That's It, I've Been Renewed (Paradise Towers)

We call it... the drink machine.

It's October 5th, 1987. M/A/R/R/S are at number one with "Pump Up The Volume/Antina (The First Time I See She Dance). A week later The Bee Gees unseat them with "You Win Again,"  Erasure, Billy Idol, Bananarama, George Michael, and Pet Shop Boys also chart. As do The Sisters of Mercy, with "This Corrosion," so, you know, welcome to the glory days of goth.

In real news, the south of England gets whacked with what is functionally a hurricane, killing 23 people and knocking out power across the region. The New York Stock Exchange jumps off a cliff to the tune of 22.61%, leading to similar fun on the London Stock Exchange. And Robert Bork is rejected from the US Supreme Court.

While on television, we have Paradise Towers, the supposed 8th worst Doctor Who story of all time. It is, by the way, absolutely brilliant. i say this to make clear, this is not one of my redemptive readings, that phrase implying as it does that there is something about the story requiring redemption. The only thing about this story to maybe require a spot of redemption is the acting, and we'll get there. But since everybody, when talking about this story, wants to go on about Richard Briers, let's leave the acting for as long as possible and talk about everything else first.

Because if you set the acting aside Paradise Towers fits very smoothly into a lengthy tradition of literature and thought about housing. If we were to sketch a quick history of this, it would go something like this. In the 1950s-70s there was a bizarre little fad in architecture called Brutalism. You know the type of building - those horrific piles of angular concrete that scream out the era of their production like the muted eyesores they are.

In practice brutalism marks the death throes of modernism. Modernism is a term that is perhaps even more devalued than postmodernism, which is an impressive feat when one stops to think about it. But for our purposes the two most important things to note about modernism is that it aggressively rejected tradition while still putting an enormous premium on notions of form and structure. This caused it to eventually fall awkwardly between both the right and the left. The right hated it because it was too non-traditional and because Hitler hated painters who were better than him, which is to say, virtually everybody. The left, on the other hand, noticed that an alarming number of modernists turned into fascists who were, after all, equally fond of throwing out the established order of things and replacing it with a rigidly designed new system.

After World War II, however, modernism broke out in architecture in a big way. The post-war fascination with technocracy and the sudden availability of lots of modernist architects who had fled the Nazis meant that everybody wanted to do big urban renewal projects with grand designs and visions. Hence the rise of brutalism. The archetypal product of this were what in the US are usually called housing projects (as in "living in the projects") and in the UK are council estates (as in the backronym of chav as "council housed and violent"). That is to say, government-subsidized affordable housing.

In the brutalist style this turned out to be a disaster. The standard example is Pruitt-Igoe, a shoddily constructed block of housing that quickly degenerated into a crime-ridden nightmare and was demolished less than twenty years after its construction. The two extremes of this form a clear snapshot of this sort of modernism. On the one hand, Pruitt-Igoe was an unmitigated disaster of a construction. On the other, it was built by respected architects and was an acclaimed piece of architecture. The contrast led to the ironically derogatory phrase "award-winning design" to refer to something beloved by architectural critics and thus, by implication, almost certainly a piece of crap in practice.

For those who have been following the blog for a while, you may recall that we briefly dealt with J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition just under a year ago. Ballard, in his time, was one of the more scathing critics of this sort of modernism, and indeed, one of his better books was his 1975 novel High Rise, about a modernist apartment block falling into a raging internal civil war. This sort of thing was very much in vogue in the 1970s - a criticism of the technocratic structures that underlay modernism and of the fetishistic worship of spectacle that they entailed. This was a major theme of the early Pertwee era, with its initial anxieties over technocratic structures giving way to an embrace of glam. After which Ballard and his ilk kind of fell out of fashion.

But in the 1980s, under Thatcher, this line of thought experienced a revival as, under Thatcher, urban renewal became chic again, this time in the name of redevelopment for major corporate clients. In the UK the major example is the London Docklands, which went from a working class area of London to a herd of glass and steel white elephants. (Now we're well into East London Redevelopment Act II: Olympic Boogaloo) Like the first wave of modernist redevelopment this was based on the idea of "fixing" the bad areas of the city. Unlike the first wave, instead of fixing them by providing decent housing for the people who lived there, this wave sought to price them out and get them to move somewhere - anywhere else.

This led to the rise of a second wave of concern about modernism and its effects on ordinary people. But this second wave had some interestingly different concerns. Where the first wave had mostly been critical of the way in which totalitarian modernist visions crushed individuals and led to depraved social conditions, the second wave was interested in finding an alternative to the totalitarianism. The alternative of choice has generally been community-based strategies, in which local community groups band together to produce their own cooperative solutions to their problems, developing functional structures around their behavior instead of imposing them from above. Much of the sharpest opposition to austerity programs in the UK has come from these perspectives - ones that heavily inform the political thought of Rowan Williams as well, and, for that matter, of Barack Obama, whose role as a community organizer basically meant "doing this stuff."

This second wave is, indirectly, a big influence on this blog. One of the people to come out of the late 80s critique of modernism was Iain Sinclair, a brilliantly obscurantist chronicler of the material East London who, in turn, became a mid-career inspiration for Alan Moore, whose work has increasingly combined Sinclair's psychogeography with Moore's fascination with Ideaspace, tracking the imaginary geographies of things - an idea that led directly to my discarding the physical geography entirely and taking an idle stroll across an entirely imaginary landscape of memory. And Moore's more recent work - particularly his tragically aborted underground magazine Dodgem Logic - has focused very explicitly on the failing council houses of his native Northampton and the practical lives of the impoverished in his own community.

Paradise Towers fits completely in this tradition. Kroagnan, the Great Architect who despised how people ruined his perfect designs, is a straightforward parodic critique of the modernist architect. The devolution of Paradise Towers from beautiful planned community to urban warzone is right out of Ballard. The equivalence between Kroagnan and zombies is a flat-out lift from Romero's Dawn of the Dead and its mall setting. Paradise Towers, through and through, is a contribution to this tradition of thought.

Tat Wood, in About Time, notes that it is the first story in some time to have no references to previous stories. This is a telling detail that explains at least part of why the story is unloved. The fact of the matter is that Doctor Who has, for several years now, been catering primarily to an audience of fans. Fandom is an exceedingly middle class practice, based as it is on a surplus of leisure time and the disposable income to fritter away on Dapol action figures, Target novelizations, trips to conventions, and other such commercial product. This fact is largely responsible for the maddening sociopathy of mainstream science fiction fandom - it's a self-selected group of reasonably affluent people focused on capitalist production. They are myopic by design.

A story about modernism and council estates is, in other words, utterly removed from anything that a fan in the Ian Levine model would ever care about. And to be frank, large numbers of people who talk about Paradise Towers simply don't seem remotely aware the larger literary tradition it fits into. They treat it as a naff runaround with silly concepts. And this inevitably makes it look like a much, much weaker story than it is. Which is fine - Tat Wood's observation of the way in which it breaks from past stories by not catering to fans is telling. This isn't a Doctor Who story for Doctor Who fans. It's a Doctor Who story for the British public - an attempt to think of Doctor Who as an alternative to Coronation Street (which, of course, it was in the McCoy era - directly so).

To put it another way, Paradise Towers marks a return to a very old conception of what Doctor Who is based on the bygone utopian models of what the BBC is. It's a story that is simultaneously tackling issues of concern to working class segments of society and framing them in terms of a larger and highbrow philosophical debate - something, in other words, that has something to say to large swaths of British society and that, more importantly, speaks to them as part of a unified whole. This used to be what the BBC was about and what it was for. This used to be what Doctor Who was for. About the only people really excluded from the audience to whom Paradise Towers attempts to be relevant are sad sack anoraks. Unfortunately, they were the only audience left, but that's neither here nor there.

There is, however, a pesky set of grounds for criticism. This is ostensibly trying to go for Ballard-esque 2000 AD-inflected dystopias of street gangs and cannibal old women running around a council estate. Unfortunately, it looks like a children's panto. This is somewhat dissonant, in much the same way that that claim is somewhat understated. But most of the criticisms of it miss the point. The usual line of critique is that Richard Briers as the Chief Caretaker overacts. Which, yes, he does.

The thing is, everyone overacts. It's one thing when there's one jarring note in the acting that skews a production. But here the entirety of the acting is skewed in the same direction. The Kangs are too old to be a child street gang and don't so much act like a street gang as like a childish approximation thereof. The Rezzies are over the top. Pex is a completely inadequate parody of an action hero. And yes, Richard Briers is channeling his inner John Cleese in portraying a fascist authoritarian.

But look at that list - everything is pushed towards a broad and theatrical sort of children's television. Paradise Towers isn't a Ballardian dystopia screwed up by bad acting. It's a Ballardian dystopia performed as broad-stroked children's television. It is, in other words, a completely consistent genre fusion in which one of the genres is postmodernist social commentary and the other is low-rent children's television.

Of course, fusing two flavors together is not an inherently good idea. But in this case there's a pleasant logic to it. Both children's television and Ballard have a strong commitment to a sort of wild excess. They are considerably closer than they might appear. The only reason to fault this, in other words, is if you really think that the discussions of anal sadism are the whole point of The Atrocity Exhibition. If, on the other hand, what you favor is its inventiveness and its sense of manic glee, Paradise Towers will be right up your alley.

And more to the point, Paradise Towers is a theft of what is, in 1987, a twelve year old book. It's not like High Rise is brand spanking new and innovative anymore. A piece that just wallows gleefully in the sick and twisted nature of Paradise Towers is going to be little more than Vengance on Varos without as much self-awareness. On top of that, it was never going to work on Doctor Who, both because the BBC was never going to let outright Ballard go out under the Doctor Who banner, even in a later timeslot, and because Doctor Who was never going to be able to afford it anyway.

Whereas Doctor Who can nail low-rent children's television in its sleep. And children's television Ballard carries all of the frisson that Ballard could cause in the 1970s. The dissonance between the story's apparent mood and its actual content is substantive. Ballard was always trading on the tradition of the grotesque, which the overacting is still perfectly compatible with. The tension between what the show is about and how it's being performed is tangible - which is to say that all of the grotesqueries are more noticeable through their absence than they ever could be through presence in 1987.

There's also a pleasant charm to be had in the compatibility of the underlying messages. On the one hand the ending is a mawkish festival of "but we need to put aside our differences and work together." On the other hand this is exactly how social alliances for the purposes of community organization work - people come together on the basis of shared goals like improving their living areas or not being murdered by evil cleaning robots. Yes, there's the vague threat of bathos that risks making the serious and important point about what effective action in the face of totalitarianism is look like cheap sentimentality, but it's a relatively minor risk. For the most part it comes off.

The easiest way to put this is that Paradise Towers gets away with being Ballard for kids. But this undersells what it accomplishes. It's not just kid-friendly Ballard, it's a new take on what Ballard is doing. The introduction of children's television isn't just a shift in audience, it's a materially new perspective on the concepts that deserves to be taken seriously on its own merits and terms.

In the end, to criticize Paradise Towers we have to suggest that children's television adaptations of Ballard that are about the failures of modernism is a bad thing. We can certainly make that case if we want to, but frankly, if that's not something you're interested in it's not entirely clear why you're watching Doctor Who in the first place. Stories like this are why I blog.

Is Paradise Towers flawless? God no. Everything it does well will be done better in at least one of the next ten stories. But more importantly, nothing it does well has been done in Doctor Who for years at this point, if it's ever been done at all. It's at once a clear return to the actual legacy of what Doctor Who used to be - its purpose, as opposed to its iconography - and a genuinely new take that's bang on target for the year its airing in.

This is, in other words, it. The moment where Doctor Who turned it around. We're now in an eleven story run where quality is the norm and disasters are an aberration, and, at a minimum, a ten year run in which Doctor Who is consistently good with regular outbreaks of genius. We're finally at a point where the show is not only brilliant again, but one where the trajectory from here to the present day is, save for one brief but calamitous downturn in the mid-90s, one of almost constant improvement.

Welcome back.

The Evidence Was Not As I Remembered (Time and the Rani)

Well, clearly something has changed about the program.

It's September 7th, 1987. The number one song has to be linked to, I fear. It remains there for three weeks before being unseated by M/A/R/R/S with "Pump Up The Volume/Anitina (The First Time I See She Dance)." Also in the charts are Michael Jackson with Bad, Madonna with Causing a Commotion, U2 with "Where The Streets Have No Name," and The Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield with "What Have I Done To Deserve This."

In real news, recapping since Colin Baker went down in a hail of carrot juice, British Gas and British Airways both go public. The highest ever audience for a British television drama tunes in for the grimly depressing EastEnders Christmas episode. Kurt Waldheim is barred from the United States, Klaus Barbie goes on trial in Lyon, and Rudolf Hess dies. Thatcher wins election to a third term, and the Docklands Light Railway opens in London. And the entire Spycatcher affair rumbles on, with The Daily Telegraph being sued in an attempt to block them from publishing details from the book. And Jeffrey Archer wins a libel trial against the Daily Star. He will go on to lose a perjury trial over his actions in the libel trial. Oh well.

While during this story, Pat Robertson announces that he's running for President, Spycatcher gets published in Australia, and Star Trek: The Next Generation premieres.

Speaking of television, we have here Time and the Rani. Time and the Rani, obviously, is not very good. We might, if we wanted to, suggest that this was some sort of major problem that damaged the series and screwed over the rest of the Sylvester McCoy era, but let's face it, it wasn't. Ratings dropped after the first episode, but recovered healthily over the remainder of the season such that it's difficult to blame Time and the Rani for any long term damage.

This is oddly liberating. For five seasons - arguably for nine - every bad story has required some larger contextualization in terms of the failings of the production team and some exploration into what specific role the offending story played in the downfall of Doctor Who. But here we're free from that! It had nothing to do with the downfall of Doctor Who. There's nothing left to explain here - we're on a twelve story run of bonus stories. The show is doomed, nothing save maybe for realizing that they could have promoted Remembrance of the Daleks as a stunning rebirth of the franchise could possibly have saved it, and we're free to simply enjoy the steady improvement the show undergoes and the fact that it very quickly becomes better than it's ever been before.

So, yes, Time and the Rani is rubbish for all the reasons you expect it to be rubbish, most of which are Pip and Jane Baker, but really, who cares? Not only does it not matter for once, what's bad about this story isn't even one of the most interesting things about it. What's interesting about it are, frankly, the myriad of casually good things.

On a technical level, at least, this is a much more solid show. This, in many ways, began with Trial of a Time Lord. The decision to switch entirely to video gives rise to a newfound unity in the look of productions. It also coincides with a willingness to use locations better and an increased savviness in camera placement and movement such that the flashes of brilliance that characterized Camfield or Maloney or Harper stories in the past suddenly become the norm.

But the technical side can safely be saved for the video blog below. So let's move into the aspects of this story that are better than people give them credit for and don't have anything to do with the production. For instance, the writing.

No, really. For all of its flaws, let's not forget that this story had a genuinely massive mountain to climb in terms of writing. With McCoy's hiring happening barely a month before production, there was no way that his entrance wasn't going to be rough. As good an actor as McCoy is - and we'll talk about that in a minute, his opening scenes are tough to watch.

It's to their credit that the Bakers come pup with a good solution to the problem. If the Doctor isn't going to be up to snuff in this story then pair him with Kate O'Mara's Rani, a character who had already acted Anthony Ainley's Master off the screen in her last appearance. And on top of that, cover up his first two episodes with the utterly ludicrous conceit of Kate O'Mara impersonating Bonnie Langford. Which is a genuinely clever way of papering over that crack. It's notable that Time and the Rani doesn't really start to drag until after the Rani's ruse is exposed. The wheel-spinning of the first two episodes is genuine, but to be honest, Tat Wood's declaration that episode one is the single worst episode of Doctor Who ever is simply bewildering. Much worse, for my money, is episode three, in which all pretense of comedy is drained and we watch a still-not-quite-there Sylvester McCoy in a turgid Pip and Jane runaround through a quarry.

Yes, the Rani has flaws as a character and is at times annoying in her vapid campness. But Kate O'Mara can anchor a scene capably - indeed, she makes a fair meal out of some painful dialogue here. As bad as this story is, it ran the risk of being incoherent and having nothing at all that clearly anchored it if they forced McCoy to the center too early. The decision to have this be Kate O'Mara's show first and foremost steadied the ship considerably and gave McCoy the space to start to feel out his character.

And McCoy, let's be clear, is quite good here too. The usual (and utterly wrong) brief about McCoy's three years are that his first season involved a lot of clowning around and then he settled down. This is based on two things, neither of which have a lot to do with his actual stories. The first is the fact that one of McCoy's pre-Doctor Who jobs was as a physical comedian in roadshow comedy. The second is that, starting with Season 25, the series takes a somewhat darker and more serious turn, and as a result everything prior to that turn is automatically relegated to being "silly."

In truth, both judgments are thoroughly off-base. Season 24 has some comedic stories, but with the arguable exception of Time and the Rani - and let's face it, the Bakers weren't trying for comedy - all of them have serious undertones. As for McCoy, well, this is a complete misunderstanding of him. Yes, he was a physical comedy clown. In the Ken Campbell Roadshow. So that would be a physical comedy clown for the guy who did a nine hour staging of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. Clearly this is not quite as straightforward a career as "stuffing ferrets down his trousers" makes it sound. And that's ignoring the fact that McCoy had already branched into serious acting performances.

It is true that McCoy's earliest training was in stage shows played to potentially indifferent or hostile audiences, and that he as a result internalized the crucial skill of being willing to do absolutely anything to win over an audience. It's arguable that this leads to his one real failing in the part - his marked weakness in scenes in which he has to be angry or over the top - but for the most part it's to his credit, keeping his Doctor constantly animated and active. Indeed, the more brooding, dark elements of his character that later come to define him are only really possible because of this aspect of McCoy's performance. The skills he honed getting indifferent and intoxicated audiences to keep being entertained are the same ones he later uses to get away with the more somber Doctor he plays.

What's interesting, then, is that McCoy, over the course of Time and the Rani, shrinks into his role. Or, perhaps more accurately, he fills the space he's given with increasing thoroughness. He starts, unsurprisingly, with a broad and comedic scope, but between having Kate O'Mara vamping her way across the first two episodes and, I think, a growing realization that the part calls for something smaller, he draws inward. He learns quickly how to play the part so as to suggest hidden depths. Again, there's an odd way in which the Bakers' script benefits him here. The script spends two episodes with a lot of the plot hinging on the details of what the Doctor is thinking, which means that McCoy gets the opportunity to work at implying a vast and incomprehensible amount of thought under the surface.

By the end we routinely get moments that seem like what we all remember McCoy's Doctor as being. The moment when he muses over what the Rani's control over the universe would mean, commenting that "Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Louis Pasteur, Elvis, even Mrs Malaprop will never have existed" is telling for its lack of bluster. It's not delivered as a furious rejoinder to the Rani, but rather as though the Doctor is thinking through her plan and naming the first consequences that come to mind. Even much earlier, when the Doctor refers to "that sad skeleton" the line resonates in compelling new ways.

The other thing to note is that for all the script's flaws, the Bakers do tend to have interesting ideas clanking about in the depths of their scripts. The line that "the barrier to understanding time is empirical thinking" is deliciously suggestive, even if the Bakers don't do anything at all with its implications.

These are, of course, all small things in the face of a story that is pointedly not good. But it is, I think, more sensible to look at this as the first step in a necessarily gradual process of improvement. It's simply not possible to go from being the sort of show that does Trial of a Time Lord to the sort of show that does Remembrance of the Daleks in a single story. That Doctor Who got there in four stories is remarkable, and the fact that it's not good yet after one story can't be taken as grounds for criticism.

If we're being honest, much of this story's reputation comes from the circumstances surrounding its original airing. Watched without knowledge of the future it was a terrifying moment of "oh God, here we go again." But again, we don't have to do that anymore. We know the series gets better, and can afford to look at this story in the context of that improvement. Its innovations are incremental, but they're important ones that have a huge impact later on. Its flaws are massive, but they're holdovers from an era that is already almost completely shoved out the door. Watched in the context of Doctor Who's larger history, this is clearly more the beginning of improvement than it is a continuation of problems.

But in any case, let's move on to the editing and visual improvements I was talking about and bring in, after some time, another video blog.

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 32 (Knights of God)

There's a shift between the early and late 1980s that is difficult to articulate, but nevertheless clear. The cultural moment of the late 80s - one that, in practice, extends a few years into the 90s - is clearly a vibrant one. Swaths of really good bands release career high albums in this period, the much-feted British Inavsion of Comics hits high gear, you've got the Second Summer of Love, and, for good measure, Doctor Who has a creative renaissance.

Knights of God, which ran in 1987, airing the day before the episodes of Season 24 of Doctor Who, is clearly a part of this era. Which is interesting, as it was held back by two years and actually belongs to 1985, a very different era of television. And yet the delay is in many ways absolutely perfect - a case of something that would have been a few years ahead of its time instead ending up being an iconic example of its time.

Throughout the Baker era one of the running defenses we could fine was that it's not entirely clear what Doctor Who should have been in the context of television of that period. Starting, well, not quite next story, but definitely the one after, Doctor Who starts to figure this out. And the solution it comes up with is very similar to the one that Knights of God turned out to have come up with two years previously.

Last time we focused on children's television we noted that there was an awkward gulf confronting Doctor Who between its children's television tradition and the considerably darker and edgier tradition that serious-minded science fiction was taking. The question left hanging was how to mix the aggressive and dark weirdness of something like Max Headroom with the traditional structure of children's television.

It's worth reflecting, though, on what the nature of this tension is. It's not, obviously, that children's television can't be dark. Indeed, for the most part good children's television is defined by an aggressive darkness. Rather, it's that in the end children's television tends to be about making the bewildering understandable, which means that while estrangement might be a tool along the way - indeed, a very important tool - it's rarely the endpoint.

The troubling bit is that so much of the energy of this cultural moment comes from estrangement. It's a cultural moment based on new, often more cynical takes on the epics of the past, and on disillusionment and alienation. The ostentatious and gaudy approaches of the earlier 1980s gave way to an angry depression - a situation that only increased come Thatcher's third election in 1987. So children's television's had a real problem at this point, especially children's television that wanted to deal with science fiction at all.

Enter Knights of God. On the one hand, it's a searing, angry dystopia positing a fascist futuristic Britain in which the north and Wales have been brutally subjugated by the eponymous Knights of God. It's not the sort of actively weird  estrangement of, say, Max Headroom, but it's a vividly unsettling milieu. The opening shots of the credits sets the tone well - a burning Union Jack and an ominous fleet of helicopters flying toward the camera - do huge amounts to set the tone for the series. Even within the series there's a real edge to it. The regions of Britain to hold out against the Knights of God - Wales and the north - are the same ones hit hardest by Thatcher's tenure. So on the one hand what we have is a venomous piece of disillusioned dystopia.

On the other hand, the basic plot - a young boy discovers he's the secret king of Britain and goes through some Arthurian symbolism in the course of overthrowing the Knights - is fairly standard "light reskinning of an existing mythology" stuff that one would expect to populate a lot of children's television. In practice the story is a modern day King Arthur type story, albeit one with a surprisingly good cast and a dark tinge to proceedings. Nevertheless, there's something very safe and familiar about the basic arc of the story.

So far this isn't anything new, though it is something about which we've found much to respect in the past. It's a fairly standard "let's mix two sets of narrative codes" approach of the sort that Doctor Who started doing reliably and well in the Tom Baker era. It's an approach that has fueled most of the best Doctor Who stories since that era too, if we're being honest. So even if the basic form isn't a radical invention, it's something with a lot of legs and potential.

But in this case there's a tough spot - the basic fact that disillusioned and dystopic depictions of fascist Britain and a King Arthur adventure aren't just two different sets of narrative codes, they're two different sets of narrative codes that actively jar. Much like panto and dramatic piece about domestic violence and its aftermath turned out to combine with spectacular lack of success at the dawn of the Colin Baker era this combination risks being really unpleasant and uncomfortable.

But let's think for a moment about why The Twin Dilemma was so bad - indeed, why much of the Saward era was problematic. The trouble was that Saward had an unfortunate tendency of flaunting his supposed edginess in a way that badly overestimates just how edgy he's being. I wouldn't go so far as to say that all of the problem with The Twin Dilemma comes down to this, but certainly a part of it is that the show is clearly going "Oh look, we've got a violent and unpredictable Doctor, isn't this dramatic" while the audience is going "you have a man in the worst coat ever made in a story about a giant slug with a deely bopper, and so having him try to strangle somebody isn't dramatic, it's just horrid." That is to say, The Twin Dilemma swings for drama and hits stupid panto, which is bathetic.

Knights of God makes a savvy move to avoid this. For the most part, it's content to act like children's television. It never over-emphasizes its darkness or strains to wring added drama from proceedings. Instead it plugs along as a straightforward sort of Arthurian remix and allows the bits of it that are more serious and unnerving to cut against that. It's a small but significant thing. Instead of aiming for drama and ending up a bit silly, Knights of God purports to be light children's entertainment and then goes further than it should for that.

This is a good general principle to hold to when crossing genres, particularly those of differing levels of seriousness: it's better to have hidden depths than appear oblivious to your own shallowness. And it's a lesson that Cartmel and Nathan-Turner quickly start to apply to Doctor Who. Indeed, this can fairly be described as the basic approach of the Cartmel era. It goes back to making stuff that feels like children's television, but constantly bristles with deeper implications. This isn't just children's television that works for adults too, but something more fundamental. The depths are visible, if not always entirely understandable, to children, and the show is far more compelling for it.

Indeed, this approach is more compelling than the maturity in play even in the Colin Baker stories that worked. As an adult I can see perfectly well that Vengeance on Varos is brilliant and satirical, but as a kid I didn't see any of that. Whereas I knew that stories like Survival or Ghost Light had things going on that I couldn't see, and they were altogether more compelling for it. Knights of God isn't a show I saw as a child, but it has that same approach down where it's clear that there's something bigger and darker lurking about in the subtext.

Ironically, the trick to hinting at these depths is to have actors who don't play towards them. Knights of God does this well, casting actors who are both experienced with children's television and skilled at drama. Gareth Thomas, Patrick Troughton, John Woodvine, and Julian Fellowes are confident enough actors to play their scenes as straightforward drama. Woodvine occasionally stops to gnaw gently upon the scenery, but his overacting remains firmly within the range of what is normal for children's television villains, and as evil fascist overlords go he's profoundly restrained. The result are actors who are neither overly stressing the serious portions of the show nor undermining them, but who are instead acting as though they are making serious children's television. This lets the larger darkness of the series lurk about the edges, given enough room to exist and thrive by the actors' seriousness but never foregrounded.

It's not a foolproof strategy. The problem with hidden depths is that it's easy to have them not quite be deep enough to carry what they're doing. The result can be a troubling level of glibness. For all that it's compelling, for instance, Knights of God trends uncomfortably towards a dictatorial monarchism of its own in its endless focus on how a good king will rise up and rule everybody wisely and justly. There's something off about the ethics of the show - something that stems, ultimately, from the fact that its genre is just a little too facile to really deal seriously with the issues of fascism in British culture.

There is, in other words, still that lurking problem of bathos. Foregrounding the lighter half of the juxtaposition reduces the danger and makes for something compelling, but there's still, at the end of the day, the problem that children's television is limited in its capacity for the avant garde or for serious social commentary is real. There's a constant danger of glibness. Or perhaps even worse, there's a slight inevitability of glibness. No matter what you do with it, the uncanniness that is so compelling within this approach remains a weakness as well.

But equally, this fusion opens doors that other approaches just can't touch. There's something about pitting Arthurian legends against a stand-in for Thatcherism that is compelling. If its virtue isn't that it's a fully functional piece of serious thought about political issues, well, fine, but this doesn't make what it does offer any less potent. So much of pragmatic politicking these days hinges on the realization that people think about the world narratively. And children's television has access to a set of narratives that are deeply powerful. The iconography of children's stories makes up for its lack of seriousness in its ability to be haunting and striking.

And beyond that, what good are our childhood mythologies if they cannot be pitted against our adult demons? We do not need King Arthur to defeat Margaret Thatcher any more than we need him to defeat the schoolyard bully. That's not his purpose or his value. Our imaginary heroes exist to defeat the imaginary dimensions of these things. And children's television is unique in its ability to make use of that. Children's television that thinks to turn that tool towards things not normally confronted by imaginary heroes is a striking idea worth taking seriously. Imperfection is not the opposite of good.

And Knights of God is good. It's very good, in fact. It's gripping, it's well-made, it's well-acted. It's the sort of show that worms its way into your consciousness as a kid. And, for our purposes most importantly, it's a show that demonstrates how Doctor Who could  be that while still making a real, material social engagement. It is, to put it another way, a map of alchemy.

It's fitting, then, that this is the last television appearance of Patrick Troughton. Not the last thing he filmed, but the delay from 1985 to 1987 meant that it was the last thing that he appeared in to air. And this seems a good place to end - with a final nod to the man who did so much to map out the alchemy of Doctor Who. Here, for the last time, he gives a sense of what Doctor Who could be. And twenty-four hours after the first episode of it aired, we'd have a chance to see whether the new regime could make it work.

Time Can Be Rewritten 27 (Time's Champion)

Time's Champion - probably the single least findable thing I'll cover on this blog - is an unlicensed novel by Craig Hinton and Chris McKeon published as a charity endeavor in 2008. The provenance of it is interesting - Hinton pitched the novel to BBC Books, but it was rejected - instead they published Gary Russell's Spiral Scratch to fill basically the same purpose of giving Colin Baker a regeneration story. Separately the American writer Chris McKeon pitched a story to Big Finish about the Valeyard which was also rejected. McKeon and Hinton got in touch, and Hinton gave McKeon permission to turn his outline of Time's Champion into a full novel, which, following Hinton's death, McKeon did.

Let's get one thing out of the way- this is not a good book. McKeon, who is by far the more involved writer, is a weak prosesmith at best. On top of that, the plot elevates fanwank to a profound art, relying heavily not only on Hinton's previous novels Millennial Rites and The Quantum Archangel but with heavy references to scads of other stuff. This is not in and of itself a problem, except that it seems to be the entire point of this book -  to try to fit absolutely as many existing pieces of Doctor Who together as is possible.

I'll attempt something resembling a summary of the plot. The Doctor visits Sergeant Benton's 70th birthday party, which is also visited by some characters from The Quantum Archangel including the human component of Kronos from the Time Monster and his pregnant wife. Meanwhile, in 1908 a writer is attempting to write a book called Time's Champion that turns out to be written in quantum mnemonics, the magical language from Millennial Rites. And in 9908 another man with the same name as the 1908 writer is writing a computer virus called Abbadon. Eventually it turns out that both are being manipulated by Morbius's children to launch an attack on Gallifrey, which coincides with the birth of Kronos's child.

So all hell predictably breaks loose, the Doctor runs to Gallifrey where he meets up with President Romana, a character from another Hinton book, and several other named Time Lords, then goes into the Matrix where the Keeper turns out to be the Valeyard, who is later revealed to be the Doctor's stolen regeneration energy caught in a time loop, created by the gods, Pain, Hope, Time, Life, Death, and Fate, as a substitute Doctor because Time wanted the Doctor as her champion but was denied by the other transcendent beings, thus creating the Valeyard as a compromise. Then there's a bunch more stuff, but it ends with the Doctor taking complete control of the Matrix by temporarily becoming Lord President of Gallifrey, then letting the TARDIS get eaten by a sentient computer virus and using quantum mnemonics to blow up the computer virus outside of the universe, but only after unregenerating in order to trick the Valeyard and destroy him, and then has to become Death's Champion to save Mel, but cheats and sacrifice himself using the powers of Time's Champion to force a regeneration, and what is this I don't even.

Despite this, underneath the hood - deep, deep underneath it at times, but underneath it nevertheless - there is a glimmer of the thing that distinguished Millennial Rites from Business Unusual. For all the book's flaws, this is striving to be a story about characters. It's the final and definitive redemption of Colin Baker's Doctor, the story where he and he alone defeats his own dark side (and let's be honest, the nature of Trial means that the Valeyard has always specifically been the dark mirror of Baker's Doctor, "twelfth and final regeneration" business or not), and earns a meaningful, real place in the arc of who the Doctor is. It's an absolute mess, but it's an absolute mess that's trying to be something interesting.

But let's look at this mess again. Let's set aside McKeon's clunky prose and look at the plot. It's absurdly over the top, yes. But nevertheless there is something irritatingly, compellingly... cool about it. I mean, look, I'd be lying if I didn't say that there was something kind of intriguingly awesome about the entire basic idea of this story. How could I possibly say otherwise? I must be at least a half million words into a massive exegesis of everything involved in Doctor Who. Like I'm going to pretend taking Doctor Who apart and putting it back together stops being interesting or valid just because it has a plot.

One can't even easily mount the main distinction I've sought to make over the past in terms of continuity about the difference between a unitary "Whoniverse" explanation and playing around with possibilities. But this is a fan-published novel that goes out of its way to leave other stories, even Spiral Scratch, in place. This isn't some horrific land grab to collapse the possibilities of Doctor Who. It's the exact sort of thing that one opposes those land grabs in order to allow - sone fans expounding their pet theories. So is there any basis to object to this book beyond poor execution?

One possibility, at least, is based on the contested nature of the epic. Epics, especially within sci-fi/fantasy, are a common trope that's been plaguing Doctor Who since The Key to Time. I'm certainly not going to criticize epics in the general case, but there is something troubling about the idea that they're the pinnacle of the genre. The epic, by definition, is defined by its scope and scale - by the fact that it is a big, definitive story. Indeed, within a serialized narrative an "epic" is the biggest story around - one that asserts gravity on everything around it.

Epics, in other words, impose a master narrative on everything around them. By their very nature they imply unity and singular vision. Even a hypothetical epic like this has those implications - that nagging insistence that this story ought be the one you look at every other story through. That infuriating belief in absolute, fixed truth.

To some extent this is a conflict embedded in the very fabric of Doctor Who. Doctor Who's debut came in a period where Britain was coming to terms with the fact that post-World War II it was a supporting player in global affairs instead of a superpower. In 1963 that was a difficult proposition, not least because Britain still had an awful lot of empire. But fundamentally, Doctor Who was science fiction coming from the perspective of a country that was giving up the idea that it had a singular vision of the world.

But that anti-imperialism, in Doctor Who, always contrasted interestingly with the fact that Doctor Who's central character was an obvious heir to the same Victorian tradition that oversaw the height of the British Empire. The Doctor, as we've said before, is ultimately the Victorian inventor. But he's the Victorian inventor recast and reimagined for a post-empire era. He is at once of the imperial past and rebelling against it, an attempt to salvage a secret history of the Victorian era that provided a way forward from its apparent dead end.

This is a tradition that still exists in Doctor Who. The whole "the little people are the most important people" ethos that runs through the Davies and Moffat eras comes directly from this aspect of the show's history. The Doctor, to start at least, was interesting not because he was a prime mover of history but because he was a cranky old man who couldn't fly his spaceship. He was consciously designed as the opposite of the traditional "great man" of history - indeed, under Troughton he became a figure who had clearly chosen to rebel against greatness in favor of the mercurial.

Unfortunately, he was in a genre that the Americans, drunk on their newfound status as the world's superpower, had recrafted to suit a new sort of cultural imperialism. A genre that was rapidly obsessed with hero's journeys and interstellar manifest destinies. A genre, in other words, that fell in love with epics. And to some extent we can just set this up as a tension that plagues Doctor Who. It constantly gets pulled towards epics when what it does best is something else. No, more than that - when its soul, its original concept, is a reaction against epics.

But dammit, they're fun! Epics are fun! They're big, ostentatious fun. And more to the point, there are things you can do in epics that you can't do otherwise. Epics allow for circumstances where the normal rules of business are suspended, which allow for stories that throw out the rules. In this regard epics are why Doctor Who is still around - because they had the idea of doing a big story where the Doctor died at the end and then casually carrying on. Whatever hostility to epics might be built into Doctor Who, there's also a dependence on them.

It's worth looking, though, at the sort of epic a regeneration story is. Its epic nature hinges on the fact that the Doctor dies. It's a narrative collapse - a story that appears to threaten the end of Doctor Who and then doesn't, albeit at a substantial cost. This is the first type of epic Doctor Who ever did. I mean, it faked and blustered its way to an epic with The Dalek Invasion of Earth, but its first real epic was The Chase. Where the whole point turned out to be that taking Doctor Who and adding an epic flight from the Daleks to it was absolutely horrible.

Put another way, Doctor Who epics can and do work, but when they work it's because the absolute, orienting power of the epic is undercut by the fact that such an ordering power is antithetical to the structure of Doctor Who. They work by threatening a narrative collapse. Or, as with The Key to Time, they work by wedding the epic structure to something profoundly non-epic and relishing in the tension this creates. These are the two main structures for Doctor Who epics. We can, if we want - and I certainly do - even label them. The narrative collapse is the Whittakerian epic, the epic of minutia the Holmesian epic. Or we can describe them as alchemical principles. The Whittakerian epic is "solve et coagula," the Holmesian "as above, so below."

And this, in the end, is the problem with Time's Champion. It's neither of those things. The Valeyard isn't' a narrative collapse. He's an evil twin. That's still an epic trope - there's not that glorious focus on the minute that characterizes the Holmesian epic. But it's not one that tears apart the principles of Doctor Who, especially since the Doctor already had an evil twin and had for some time in the Master. And so Time's Champion isn't falling into either epic shape. It's just being a big epic that tries to explain everything. Even if it goes out of its way not to erase any other stories, it still tacitly demands that it be allowed to serve as the key that interprets them. It's exactly the sort of sci-fi epic that Doctor Who resists.

It's not that it's fanwanky. There are great stories to be told out of the minutiae of Doctor Who history. It's that it's a bad story - one that goes against the aesthetics of Doctor Who and, in doing so, goes against the ethics of Doctor Who as well. The problem isn't that it tries to present a grand unified theory of Doctor Who. It's that the theory Time's Champion advances is more boring and more limited than Doctor Who. The show Time's Champion is a story about just isn't as good a show as the one I love.

As for me, my favorite epic theory about Doctor Who remains that Graeme Harper and Robert Holmes are both, as The Brain of Morbius suggests, pre-Hartnell Doctors, and that the making of The Caves of Androzani is itself a multi-Doctor story that explains how the Doctor got around the twelve regeneration limit, namely by sneaking out of the narrative and cheating the rules. A Whittakerian epic starring Robert Holmes that actually took place over the 20th Anniversary (which fell in the midst of shooting Androzani). What more do you want out of Doctor Who?

Time Can Be Rewritten 26 (Millennial Rites)

More than anyone - even Gary Russell or Lance Parkin - the late Craig Hinton has a reputation for fanwank. But the fact that we're dealing with that list in the first place is interesting. On one extreme we have Russell, who I confess to having relatively little regard for as a fiction writer. (Although there's reason to rate him fairly highly as an editor or a writer of non-fiction material) On the other we have Parkin, one of the consensus best novel writers. So once again there's clearly not a direct correlation between fanwank and quality.

It's tempting to try to chart out some sort of principle based on the fact that Jubilee works and Business Unusual doesn't. Jubilee deals with the past of the program in broad strokes, Business Unusual gets bogged down in tedious and pointless details. But I'm hard-pressed to buy that as a logic - there's something desperately unsatisfying about the idea that the details not only don't matter but necessarily cannot matter and are fundamentally opposed to good storytelling. (For one thing, it would pose an uncomfortable existential challenge to the logic of this blog.)

We're at a point of transition in the arc of the blog, moving from the decade-long deflation of the series that stretched from The Horror of Fang Rock to Revelation of the Daleks to the invisible reinvention of the series once it moved out of the public eye. One of the things that's going to happen over that period is, both within Doctor Who and outside of it, an evolution in how storytelling works in what we can broadly describe as genre fiction. We'll watch this unfold over the next lengthy chunk of the blog, but one of the basic principles of the new way of doing things is that the high concept genre ideas are parallel structures to character-based storytelling. (When we get to the inevitable Buffy post in January or February we'll deal with the details of this.)

And that's the difference between Lance Parkin and Gary Russell - Parkin writes in a form that recognizably behaves like that while Russell writes more in the style of the Saward-era continuity writers. And the thing is, even though Craig Hinton's level of fanwank exceeds both of them, at the heart of things he is a Parkin-style writer. And so we have Millenial Rites, a story that is on the one hand a massive celebration of minutiae and on the other is actually a reasonably functional piece of storytelling in its own right that has an actual point to it.

On its most basic level, Millennial Rites is a story about the Doctor's fear of the Valeyard and what that does to him. All of its big dramatic beats come out of that - from the Doctor's realization that his treatment of Mel is putting him on the road to that future to his temporary transformation into the Valeyard late in the novel. Even the smaller details work towards that, with Ashley Chapel and Anne Travers both serving as figures that in their own way grapple with obsessions, paranoias, and temptations, thus backing up the theme.

It's difficult to overstate how big an improvement this is over Business Unusual. Put bluntly, there's actually a point to this book. Indeed, it does relatively little of the stuff that was so frustrating about Business Unusual. It's not a book that sets out to answer lingering questions about continuity. It has some hints about how the Valeyard fits in with the larger mythology that the Virgin line was spinning in this period, but most of the hints are exactly what everybody had been assuming anyway. But mostly it's serving either as a straightforward sequel to stories - not necessarily a great idea, but not an inherently doomed one - or it's grabbing concepts either for a passing joke (a la the chronic hysteresis drinking song in Cold Fusion) or because they contribute usefully to the ideas it's playing with.

Let's take Anne Travers as an example. In terms of her, Millennial Rites is just serving as a sequel. It's picking up the character at the most recent point anyone has seen her (actually, even more recent - the book makes heavy allusion to the then-unreleased Downtime, teasing its contents as a sequel) and telling the next story in her life. The most obvious thing to point out here is that this isn't a gap. There's a difference between sequels, which, while potentially ill-advised, at least pick something up and go forward, and prequels, which are very rarely good things unless they were actively planned for from the start. (Do we want to go with Prometheus as the example here? Or Before Watchmen? Or perhaps Star Wars, where, contrary to popular belief, the first movie was not originally targeted as "Episode IV?" You're spoiled for choice here. But contrast with The Hobbit, which was always planned for.) And more to the point, she has a story about the way in which her past experiences have left her jaded and bitter, and about her eventual redemption from that.

Of course, Mel and the Doctor are not the most recent versions. But this isn't a story about Mel, in the end, and inasmuch as it is one about her it's structured like a sequel to a story we've never seen. Mel returns to Earth and checks in with her old friends from college. Since Mel's return to Earth is a blank slate this works. Unlike in Business Unusual, which is about setting up a status quo prior to where we know Mel and moving Mel from that to the character we know, Millennial Rites is about setting Mel up with a previously unknown status quo and moving her to one we know nothing about. We don't know what her relationship with Julia or Barry turns into. (Admittedly we didn't know about Mel's relationship with her family either, but Business Unusual, inasmuch as it was about Mel, wasn't about that relationship. Whereas here the bulk of Mel's plot is about her old classmates, not about how she met the Doctor.)

The Doctor, on the other hand, actually is in a position to have sequels - something he shared only with McCoy in 1995. Baker's Doctor never got a regeneration story - he got a lame excuse at the start of Time and the Rani instead. Unlike Mel, who is 70% a McCoy companion, we never see Baker's Doctor on screen again after Trial of a Time Lord. His story is open-ended here, which allows for something that the Missing Adventures can rarely do - tell a story about a past Doctor that fundamentally changes that past Doctor. Which is what a story about the Doctor's relationship with the Valeyard - another concept that is not a gap but an outright dropped thread - allows.

So Millennial Rites has an actual idea underpinning it, and one that is distinctly a story. The Doctor is forced to confront the apparent fact of the Valeyard and to come to terms with the idea that he might go bad. It's not something we've seen before, and it's a story in which characters have things happen to them that readers can empathize with. This is closer to drama than almost anything we've seen in several seasons, in fact.

On top of that, Millennial Rites manages to do something that the continuity-minded era of the program was able to do relatively rarely, which is to simultaneously call on Doctor Who's history and Doctor Who's ability to do anything. It trucks along for half a book seeming like a fairly straightforward continuity-heavy technothriller (an unfortunately existent subgenre of Doctor Who) before suddenly and with minimal warning turning into a cyberpunk sword and sorcery epic, and then, to boot, finishing its story in a sensible fashion given this turn.

Let's consider for a moment the virtues of this. For one thing, it's a case of playing to both of Doctor Who's strengths - the fact that it can do anything and the fact that it has a titanic history of doing just that. It's easy to treat the debate over fanwank as a debate over creativity and doing new things, and Hinton, in one gonzo move, demonstrates that no, in fact, there's not a distinction there and that you can easily do both. As with much of what we've talked about here, this is a train of thought picked up straightforwardly by the new series. "Let's bring back the Emperor of the Daleks. In a story that also features a Big Brother parody."

For another thing, it demonstrates a solid sense of how good the idea actually is. The truth of the matter is that cyberpunk sword and sorcery is an idea that sounds cooler than it is. I mean, it has some precedents, most obviously Nemesis the Warlock in 2000 AD, but for the most part it sounds like the sort of thing someone excitedly describes before never getting around to actually writing it. And no surprise, really - this is true for the exact same reasons that its true that this is a better book than Business Unusual, which is that an idea that's cool to vaguely imagine and a good story are two distinct things.

But in the scope Hinton uses the idea - about half of a book - it's perfect. This is one of the oldest tricks Doctor Who has, really. It establishes a cool-sounding premise, pokes at it for a while, hits the highlights, and then beats a retreat before it wears out its welcome. Here Hinton comes up with an outlandish conceit, plays with it for about the amount of time the idea remains cool on its own merits, and then gets out. It's proper, vintage Doctor Who.

This is not to say that the book is unambiguously and straightforwardly belonging to the future of Doctor Who storytelling. It's awkward in several ways, most of them related to its consciously limited audience of hardcore Doctor Who fans. There's an odd bum note in the book I want to look at, not because it's a big moment, but because it's a revealing one. Mel is told by two characters about a birth defect their child suffers from. The mother, it is mentioned, smokes. Mel, in response to being told about this, says "I hope you gave that up while you were pregnant." This is not the key moment, though. The moment is what comes after: "The looks that shot between Barry and Louise indicated that she hadn't just touched on a nerve, she had wired it into the mains."

This is very strange. It's not that the book doesn't realize that what Mel says here is inappropriate, but it seems to have no real sense of how inappropriate or why it's inappropriate. The book seems completely blind to the idea that shaming a mother to her face about her responsibility for her child's disabilities is not inappropriate merely because it touches a nerve but because it's a completely appalling thing to do. Which, not to plunge headlong into gender politics, but... there's something painfully confirmatory about every stereotype that Doctor Who fandom is overwhelmingly male here. The scene reads like it was written and edited by people who just have no awareness whatsoever of conversations surrounding motherhood, pregnancy, birth defects, or any related issues. There's just something... painfully limited and blinkered here.

And I highlight it not to stamp my feet about gender in Doctor Who but because it's indicative of a larger problem with the book, which is that it has the basic shape and approach of a good story but doesn't quite stick the landing. The Doctor confronts the possibility of becoming the Valeyard, but he never quite does anything with the confrontation. There's not a resolution.

Part of the problem is that Hinton is trying to weld together two concepts that don't quite go together. He's trying to link the Valeyard to the later image of McCoy's Doctor as the master manipulator and as "Time's Champion," with the idea that this darker figure McCoy embodies is a step on the road to the Valeyard. But these are two different concepts, and they don't actually go together that well. The idea of McCoy confronting the Valeyard really doesn't work that well (even if you do try to take Perry and Tucker's Matrix into account - note that it hinges on the idea that the Seventh Doctor isn't part of the Valeyard). The Valeyard is, in the end, a concern of the Sixth Doctor, and the seams between the two ideas in this story never quite work.

But the larger issue is that, frankly, the Valeyard is just damaged goods as a concept. Because Trial of a Time Lord is so incoherent in introducing him there's no way out for him - his character doesn't make sense. Like cyberpunk sword and sorcery, he's a cool idea in search of an actual story. And so he proves to be the weak link in the chain for Hinton. There's really not a satisfying solution to the Valeyard problem. The general consensus solution - ignore it - is probably the best one. And yet people, Hinton included, can't bring themselves to. Which brings us to the last part of this little triptych…

Time Can Be Rewritten 25 (Business Unusual)

Last time we dealt with Gary Russell we found ourselves reflecting heavily on the notion of fanwank. Broadly speaking, at least, I’m hard-pressed to complain too heavily about fanwank in the novel lines, particularly the Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures, both of which by their nature appeal virtually entirely to dedicated Doctor Who fans. When you’re dealing with an audience of dedicated fans the extent to which you can rely on existing work increases dramatically. There is a fundamental difference between writing novels for a fan audience and writing television for BBC1.

But having navigated the Saward era and its continuity fetishism there become some new issues around this. Or, put another way, the mere fact that there’s nothing wrong with fanwank is not equivalent to fanwank being inherently worthwhile. There are things that you can do when working in the margins of existing work that you can’t do any other way - a fact that is responsible for no small part of my interest in things like Doctor Who and superhero comics. But the margins aren’t interesting in and of themselves - a problem that plagues Gary Russell’s work, and that, in a few paragraphs, is going to prove the undoing of Business Unusual.

But let’s back up and look at the larger situation, since this is our outro to the Colin Baker era. At the heart of the problem is still the Seasonish and the way in which both Season 23s - the transmitted one and the erased one - create a tangible gap in the history of Doctor Who. Colin Baker is the first Doctor to lack a regeneration story, a fact that coincides with Mel being the first companion since Susan to lack an origin story, combined with the deeply unsatisfying nature of the Valeyard, an idea with far more and deeper implications than the series was willing to actually explore, with all of this slotting into the already confused gap introduced by the hiatus.

The result is a period that is the subject of a massive amount of fan theories. And so, having at least determined that the flaw is not inherently Colin Baker, let’s tie off the last issue - was there ever anything interesting to do here? Are the gaps of this era - gaps that we cannot, given the absurd turmoil behind the scenes, chalk up to any deliberate ambiguity - ones that can be interestingly filled? In other words, is the era we’ve just been witness to fatally and irrevocably flawed, or is there actual quality to be had here?

So that’s what this final triptych of entries is going to focus on - three books that fill the holes in and around the gap between Trial of a Time Lord and Time and the Rani. And first up we have Gary Russell with Business Unusual, a novel that proposes to introduce Mel. And give Colin Baker his “missing” Brigadier story. And serve as a sequel to The Scales of Injustice. And bring back the Autons.

I almost wrote “so no shortage of ambition” after that list, but no, that’s wrong. The problem here is that there is a profound shortage of ambition. The goals of this book are to check off some supposedly needed boxes in Doctor Who and to advance a couple of pet projects from the writer. In many ways it’s the inclusion of the Brigadier that’s the dead giveaway. Like the obsession with the idea that Pertwee should have a Cybermen story, it sets the defining characteristics of an era as being nothing more than attaining a pre-existing set of goals. And what’s key about these obsessions is that they comprise a list that can never be added to. Only things old enough to have been in the Hartnell era can be one of these era bucket list items. Their nature is to constrain the show, limiting what it can be to what it already has been. It’s the Whoniverse logic at play once again. (It’s perhaps thankful that the list has dwindled in size, with Eccleston, Tennant, and Smith all not getting Brigadier stories and Eccleston not getting a Cybermen story, leaving the Daleks as the only plausible necessary element for an era, which is just about right.)

But this checklist approach shows particularly in terms of Mel. We’ve already discussed how Mel is oddly torn between her description in John Nathan-Turner’s The Companions volume and what appears on screen. The Companions makes much of the fact that Mel is a computer programmer. This information plays into what we see on screen exactly three times, though - twice in Time and the Rani it’s mentioned that Mel is good with computers, and then once in The Ultimate Foe she identifies something as a “megabyte modem.” But there’s a larger problem, which is that Bonnie Langford comes nowhere close to playing a tech-savvy career woman of the mid-1980s. 


I don’t mean this as a criticism of Bonnie Langford at all. It’s just that if “1980s crack computer programmer” was what the show was actually going for then having Bonnie Langford written by Pip and Jane Baker was an absurd idea. Bonnie Langford played the role she was obviously hired for - Bonnie Langford as a Doctor Who companion - quite well. But there’s a massive disjunct between that and the character described in The Companions.

But Gary Russell has clearly decided that he’s going to try to write a Mel story that builds off of The Companions. And so despite the fact that the Mel that appeared on screen could easily have had any origin she’s, dutifully, a computer programmer. Even the detail of her being involved in an attempt to stop the Master from taking over the world’s banks is preserved, with Russell going out of his way to make sure that can be reconciled with the fact that Mel doesn’t recognize the Master in The Ultimate Foe. The trouble is that we’re left instead trying to imagine Bonnie Langford delivering the line “Be thankful I don’t play loud Gothic music, try to sell Socialist Worker to your WI friends or have a drawerful of thirty-five different-flavoured condoms in my bedroom.”

In other words, Mel’s origin story is, to a fault, exactly what the readership would expect. But when the answer to “what goes in this gap” is “exactly what you’d expect to go in that gap” then, narratively speaking, there’s not much of a reason to fill it. Mel’s origin story is, it seems, a completely generic piece of Doctor Who that tells us nothing new about Mel and makes little effort to reconcile or resolve any of the existing mysteries surrounding her.

Indeed, the story is bizarrely dislocated from any actual impact. I’m not one to nitpick bad writing about computers, in no small part because I have a not-terribly-secret love for it, but on the other hand, if you’re writing in 1997 and setting your book about computer technology in 1989 then there’s not really a lot of excuses for glaring anachronism. And yet the book has the idea that Sony and Sega are preparing “a 32-bit CD-based system for release early next decade” that the fictional Maxx 64-bit CD system is going to be miles ahead of, a claim that both flubs the release date for the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation (both were, by any reasonable definition, mid-decade) and dramatically overestimates the impact that the 64-bit Atari Jaguar, which actually did come out in the early 1990s, would have. Yes, this is a nitpick, but equally, if you’re going to write a story about computers and corporate culture in the late 1980s there’s something to be said for not screwing up the details on the setting. It’s not like 1989 is a particularly difficult time period to research in 1997, after all.

But really, I harp on this issue because it’s so indicative of what this book is about, or, more accurately, what it isn’t about, which is telling its own story. Heck, even the underlying premise - corporate machinations and the Autons - is just a ripoff of an Alan Moore comic that Russell could barely be bothered to change the name of. There are interesting Doctor Who stories to be done about computer technology - something we’ll see when we get to the New Adventures. There are interesting Doctor Who stories to be done about corporate culture - something we saw in the Baker era itself. But this isn’t trying to be either. It’s just interested in being The One That Introduces Mel, The One Where Colin Baker Meets The Brigadier, and The One Alan Moore Already Wrote.

What’s interesting is that this effort to just fill in blanks and correct Doctor Who leads to some bewildering tonal lapses. Ostensibly Russell’s goal is to, as he says in his introduction, “write a sixth Doctor story that I thought Colin Baker would have liked to be in,” a vision that, based on the book, he sees as a character full of bombastic charm. Certainly this is plausible based on Baker’s acting. But this more charming, fun version of the Doctor who gives plastic toys to children in restaurants jars grotesquely with later scenes in the book such as the alarmingly gruesome description of a twelve-year-old boy being murdered by his toys.

Like the murderous policemen of Resurrection of the Daleks or the lifting of the deleted “Kill me Vera” sequence from The Ark in Space for Revelation of the Daleks, this seems largely to be a case of doing something that the show couldn’t have gotten away with, in this case riffing on the alarm at the killer toys in Terror of the Autons. It is, in other words, the exact sort of thing that the Saward era so regularly got wrong. It’s almost as though the empty recitations of continuity points and the sort of blithe nastiness go hand in hand.

In a way, this even makes sense - when drama abandons being about people in favor of being about obscure points of sci-fi continuity it becomes ugly like this. Certainly it’s an argument that works well with the overall themes of this blog - when Doctor Who becomes nothing more than a commodity and a brand it loses all of its power. Because this is market-tested Doctor Who - a case of writing a story not because there’s anything dramatically interesting about the story but because it’s something fans are known to want and will thus buy. (Ironically, of course, this is exactly what the Autons were designed by Holmes to critique. They’re the ultimate capitalist Doctor Who monster.)

But all of this paints me into an interesting corner as a blogger. I’ll confess that in picking books to cover in the Time Can Be Rewritten entries I have tended towards ones that have continuity ramifications. Part of that is simply the premise of the entries - the point of these little side jaunts is to look at later conceptions of the era, so the ones that have metafictional implications are naturally more interesting to me. But the implications are somewhat questionable. It’s fair to ask whether, instead of spending three Colin Baker books on the mess surrounding Trial of a Time Lord I shouldn’t have done the oft-recommended Killing Ground and Synthespians™, a story that would actually give me an 80s Auton story that attempts what this story should have (and has what is surely the most logical extension of the Auton concept, killer breast implants).

Because this is a bad book pointlessly filling a continuity gap in a bad era of Doctor Who. It’s a book that comes perilously close to indicting the entire concept of the Time Can Be Rewritten entries and that suggests, unnervingly, that perhaps it shouldn’t be and that the gaps and margins left in the past of Doctor Who are best left alone on the grounds that they are, by definition, not going to be functional pieces of drama.

Finally, as we enter this last jag of Time Can Be Rewrittens for the Colin Baker era, the standard information packet for the McCoy era. I'll be doing four Big Finish adventures: The Fires of Vulcan on July 4th, Thin Ice on August 1st, The Shadow of the Scourge on October 10th, and A Death in the Family on December 19th. (So that's future planning for you.) I'll also be doing Death Comes to Time on August 13th. All of those are in print and available, for those who want to play along at home. There will be two Past Doctor Adventures.

Time Can Be Rewritten 24 (Jubilee)

The first and most obvious thing to say is that the Sixth Doctor does, in fact, work. More than anything else, we ought to acknowledge the fact that Rob Shearman, with Jubilee, makes it so that Colin Baker has an unambiguous classic of Doctor Who under his belt. Baker has a lot of good audios, actually, but this is one that is blatantly a classic. So before we get into anything else we ought look at what it did with Baker's Doctor that finally got the character to work.

I would argue that there are two things. The first is a trick the show should have picked up from Jon Pertwee, who was so often at his best when his confident and at times outright arrogant Doctor was put on the back foot or the defensive. Baker's Doctor is helped enormously by the scenes in this story in which he gets to play the Doctor driven mad by a hundred years being locked in the Tower of London. Seeing his Doctor so weakened and afraid has the same effect it does for Pertwee, on top of letting Baker show off some acting ability that he was rarely given the opportunity to on television. Indeed, the mad Doctor in the tower is in many ways an idea perfectly suited to Baker's Doctor, whose bluster and confidence can be subverted with a wickedness that the Doctors on either side of him couldn't hope to match.

The other major trick that Jubilee manages to improve Baker is not Shearman's invention, but a brilliant idea nevertheless: Evelyn Smythe. Evelyn is an interesting concept for a companion - a middle-aged history teacher. OK, so actually, that's more accurately described as the original concept of a companion, though Evelyn is a good twenty years older than Barbara was. But it's a compelling move away from the horribly sexualized peril monkey Peri was stuck playing that doesn't go straight to comedy as Mel, by dint of her casting, did.

The result is a companion who can actually stand up to the Doctor in such a way as to make him no longer seem nearly so nasty. Again, this is largely lifted from the Pertwee era. Pertwee worked because he had Jo Grant for three years and she, no matter what Pertwee did, could smile winsomely and reassert herself with a moment of sheer pluck and charm. That meant that Pertwee's character was always kept in check. It's the same thing that made Tom Baker's grandstanding in the latter days of his tenure bearable - the fact that Lalla Ward could hold her own. And in Evelyn Smythe Big Finish created a character that could stand up to Baker's Doctor in that way and thus keep him charming instead of overbearing. She was in many ways the companion he should have always had.

That, at least, explains the infrastructure changes Jubilee enjoys. It starts at a higher baseline of quality and potential, and that makes it easier for it to achieve greatness. It doesn't, however, explain why Jubilee is great. And this question sets up an interesting opportunity for us. If we were only covering Jubilee, of course, this would be an entry for talking about all the terribly clever things that Rob Shearman does with the Daleks. But if I do that I'm going to have very little to talk about when I get to Dalek, which is a partial remake of Jubilee for television. So instead I'm going to do something that hardly anybody has done for the much-acclaimed Jubilee and talk about all the brilliant bits that get overlooked for the Dalek stuff, and keep the Dalek bits to a minimum here in favor of talking about them with Dalek, a story that, while also very good, doesn't have all the other clever stuff Jubilee does.

In practice Jubilee is a piece of snarling political leftism of the sort that I'm predisposed towards liking. Let's start with its title, an oft-overlooked detail. It's not called Foo of the Daleks or anything like that. It's called Jubilee, a title that focuses attention away from the Daleks and towards an act of celebration, specifically celebration of history and the anniversary of a monarch's reign. But what's crucial to Jubilee, and what the whole of the plot and theme revolves around, is the fact that a jubilee is not a piece of history itself but merely a ritualized celebration of it.

Jubilee is, of course, tremendously skeptical of this logic. Actually, more than skeptical, it's outright hostile to this logic. It openly accuses the celebratory commemorations of history of being tools of oppression that sustain and justify imperial horrors. It's a remarkably compelling piece in that regard, especially coming in a year where the Queen's Diamond Jubilee has proven an opportunity to force people to work a fourteen hour shift for no pay and sleep under a bridge. Or one where the Olympics are being used as a reason to install missile batteries on residential buildings and have London patrolled by helicopter-based snipers. Or one where a government preaching austerity slashes benefits while funding both of the above, because these "celebrations" are, after all, absolutely essential to Britain. (Not that my country is any better on any of these fronts. Celebration capitalism knows no national boundaries.) The sequence where Rochester dismisses the idea of spending money rebuilding houses demolished as part of an aborted redevelopment of London on the grounds that the jubilee is more important is particularly chilling in light of the Olympic-instigated leveling of swaths of East London.

So off the bat we have a story that's baring teeth and going for the political throat - something I've been itching to see the show do for several years now. And it's a flat refutation of the idea that this sort of approach requires being heavy-handed or obvious. Yes, Jubilee goes on a bit about how people shouldn't be like the Daleks, but as we'll see even that's more complex than it appears. But nobody complains about the excessive anti-imperialism or anti-capitalism of Jubilee. It's not a heavy-handed allegory. It's a damn good piece of drama.

Part of this is down to the quality of its cast. When the lion's share of the dialogue for the non-regulars is going to Martin Jarvis, Rosalind Ayres, and Nicholas Briggs doing some stunningly disturbing Dalek voices you have a strong baseline. On top of that, Shearman doesn't take the "moralizing polemic" approach in the first place. He takes the Robert Holmes "deeply uncomfortable joke" approach, letting the characters take on comedic roles and then pushing the comedy past the point where it's funny in order to make it disturbing and upsetting.

But the other tremendously interesting thing about Jubilee is that it uses the history of the program as one of its weapons. The story is one that only works because it has the Daleks and all of the history they imply. What's key is that the Daleks play a double role in the story. On the one hand they are themselves nostalgic fetish objects - the subjects of their own jubilee. (Indeed, this is Big Finish's Dalek story for the 40th anniversary.)  They're repeatedly treated as the silly pieces of history that, in the larger culture of the show, they are. (There's a choice line about how slapping a picture of a Dalek on anything increases sales.) But this jubilee purpose is continually subverted by an alternate version of the Daleks - one in which they're a genuine, terrifying menace.

Here's where Jubilee differs from Dalek, then. Dalek was entirely about establishing the Daleks as a credible threat. Jubilee, on the other hand, depends on the fact that the Daleks continually move back and forth from being jubilee monsters - empty signifiers of nothing more than the series' history - and seriously disturbing threats. These two positions aren't even presented as opposed to one another. The Daleks are dangerous in part because of their history, and, more specifically, because of the way that history is obscured by their jubilee nature.

The big moment in terms of this comes in the phenomenal scene in which the Dalek orders Farrow to cut Lamb's head off, leading to Farrow nervously asking whether the Dalek knows the history of the Tower. In response the Dalek thunders that it is the history of the Tower. This is a wonderful concept - the Dalek is claiming to be the gore and violence and horror that constitutes the material history of the Tower of London. The Daleks, in other words, are reconceptualized as the erased material remnant of history - as the very thing that the jubilee serves to obfuscate - while simultaneously being presented as the jubilee itself.

This is what stands at the heart of the Dalek's concluding paradox whereby the Daleks, to conquer the universe, must never conquer the universe. It's not a drab "blow up the computers with a paradox" ending, but an acknowledgment of this fundamental tension at the heart of the Daleks. The Daleks are dangerous precisely because of the jubilee's erasure. The entire threat of the Daleks is based on the fact that they are the horrific consequence of reiterated history.

This also gets at what's actually going on in the Doctor's rather overlong and unconvincing speech to the people. The Doctor is, in fact, going about it the wrong way - a point reiterated by the awkward echoing effect given to his speech, making it sound like every bad commencement speech you've ever heard. He's trying to persuade people not to be like the Daleks. But the rejection of the Daleks is, in fact, the problem. The fact that everybody has pushed the Daleks into the darkness of an erased history is what's dangerous about them in the first place and where their power comes from. Or, to put it another way, the fact that the Daleks are mythic wildly enhances the threat posed when their visceral horror reasserts itself.

This is a relationship with the series' past that is, in 1986, still a bit ahead of what the series can actually do. It's not until 1988 that the ideas underlying Jubilee even start to emerge in the program itself, and it takes time for the techniques to develop to where Jubilee is possible. But we do, here, have a very different sort of take on the idea of continuity and the past. Here the excess of history that the program has is one of the tools it uses to make its point. The irreconcilability of the program's continuity is, here, where its power comes from. The fact that the Daleks are simultaneously ontologically defined as the most dangerous thing in the universe and obviously nothing more than homicidal salt shakers is used as a concept not in spite of the contradiction but because of it.

And, fantastically, deliciously, this feeds back into the story's point. The story makes much of its anti-imperialism. On the one hand, this is prescient - the story came out months before the invasion of Iraq and all of the sublimated dreams of empire involved in that. On the other, "the British empire was really bad" is, while undoubtedly true, a bit of a bland point to be making in 2003. But under Shearman's approach the degree to which "imperialism is bad" is a banal cliche is exactly what makes it dangerous. The fact that we all know that imperialism is bad and have relegated it to the past is what allows it to sneak out and rear its ugly head again. (Compare to how, in the US, the victories of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and Obama's election are used to obscure the continuing existence of racism, and indeed, how Obama's election worsened racism in America.) The same processes through which the Daleks gain their potency are the ones through which real-world structures of oppression disguise themselves and their intentions.

So we have the past of Doctor Who being used to creative effect in a story that has real, concrete things to say, and that says them with devilish, skewering cleverness. And with Colin Baker, of all Doctors. It's a pity he couldn't have had this era on television - if he had, he'd be remembered as one of the greatest Doctors of all time.

The Catharsis of Spurious Morality (The Ultimate Foe)

Part 3: The Nature of Earth to Gallifrey

In the course of Holmes's mad recycling of the past, however, Holmes fires off one of the most fascinatingly problematic concepts in the history of Doctor Who, namely the idea that the Time Lords eventually yank Earth and its "constellation" out of place in the galaxy and plop it down elsewhere.

The use of the word constellation is interesting. It's a chronic foible of Holmes that he seems to use the word as a synonym for "solar system," but the error is almost the perfect Holmesian error. The nature of a constellation, after all, is that it makes sense only from a set physical vantage point. The constellations of one solar system are not the constellations of another. And yet the Doctor routinely identifies Gallifrey with reference to its constellation.

Tellingly, though, the constellation he names - Kasterborous - cannot be a Gallifreyan one, since constellations are merely happenstance arrangements of stars in the sky of a given planet, and thus one cannot see a constellation that one is a part of. So when Gallifrey is said to be in the constellation of Kasterborous, what can this possibly mean?

Clearly, and this ties in alarmingly well with Gallifrey as we understood it back in The Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords' understanding of themselves is defined primarily by reference to an external observer. They are, after all, seemingly a race governed not by the recorded facts of history but by the material memory of history. Their entire civilization is based around the Matrix, known to be a collection of memories. So it's not a surprise that even the location of their planet is defined in terms of an external perspective. The only question is whose.

By far the most sensible answer, within Doctor Who, is Earth's. Yes, there's a sort of dreary cliche to the idea that the Time Lords are future versions of humanity, but it's also difficult to avoid the fact that it makes a lot of sense. Not, as Miles and Woods sneer, because the sorts of people who like this idea are the sorts of people who want the Doctor to be Anakin Skywalker's father, but because some version of this is already true. The series is hopeless at making up its mind whether the Time Lords consider Earth an obscure backwater or whether they see it as a vitally important planet, but it's difficult not to observe that Earth has been the obsession of every single renegade Time Lord in the series from the Monk on.

Part of this may simply be geopolitical. Clearly there comes a point where Earth is the dominant force in the galaxy. In that regard, the Time Lords would, in any conception of them, have a lot of investment there. But the Time Lords seem almost wholly unconcerned with, say, Draconia. None of the other vast conquering species besides the Daleks raise much of an eyebrow. The Time Lord fascination with Earth exceeds mere local politics. After all, we remain at least somewhat committed to the idea of the Time Lords as guardians of the arc of history. But if pressed on whose history, exactly, we'd be forced to confess that we are ourselves the most likely suspects here. This is inevitable - after all, its humans writing the series, and so a human conception of history that drives things. And indeed, if we really want to be particular about it, this is inevitable simply because its true. The Time Lords really do exist and understand themselves only through our eyes.

But let's pull this thread a little further. The Time Lords at large seem at best marginally aware of Earth (again as evidenced by The Deadly Assassin), which is strange given that their politics are flagrantly a reenactment of the Kennedy assassination in that story. But renegade Time Lords are all obsessed with the place. Something about renegade status, in other words, seems to involve an awareness of the fact that the Time Lords are inherently linked to human perspective. (If we take the meta-fictional truth of this seriously then it is perhaps telling that The Mind Robber, along with implying that the Doctor is an exile from the Land of Fiction, inadvertently gestures forward and implies the Master's presence there as well.) But on Gallifrey itself this seems to be more secret knowledge.

But let's return to Trial specifically. Of the many bits of dodgy explanation to be offered in the course of Trial, the Time Lords' supposed logic in moving Earth around is by far the strangest. Surely options less extreme and scandalous existed to deal with the seemingly minor problem they were actually facing. Moving a planet in lieu of chasing down some thieves you know where are is just strange.

Here it's worth thinking again about the fact that Earth's entire constellation is moved. In other words, the shape of it within the Gallifreyan sky is maintained with a seemingly slight positional change. But from an Earthbound perspective the difference is more significant - the entire sky would change. And the Earthbound perspective is how the location of Gallifrey is understood. In other words, moving Earth's constellation would be nothing short of a covert redefinition of the entirety of Time Lord culture - the most fundamental social revolution imaginable, done as a complete secret. No wonder the coverup was such a big deal.

---

Part 2: The Story That Didn't Happen?

Indeed, in the end the only escape the story can muster from its own critique is the idea that it never happened. This is emphasized twice over. First of all, we're told throughout the story that the Doctor's actions are being misrepresented. Second, we're told at the end of the Trial as a whole that the story's grand crescendo, Peri's death, was all a fabrication and that Peri is fine. (Well. Ish. But that's for later in the entry.) What we're left with is an oddity in Doctor Who - a story defined primarily by the fact that it never happened.

This is a pity, as what's actually going on in Mindwarp is quite good. Philip Martin, predictably, brings the politics, and Mindwarp ends up being, among other things, a pleasant bit of anti-capitalism (or, at least, anti-the capitalism of the 1980s). In terms of its own storytelling its far and away the highlight of Season 23. (Of course, in another sense the idea that the Colin Baker era would render one of its best stories non-canon is almost too fitting.)

But what's really interesting here is the idea of a story that is on the one hand televised Doctor Who (and thus "canonical" by even the strictest of definitions not to be willfully silly) that never happened. Doctor Who has not previously engaged in the idea of an unreliable narrator like this, and it won't again until the Silence start complicating matters.

This requires some thought about the narration of the program in general. Tat Wood has what is probably his most unfortunate essay on this subject, in which he proceeds to try to posit some actual diegetic reason why the actions of a Time Lord are being sent to the BBC for transmission. But even if this take is overly silly, it's worth noting in the general case that the psychic impressions taken by the TARDIS of events around it are edited with careful choice of camera angles and cuts. And the implication is that this is not simply the Valeyard making choices, as the Doctor's objections in Terror of the Vervoids are merely to the truth of the evidence. Had he served as film editor in preparing his defense one imagines his objections taking a very different phrasing. Similarly, the fact that the Doctor struggles for an explanation for the idea that the emphasis of the evidence in Mindwarp is wonky suggests that he hasn't thought about editing. If nothing else, the fact that the Doctor is not allowed to review any sort of master tape from which this edited evidence is extracted suggests that, no, the Matrix really is recording information as though it's a television program. (Recall that in The Deadly Assassin we posited that the camera and the Panopticon are fundamentally related concepts)

But by and large this fits with our larger understanding of the Time Lords. Of course their sense of events are narratively constructed. How else could they possibly see the world? And even the Doctor doesn't question this. Indeed, there's something altogether consistent about this - remember that the Doctor's mental impressions of The Evil of the Daleks were also edited like a television program. Not for the first time it appears that the Time Lords have no conception of events except as narrative. Indeed, even the Matrix is just a collection of stories. (Perhaps explaining how something that is apparently just a collection of Time Lord brains is capable of providing nightmarish virtual reality to entrap people - it's just fragments of the narratives contained within it.)

Above all, however, it is fitting that this happens in the segment of the story designated as the "present." Trial of a Time Lord exists in place of the Seasonish, and the one story that ostensibly exists within its timeframe is itself ished and left ambiguous as to its very existence. This is, in short, the point where the Trial begins to fall apart as a coherent narrative.

---

Part 3: What Is The Future?

Even as Terror of the Vervoids descends into incoherent mess, however, there are interesting interpretations to be made of it. The biggest bit of intensive wonkiness to come out of Terror of the Vervoids is the idea of the Doctor reviewing the events of a future adventure. But as bits of head-scratching incoherence in Doctor Who go, there are few bits more generative of strange implications.

Let's start big here with predestination. Doctor Who has typically been pretty strongly pro-free will. Even in the new series, when things get intensively timey-wimey, the show constantly stresses the ability to change and reshape the wime. So given that, it's difficult to even begin to make headway into the idea of the Doctor casually reviewing his future adventures. And presumably he did have to review a decent number - I mean, one doubts he just plunged into his future, grabbed an adventure at random, and said "oh, this will do." So how, exactly, can this be squared away with the series more general embrace of free will? I mean, it's one thing for the Doctor to know vaguely what his future incarnations look like and one of his adventures. It's another to systematically peruse them.

But wait, there's a bigger issue here. The Matrix contains the minds of past Time Lords. We've been told repeatedly that we're watching the psychic impressions of the TARDIS. So why the heck does the Matrix have access to this adventure in the first place? Short of completely abandoning the idea that Time Lords have any sense of the present - a viewpoint that is irreconcilable with everything else we've ever seen of them - there's no way to figure out how this would work.

Unless, of course, these aren't the Doctor's Time Lords. After all, the presence of the Valeyard does necessitate that the Doctor is out of his own personal timeline here. The question is purely whether the Valeyard is meddling with the past of Gallifrey or whether the Doctor is being yanked around by a future Gallifrey. The fact that the Doctor's future adventures are known to these Time Lords suggests very strongly that it's the latter - that this is a Gallifrey from several incarnations in the Doctor's future.

Indeed, future events in the series even make it fairly easy to peg when in the future it is. We're jumping the gun a little bit here, but one thing we'll notice when we get around to the new series is that the Time War is in part a metaphor for the program's cancellation and the resulting loss of a unified or master text. Given this, and given the Trial's necessary engagement with the Seasonish, there's every reason to treat Trial as an early echo of the Time War.

So what we have is, in effect, the future of the series attempting to rewrite its past. Or, more accurately, its present. And by necessity, at least some of this rewriting takes. The Valeyard may be defeated at the end, but that doesn't mean that the Doctor's narrative doesn't shift. Aside from handily resolving the mess of continuity errors introduced by the Trial, this has the exceedingly useful benefit of providing a diegetic reason for the increase in quality that (slowly but surely) begins after the Trial. The future goes to the weakest point in the program and demands that it justify itself. And in response, the program begins to retune itself towards that future.

---

"Well this is..."
"Unexpected?"
"I don't know, does that joke work before the Press Gang
post?"

Part 1: A Courtroom of Renegades

It's November 29th, 1986. Berlin remain at number one, and are unseated for the final week of this story by Europe with The Final Countdown. Erasure and Debbie Harry also chart. Lower in the charts - we've not looked in some time, after all - are Genesis with "Land of Confusion," A-ha, Eurythmics, Simple Minds, and The Damned. Which paints a rosy picture, but we could also have done that by saying Bucks Fizz, Kenny Loggins, and Rod Stewart were in the lower charts, so, you know, let's not get carried away.

While in real news, the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or, as we cheerily call it, Mad Cow Disease is diagnosed in British cattle, and preparations are made to offer shares of British Gas as the British natural gas industry gets privatized.

While on television, Trial of a Time Lord finally wraps up. Throughout the preceding three entries we have been pursuing various theories as to what is actually going on in the Trial. And for the most part we've been relatively fortunate, in that the thematic implications of the Trial have managed to explain the on-screen events surprisingly well. The infelicities of Holmes's cosmic terminology play off of our established understanding of the Time Lords perfectly to produce a political situation where the apparent malfeasance of the Trial makes sense. The implications of the Doctor perusing future adventures perfectly sets up the bizarre contradictions within the story. We're clearly miles out of line with what anyone writing this intended, but we're nevertheless finding ourselves with a fairly easy interpretation of the entire trial as belonging to some hypothetical future period of the show that is at least partially averted by the revamp of the show that occurs in the Trial's wake.

What remains, then, is understanding what this future timeline is like. Given that it is a future timeline, my readership will forgive me for actively cross-checking it with future stories, since I try not to discuss stories I've not covered yet at length. In any case, very few details present themselves. The Master is in his Tremas skinsuit still, suggesting that it predates the McGann movie. But we've also posited that this could be as far forward as the Time War, in which we know the Master was brought back to life, so presumably any version of the Master could do there. A better clue comes from the Inquisitor's claim that the Doctor was deposed as Lord President.

This clue is admittedly trickier. At first glance it seems to suggest that we are, in fact, in the Doctor's present. But that is just about the only thing in the entire Trial that points towards that, so let's instead suggest that it merely implies that the Doctor has been deposed by the time in Gallifreyan history that the trial is taking place. That tells us that it post-dates Remembrance of the Daleks. (This is, of course, assuming that time is not excessively rewritten by the events of the Trial - a topic we'll come to shortly)

But past those vague guideposts we're left without much mooring in terms of the when - which is, admittedly, unsurprising given that Gallifrey post-Five Doctors is a complex topic to say the least. But it's sufficient to observe that the Trial seems to take place somewhere in the hiatus - a period that, as I've already remarked, necessarily coincides with the Time War.

Moving on from when, then, let's look at what. The first and most obvious thing to point out is that the setting of the Trial is strange. On the one hand it is clearly aboard a space station distant from Gallifrey. On the other the space station is clearly a place important enough to be the location of the Seventh Door to the Matrix. To be blunt about the question, then, where the heck is this place?

The more interesting thing to point out, however, is that nobody on the station seems to have a name. Even the seeming representative of Gallifreyan authority, the Keeper of the Matrix, is a position we have never seen referred to before held by someone who lacks a name. We observed back in Mark of the Rani that there is an existent if inadvertent distinction within Time Lords between named exiles and nameless renegades. And so it is of considerable interest to note that the trial is comprised entirely of renegades.

What is strange about renegades (as opposed to any other group of Time Lords) is that they are at once the lowest and the most powerful sorts of Time Lords. On the one hand they are wholly separate from Gallifreyan society, on the other they are continually uniquely privileged within it. The fact that the Doctor is put on trial by renegades speaks volumes and is one of the most intriguing details of the story. Especially when one thinks about how the renegades are privileged. For one thing, the only people we have ever seen to have a TARDIS in all of Doctor Who are renegades. Now we see that a space station full of renegades has one of the doors to the Matrix. And let's further note that in The Deadly Assassin entering the Matrix from Gallifrey is a dangerous and dodgy process involving machines. Similarly, communion with the Matrix in The Invasion of Time requires no end of danger and equipment. We've never seen anything like a door to the Matrix on Gallifrey, and prior to this story it was never viewed as one of the functions of the Key to Rassilon. The implication is that not only do the renegades have privileged access to the Matrix, they are in fact the true keepers of it.

To be a renegade, in other words, is to be in a position of true authority - to be the driver of the eye of the Panopticon. And the Trial consists of them turning the Panopticon and all of their authority onto the Doctor in what we now understand as an explicit attempt to rewrite his history. At this point, then, we must finally turn to the question of who's doing this.