to troubling - the sequences with the face-melting gas are really quite disturbing. All of the brutality is pitched exactly where it needs to be so that it’s just troubling enough that we should be able to buy the sucker punch at the end.

So why doesn’t it work? Part of it is, ironically, that this is the one bit of the series’ past that you can’t take this approach with. If you’d just swapped the monsters of Earthshock and Resurrection of the Daleks, both would have been dramatically improved. But the return of the Daleks after four and a half years is one of the few bits of continuity that carried enough inherent weight that it was difficult to undermine. Even if the final sequence hadn’t looked for all the world like Davros and the Daleks ejaculating themselves to death, the idea of Tegan being horrified by a bunch of Daleks exploding just doesn’t quite wash. There’s just too much history of enjoying Daleks slaughtering everybody to use them as the basis of this critique. No matter how solid the critique is - and I think Saward does, in fact, effectively skewer the flaws with Terry Nation-style plotting - actually using the Daleks for it is just a bridge too far, simply because they’ve long been more than just Terry Nation villains.

Lawrence Miles speaks admiringly of the way in which this story was the last time that Doctor Who felt like an event, and he’s surely right. But that’s the problem - this is one of two times in the Davison era when the show is right and the weight of the returning continuity is genuine and big. There’s a lot of room to play within that - as Remembrance of the Daleks will eventually show, you can do a lot, even within the classic series, with the Daleks. But the sucker punch isn’t one of the things you can get to work here.

But there are also just some sloppy and unforced errors here indicative of the larger problem with Saward’s work, which is that he’s just not good enough to do the ambitious scripts he’s shooting for. The decision to kill Laird in the third episode, for instance, is indefensible. As the one character Tegan is actually close to in the story, her death is an obvious opportunity to actually provide a motivation for Tegan’s departure. She should have survived through to the end and died in the final battle so that Tegan actually had a proximate cause for her departure. Instead she gets killed almost as an afterthought, with the big dramatic supporting character death being Stein. Who is a well-acted character, but the struggle of a pleasantly cowardly man to overcome Dalek conditioning is not the best opportunity for dramatic impact.

Indeed, this scene gets at the crux of the problem that Saward has. Stein goes down with a snarky one-liner about the Daleks being just in time for the fun before he suicides to destroy them all. Miles and Wood describe it as “adolescent,” but that’s not the real problem. The problem is that it’s macho action movie posturing of the most stereotypical kind. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of thing the story is supposedly critiquing. And yet in this scene it’s played as a big, cathartic moment. Never mind that the catharsis is unearned and that Stein is completely the wrong character to be using here given that his only settings in the story are “wet” and “traitor,” it’s just the wrong catharsis for the story.

And this is the problem. Saward is writing a critique of violent storytelling, but he has a very muddy sense of where the line is. To constantly push the line as setup to a big about face and moral point requires a meticulous sense of what that line is. And Saward doesn’t have it. He enjoys giggling like a schoolboy at the violence of it all too much. The dead giveaway is the opening, with its “evil cops” routine that’s a blatant homage to the Terror of the Autons scene with the Auton police officers that proved controversial. He’s got a critique of violence going here, but he can’t keep from, in places, engaging in exactly what he’s trying to critique.

Still, it’s easy to like this story - considerably easier than people would have you believe, in fact. In context it’s far from, as Miles would have it, cheap and lightweight. It’s an attempt at a great story, and while it falls short, that’s worth something. In an era where the program has had trouble when striving for mediocrity at times, in fact, it’s worth a great deal.

The problem is that this is by the script editor, and that points to more systemic problems. Especially when you have a producer whose blind spot is writing, when the writer can’t quite deliver the goods you have a big problem. Saward is almost, but not quite, up to the task of greatness. And Nathan-Turner’s production, to work, requires actual greatness. As ever, Dalek stories have an uncanny knack for summing up their eras.