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@whoreviewswho
I am sitting here GIGGLING and kicking my feet like a little school girl watching paul mcgann's audition tape for the doctor again and again. You have him do some good acting yada yada and then its "more excited" --- "hm?" "Excited!" And he switches up so fast and the 8th doctor is born right there. A smile burning brighter than a thousand suns and movement that makes me bite my SCREEN look at him go!!!
The way he doesnt just adjust his voice for the line his entire body switches up like it all just CLICKS. The mannerisms, the gestures, the smile, talking faster, repeating words, the whole thing, just ARGH. Have I mentioned the smile. THE SMILLLLEEEEEE
"I THINK I HAVE! I think, I think, I THINK. I THInk- I have."
"Yesyesyesyesyes, will-will-will lead his people out of darkness-"
extremely funny to me that Kermit the Frog is the only main overlap character between Sesame Street and The Muppets. imagine your day job is hanging out in a community of lovely people that genuinely just want to help kids learn and care about everyone so so much and then your night job is the reason that you have to stay up to date on your rabies AND tetanus vaccine
at noon the giant you're hanging out with is Big Bird! a wonderful fellow who likes reading stories and singing and telling fun facts! at midnight there's a giant named Sweetums who makes you feel like you're being hunted for sport
Ernie, trying to maybe come out to Kermit: well you know Kermit, me and Bert-
Bert: Bert and I
Ernie: Bert and I, we've been best friends forever, but we're also something else too!
Kermit, who every goddamn night has to tell Beaker and Bunsen to keep it professional, deal with Statler and Waldorf's bullshit, AND update his organizational chart on Dr. Teeth and the Electric Polycule: that's really great to hear fellas, happy for you two! :)
The Sea Devils, 1972
Will The War Between the Land and the Sea be a great spin-off?
All cards on the table, let's just admit that The Sea Devils was fighting an uphill battle from the word go. The second serial in Doctor Who’s seventh season, Doctor Who and the Silurians, was penned by one Malcolm Hulke and it was the first that new producer Barry Letts was awarded any control over. What Hulke delivered was a seven episode masterclass in science fiction, introducing a species of highly evolved reptiles who had awoken from hibernation to reclaim the planet from the human race. The serial brilliantly tackled mature themes of xenophobia, nationalism, ethics and provided a broad and bold allegory for the ongoing Cold War within the framework of an otherwise entertaining and exciting action thriller. The cherry on top was the metatextual component of Hulke essentially presenting a case for why earthbound Doctor Who was a flawed idea from the start. Steven Moffat once claimed that Doctor Who and the Silurians was such a strong story that it had the potential to be a blockbuster film and, thanks to some well handled financial allocation and the epic direction of Timothy Combe, it quite often feels like one as is. Like really the entirety of season seven, The Silurians was truly lightning in a bottle. So, it only made sense for all of the same people to go back to thew well two years later and attempt to do the whole thing over again.
Surprising as it may seem, revisiting one of the obvious successes of an earlier season was not this story's inception but rather Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks' penchant for spectacle. In the search for original ideas to set a new serial around, Letts and Dicks were intrigued by the notion of a sea based adventure and commissioned Hulke on the knowledge that he was a Royal Navy veteran. It was during the initial brief that Hulke was instructed to draft, not only a sequel to The Silurians but also, a sequel to The Dæmons with the return of the Master. Hulke's story was initially titled The Sea Silurians and that title alone pretty much tells you everything you need to know about what to expect here.
Starting out with net positives, this is a spectacular looking story. The location work is wonderful, the action is very well done and the active involvement of the Royal Navy leads to some very expensive looking sequences that could never have been accomplished on the show's budget without such good faith. Michael E. Briant was a more than competent Doctor Who director and his talents were put to good use here. Some particular praise should also be directed to costume designer Maggie Fletcher and visual effects designer Peter Day for creating the look of the eponymous creatures. The Sea Devils themselves are a great creature, similarly frightening to the Silurians but fundamentally quite different aesthetically, cribbing on the iconigraphy of fish monsters and sirens rather than evoking dinosaurs. Their design is really cool and iconic (even if their eyes obviously cannot move and the actors are plainly seeing through the necks) and they are immediately striking and attention-grabbing whenever they appear in frame.
The commitment to being 'the sea based serial' allows for much fun and spectacle but it also provides no small amount of coverage for the biggest disappointment of this whole affair which is that the broad strokes of this plot and The Silurians are practically identical. Any exploration or dissection of the basic themes between the two of them would come out about the same and the only thing resembling a legitimate rogue element is the Master who does less to disrupt the expected plot than simply accelerate it so it can take one less episode to tell.
This is not to suggest that the Master's appearance is unwanted. Far from it. In fact, his plot elements are largely the most entertaining to watch, making The Sea Devils a strong contender for the finest story to showcase Pertwee and Delgado's delightful rapport. Every scene between them is unquestionably electric and awarded us brilliant moments like the Doctor’s withdrawn handshake and that memorable sword fight. Malcolm Hulke was always one of the strongest writers of this period and his grasp of the Master was particularly strong on all three occasions. There is an interesting shift in the Master’s motivation in this story, following his imprisonment, from one of genuine desire for conquest to pure, petty destruction. Perhaps this, in hindsight, marks the beginning of the end for his ability to be taken seriously, as madcap schemes for revenge became the only consistent character trait of Ainley's version later down the track, but you cannot deny that he really works here as the ultimate puppet master. Seeing him effortlessly manipulate both the Sea Devils and the humans into the first stages of war is wonderful to see. Like the classic thriller plots of the 1960s, we have the perfect cold war allegory with our devious third party attempting to stage conflict between two enraged superpowers. Trenchard is a particularly good supporting player here, fulfilling his blindly authoritarian nationalist role with aplomb.
Despite how good all of this is though, and it is good, The Sea Devils proves frustrating from an analytical perspective. This is a great romp and not one devoid entirely of substance, yet its characters are wafer-thin (Jo gets nothing to do, yet again), the plot is never less than straightforward and there is nothing to analyse when all of the subtext is in-text. I really have no purpose here other than to say that I enjoyed it and close up my laptop. The Sea Devils is quintessential Who of the Barry Letts variety. The story is engaging, the action is dynamic and the whole thing comes together in a fun-sized package of pure entertainment. Sure, every episode is a little bit worse than the last one and the moral weight of the original premise is stripped from its sequel entirely in favour of explosive action set pieces but who cares? The Sea Devils is fun. This is simple, quality but disposable entertainment.
So, why am I still writing about it then? Well, because The Sea Devils, quite pointedly, is not disposable entertainment. What was concocted as a series of action set-pieces, propelled by witty dialogue and simplistic morals, to amuse television audiences over six weeks in 1972 has had an incredibly rich life. For one thing, the impact of this story on fan's memories cannot be overstated. Very few things have become as iconic for generations of Who fans as the image of the Sea Devils rising from the ocean. What was similarly impactful was the concept, albeit that is not this serial's achievement to celebrate. Wrapped up in these two observations, however, are the core problem with revisiting the Sea Devils, or even the Siliurians, ever again; there is only one story to tell here.
So, the humans have made their way below the surface to exploit the mineral wealth of the Earth and begin to go missing. The Doctor assists the party and they discover that a race of reptiles, indigenous to Earth, have been awoken from hibernation and are ready to reclaim the planet. Great. Is that The Silurians, The Sea Devils or The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood? There is simply no way to know. As for their other TV appearances? Sure, we have Warriors of the Deep and Legend of the Sea Devils but, crucially, neither of these stories actually necessitate the villain being homo-reptilia. Warriors is almost a straight lift of Earthshock but with none of the latter’s redeeming qualities and Legend, while certainly unique, is a mystical pirate story before anything else. Either story could be told with a generic, new alien species and nothing notable about them would change.
And this might well be a serious problem because, as noted in our first point, the Sea Devils largely continue to permeate on the strength of one deeply iconic image. Everything about them that makes them actually interesting, they share with the Silurians and not even all of that. The Silurians grows to great lengths to introduce an entire society of alien creatures with individual characters who have identifiable goals and actions with which to accomplish those goals. The Sea Devils have none of that. The Sea Devils are not a fully formed alien culture unto themselves. They are, at worst, a generic alien race who are ready to wipe out the humans with no chance of a compromise and, at best, the Sea Silurians.
At the time of writing, The War Between the Land and the Sea has yet to premiere. Over the past four posts, I have been exploring various aspects of the new show's set-up and attenuating to identify the ways in which it may or may not work as a successful, spin-off mini-series. When it comes to considering the Sea Devils themselves, however, it is hard to know what to expect. On the one hand, a multi-episode parable exploring the hypothetical and real-world ethical and political implications of an indigenous group seeking human and land-rights is obviously a great idea. It is not like it is going to become any less essential a story to tell and it obviously has legs. We know that for sure because it has already been told at least three times by now.
Perhaps this time might even be the time that the Sea Devils finally become a fleshed out culture with a societal logic and distinct characters that allow them to finally graduate into a properly developed aspect of Doctor Who lore. It is not like it is impossible to find new avenues to go with homo-reptilia. Big Finish almost found one in Bloodtide by transposing the plot we expect onto an historical context that could tease out different elements of the subtext but this is still, ultimately, an aesthetic change. TWBTLATS establishing a leading duo of human and Sea Devil at least gestures toward originality. Perhaps there is more than one story to tell here and Malcolm Hulke just wasn't the guy to find it. For my money though, I think he absolutely was the man to find it and the fact that he didn't... well, here's to the future.
The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion, 2015
Will The War Between the Land and the Sea Be a Great Spin-Off?
The series nine Zygon two-parter might be the most controversial Doctor Who story of its day. Certainly, it was the most controversial since the previous year's Kill the Moon which happened to be penned by the same person. But, while Kill the Moon sparked outrage that largely led to universal disdain (it came second from last in the Doctor Who Magazine 60 Years poll), 2015's The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion was a more divisive number (it came in seventh). The story continues to accumulate vocal detractors and supporters to this day, giving it a difficult to untangle reputation. To be blunt, the story was unpopular with fans who lament the non-existent days when sci-fi wasn’t political. Perhaps I have shown my hand too soon here. The two-parter, of course, was also unpopular with fans who wish the new series would (simultaneously) just leave the great, classic monsters alone as to not ruin them but also bring them back every week. The intersection between these two camps is practically a single circle.
Seeing's as these two aspects are at the core of the story's division, why not start there? The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion marks the second appearance of the shapeshifters in the revived series having previously played a major role in 2013's The Day of the Doctor anniversary special. When preparing said special, Steven Moffat always intended for the Zygon plot to be carried over into a future story that would explore the sociopolitical repercussions of the events presented, The assignment was handed over to Peter Harness who, apparently received the brief during a press screening for Deep Breath in 2014. Harness accepted and briefed a version of the story titled Invasion of the Zygons, inspired by the famed bodysnatcher film of the same naming convention, and Truth or Consequences. The story would have featured the return of McGillop and legacy characters invoking Brigadier Bambera and Corporal Bell. The most significant change in subsequent drafts was the whittling down of Bonnie's backstory, a police officer who was radicalised in New Mexico while exploring the murder of a Zygon duplicate Danny Pink. Perhaps this version of events would have clarified the final script's vague claims of "twenty million" Zygon refugees living on planet Earth in human form. If those twenty million are presumed dead, the answers as to where the original humans are becomes much clearer (according to Moffat in DWM #494; "the idea is that the Zygons take the human form of various British citizens, and then decamp to other countries, forbidden to interact with their duplicates").
Early versions of the two-parter also featured a Zygon Courtney Woods (who ended up never reappearing after series eight), three Doctors, Zygon caterpillar creatures and confirm that the living Osgood was, in fact, a Zygon. A significant part of the story would have also involved the Doctor and Osgood travelling back in time to see how events for Bonnie and Zygon Danny unfolded in New Mexico but this element was eventually dropped in favour of the Osgood Box element. Despite his initial focus on body horror as a starting point, Harness' scripts continued to drift further into a political-thriller realm and the final story could best be described as such over anything else. Revisiting this in late 2025, it is hard not to be affected by the long arm of history. If there were any one story to look at as a significant precursor to The War Between the Land and the Sea, this might be the one. Series nine is a strong run of episodes but one if its biggest struggles is with landing a consistent tone. Coming next in line of a season featuring a madcap Dalek romp, a base-under-siege ghost story and two episodes of broad comedy shenanigans in history, the hard left turn into a legitimately dark (almost dour), violent and mature thriller story that is striving to somewhat realistically portray real-world issues really does require some adjustment. Perhaps, in hindsight, this story will watch like a backdoor pilot for TWBTLATS wherein Doctor Who, as we know and love it, is colliding with the tone and aesthetic of a completely different, political thriller show starring Kate Stewart and U.N.I.T.
As is, I must admit that I find this story's tone a little difficult to get a hold of. For example, Harness knowingly taps into something as beautifully absurd as two schoolgirls being the Zygon high command but the way the scene is scored, directed and even colour graded suggests everything about it is deeply serious and grim. I did find this to be a bit of a barrier on some viewings (I have had a very back and forth relationship with this story). Take Clara's introduction, for another example. The scene has a very weird vibe about it which I did find off-putting at first. Why is Clara so weirdly cold with the kid? Why is the scene so quiet and shot to be so obviously sinister? I realise that this is all intentional but it took me a while to find a way in with it. The scene, like a good number in the story, is deliberately uncanny and unsettling, going for that horror vibe that Harness was striving for. It just doesn't really feel like horror and thriller in the way that we are used to Doctor Who feeling which I think, reasonably, takes people a bit out on first viewings. Australia's own Daniel Nettheim is a more than competent director but, as stated earlier, Invasion/Inversion is a little bit rough tonally. I get the sense that thriller simply isn't Nettheim's wheelhouse and, comparing the key moments revelations in this episode to a similarly heart-racing episode of Sherlock, The Reichenbach Fall,you can see that Nettheim isn't quite in his element here (It's not for nothing that Toby Haynes helmed four of Steven Moffat's masterpieces and then moved on to shooting episodes of Andor).
First viewings, however, are exactly what a story like this is made for. On broadcast, I was enraptured by this two-parter. It was simply a brilliant two hours of television. As tense and thoughtful and engaging and moving as it was surely intended to be. Great television is a magic act and the act definitely worked for me. You might see where this is going. An unfortunate effect of the overall acceptable production is is that it doesn’t ever hold up as well on a rewatch. That's not to say that it makes for a bad rewatch. Far from it. These are incredible scripts and I have watched these episodes many times since broadcast on the power of them and the actors involved. And I certainly will again. However, I have never been as on the edge of my seat as I was on my initial viewing. One aspect of this is, admittedly, knowing where things are going. The church scene is fantastic, the Bonnie reveal was amazing and the climax is obviously a rush but all of these moments are relying on being unexpected twists in the tale and require element of suspense that, A, don’t really land when you know what’s happening next and, B, really don't land when the direction and editing is as lacking in confidence as this story feels.
Being 'political' is not the problem. Obviously. Doctor Who has been offering up politically charged fantasies since 1963 and should never stop doing so. However, there are things that also need to be acknowledged about said stories and practically all of them can be summed up in the phrase "passage of time". Political and social sensibilities are guaranteed to change and develop in such a way over time that they will invariably render any given take on any given sociopolitical issue in a Doctor Who story irrelevant within some number of years or even less. This is a good thing, by the way. It is good that Colony in Space is a little problematic fifty-plus years on. With that in mind, yes, the politics of this particular story are indeed flawed but the specific context of which they were borne out of is incredibly important to remember. I've more than once seen the Doctor's speech in this story trotted out as some dangerous rhetoric condemning the Palestinian cause, for example, which is a ridiculous thing to do. Pretending that this one speech, from a ten year old episode of Doctor Who pertaining to a generalised allegory for mid-2010s islamaphobia, has any amount of bearing on any issue that’s not the specific one being discussed is, frankly, ludicrous. This is not a story about an oppressed minority but about a peaceful majority of ordinary people living amongst us who are being either profiled as violent radicalists or dragged into a conflict they have no interest in being a part of.
For those who were not there at the time, this Doctor Who story is openly addressing the impact of terrorist organisation ISIS. Or, rather, the impact as filtered through the lens of an English and Scottish screenwriter, respectively. For anybody unsure of what this means, and as far as I understand it, ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, are a militant organisation that believe in reforming a long since abandoned mode of government that fundamentally assume all people on Earth are Muslim, even if they haven't realised it yet. ISIS have made it their responsibility to ensure that everybody practices Islam in the way that Muhammad originally transcribed. The kind of system that they are propagating is called a Caliphate or generally, an Islamic State (of Iraq and Syria). By 2015, the same year as this story was broadcast, ISIS had claimed to be an institution led by a self-appointed caliph (meaning they are Muhammad's successor) and ruled over twelve million people upon whom their law was enforced. The most important parallel to note here is that, while ISIS claimed claimed religious and political authority over the global Muslim population, the vast majority of practicing Muslims, and Muslim countries, did not accept this claim.
Thus, the text and the subtext become largely a conversation about the same thing. A vocal segment of the English population in 2015 assumed that all Muslim immigrants are ISIS sympathisers and therefore dangerous people to have in their country. What takes The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion from being important commentary to being something genuinely brilliant, however is the way in which its premise is fundamentally addressing the Doctor Who's own xenophobic flaws. Osgood says as much in the prologue; "Any race is capable of the best and the worst. Every race is peaceful and warlike. Good and evil. My race is no exception. And neither is mine." Doctor Who, alongside innumerable other science-fiction stories,has a terrible history of pedalling xenophobic ideas, presenting entire alien races as malicious invaders. The ties to The Day of the Doctor are important in subtly selling this; an unspoken acknowledge that this story is following on from its predecessors ambitions to set new goal posts for the series and to break from the past. That being said, this representation and humanisation of the enemy threat is certainly not perfect. As great as the Doctor's speech is at the end, it is a little bit easy that Bonnie is entirely swayed in a single scene. The complete lack of context for how she got to being a radical and seeing her be entirely uncompromising up until she confronts the Doctor is a little too rushed, in my opinion. I would have preferred to see her doubting the cause or at least feeling remorseful for the things she thinks she has to do. I realise that the Doctor's whole point is that violence begets violence and the only solution to any conflict is to actually listen and talk to each other about what everybody wants and needs. A conversational climax is the appropriate one for the stance being taken but there is no build up to get us there and the change happens far too quickly to be wholly satisfying. As well as that, we also have the implicit difficulties of several white men on the production team effectively lecturing Hamas as "tantrumming" children.
In fact, it might be worthwhile to just untangle the politics of the speech completely since it is an incredible piece of writing that also fuels a lot of audience's disdain about the episode it rounds out. The problem, and it is a legitimate problem, is that Harness simplifies the entire context of the story (both in-universe and the real issue inspiring it) to a point that ultimately puts it at odds with the nuance presented basically everywhere else. In his own words; "what the Doctor says, [is] that whatever grievance you have with somebody else and whatever battles you're fighting, no matter how terrible somebody has been to you, and how unjust things have been, that the only way to stop it destroying you completely is to reach some form of accommodation or forgiveness about it". In a broad sense, this sentiment unproblematic and it would be unproblematic here IF the episode wasn't severely lacking in perspective presented on the Zygon situation. This seems like another story element that was better fleshed out in a previous draft. Originally, Etoine (never named in the final script) was actually a vicar named Emily and was transformed at a police officer's funeral, likely in some way connected to the axed New Mexico plot-lines. In the episodes as they are, we desperately need more than just two scenes in the second episode with a complete bystander to fully sell the idea. Why not put a Zygon actively on the team? As much as I like and get what they're going for with the Osgood human-Zygon thing, it probably would have been savvier to abandon that completely and just embrace her being a Zygon. Have her and the Doctor doing their buddy-cop thing with Osgood, or some new character, on-hand to actually offer a voice for the broader Zygon population who are rejecting Bonnie's movement.
As it stands, why shouldn't we just believe Bonnie is justified? She seems to make a compelling case with the lack of counterpoint from her own people so why should we support Kate and the Doctor's solution? The Doctor's speech only really works if Bonnie's actual goal is clearly detrimental to the Zygon cause and devastating to humans. In this way, perhaps a contemporary metaphor would be apt; if Bonnie were to be some major military leader spearheading a genocide that was fuelling a distrust and hatred of her people despite a lathe number of them being uninvolved in those actions. As presented, a lot of audiences genuinely sympathise with Bonnie (hence the projection of her cause to the Palestinian one) and that completely destroys the point that the story is going for. Bonnie has to be wrong and a lot of fans watching seem to not believe that she is.
In terms of character, The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion has little to offer in the way of challenge for any of its characters though they do have their moments. Everybody very reasonably praises Peter Capaldi's performance with the second episode's speech but he is on top form throughout the whole story with some of his most memorable witticisms sprinkled throughout the runtime. Following Death in Heaven, his relationship with U.N.I.T. also feels a lot clearer defined. He clearly wants to help Kate but does not fully trust her. He works with Colonel Walsh (a cute casting choice) and attempts to advise her but will get in her way if it prohibits him getting what he wants. This is a partnership of necessity where the Doctor is a truly neutral party, unlike their previous appearance where he seemed to be more or less completely on-side with them bar one guy he picked on for some reason. It goes without saying too that the speech is so perfectly informed by what we know of his past. Capaldi and Moffat/Harness both do exceptional work at selling such an impossible characterisation to relate to as a human being.
The sidelining of Clara in episode one is unfortunate and feels like a big mistake at this point in the season. The second episode is superior in most respects but especially in terms of Clara who, thankfully, gets some really creative and memorable scenes in her Last Christmasesque dreamscape. Sadly, this is still not really enough and the story is clearly more interested in Bonnie, the one character who does legitimately have her beliefs challenged and changed in a meaningful way throughout the story. Considering that the emotional crux of series nine is the downfall of the Doctor and Clara, the absence of any progression on that front is a real shame. The Doctor gets some nice moments that highlight where we are at when he assume she is dead but, to be honest, the whole plot line tracks perfectly well if you skipped from Last Christmas straight to Face the Raven and that’s a real issue. Regardless, Jenna Coleman is excellent as Bonnie and steals the show even more than she already had.
Osgood still fails to feel like a character and never completely works as a literal allegory for fandom either but Kate gets some of her best material in the whole show here. That isn’t saying a lot, mind you. Still, her getting her own subplot in New Mexico (laughable production error in costuming and all) does once again provide glimmers of anticipation for what a Jemma Redgrave espionage thriller might look something like. She has some great moments there but it saddens me that the ultimate point of her going there, presumably uncovering exactly who and why Bonnie is, ended up being cut from the story.
The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion is a great story and a strong two episodes of television but it is a little bit of a mixed bag. Despite having some brilliant ideas and some incredible moments, it is ultimately less than the sum of its parts never quite landing unbridled brilliance but never being less than entertaining if flawed. Ever since this story's broadcast, the discourse surrounding political Doctor Who episodes has only gotten more and more unhinged. Alarmingly, what should have started a trend in the show of responding to its own flaws and engaging meaningfully with the political context around it (series ten did continue down this path very successfully) has continued to roll down into decidedly toothless, "all sides matter" presentations of what should be difficult to discuss issues. The Zygon two-parter is no shining light to strive toward and never really was but its heart has always been in the right place. This is not a Kerblam! or The Ark or The Dominators situation but something more akin to The Savages or Planet of the Ood. The intentions are clear and the final product is delightful but the execution leaves something small to be desired. I love these episodes with all my heart and will never forget how much they impacted a fifteen year old with developing ethical and moral stances. I love it like a childhood friend. But we have gone seperate ways.
And as for any potential U.N.I.T. spin-off... Well, it is hard to deny the idea would have legs and, at the time writing, The War Between the Land and the Sea is still almost two weeks away. The premise and tone promise something akin to exactly what might have been promised way back in 2015; a political thriller featuring human and non-human characters in crisis about real-world issues. The days of Peter Harness and Steven Moffat have long since gone by now leaving room for the even more politically vague Pete McTighe and the transparently virtuous Russell T. Davies to leave a similar stamp on the Whoniverse exploring similar themes and concepts. Quite what that stamp will look like is a huge question mark but one thing we can say for sure is that, no matter what the show ends up being like, its politics have to be better than this is in 2025.
Will The War Between the Land and the Sea be a great spin-off? - Downtime
So far as independently licensed Doctor Who spin-off productions go, 1995's Downtime is one of particular significance. As established in my Wartime retrospective, direct-to-video fan films and independent audio dramas featuring authorised adaptations of original Doctor Who concepts and characters were an essential element of the show's serval during the 1990s and early 2000s. As well as featuring Who alumni in various roles, these productions provided a training ground for enthusiastic, amateur creatives to hone their skills and hopefully find a break in the industry. The primary two parties behind these works were the companies Reeltime and BBV and the larger portion of their respective catalogues has been lost to time, especially the film side of things. However, Downtime stands out as one of the notable exceptions; a fan production so successful that it was adapted into a then-ongoing official line of novels. One deemed so official that footage from it was nearly included as flashback material in The Sarah Jane Adventures. It was even so well-known within fandom that one of its key characters was revived and has been a major player in the TV show proper since 2013.
Produced by Keith Barnfather, Paul Cuthbert-Brown, Andrew Beech and Ian Levine (*shudders*), Downtime set its sights on being as close to an offical Doctor Who product as it could possibly get, successfully licensing U.N.I.T., the Brigadier, the Great Intelligence, Victoria Waterfield and Sarah Jane Smith in a script from real Who scriptwriter Marc Platt directed by the legendary Christopher Barry. If Wartime proved, albeit not in execution, that a Doctor Who spin-off could work perfectly well by taking an entirely different approach to the series itself, then Downtime seemed hellbent on proving the exact opposite. Its reputation these days, amongst fans who are even bothered to invest any time in these wannabe spin-offs, is that Downtime is the most watchable of the films from this era. In some ways I can understand why. It has some great location filming from an experienced director, some very good actors in front of the camera and some rather neat visual ideas and effects that both provide a unique aesthetic and also callback heavily to former glories. I can see the appeal. For me, however, I think this film is dreadfully dull.
Downtime perfectly embodies the least creative impulses of a Doctor Who fan production. Like modern Big Finish, Downtime cannot conceive of a continuation of the show that is not simply a recreation of what was done in the past. It leans on its own connection to something that was, at one time, an innovative piece of work to justify its own existence and does very little to get its audience on side beyond that. What makes this such a frustrating watch is how close it comes to being a successful spin-off. The Sarah Jane Adventures, the clearest successor to this approach, revelled in being an extension of Doctor Who's long, half-remembered legacy. That show was primarily a young adult redo of the same old tropes and images of ‘70s Doctor Who. It leaned on lore and world-building just as much as this film does but the key difference is in the focus. It is all well and good to bring back the Brigadier and the Great Intelligence and have Yeti stomping about the place but that, in and of itself, does not make for a worthwhile and interesting story. You just have the same things that fans expect to see trotted out like museum pieces. This might as well be a Longleat exhibition.
Compare this to something like The Last Sontaran or Enemy of the Bane where the familiar elements of the Pertwee era are weaved in and out of the narrative but they are being actively repurposed into an entirely new context that serves to introduce young children to this familiar fantasy through the ongoing story of our new characters and their relationship to the world. Doctor Who's past becomes another rabbit hole that theshow can dive into rather than the whole reason for the show's existence. Even when Doctor Who itself drudges up some key component of its past, it acts in much the same way. 'Old school Doctor Who' is as much a place the TARDIS can visit these days as any other storytelling realm. Indeed, thethe point of doing so when it does go to those places is often to draw a link between what any given idea represents in the cultural narrative of the show to what the show is doing in that moment. There is little to be gained from simply do the same idea again because it was a good idea the first time. Downtime introduces no new characters of note, has nothing particularly clear to say about these half-remembered glories and offers plenty of plot but very little story.
To be honest, I would have some great difficulty even summarising what that plot even is. If there were any thread to pick at as the core of the story then it would be the anxieties of the digital world changing who we are. The Great Intelligence is manifesting via cyberspace, infecting the youth and is ultimately defeated by the old ways prevailing. So, in other words, traditionalism wins out over innovation because innovation scary. Zooming into a character level, things are pretty dire too. The Brigadier gets his deadbeat dad arc and comes off pretty embarrassing for it. We have the technical introduction of Kate Stewart but this is in no meaningful sense the introduction of the character as she exists now. Beverley Cressman is fine in the role but she has little of interest to do. Kate just has to be a mum, be scared and intimidated and ask other men for help. Victoria is effectively one of our main villains which is the kind of odd choice that makes you wonder why they even bothered to use her at all. And then there is Elizabeth Sladen who is well above any of this material and cops the biggest insult of all by having nothing of consequence to contribute to the story. Her scenes are easily the best simply by way of her outshining every scene partner she has but they are frustratingly few in number and could be entirely excised without affecting the plot at all.
The problems are all clear from the terrible opening scene. Despite some real talent, this film still reeks of amateur work. Deborah Watling is shocking and overreacting all about the place, the old white monk is nothing but cringe-worthy and the whole scene is pretty poor in all the ways the film will continue to be poor. Wartime makes an effort to generate investment in the protagonist and intrigue in the story on its own terms. There is no reason to care about any of the major elements in downtime if you don’t have an existing relationship to the material. It’s not even especially easy to understand the broad strokes of the plot without having a base level understanding of twelve almost entirely missing Doctor Who episodes from thirty years earlier. Downtime is not a good spin-off and certainly not a very good film. But it is good fan-fiction. We can only hope for much better from the Whoniverse to come.
Will The War Between the Land and the Sea be a great spin-off? - Wartime
1987 must have been an especially strange time to be a Doctor Who fan. Your favourite series had been cancelled the past year, returned in an atypical and overambitious format that was ultimately unsatisfying for everybody who watched it and made it leaving the stage set for one last chance with a largely new team both in front and behind the camera whose sensibilities were so far from what you might have expected that it would have been impossible to gauge whether the show was even working anymore. Ultimately, everybody (wrongly) decided that it wasn't and the show spent the last three years of the 1980s quietly churning out one classic after another while nobody in the general public, at the BBC or would have been the type of fan to self-identify as such seemed to care.
It was in this context that Doctor Who's second ever spin-off got off the ground because of course it was. Well, perhaps this is a misnomer since Wartime, as it came to be known, has really nothing at all to do with Doctor Who proper. Producer/director Keith Barnfather was keen on producing a Doctor Who film and, unhappy with how the show had turned out in recent times, approached John Nathan-Turner in the hopes of licensing an official spin-off. His initial plans hoped to see Jon Pertwee and Elizabeth Sladen return in a story filmed at Longleat but JNT refused permission thinking that such an endeavour would not be accomplishable on Barnfather's budget. So, instead, Barnfather went directly to Derrick Sherwin. Sherwin was Doctor Who's producer between 1969 and 1970 and was the creator of the U.N.I.T. concept, a concept he ultimately owned the rights to.
With this manoeuvre, a precedent was set that would become the backbone of Doctor Who's survival during its sixteen years off-air. Companies such as Reeltime Pictures and BBV would produce Doctor Who adjacent films direct-to-video that maintained their 'legitimate' connections by way of including characters and concepts that were not wholly owned by the BBC. The impact of these films on the show's overall trajectory, regardless of quality, is not insignificant. Two such films were officially adapted as novels in the ongoing Virgin New Adventures book series, an officially licensed continuation of the show and more than a handful of creatives and actors involved in these productions would go on to pioneer Big Finish, the next most significant official continuation after the Virgin novels wrapped up (both Virgin and BF ported talent directly into the revived show). Even more extraordinarily, one of the characters from these films was introduced into the actual show as a regular, recurring character. How's that for influence?
My primary reason for looking back on Wartime in 2025 is the approach of The War Between the Land and the Sea, the fifth official Doctor Who spin-off actually produced by the BBC. TWBTLATS also marks the first series to actually focus on U.N.I.T., a concept that, for obvious reasons, naturally lends itself to being the focus of a whole show. What better time to look back on the first attempt to make spin-off material out of the UN's alien research team? That said, it's not like this spin-off is really necessary to form precedent for U.N.I.T. being good material to make a series out of, Doctor Who itself did that for almost five years, but it was made and is worth acknowledging for getting the ball rolling on an enormous line of spin-offs over the years to come.
Perhaps what stands out immediately about Wartime is the fact that it's actually not really a U.N.I.T. spin-off at all. I mean, they are in it and its focuses on one of its key members but if we were to look at this as some kind of template for how a U.N.I.T. show might work there is little to be found. Wartime is a half hour film about Warrant Officer John Benton and a (maybe) supernatural encounter that takes place while he is on duty that explores his psyche and the traumatic events that formed his relationship with soldiering in the first place. This is not a pilot for anything and the story is so closed off that it doesn't even lend itself to a sequel particularly well. On the face of it, nothing really happens here. Benton has a series of bizarre experiences that are linked to some trauma in his childhood and... that's it. It's not even especially clear whether these revelations to us are revelations to him and whether he leaves the story with any sense of resolve that he was perhaps previously lacking. Attempting to build any kind of dramatic narrative out of Sergeant Benton as a character in the first place is an odd choice so it is not really a surprise that it doesn’t pay off. Benton is such a thinly defined entity in the show prior to this that describing him as an actual character rather than a role seems like quite a stretch and John Levene's limitations as an actor don't help either.
When Wartime works it is because of its visual flair. There is very little in the way of story here and the pacing is particularly problematic. By the exact mid-point, all we have seen occur is Benton be disrupted en route to U.N.I.T. HQ by (presumably) psychic visions that prompt him to leave the jeep and wander about the woods where he sees some small, ghostly children running around. That's more than fifteen minutes of screen time and a single sentence description to cover HALF of the film's run time. The second half is the better portion but there is no conclusion to anything we see here. The film is edited as such to suggest that Benton’s experiences were purely psychological (which kind of suggests he maybe shouldn’t be a warrant officer at U.N.I.T. in his condition) and we just move on and roll credits. Hardly a desirable outcome for your psychological drama film.
Still, the spirit of Doctor Who does peek through in more than a few places making the tenuous connection feel warranted from time to time. The combination of uncanny visuals, juxtaposing familiar objects in fundamentally wrong places really gets the core of what Doctor Who has always been good at and there are several arresting images in here despite the obvious budgetary shortcomings. There is a very impressive shot with Chris’ reflection in the water. Benton’s dancing parents is a creepy and provocative visual as is his being shot at point blank out of nowhere. Nicholas Courtney’s small appearance adds an air of authenticity to proceedings despite having no plot relevance at all and Mark Ayres score similarly helps to create an impressive synergy with the sound of the main show at the time. The visual storytelling of Wartime functions much better than the dramatic aspects do. Characters are frequently just describing their wants and motivations and expositing backstory in dialogue. There are amateur mistakes aplenty.
To some extent, any attempt to formulate any amount of criticism on these wilderness years spin-offs must be conducted on a curve. These are, at the end of the day, fan films. Licensed fan films but fan films nonetheless. The crew are working for very little money, a number of them would be lacking in professional experience or budding creatives in their fields. These are not bad things by any stretch. The most important thing to acknowledge about any fan production is that, as much or more so than any other independent or amateur film production, they are a labour of love. These films comprise of pure passion for the characters and the worlds of the stories they want to tell. That is the only reason these things get made so why shouldn't they? Yeah, it's not a great film and the rewatch value is low but at least they had an idea and ambitions beyond just making a cheap military drama in the woods somewhere. That alone makes it more interesting than the modern spin-offs of, say, Star Wars. And what else is Doctor Who, at the end of the day, if not a scrappy, weird little series that's constantly punching above its weight?
If Wartime reveals anything to us about a Doctor Who spin-off, it is that it can move away from being simply something that is like Doctor Who. This film is not a bit average because it tries to be a surreal, psychological thriller instead of a fantasy, adventure serial. No, it falls short because the thrills are not very tense and the script is just a bit thin. There is a powerful story about fathers and sons, cycles of abuse and how class and circumstance creates the young minds that enlist in the military for reasons perhaps they cannot even understand yet. Now, perhaps this is a little far out from Doctor Who's wheelhouse to the point that you might reasonably ask why a connection is necessary and that is a good counter-argument. Remove the two Whoniverse references from Wartime and it stands alone perfectly fine. Perhaps better since there is no expectation to be placed upon it. Wartime is a big swing and a Doctor Who spin-off that decided not to justify its own existence by being a Doctor Who spin-off but by being a good film. Torchwood set out and accomplished exactly the same thing. Class had the same ambitions but fell short in practice Perhaps The War Between the Land and the Sea will do the same. Or, perhaps, it will be simply brilliant. One can only hope.
Sweet Planet, This. I Think I Might Keep It - Dark Water/Death in Heaven, 2014
Endings are hard. Finding a satisfying ending to something as complex as an entire season of television is particularly hard. Prior to 2005, televised Doctor Who had made exactly two attempts at landing a season finale in the way that we understand them to be and those two stories happen to have been The Armageddon Factor and The Trial of a Time Lord: The Ultimate Foe. Needless to say that precedent was not particularly encouraging. Thankfully, Russell T. Davies had little interest in reviving Doctor Who with the many flaws of its format intact and his 2005 revamp completely redefined the terms for how the show was going to survive. His first season as show runner is a tightly woven and deliberately conceived thirteen episode run with a regular cast of characters, a clearly mapped out character arc and exploration for its protagonists and successfully lay out all the pieces required for the finale one episode at a time as to present a very thoughtful and satisfying climax. RTD would replicate this format three more times before stepping down as showrunner when his successor took his approach onboard and ran like the wind. Series five follows the structure of an RTD season pretty effortlessly and even takes it further. As established in my examination of Mummy on the Orient Express, series five began to embrace and challenge the understood logics of television viewing as a key part of its approach to telling stories. The game of Doctor Who during the Matt Smith era was "What are the rules that this story is playing by?"
The three Capaldi seasons, as established, change tact; "what kind of story is being told here in the first place?" Dark Water/Death in Heaven therefore shoulders the burden of being the place where that question is answered. This change requires some amount of adjustment for watching the whole season. Like every season of Doctor Who so far, series eight was a really strong series with some really great episodes but the then unique thing about it was how it set out to work as a longer term investment in the greater whole. It has more than its share of strong episodes but, unlike really every season before it, those great episodes are not conceived as individual and isolated peaks, unique pockets of storytelling in amongst a show that deliberately changes its MO ever week, but rather more like aspects of a greater aesthetic goal.
The Human Nature two-parter, for example, introduces an element of world-building that will be relevant in later stories and builds upon the established dynamics of its characters to develop its dramatic engine but that story is entirely watchable and unaffected by the episodes on either side of it in the same way that nobody ever needs to watch The Twin Dilemma to fully appreciate The Caves of Androzani. In season eight, however, it would be a hard sell to any casual viewer to jump into, say, Mummy on the Orient Express, and really get the desired experience without ant prior context. This entire season is working toward this story in a very intricate and deliberate way that kind of hasn’t been done before. Even series six, which was previously described as impenetrable to new viewers at the time, was largely comprised of one and done concept stories leaving the major openers and closers for ongoing plot developments. Series eight is unified in a different way with incredibly tight thematic and character beats unfolding very deliberately in every episode exploring the Doctor's morality and identity crisis alongside dissecting Clara's attempts to balance/challenge the responsibilities and expectations of her intimate relationships.
However, this is not a perfectly executed season and its reach somewhat exceeds its grasp. This finale wraps up a lot of these ideas presented very effectively but one in particular feels a little half-baked. The exploration of soldiers as a thematic idea in this season is maybe the weak link of the whole thing. The broad strokes of painting the Doctor as a solider himself are fine, even if it is ultimately a reiteration of Robert Shearman’s dissection of monstrosity in Dalek, but they hardly make for something very interesting as presented. Danny is a good character on the whole but the depiction of his relationship with soldiering across the season is more than a little thin and just comes off more than a little like Moffat doesn’t really have much to say or a personal enough relationship with the topic to present it with any amount of weight. I don't believe this is true either. Based on what he would get to saying by the time we get to Boom, I think he knows exactly what he wants to say but skirts around anything too intense here and it is not hard to see why he might be wary. Killing a child civilian in presumably a middle eastern intervention by the western superpowers is an intense topic to introduce in a family oriented fantasy adventure show and the results of doing so are not good. Well, the results are actually non-existent because the story never really opens up a dialogue about what this is and how it impacts Danny beyond his being very sad and regretful for it. Did he believe in what he was doing? Was he dismissed from the military? What were even the circumstances that led to his enlisting, that could make for a fascinating story. These are basic points of character definition that I am bringing up and they’re the kinds of basic that you actually need to be exploring if you want to have an interesting conversation about soldiering and militarism on an individual level.
The lack of this definition is also part of what makes the Doctor and Danny’s relationship so ugly. There’s a gross racial component to the Doctor’s disdain that’s deeply regrettable and we have to acknowledge that before moving any further. It's obviously not intended but the read is hard to ignore. While keeping that in mind, let us consider the parallels the show is attempting to draw here. Danny was a soldier in the British Army, an unambiguously authoritarian force shown in this episode to be raiding civilian houses while intervening in foreign countries. The Doctor, for so far as he can see, is an irritable old man in an unhealthily intimate relationship with his girlfriend. Plenty of red flags, for sure, but hardly a lot of commonality in their experiences as “soldiers”Granted, a lot of the missteps in the Doctor/Danny dichotomy are made in The Caretaker so they’re not entirely Moffat’s fault but they are enough his fault that they’re still problems here.
The Doctor’s general disdain for the military is not a new idea for the show. Part of the tension implicit in the Pertwee era, however effectively it was handled (it was mostly ignored), was the contradiction and conflict that was naturally borne from the Doctor attempting to implement scientific and pacifistic resolutions as a member of the military himself. See The Silurians. The Doctor was explicitly an anti-authoritarian figure in the Troughton era and that take never really went away but it rose to the surface more prominently than ever during McCoy’s time. In the modern show, this trend only really continued with the significant and intriguing nuance of the Doctor being a war veteran himself. From this perspective, the anti-soldier outlook takes in a different guise, either that of projecting self-hatred such as in Dalek or the aggressive self-righteousness of The Doctor’s Daughter.
The problem with series eight’s depiction, however, is the removal of any larger systemic or circumstantial context to the Doctor’s resentment. The Tenth Doctor kept the likes of Cobb and Colonel Mace at arm’s length as perpetuators of a harmful status quo. Martha, however, gets let off the hook pretty quickly in the Sontaran two-parter because we have been made to see her for who she is as a person trying to do the best she can in circumstances beyond her control, rather than an authoritarian force attempting to violently uphold undesirable situations. In fact, her (and everybody else) going so far as she does in Journey’s End because of the Doctor’s influence is a more appropriate soldier/Doctor dichotomy than the one we have with Danny since the characters actually have longstanding relationship and the full context of Martha’s position in life, upbringing and morality leave us with no ambiguity as to her agendas and beliefs. In the case of Journey, however, from Into the Dalek, the Doctor just writes her life off because she’s in the military. Does he even know she wasn’t conscripted to fight off the Daleks? And he does the same to Danny which, one can only presume, is meant to come off as an incorrect assessment since our other protagonist is in love with him and his military training is key to the resolution of at least two episodes (sort of). But this is why we need to know more about him. Doctor Who is a show that has previously, and will continue to, positioned itself firmly as an anti-violent, anti-aggressor sort of show. The black and whiteness of the Doctor’s stance here is troubling since that is kind of simplistic moralising that allows facism and authoritarianism to work. The whole thing is just a bit messy which is a shame because practically everything else here just works.
There are so many wonderful moments in this story that a deserve fart more praise than they tend to get. Danny’s death is legitimately a shock (though Moffat maybe hammers the point home a little too hard with the “last person who’s ever going to hear me say that” beat) and opens up a breathtaking pre-titles sequence. Immediately, Moffat milks some tension out of the question of what this story is going to be about. Dark Water seemingly establishes things pretty firmly as being a story about death and Clara attempting to cheat death despite our knowing (by the established rules of the show) that this isn’t going to end well. No doubt that nobody watching count have guessed that this would in fact be both exactly what the plot is about yet not really what the story has to say. The volcano scene is probably be the best in the season, maybe the best that Moffat has penned for the show up to this point. There is a huge risk being taken here with the Doctor seeming deeply unlikeable in the whole scene before you know what’s really happening. It’s a bold choice and the kind of choice this season makes that didn’t necessarily pay off. At least, based on the anecdotal evidence of people who turned off after this season due to finding the Twelfth Doctor unpalatable (my dad was one of them). This is one of the troubling things about putting trust in your audience; audiences are stupid. The show is making no concessions for casual viewers by this point, assuming that the audience has seen the whole season’s worth of manipulative and toxic behaviours displayed by both characters as to appreciate their coalescing in what transpires here. “Do you think I care for you so little?” is frequently trotted out by fans as a romantic sentiment but it’s obviously horrific.
Clara is the great renaissance of series eight. The criticism that she, the dual protagonist of the show, stole too much screen time from the Doctor was always bizarre and rooted in misogyny. Jenna Coleman was always great but Clara becomes the best written companion in the show’s history beginning with Deep Breath, a fully realised character with flaws and contradictions and whose influence on the show and its characters is mostly and earned. Not since Rose has the relationship between our leads been so challenging but the Doctor and Clara, by design, can be pushed and pulled onto unprecedented, genuinely dramatic directions and they are all throughout this season. That being said, the reappearance of Clara’s gran, while welcome, is strange. The one misstep with Clara throughout her three years on the show is how much her home and private life is a hodgepodge that never really adds up.
Dark Water is the better of the two episodes and functions much the same way as the best episodes of Sherlock did by introducing an abundance of new ideas at a rapid pace and accelerating the narrative toward an impossible to have guessed conclusion based on where things started out. Every part of these elements makes for something I really love though. Everything in the Nethersphere is legitimately hilarious. Chris Addison is a cute addition and Samuel Anderson does a great job playing the straight man in the deeply Adamsesque satire he finds himself in. It’s one cracker line and concept after another. The dark water is neat even if it’s just a device to make the Cyberman reveal work but it’s not so neat that it makes sense to title a whole episode around it. Water that removes all the layers and makes the figure within completely clear, laid bare. Yet, it does the opposite. In showing the basic conception of what is submerged, the reality of what they are is hidden. I'm not sure if this connects to the rest of the story in a meaningful way but it’s a nice idea in and of itself. It would be nice to have delved a little further into the notion of humanity’s one percenters all being invested in 3W but the story has so much going on already that I don’t blame them for not doing anything with it. Why would you when you can milk "the dead being conscious" which might be the scariest thing that Moffat has ever conceived of. Still gives me chills even now considering the possibility. The slow burn reveal of the three words intercut with Danny learning the same thing is masterfully done. Horrific stuff. I also appreciate the cheeky play on the iconography of Tomb of the Cybermen. Part of me wishes that the reveal didn’t come a beat earlier than it naturally should but I appreciate the misdirect away from Missy by lamp shading it so hard a little early.
Yes, Missy. A character who had me rolling my eyes when I first saw this and her kidding the Doctor. Of course they have to kiss now because she’s a girl”. But that was a fourteen year old boy with no idea what the fuck he was on about. You’re telling me John Simm wasn’t desperately looking for this opportunity in Sound of the Drums? I find that unlikely. Capaldi pitches his performance in this moment perfectly for kids as well. Missy’s conception of being a women being something so overtly feminine is lovely and, in hindsight, the only appropriate choice to have made. With no disrespect to the number of wonderful actors and writers who have developed the character since, Michelle Gomez being such a radical departure from what more insular fans would have expected the Master to be in 2014 was the perfect choice to reinvent the character. It’s Troughton levels significant in redefining who the Master is. She is so far away from the original conception aesthetically yet Moffat reconnects with the core of the character in a way that nobody has successfully managed to do in the years since. Delgado works as a shattered mirror for Pertwee’s Doctor, the evil version of the Third Doctor specifically. Anthony Ainley’s take never really came together because the only direction his version ever took was to replicate what worked about Delgado’s performance in completely different contexts. He doesn’t make any sense as a twisted version of Doctors four through seven. RTD and John Simm’s version fairs a lot better since he is a conceivable evil version of David Tennant’s Doctor but both of his appearances are a complete mess and characterise him radically differently for entirely their own reasons that make it somewhat of a challenge to fully pin down what his characterisation is even supposed to be, let alone determining if it works (and this is not the place for me to go into all that). All the remaining Masters are either one-time experiments to serve a specific so it’s hard to assess how they would have functioned as real characters.
Besides being a complete innovation performance wise, Missy works simply because of how scaled down her motivations are. Practically every story before this offers up the Master as a megalomaniac hellbent on conquest and domination but that goal is rarely connected to any legitimate characterisation. The Master of the original series is a comic book villain, determined on either taking over planets he sees himself superior to or destroying the Doctor because he stops him from taking over planets. The most nuance we get comes out of The Deadly Assassin and Survival where we explore him as primarily a survivalist over anything else. RTD’s Master is ultimately even less interesting than any of these ideas because he is simply somebody who is just delusional and driven to madness in both of his appearances. Crucially, Missy shows more than signs of all of these things in her depiction but what ties it all together is the emphasis on her legitimate friendship with the Doctor. It’s not lip-service here, some glib remark from either of them about outwitting the other at the academy. Missy’s entire scheme is an attempt to actually connect with the Doctor on a personal level which is legitimately quite sad. Even better than that is successfully tying in that scheme to all of the other ideas at play in this season. Missy thinks she and the Doctor are one and the same, a single soul sharing two bodies so she gives him everything that she would want in the hopes that he realises that too. Her character is perfectly conceived as meaningful counterpoint to who the Doctor is (more on that in a bit).
Death in Heaven is the lesser of the two episodes for sure but it does have its share of incredible moments and never completely falls apart despite showing signs of trying at more than a few opportunities. Obviously, UNIT need to be here and we get them on the scene immediately come part two. You’d be mad to try and do all this soldier stuff without including them but their inclusion ultimately does make things a little strange. In The Power of Three, Kate was pointedly rebuilding UNIT as a predominantly scientific body instead of a militaristic one. The Day of the Doctor largely continues this with the only major characters we see all being scientists and their main base of operation being depicted only as where they keep all of their alien artefacts in this story, however, we’ve just given all that up with UNIT seemingly filling their old role as the supernatural arm of the UN with armed forces left, right and centre and characters like Colonel Ahmed (another guy the Doctor just writes off completely)
So we have a problem in that UNIT’s role as an organisation is thinly defined and what the Doctor’s relationship to them is is also thinly defined. He gets appointed the president of the Earth against his will, which is a more bombastic and absurd idea than the tone of this story seems ready to commit to, but so what? Why doesn’t he just leave at the first opportunity of he resents what they do so much. I get that he is drugged and taken to the plane but this episode is still seriously lacking in an actual conversation between the Doctor and Kate about how he feels toward them and why he wants to help them. We get that material later in the Zygon two-parter which makes it easier to retroactively project onto this but it’s still a problem.
Osgood makes her second of only three appearances in the show proper and Ingrid Oliver is great, her death scene is one of the great triumphs of this episode for obvious reasons that maybe should not have been undone, but the character never fully comes alive. The death works because of her assumed status as a charming, recurring character but not one of her stories actually offers her the agency or definition she deserves. I like her but it’s always a worry when I could give you a more fleshed out character sheet for Mike Yates than I could for her. Kate makes her third appearance and, by contrast, does feel like an exciting and real character. The constant references to her lineage are distracting (there are four in this episode alone) and they kind of set her up for failure for fandom. She has her own character traits, a very distinct performance from Jemma Redgrave and fills a necessary role in the show to continue telling these types of earthbound stories. Constantly positioning her as being like a completely different, beloved character does little besides make it painfully obvious that she isn’t that character. (Side note but isn't it weird that Kate acts like she has no idea who Clara is?)
As alluded to earlier, the tone of Death in Heaven is a bit confused and it makes for a slightly uneven watch from scene to scene but the episode settles down a lot in its second half, around the time the plane crashes. The scenes with Clara and Danny in the graveyard make for the best realisation of the Cybermen as a concept since at least Sally in The Age of Steel if not the best in the whole show. The problem with Danny and the Doctor’s relationship up until this point notwithstanding, the scenes between them are also cracker with some legitimate weight to the ethics of what they are talking about. Turning the Cybermen into a zombie plague is a cool idea even if the science behind it is the furthest from existent it could be. The more pedantic of fans could also get up in arms considering the question of whether humans are supposed to know what Cybermen are or not at this point. A definitive answer will, hopefully, never come.
Another quiet success of this story is its attempt to be a pitch for how a female Doctor could work in the show. Obviously, Missy serves this function in a plot sense (and characterisation to some extent. I like the meta joke between the Doctor and Osgood where he assumes she won’t believe the Master is a woman but actually just assumes that’s the case unprompted. Nice touch.) but Clara is once again the real place to look for this. It’s not a coincidence that the first thing we do after unambiguously confirming that Time Lords can change gender is attempt a fake-out where Clara has actually been a secret incarnation of the Doctor the whole time. Thankfully, this isn’t literally the case but it does successfully prove it’s two points. Yes, the Doctor could very feasibly be played by a woman and lose none of their mercurial charm and power over the narrative but, also, Clara does definitively have these qualities in the show in its current form. She is on equal footing with the Doctor, as well she should.
Into the climax, we have the story's most up and down points. I said before that part of what rubs me the wrong way about the Doctor’s hatred of soldiers is the black and whiteness of it and the lack of nuance surrounding Danny still makes this a problem to no small extent but it is, certainly, part of the point. The whole season has seen the Doctor grappling with his identity. Every story presents some kind of test for his morals (Kill the Moon, Mummy, this one) or a mirror with which to see himself (Robot of Sherwood, Flatline, this one) and the conclusion we get to here is ultimately an appropriate one that really works for a family audience. Nobody is wholly good or wholly bad. The world doesn’t work in absolutes. The Doctor has spent twelve episodes attempting to find himself somewhere in a binary of good people and bad people but he is better than that. "Armies are for people who think they’re right". The Doctor is a man who helps people and he does his best. Much is made of the Twelfth Doctor’s ongoing development across all three seasons, and rightly so, but Death in Heaven is essential for laying that groundwork and effectively offering us the same sentiment of series ten’s “be kind” speech a good three years early
Yet, somehow, the story doesn’t end here. In a weirdly RTD-like fashion, Death in Heaven wraps up a good ten minutes earlier than its runtime and we get an extended epilogue. The dead kid coming back is an unsatisfying way to wrap up that thread and the CyberBrig is rightfully mocked for being an ill-advised solution to keep Kate in the show. The revelation of Missy being the woman in the shop is also so pointless it might as well never have been addressed. Surely Hell Bent ought to have done anything at all with that idea. The episode also seemingly closes the door on the Doctor and Clara relationship in a wonderfully tragic way. At the time, this was another moment that ultimately felt frustrating that we were all completely wrong about. Seeing these two characters get again lie and deceive the other, hoping that one of them has a happy ending out of this awful friendship. But we all know better, don’t we? And isn't Missy’s final revenge in the Doctor so heartbreaking? Like the whole season, Dark Water/Death in Heaven is a flurry of madcap brilliance and risk and heart that gets weighed down by some awkward choices and overambitious intentions. The result is something hard to condemn but still inching away from exactly what it could be. Moffat would take on the season finale another two times over and improve upon what he tries here with both of them but, for now, let us revel in the glory of this insane accomplishment. In this fifth year on the show, Steven Moffat proved that he was hardly out of ideas. The stage has been set for series nine and the extremities of that season all too well. Like the rest of the Moffat era to come, this is a beautiful false ending.
The Most Interesting Thing - Mummy on the Orient Express, 2014
When the time comes once again for me to sit down and write something, events always start to play out somewhat similarly. Perhaps I will feel to have a good idea, a good starting place and thing that I want to say and start the mountainous journey with some fitting or even perhaps unique way to articulate that thing before it all starts to go drastically awry. Frequently, and without warning, I will find myself leaning on some familiar image, some tropey phrase or overdone sentiment. I read what I am doing back and feel a bit deflated and beaten at the prospect of having turned to yet another riddled cliché and denounce my progress as being that of a hack and rip-off artist, failing to change the face of arts and culture with this singular new project. It is at these desperately low and dire times that I am happily reminded of an old maxim; sometimes clichés are cliché for a reason. It is simply a fact that tropes and clichés and generic old ideas are not inherently bad. These things have been so overdone because, in very significant structural and cultural ways, they just work.
This is where Mummy on the Orient Express enters the conversation. Another old maxim, one frequently parroted by the Doctor Who fandom evokes a similar but crucially different idea. The basic sentiment is something akin to "the show is at its best when it does a proper, classic Doctor Who". This is not a difficult stance to interpret. Doctor Who fans generally like it when Doctor Who feels like how it used to ie when they were children. This has always been historically true and likely remains true today based on the reams of commentators who continue to take RTD to task for not writing the show exactly like how they (often falsely) remember him doing last time. In a lot of ways, a lot of conversation about this story's popularity can simply end here. Mummy on the Orient Express is a 2014 Doctor Who that overtly operates in the mould of a 1975 Doctor Who and fans tend to like that sort of thing.
So, let's put that to one side and address something I stated a bit earlier which is that the disparity between these two maxims. Simply, the difference as I understand it is that Doctor Who fandom likes the return of the old tropes for the sake of the show feeling like a familiar and nostalgic comfort but the actual reason for doing those things is, almost the complete opposite, to dissect and examine why those structures and clichés ever worked in the first place. In this respect, Mummy on the Orient Express is simply a work of genius in my opinion. This is an incredibly standard premise for Doctor Who of any era, it just so happens to be wearing the Hinchcliffe/Holmes costume, and the episode burns through said premise with skill, flair and a sensible pace. On the surface, there is little to be seen as subversive about this and, for some viewers, a ripping yarn about ghoulish creatures on an old train in space is more than enough ideas to conclude this show is operating on some other level to your standard BBC1 drama. For me, however, the joy is all crackling below the surface. Mummy on the Orient Express plays at being a bog-standard Doctor Who in order to facilitate the real story, the much wittier and more thoughtful one, of deconstructing the nature of what a Doctor Who adventure actually is how and they ought to be told in 2014.
In a way, perhaps what is so remarkable here, however, is how unremarkable this is. Deconstructing how Doctor Who stories work is par for the course in the Moffat era. Steven Moffat is a master of story structure and this has always been evident from his Doctor Who oeuvre. Throughout his four years writing for Matt Smith, the show was routinely exploring the logic of television as a medium for telling stories. His Angel two-parter, for example, utilises what was interpreted as a production error as a key plot element for the finale. Series seven deliberately courts the fanbase by introducing Clara five episodes too soon. Series six is the apex of this approach with an overwhelming majority of episodes utilising tricks such as these are. For better or worse, that season challenged its audience greatly by essentially being presenting us with the streaming show model of long-form, chapter based story arcs a few years too early. Key to understanding what Doctor Who was doing between 2010 and 2013 is understanding the artistry of television making and challenging how viewers engage with the work itself. Sherlock functions in much the same way only even more so and to more polarising results.
The Capaldi era, perhaps wisely, takes a step back from this and takes a more back-to-basics approach to structure. The intended outcome here, similar but different, becomes one of tension for the viewer. For four years, the game of Doctor Who was "What are the rules that this story is playing by?" In the Capaldi era, the question becomes, "What kind of story is being told here in the first place?" The Capaldi era is littered with stories intentionally designed to lure in audiences with false expectations so that they can be blind sighted by a completely different one. See Hell Bent for the most blatant example. Sherlock functions in much the same way only drastically more so and to overwhelmingly mixed results. Obviously, this is not a hard and immediate change in M.O. Moffat experiments with the latter approach in A Good Man Goes to War (pointedly not a revenge thriller) and even earlier in Blink (decidedly not a horror story). Nevertheless, it is a clear development in his style and is only more prominent in later works such as Douglas is Cancelled whereby the entire premise only works if its audience is lured into it with false expectations.
Mummy on the Orient Express fits firmly in this mould but, as alluded to earlier, cunningly disguises that fact by way of being an incredibly familiar structure, not just for fans but, to anybody who has ever engaged with genre fiction before. With the the exception of leading duo, everybody in Mummy on the Orient Express is an archetype of some kind, the sort of character you would expect to see in a sci-fi murder mystery. I would be shocked if my local sci-fi bookstore didn't stock a hundred and fifty original novels containing a character identical to Perkins. I stated before that the Hinchcliffe aesthetic is somewhat window dressing but that is not really fair. The collision of some form of genre fiction, or specific story in this case, that is so embedded in British culture as to make it instantly identifiable and setting the Doctor Who cast loose amongst them is exactly what the Hinchcliffe/Holmes era was so renowned for pioneering. The allusions aren't accidental – look at Capaldi's performance, particularly talking to himself in his room, and his blatant Tom Baker imitation. This is not an aesthetic callback to an older period of Doctor Who, it is a straight up recreation and a successful one at that. Is what we glean from this, then, that Doctor Who in 2014 should be doing what Doctor Who in 1975 was already doing?
Well, no because there is more to this story than just that. Pyramids of Mars is a fun runaround where Doctor Who (the character) has been dropped into a (racist) Hammer horror and that is about it. Revolutionary in 1976 but hardly great television in the mid-2010s (or great streaming content in 2024, some might say). Mummy on the Orient Express knows this and builds on it very naturally by making the sensible decision to really remove the possibility of ever taking a Doctor Who episode of this ilk seriously again by disassembling it completely and taking the piss out of it. Again, part and parcel for the Moffat era and this is truly about as meta as it gets. The entire plot and televisual structure is devised around the arbitrary rules of the monster. That plot in-universe is later revealed to have been set in motion by a guiding hand intangibly beyond our main cast who makes a big moment of revealing that everybody in the episode has been hanging out on a set the whole time with disposable background characters that just disappear when the story doesn’t need them. Our main cast does everything short of directly acknowledging the actual form of fiction that they are stuck within. And then, to top it off as horrifyingly as possible, the Doctor straight up reveals to Clara that he's been aware when he walked into the story that he's been beholden to guiding hands above him, forcing him into making horrible decisions every week.
Ah, yes, Clara. The most divisive character of the Moffat era, for some reason. Yet another of the Moff's great sleight of hand tricks was at the start of this season and the reinvention of Clara Oswald. From the off, it was apparent that season eight would be a shift in tone and style from the latter Matt Smith years but, likely due to Moffat's previous trick in the 'Impossible Girl' arc being a little too effective, it seemed that a vocal segment of the audience were not primed for the co-lead of the show to actually co-lead it. Clara is the focal point of Deep Breath and remains out in for the whole season spiking an uncomfortable amount of vitriol toward her just for being in the show and being developed in any way at all. Much is made of her relationship with Danny Pink in this season and that is certainly a driving force in this episode too but the less acknowledged aspect of her role here is the way in which is shifts, ever so slightly but significantly, into the beginnings of her season nine mode. The shift proper happens the following week in Flatline, but this episode first compares her actions directly a junkie. She is somebody who craves misadventure with the Doctor, despite how unhealthy that is for the pair of them and, of course, this leaves the realm of subtext entirely with their exchange about addiction in the final scene.
Meta-textually, Clara spends the whole story trying to escape being in Doctor Who episodes but, in an hilariously macabre and meta way, she realises she can’t because she’s not designed to. Clara Oswald has no role outside of the context of being a character in Doctor Who episodes. Jenna Coleman is always great and she is awarded some charming moments in this story. Clara's relationship with Maisie is delightful, I love their almost direct allusion to the Bechdel test in-dialogue. There are some lovely parallels between them too with their respective abusive relationships. Clara also gets the moment when she expects to comes face to face with a monster and is greeted by some lame bubble wrap. Brilliant.
As per usual, Peter Capaldi is on top form. I remember liking him right from the start of his run but this story seems to be where he really starts clicking in the role en masse and we get the first true semblance of where he’ll be as a more fully developed Doctor, circa series ten. I always really liked how alien the Twelfth Doctor feels compared to his revival predecessors and this episode, like Into the Dalek before it (but much better), takes full advantage of his inhuman relationship with ethics to great service of his character and relationships with the cast around him. After some pretty ropey and mixed characterisation in the middle of the season, this episode felt like an enormous relief and confirmation that things were back in control moving forward.
Obviously the Doctor and the Mummy parallel and this is most overt in the ongoing thematic exploration of soldiers. Discussion of militarism from a moral standpoint is on display here again and, even though this is not the meatiest or most interesting exploration in the season, it makes for a nice thematic tie in a story that feels largely quite disconnected from the main plot arc of the season. There is some kind of triad to be formed between the Doctor, the Captain and the Foretold thought not a terribly interesting one. These parallels are pretty surface level and the real meat is happening on the meta side of things. The Mummy is a victim of his form. He has to repeat the same actions over and over and has no escape. The tech is old and malfunctioning. It needs to be repaired, innovated to break the cycle just like Doctor Who does. Of course the mummy has to die but, even better than that, the whole train (the engine for the story itself) is destroyed so that everybody can move on with a fresh start.
The episode wraps up with some overt discussion about how the story has challenged our characters which borders on ham-fisted but actually works quite well. Of everybody on the train, it is not inconceivable to suggest that the Doctor’s morality has more in common with Gus than anybody else. Both are incredibly pragmatic and coldly logical but, for the Doctor, that a front or genuinely how he feels? The question remains unanswered due to the unfortunate fact that this revelation forms little more than a double beat once we get to the end of Flatline.
Mathieson has claimed in the years since broadcast that this story was his favourite that he wrote for the programme and it is not hard to see why. Mummy on the Orient Express rightfully gets held up as one of the standouts and essential watches of the Moffat era. There are handful of higher highs and certainly a fair share of episodes that are less enjoyable than this but, in a lot of ways, this is really the standard of quality that the Capaldi era tends to sit at. For series eight, this is a decidedly unambitious story which speaks volumes to how inventive this period of the show was. This story, even more than Deep Breath, could be viable analysed as a thesis statement for this entire run. Insane thing for Mathieson to pull off in his second script. The dialogue and characterisation is great across the board, the production design is brilliant and every aspect of the show seems to be laser focused on delivering a coherent goal, even down to the seemingly radon choice in pop music (is it Don't Stop Me Now because Clara does not want to stop yet?).
Following the strength of his Flatline script, Jamie Mathieson was invited back by the production team to pen another entry into Doctor Who's eight season. Given the title as a pitch from Moffat and the instruction to minimise Clara's role as to make Flatline's filming easier, Mathieson took on the assignment and initially penned a story with the train was passing through the Seven Wonders of the Universe with the eponymous threat able to ensnare victims with its bandages. The events that unfolded were significantly different and included Mathieson's idea of A.I. protective suits as an explanation for the Foretold. The suits could affect probability and the climax would have seen the Doctor fending off monsters made of dark matter. Moffat insisted on simplifying the story and the script was rewritten from a more presumably light-hearted tone, with the Doctor and Clara attempting to hide from the other their involvement in the plot under the pretence of a holiday, to accomodate the ending of Kill The Moon. As for that killer suits idea...
There are nitpicks to be had with this story, unquestionably. For one, it does seem entirely arbitrary by the end that the sixty-six seconds is related to some crucial world-building element that we’ve never heard of before this story. More problematic is the lack of actual engagement with historical iconography. It is a good idea to divorce the story from the colonialist roots of the two primary literary inspirations by moving things so fantastically far away but the episode fails to meaningfully engage with the deeply problematic aspects of those initial stories. Even the casting is decidedly white male centric (I wonder why some fans found this one so refreshing?).
It also seems a bit strange for the Captain to die after the bloke who had a car crash. It seems like his injury is a more severe one so why not take him out earlier? Of course, we could never destroy the structure so completely. We need characters like the Captain to last as long as they do since these people should be major characters in some other show. But this is not such a show. This is Doctor Who and they are the character that we need, that is instrumental, to ensure that the stories in their own show are told the way they are.
Guinevere!! the pilot was crazy and i love her dearly
I'm so sorry, but the first time I read ur user I thought it said "whore reviews who", I only noticed when I saw it separated on ur title page
Madam! What year is this? - Dimensions in Time
As fan-legend has it, the original plans to celebrate Doctor Who’s thirtieth anniversary were much grander in design than Dimensions in Time. The narrative has dictated that 1993 was somewhat of a dark time to be a fan of the series with the last serial to air, Survival, having wrapped up in December 1989 and the only signs of new material coming from the popular but controversial New Adventures line of novels and the ongoing Doctor Who Magazine comic strip of which nobody took particularly seriously. Although fans had no idea at the time, hope was soon to be in sight for the series as negotiations were already underway behind closed doors between the BBC and Amblin Entertainment for a big screen adaptation of the programme.
That is not a story for today, however. Instead, our attention turns toward the BBC Enterprises arm who were quietly taking note of the healthy sales figures the Doctor Who video line was racking up. Following BBC One's decision not to commission an anniversary special for the show's thirtieth birthday, BBC Enterprises took it upon themselves to commission a direct-to-video exclusive. The fabled Lost in the Dark Dimension was set to star Tom Baker, reprising his role as the Fourth Doctor, in a dark and twisted timeline caused by an insane human scientist wherein his incarnation never regenerated and he, along with his companions Ace and the Brigadier, have to set things right and restore the proper timeline.
While the Seventh Doctor was set to bookend the story, it was clear that the four remaining Doctors would be relegated to minor appearances. Nonetheless, the special was to be ambitious, including many monsters and all of the surviving Doctors onboard in some capacity. Negotiations, however, did not go well with particularly pushback from Jon Pertwee and Colin Baker. As the interest and scope of the project grew, BBC Drama were eventually drawn in and the promise of a BBC One broadcast was soon to follow. A month before filming, the film was abandoned after being deemed too expensive to justify making.
The idea of producing a full special for television continued to be bandied about but these plans were eventually halted for fear of damaging any exclusivity deals the BBC was hoping to make with America. In fact, it was future producer of the American TV movie, Philip Segal, who requested the shut down of the special.
And speaking of producers, this is where our old friend John Nathan-Turner re-enters the arc of Doctor Who's history. Nathan-Turner, producer of the programme between 1980 and 1989 and now producer of the associated VHS line, met up with his friend and colleague Nick Handel during the preparation of 1993's Children in Need charity night. Aware that the broadcast would fall closely alongside the anniversary date, Handel floated the possibility of a Doctor Who short as part of the programme's lineup. While initially uninterested, JN-T eventually accepted deciding to bid farewell to the franchise for good and, this time, on his own terms.
Allegedly, JN-T was less than enthused by the possibility of a Doctor Who sketch as such and, instead, suggested a thirteen minute story stretched over two nights. As per Handel's request, JN-T penned the script himself with a student, and fan, he was acquainted with named David Rodden. This marked the only occasion in his decades long association with the show that JN-T ever had an official writing credit. Handel's suggestion to implement the then cutting-edge Pulfrich 3D effect was taken onboard and Roden developed an outline for a script with the Seventh Doctor and UNIT taking on the Cybermen. JN-T turned down this proposal and suggested a multi-Doctor event in the vein of The Five Doctors. Handel, meanwhile, insisted upon a further edict to a further new element to generate good publicity. JN-T suggested the story be a crossover with soap opera Eastenders and Handel agreed, getting the Eastenders team reluctantly onboard. 3-Dimmensions of Time was then conceived almost as it aired only with the inclusion of the Master as the primary villain. When Anthony Ainley proved unavailable to reprise the role, it was instead allocated to the Rani, as played by a returning Kate O'Mara. This would be her third, and final, onscreen appearance as the character. I don't have much to say about her in any of the analysis below so I'll just mention that she is great and one of the biggest highlights of this whole thing. What a performance.
Dimensions in Time aired on BBC One on the 26th and 27th of November 1993. Alongside a notable publicity push that included a Radio Times cover, the first in ten years, the story rated as highly as 13.8 million viewers. This proved to be the single strongest figure of JN-T’s entire stint as producer (and, therefore, of any story featuring Peter Davison, Colin Baker or Sylvester McCoy to date).
This is a great shame because Dimensions in Time is incomprehensible nonsense. Yes, it is a great deal of fun and a joy to see Doctor Who being treated as the cultural institution that it is. The series is an ongoing soap opera in the UK, for all intents and purposes, and special shorts of this kind are by no means unfamiliar territory for such a series. Dimensions in Time raised a lot of money and drew in a lot of awareness for a good cause and that makes everything about it worthwhile.
So, with the objective goods out of the way, let's have a bit of fun attempting to take this seriously as a piece of art unto itself. The conceit of tise adventure, because that is all that it is, is that the Rani has returned (we are off to a great start already) and taken time aside from her scheme to capture a specimen of every life-form in the universe to enact her revenge on the Doctor. She is attempting to do this, I think, by trapping all of his previous incarnations, and companions, in a pocket universe that is in repeating itself in a cycle of twenty year periods. Not thirty. Twenty years. It should be strongly noted, however, that this is pure speculation based only on the Third Doctor’s unvalidated guess that he is trapped in a thirty year time loop and the Rani’s chide that the Doctor’s other selves are trapped.
It is hard to really articulate everything that is doesn't work about the as a narrative because it is so completely insane that one has a hard enough time even deciphering what the narrative is. I suppose to makes as much sense as any approach to just run down the various strands of the special one incarnation at a time and express my related thoughts that way. Like the multi-Doctor stories before it, Dimensions in Time has the good sense to frame the current TARDUS team as our de-facto protagonists. We bookend the story with the Seventh Doctor and Ace which implicitly suggests they are our present day. All well and good. Weirdly, though, the incumbent incarnation is the one who leaves the least of an impression.
We first meet the duo as they arrive at the Cutty Sark and it is nice to see them bouncing off of each other as if no time had passed at all since we last saw them. Appropriately, it is the Seventh persona who ultimately saves the day but his method of doing this is utterly perplexing. The Rani is collecting alien lifeforms for...reasons and is lacking in a human specimen so she kidnaps one of the Doctor companions, Romana, under the presumption that she is one. Because of this cock up on her part, there are two Time Lord brains in the Rani’s computer and the Doctor uses this to… well, do something. I think what is implied is that the Doctors are trapped in a time tunnel being cast across the Greenwich Meridian. The Doctor then overloads the Rani’s computer and frees himself? Using what seems to be Ace’s stereo from Silver Nemesis in the process. Oh and K-9 is also there which I will noodle in a second. This resolution is, naturally, nonsense but I will give Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred all the credit in the world for doing their best to sell the stakes of this, even if they seem to have as much idea as I do of what they are. Extra points to McCoy in particular for amusing reasons that I will also get into later.
Let's backpedal a bit though. Perhaps we can piece together the plot from earlier clues instead of the barmy resolution. Immediately after the Doctor and Ace arrive on Earth, there is some kind of explosion and the Seventh Doctor is suddenly replaced by the Sixth.
Or is he?
The script seems to be unsure as to whether the Doctors and their companions have been taken out of time and trapped in the time loop (ala The Five Doctors) or whether it is just the Doctor and Ace who are trapped and their appearances are changing/degenerating based of the Doctor’s memory (see the comic book Timeslip or Big Finish's middling Once and Future series). Most of the time, it seems to be the former since each of the companions who appear have their own personalities and line of questioning intact. The Sixth Doctor even claims that the "in-rush of time zones is designed to seal [them] all". The Doctors sharing information works for me if this is case since it is well established that different incarnations of the Doctor can telepathically communicate. Them all being their own selves who are trapped also makes sense as to why, occasionally, additional characters appear such as members of U.N.I.T. (Mike Yates is back on side?) and K-9. Otherwise it would seem that Ace is splitting into two different people, Peri and Nyssa, only to change into one, Liz, and then back into two, Romana and Victoria, and then have the latter disappear completely…? What his going on?
When the Doctor meets up with Leela, who is dressed in this Pocahontas get-up after Louise Jameson insisted she not wear the leathers of the '70s, he asks her what “form” she was in when the Rani cloned her for her menagerie, to which she replies Romana. Huh??? I cannot make heads or tails of this moment. Is this really just Ace shifting through forms and the Doctor regressing through his bodies? I have no idea and the script clearly does not care. This is all just an excuse for a runaround with some classic Doctor Who characters and, as said, that part of it I do enjoy.
Now, Colin Baker has always put in 110% as the Doctor, even with the worst material, and Dimensions in Time is no exception. He has some of the funniest moments with Ace (his disgust at their clothes clashing) a lovely moment with Susan where she is scared about the stranger she is paired with and even gets to share a scene with the Brigadier in a record-making moment. Mind you, why the blazes does the Doctor need a helicopter escort just to cross the river? It is also terribly rude of the Seventh Doctor, in the climax, to telepathically connect with all of his selves and free them EXCEPT for the Sixth Doctor. Was Colin too busy to film a shot of his mind-melding? What is up with that? Still, he is a joy and I was very happy to see him back in the role.
Peter Davison clearly does not want to be here. The Fifth Doctor is actually saddled with the most exciting moment of the serial; the cliffhanger which sees him on the run from every alien creature in the universe. However, Davison knows what kind of crap he is in and responds by just half-arsing it with equal parts lacklustre and over-the-top line reads. You have to chuckle at his insistence on keeping the hat on too, to hide those absent blonde highlights. None of this bothers me, Davison is so good that half-arsing a performance is still a good performance. No, what is really off is how strangely obvious it is that he is barely in this. The Fifth Doctor has just one scene which feels longer that in is being stretched over both episodes. Apparently, he was supposed to appear again toward the climax, presumably in the scene with Leela, but allegedly reassigned the techno-babble filled scene to McCoy who was late to the set due to a hangover. I also feel obliged to mention that, in a fitting moment of surreality, the Fifth Doctor's costume is entirely unique to this story for no discernible reason.
Tom Baker also only appears in one scene; a prologue of sorts where he sends out an S.O.S., on a superimposed microphone for some reason, to his other incarnations and warns them about the Rani. Quite where he is sending it from and whether it ever reaches them is never answered though. This scene also adds confusion to events since it is this incarnation who clarifies that the first two Doctor have already been trapped. Okay, so if they are trapped then it IS the initial theory I had that the Rani is taking everybody out of time. Right?!
It is a shame that the Fourth Doctor never interacts with anybody else but it is fun to see Tom in costume and playing this role again regardless, especially when he is this melodramatic. He is blatantly reading his lines right off of the script just out of shot though. Also, why on Earth did he end up with a question mark etched onto his face? Tom’s original suggestion was, bizarrely, for a bullet wound and, if the idea was to be rightfully declined, nothing should have taken its place. At least one could hazard a guess as to how his Doctor might have obtained a bullet wound. Presumably, he was shot in the face. That addition, as bizarre as it is, at least might have provoked a reaction and suggested something about the circumstances that put the Doctor in wherever he is. I cannot fathom any reason for a question mark to be etched into his face. What a suitably strange addition.
In talking about the Third Doctor, this is as fine a time as any to break down the specifics of this pocket universe time-loop trap; it is London’s East End. As such, the cast and characters of the soap-opera Eastenders appear in force. It is nice for JN-T to get to marry the three passions off his life (Doctor Who, pantomime and soap opera) in one big package for his final televised work on this property but goodness this is a weird choice. None of the Who characters seem to be aware that they are surrounded by the cast of a different television programme so perhaps this is just the confirmation we all wanted that this is a true shared universe.
Pertwee was 74 years old when he appeared in Dimensions in Time but he has lost none of his charm and presence in this role. It is a delight to see him and he, like Colin Baker, is taking this whole thing 100% seriously. His face-off with the Rani is one of the highlights of the story. He just commands the screen so well. He is also wearing a costume unique to this story for his onscreen appearances although the purple smoking jacket is Pertwee’s own and was frequently worn by him at conventions and events between his leaving the show and his death in 1996. If this IS the Third Doctor, how on Earth could he know to recognise Mel? Or for the Sixth Doctor to recognise Ace, for that matter. It is also a little strange the TARDIS being on the other side of a river is enough for him to deem it an unreasonable solution when Sarah Jane suggests they return there. Can he not be bothered to try and take the walk? The Fifth Doctor reasons it is in a different time period but why would that make it inaccessible? Presumably it is still in the same spot in all periods.
Dimensions in Time is a fitting encapsulation of where Doctor Who had found itself at this point in time; off-air, over-the-top camp and generally tossed aside by the BBC. JN-T tried his best to remind audiences that Doctor Who was a beloved institution but, instead, he showed them every reason why it had quietly gone away. The 3D gimmick may well have been cool at the time but it means that the finished product looks otherwise extremely ugly and nauseating. This special is a rambling mess of a piece that wastes the opportunity to put five Doctors onscreen together and sends out the JN-T era of Doctor Who out for good on an enormous whimper. It is abominable and an enormous disappointment on every level. That being said, this is an easy 10/10 for sheer entertainment value.
Merry Christmas everybody. Here is a little edit I made showcasing the Whoniverse at its festive best. I hope that you all have a happy holiday season :)
I Only Know Who - The Snowmen, 2012
Any conversation of The Snowmen is one, inevitably, dominated by a big what if. That 'what if' comes in the form of Beryl, the Victorian governess created by Steven Moffat to be the new companion for the Eleventh Doctor. As we will quickly discover, The Snowmen is an odd concoction but it shines some clarity onto the project to know that the starting place was really with this character and that does make sense. The Snowmen is a story that attempts to tie three largely unrelated plot ideas together and the strongest of these, the plucky barmaid turned governess adventure, is easily the most compelling. Despite this, Clara Oswald, as she came to be known, did not become the new co-lead of Doctor Who in this form. The character does star in the whole special but her role is swiftly written out by the anxious production team and replaced entirely by... Clara Oswald. The exact same character just with a present-day Londoner background. At which point this change was made still remains unclear with some suggestion that the Victorian companion at least existed in some of the drafts for the later Cold War and Nightmare in Silver.
From a cursory glance at the title, The Snowmen appears to be following the pseudo tradition laid down in the previous two Moffat specials of being a pastiche of a classic holiday story, in this case The Snowman by Raymond Briggs. However, if this was an intentional effort at any stage in the production, the story quickly moved away from it. This episode is in no way an adaption of that story and the parallels are loose at best. Like James (or the unnamed boy if you prefer the book as a reference point), Simeon builds a snowman as a boy that unexpectedly comes to life, at least in a fashion and that’s about where the inspiration ends. Briggs’ story is unambiguously a tale about innocence and mortality with the snowman himself symbolising the experience of childhood. It is a sombre but bittersweet coming of age parable that introduces children to death and finality through a whimsical and almost Buddhist lens of circularity. Not that Briggs pioneered the idea of the seasons representing the cycle of life and death but it is perhaps a definitive exploration for many children.
The Snowmen is not about these things despite the potential certainly being there. Simeon’s snowman is, at first, not exactly a being unto itself but simply an entity into which he, as an angry and isolated child, can project his own thoughts and feelings. The snow reflects Simeon and is powered by his sociopathic and psychotic person eventually causing it to take on a life of its own beyond simply being a mirror. There are a number of places that this idea could be developed into but it never really happens. We know really nothing about Simeon’s upbringing that would have lead him to be such a cruel character save for the prologue that simply presents him as a lonely boy with some genuine care from presumed parental figures (one of which looks uncannily like Eve Myles). This could even be an orphanage which would prove to be a cool link if true to the governess side of the story later on. It is a provocative moment when the snow is revealed to just be the voice of a sad and lonely child, perhaps being representative of a form of trauma for Simeon. The man has funnelled all of his negative feelings into his work, what is literally a snow globe that could shatter with enough pressure, and left any chance for an enriching life outside that slide away completely. This is almost in the text but just needed some more teasing out of it was the intention. Similarly, the Intelligence’s existence behind Simeon as a bigger force that has snowballed (ha) into an unstoppable, raging killing machine could have served well as embodying a cycle of abuse. The consequences outlive the perpetrator and have grown to dangerous extremes. The abuser is gone but the victims still have the great force and repercussions to reckon with.
I realise, of course, that this kind of read is somewhat far removed from what actually happens onscreen. If there is any greater subtext to Simeon’s plot then it is much less subtle than any of my reads (which are not particularly deep either). Here we have Moffat in his anti-capitalist mode with the Doctor explicitly identifying Simeon as somebody looking for a profit. In practice, his resulting scheme is a bit banal – he and the Intelligence want to take over the world. This is framed as a business venture and the notion of a shapeless, malicious entity creating an homogenous monopoly across the globe is a fun one that I would have loved to see expanded upon. The episode, however, does not really have enough time to dedicate to this single aspect of the story and so it, subsequently, feels like the most undercooked element of this whole package. The Great Intelligence as a company feels positively throwaway by the end. The whole villain plot is necessarily in the background for the first two thirds of the runtime but then it is savagely railroaded into irrelevance for the final third. Even more damning is Richard E. Grant performance which makes no effort to hide how painfully disinterested in this material he is. That said, he does deliver one of the funniest moments of possibly the entire Moffat era when he unveils a giant lizard doing detective work only to be disgusted that she is a woman and it is worth praising the reintroducing the Great Intelligence as literal monstrous snowmen. It is a painfully obvious stroke of brilliance that does not get nearly enough credit.
In fact, let us turn to some even more unabashed praise which is overdue for great swathes of this episode because it is a fabulous production. Saul Metzstein is a very stylish Who director and this episode is no exception. The sets and costumes are all as wonderful as you would expect from a period BBC showcase, Murray Gold's score is breathtaking and it is an incredibly slickly constructed episode all around. Besides Grant, the cast are generally wonderful. Throughout this half of season seven, I have always felt that Smith had a bit of a season eighteen Tom Baker – his heart is not in these stories and he is clearly missing his friends that made the show feel like home. Still, that is not to say he is bad at all because he certainly is not and it is nice to see a marked shift in both the writing and performance that puts his Doctor in a more subdued and somewhat mature mode for the remainder of his run. The Doctor being in grief is a fine-enough part of this story though it does feel a little oddly obligatory. Even stranger is the fact that this isolated, morose Doctor was evidently at the core of the story's concept from the beginning. It gives way to the best visual moments in the whole episode but his arc is still so dully presented.
One of the problems could be that the framing is in the wrong place. The drama hinges rather pointlessly on whether the Doctor will get over his reclusive, grief-ridden lifestyle and return to adventuring but this is never going to work because the whole show operates on the understanding that the Doctor is an adventurer. Where the story should have had its focus, in my opinion, was on the how of this which, of course, is Clara. What about Clara and her story compels the Doctor to return to his old ways? Again, I love it aesthetically and do wonder if this story might have excelled if it were actually a silent film but there is never a good enough sense of what makes Clara so different than anybody else that he might have met. She is a great character but that relationship with the Doctor is not nearly as well-connected as it may have been. It just seems like he follows her because he fancies her and that's it. "I only know who" is the best explanation we get. Clara being the perfect companion is going to factor into all of her fatal flaws later on but perhaps we needed more examples of the Doctor with other people to really sell that idea? As it is, it seems like he just decides to take off with the first pretty girl he sees which may have been Moffat's intention but, if so, it is a little unclear to me. There also could have been a way to connect this plot line to everything else in the story with a traumatised villain and kids in fear of a dead governess. Grief, death and trauma could all have been at the forefront of the main plots here but never really are. This is my big frustration with The Snowmen at the end of the day – it is just not really about anything.
Jenna Coleman is immediately brilliant. Clara in her first season gets a lot of criticism for being an underdeveloped, generic character and, to an extent, I feel the same way but I feel that the problem is less that she is lacking in a distinct character than it is that character being deliberately obfuscated by the arc that Moffat is pushing at the audience. That is a problem later but not so much here which is probably why the sentiment that Victorian Clara is superior continues to linger in fandom. Clara is immediately a magical presence in an old-school adventure hero sort of way. The two modes she presents are very distinct feminine adventure hero archetypes, occupying at different points the adventure-seeking, boisterous, tomboyish wench (for lack of a better word) and Mary Poppins. Coleman is masterful at both and it is brilliant how one is overtly pitched toward kids and the other to the parents. It is important to note too that the character traits underpinning Clara in both of these contexts are things that we would also come to know about Clara proper. She is obviously intelligent, witty and flirtatious but more interestingly than that are things such as her overconfidence, which makes her transgressive to the narrative in the same way as the Doctor. These are all relatively small moments such as her using the improper entrance at the Latimers' and challenging the hierarchy established by all of the men around her, including the Doctor, but their go a long way toward fleshing her out immediately.
Given that she dies before the end of the story as well, it becomes even more apparent in hindsight how much of what would be the regular Clara's downfall is obvious from the beginning. Clara is entranced by the Doctor and immediately seeks him out, follows him and the pair are so enamoured with each other that neither are careful enough to protect her from her easily avoidable death. I understand though that their later relationship changes and improves on the whole reading of their dynamic. Clara is clearly a deceitful character from the start, if not a manipulator, with how she falsifies her identity for employment with Latimer (though it is never particularly clear why), and a thrill seeker of some kind at least given how much if a rush she is in with the Doctor in dangerous situations. Clara is obviously a character and a more than barely distinct one at that but the divide between her Victorian self and the contemporary version does little favours in selling that fact. The aesthetic divide is so great plus the amount of plot importance placed on the later version. It becomes difficult to connect this story as her actual introduction when so much of the "plot" insists upon that not being the case.
As for the supporting cast, I really like them too though I do not have all that much to say. The Paternoster Gang got a lot off hate at the time and probably still do by some sects of fandom but I bloody love them. Vastra and Jenny are a terrific duo and have their impact in normalising queer relationships for young minds should not be understated. As for Strax, well, if you don't find him funny then that's that really. I, for one, think he is hilarious and well on-brand for what Robert Holmes may have done with him had he seen the modern show. He is also my dad's single favourite Doctor Who character so it would be hard for me to muster any huge negative feelings, even if they were genuine.
The Snowmen is probably Doctor Who at its most whimsical and fantasy, both in tone and in storytelling. There is not a lot of interest in real science for any of this. The Doctor, the snow, the emotional beat pf the resolution are all basically magical elements and the story is all the better for it There are so many lovely moments of genuine magic in this episode such as the entire aspect of living on the clouds. It is beautifully realised and a storybook image that I truly adore. This episode is a lovely little Mary Poppins pastiche for a goof part of the runtime to a point where I wonder why the title focus was not on that somehow. Clara's stories she tells the children sound pretty wonderful, don't they? Clara being a governess is a nice part of the story and leads to some lovely interactions but, again, it leaves me wondering what the hell the intent was, if any. Simeon was a lovely child, we have two kids here being raised by a distant, somewhat cold father but they have a simultaneous childhood friend and mentor in Clara. Is there a connection? I'm not sure. I'm also not sure if there is anything to read into Franny having premonitions of the old governess returning too. It never comes back but is this supposed to be linked to the psychic snow?
Actually, it is really at about this point that the cracks start to show in the episode. Everything up until now has been one beautiful display whimsical set pieces to another and it is not so much that they stop coming as it is that the direction they are heading in changes a little. When we reach the most self-indulgent moment of the episode, the Doctor's own Sherlock pastiche, it becomes a bit clearer that the story is drifting away from itself almost as if we are watching Moffat, in real time through the Doctor, stumble about the scene until he decides what the plot actually is. Or, more accurately, what kind off plot can frame the already determined decision to have a monstrous ice governess attack the kids. Again, this is a great set-piece and very well realised at a visual level but what are we actually doing here at a story level? This sequence is immediately followed by Simeon coming to the house and being generally menacing but not really doing or saying anything of substance and the plot becomes a series of vaguely dramatic scenes that do not quite coalesce into actual meaning.
Of course, we do have one solid through-line which is just Clara who gets a series of lovely scenes with the Doctor, including that epic TARDIS reveal, and a genuinely surprising death. Following that though? Well the Doctor waffles on about the London Underground for no actual reasons besides a cute reference that nobody was really getting in the moment and the dead Simeon gets possessed until the power of love drives the Intelligence away. It is all very messy and Moffat is clearly struggling to bring the three main plots (corporate invasion, grieving man and whimsical governess) together in a way that has a clear logic to it. The vibes are all there and I freely admit to being in sync with them when I first saw it. It is just one of those stories where the sleight of hand is not really working and I can see everything that went into the trick without being actually moved.
The Snowmen is a beautiful episode of television though. It is well-paced, pretty to look at and easy to become wrapped up in. There is a great marriage of adventure and fantasy aesthetics here, presented in a swish and contemporary package that is incredibly clever and palatable. Dare I say that it's strengths and weaknesses are actually about the same as something like Pyramids of Mars or Earthshock. Is that heresy? No, frankly. Television in 2012 could do a lot better than Pyramids of Mars or Earthshock and it could do a bit better than this. I really like The Snowmen and I think it’s a great watch but I would be hard pressed to say that it really works as a script.
Still, how good is Ian McKellen though?
What phantasmagoria is this? - The Unquiet Dead, 2005
There is an element of fun to be derived for anoraks such as ourselves in exercises of comparison and contrast. One such game I have been musing upon lately relates specifically to Doctor Who writers of the original and revived series. For example, Steven Moffat is the modern Robert Holmes, Russell T Davies something more like a Terrance Dicks and Mark Gatiss, the subject of today's discussion, is perhaps more akin to a Bob Baker and Dave Martin. To a certain kind of fan, this might sound incredibly derisive and, to an extent, it is but it is worth noting that the original series' Bristol Boys were hardly hacks or even especially poor writers. Between the two of them, as a partnership or otherwise, no less than nine stories were broadcast in their names over eight years and every single one of them is bristling with creativity and energy. If anything, the downfall of Baker and Martin was that they brought too many ideas to a Doctor Who script. But despite really nobody pointing to any one of their serials and crying "Yes, that one's my favourite", it would be ludicrous to suggest their work left little impact with iconography of Axons, the Mutts, K-9 and Sarah Jane's Andy Pandy costume being etched into the minds of audiences for years to come.
And Gatiss is much the same. Contributing just as many stories over a twelve year period as well as appearing in front of the camera and helming one of the show's finest spin-off ventures, his legacy is arguably even harder to ignore. True as it is that he was never awarded tasks as monumental as The Three Doctors or The Hand of Fear nor creating something as iconic as K-9, Gatiss' unwavering position as the Moff's reliable partner ensured his mark on the series would be left no matter what he was writing and, even then, what he was writing did offer up its fair share of iconic moments. Like the kids who grew up with the Bristol Boys, you'd be hard pressed to find a fan my age who was not unnerved by the peg dolls, introduced to the Ice Warriors or able to recreate the exact cadence of Maureen Lipman's "HUNNNGRYYYYYYYY" at a moment's notice. Hell, they probably even learnt who Winston Churchill was thanks to him. Yet, the comparison still is not flattering. At the end of the day, I am celebrating Mark Gatiss for being a competent writer during two eras of Doctor Who where the overall production was some of the best it has ever been at every level.
With this in mind, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Gatiss' legacy is the one he was never allowed to have – the showrunner. Gatiss pitched a complete reboot of the series with G*reth R*berts and Cl*yton H*ckman but obviously lost out to Davies and, it has to be said, the prospect of even one full season of stories that are about as strong as Empress of Mars and The Shakespeare Code is hard to get excited about. There were some potentially interesting aspects such as the Doctor being introduced as an antique shop owner, the continuation of the serial format and Derek Jacobi as the Doctor. All of these things could have made for something entertaining to watch.
But reflecting on this pitch gets us to the biggest problems with Mark Gatiss as a Doctor Who writer and, arguably, the same things that made him the perfect co-writer for Sherlock; he is an old-fashioned, conservative writer and a dreadful romantic for all things nostalgia. His scripts are like the TV equivalent of an interactive museum exhibit that passionately recreates bygone eras. Sometimes this comes good, sometimes it does not but they are qualities that make it hardly surprising that Russell T Davies found him the perfect person to pen the very first historical revived Doctor Who.
Like practically all of Davies' initial run on the programme, My Name's Dickens... Charles Dickens (as it was originally titled) came about from a brief he hired Gatiss to fill. Davies insisted that the story take place in Cardiff, be set during the Victorian era and feature Charles Dickens in an adventure with charlatan medians. Gatiss' original pitch was entitled The Crippingwell Horror and took place in a hotel for fake medians with the character that would becomes Sneed being an employee who suddenly realises his powers are not a mere act. Interestingly, the original script would have drawn some similarities with The Empty Child two-parter with the character that became Gwyneth being haunted by the ghost of her recently deceased brother. Across the various drafts and at the production team's behest, the script became a less and less grim affair with a healthy injection of humour and self-awareness. The concept of the Gelth, however, was present across all versions with Gatiss taking inspiration from a childhood nightmare for the image of the possessed Mrs. Pearce.
In the context of its home season, The Unquiet Dead is perfectly slotted. The third story (and episode) of the season, it follows The End of the World with something completely different. It shows the full breadth of the programmes basic possibilities across three weeks and sets the template for the three modes Doctor Who will continue to alternate between and subvert until the present day. This was probably disappointing for some longterm fans as it does lay down a fundamentally different foundation to the 1963 season. In Verity Lambert's first three stories, Doctor Who was a survivalist drama that oscillated between educational historical settings, futuristic political allegories and surrealist horror flavours. Davies' Doctor Who was a soap opera that shifted between satires of contemporary England, futuristic camp absurdities and pastiches of revered literature. Neither of these is more valid but the distinction is essential to understanding how British television had changed over forty years and, indeed, the kind of fans that each version of the programme has continued to garner.
It is also important in understanding what The Unquiet Dead is actually accomplishing as it is essentially intending to fulfil a dual function. The first, as we have established, is to introduce a new audience to the historical Doctor Who but the second, and arguably harder, is to reintroduce fans to the historical Doctor Who. The way it goes about these things is the same; it turns to pastiche. For new audiences, the cultural context of Charles Dickens' writing and his literary depiction of the Victorian era is heavily leaned upon as a shorthand for establishing the world and characters of Gatiss' story. Leaning on tropes and cultural signifiers is an essential aspect of streamlining for the forty-five minute format and really the only choice for a show as fast paced as Doctor Who set out to be. It's a very savvy choice and, to be fair, not an entirely new one since it is essentially something David Whittaker was employing as far back as The Crusade. However, Whitaker never had to contend with the second aspect of this that works which is making the story equal parts a pastiche of the Doctor Who historical arguably a literary style in its own right in 2005. Henceforth, The Unquiet Dead would be just as the general audiences remembered and expected it to be; famous figures from history, gothic horror tones and colourful and exaggerated period stereotypes.
The latter of these two examples, of course, pertain almost exclusively to the mid-'70s period which, fair enough, was when Doctor Who was at its peak of general audience popularity (and even then it's pretty much exclusively Talons of Weng-Chiang we are referring to). As for the first, that practice was pretty much abandoned after The Crusades. No, this is not a genuine Doctor Who historical anymore than this is a genuine recreation of Victorian Cardiff. Rather, it is a streamlined and romanticised version and the one that Gatiss is most fond of recreating (and he would several times after this, even in Sherlock). Authentic to real history and Doctor Who or not, The Unquiet Dead set the precedent for practically every historical episode moving forward with every season (save for exclusively series seven) uniting its main cast with a celebrity historical figure for a heightened romp around some bygone literary tropes.
The more attentive reader would likely have noticed by now that I have been avoiding actually talking about The Unquiet Dead itself for some time now. There is a good reason for this which is simply that, besides the context surrounding it, there is very little to actually say. Even what I have is mostly just production background and reiterating points El Sandifer made years ago now (and more eloquently than me at that). I promised an analysis of the episode so let's just bite the bullet and get on with it. As I have already suggested, there is plenty to like about The Unquiet Dead that makes it hard to write off as some wholly disposable runaround. Being so obviously in the mould of the original show, more so than its predecessors and really any other episode of the first season, there is a simplicity to the affair that I find works to its advantage. There are some mature but simply laid out themes of spirituality versus science that come together rather deftly in a climax that hinges on children realising that an open-mind and attentive nature can allow for new discoveries and broader horizons. The constant reoccurrence of gas as a thematic symbol is effective and easy for children to spot. It provides a coherent, visual link between the Victorian era and the modern day, the old world hurtling into a new age.
Dickens himself is key to conveying these themes as well which is impressive considering that Gatiss was reluctant to include him in his story in the first place. Dickens is portrayed marvellously by Simon Callow, an expert on the author with prior experience playing the character and recreating his public readings. Callow was adamant that for him to sign on, the script would have to be of a sufficiently high quality. Allegedly, his initial reaction to the news that the author would be part of a Doctor Who was disappointment, feeling that fiction often did an injustice to the man. Thankfully, he was very much won over by the material and brought, not only the best performance of anybody in the episode but, some serious credibility to a programme that needed it. Simon Callow does not just sign on for any old slop and why should he when he brings such gravitas and grandeur in his characterisation of Dickens? Callow single-handedly elevates the already solid material to make the part simply superb. Like all the great character actors, and like this episode's approach to history, he may not be one-to-one accurate to Dickens as he was in real history but he embodies his spirit and essence of the author as he is remembered by us today.
So Dickens becomes the heart of the narrative, somewhat inevitably given the mythic status he holds in British literary canon. While Rose is still serving as an audience surrogate in the sense that hers are the eyes with which we view the past (more on that later), it is Dickens who serves a more traditional protagonist role to no small extent. If we consider the Doctor and Rose as analogous for Doctor Who as a series and the Gwyneth/Sneed double-act as our vessels for historical pastiche, Dickens falls in between as the baffled and wry viewer of events who understands the rules of period costume dramas and is being introduced to the weirdness of a Doctor Who story. All of the characters are awarded strong moments but only Dickens receives a full-blown opportunity for change and it is he who actually saves the day (with a healthy dose of real-world science for the kiddos at that). Dickens is the narrow-minded know-it-all whose beliefs are challenged by exposure to a new facet of his world and this, on the surface, is an extremely obvious direction to go. In the absence of a full-blown special, The Unquiet Dead is honorarily regarded by some fans to be the Ninth Doctor's Christmas episode and the allusions to Dickens' most renowned work in that arena are anything but subtle. The door-knocker is a cute touch and offering Dickens his own Scrooge arc, of a sort, works well enough however on-the-nose it is but going so far as to quote the book, not only several times but, as his final line is a level of overtness that I could have done without.
What is more interesting to talk about is Dickens' role in a metafictional sense. Like every story of the first series, The Unquiet Dead is drenched in metatextuality, in this case responding directly to its prior television version. Dickens is the original series of Doctor Who; a beloved icon that still has many fans that has grown stale, burnt its bridges yet continues to go on and on "the same old show... [p]erhaps I've thought everything I'll ever think". Yet, Dickens' worldview is challenged and his morale reinvigorated as the new show, the Doctor and Rose, enter the scene and disrupt his entire understanding. Doctor Who is more than capable of continuing in a new form for a modern world but its older form, the one Dickens embodies, cannot continue alongside it. Zooming out to a broader lens, we can see an even cheekier read where Dickens is symbolic of an entire storytelling approach for science-fantasy and drama that is reinvigorated by the potential of what Doctor Who could be.
Despite Dickens taking over the narrative, the medium aspect was obviously not abandoned and the bridge between the two worlds in this story is not Dickens but literally and figuratively embodied through Gwyneth, played very charmingly by Eve Myles. Gwyneth is the core character embodying the spirituality aspect of the story, essentially serving as the opposite for Dickens. The latter refuses to accept the Gelth exist because they do not fit the facts of his worldview while Gwyneth accepts them more readily than anyone because the facts presented align with her spiritual beliefs. Gwyneth is a medium, communicating with her “angels”, the Gelth, and ultimately understands both conflicting parties’, the Doctor and Rose's, ideologies but refuses both and makes her own choice to help the Gelth, regardless of what others think and makes her own choice to destroy them be sure it is what she believes to be right.
Besides it being a good choice formally to air this episode in the third slots, The Unquiet Dead also lees back an appropriately further layer to the Doctor's character, challenging the audience's morality without ever making him non-empathetic. Plagued by guilt over the consequences of the Time War, still something that we know nothing about beyond the fact that it wiped out there Time Lords, the Doctor offers the Gelth the opportunity to roam freely amongst the bodies of the dead, much to Rose’s disdain. The Doctor's role has little precedent in the televised show, clearly suggesting that his mistake comes from an overwhelming and misplaced emotional response. The Doctor projects his guilt onto a situation that takes advantage of that but his moral position is never seriously challenged. Rose takes a more conservative position which stems naturally from the best scene in the episode where she and Gwen are conversing about their respective upbringings. The scene overtly positions Rose as the educated, condescending lady of privilege which is a delightfully intelligent role to cast her in given her introduction in Rose explicitly establishing the opposite. Rose thinks she knows better than Gwyneth because she thinks she is smarter than her. It could have been a disastrous move and it is impressive that it never paints her in an entirely unlikable light. Importantly too, this scene is written by Russell as a late addition to extend the runtime.
Everything in the story up until here is working but the climax is ultimately where it kind of breaks down and never recovers. The story needs the Doctor to be right for the arc and theme of enlightenment and indulging other perspectives to broaden your own to actually work but it also needs to have an exciting third act with monsters and life or dearth stakes. So, the Gelth are just irredeemably bad beings. As Sandifer exposes in her own essay, this story is infamously criticised for xenophobic undertones regarding the Gelth and she breaks the entire argument down incredibly well. My only addition to that critique is that I think it is barely a matter of conjecture to say that this reading was unintended given Russell's insistence upon recreating the 1980 moment from Pyramids of Mars. The scene was, mercifully, cut but the intention was to explicitly depict a present-day Earth that has been invaded by the Gelth which would have more than doubled-down on their position as irredeemable monsters.
This is not a story about immigration, it is not Flip-Flop, and Rose is never painted as morally correct for insisting that their cohabiting the Earth is wrong. The focus of the conflict is on the whys of their choices, not the what. The Doctor is perhaps the most enlightened, for lack of a better word, of the cast but his emotions override his judgement and he allows the Gelth a way to invade while Gwyneth has an unwavering belief in her angels and the blind faith gets her killed. Dickens is only able to save the day once he accepts that his life has been fundamentally changed which leaves Rose as the one character whose development is somewhat confused. Rose thinks herself superior to Gwyneth due to her relative education and life experience but is shamed by her for assuming she can make decisions on her behalf. The result of this is... nothing really. Rose just sympathises with Gwyneth and is as moved by her death as her two surviving companions and that is about all here is to it. The sombre tragedy of the scene following Gwyneth's death ("She saved the world. A servant girl. No one will ever know.") is staged like a story that is fundamentally about class but The Unquiet Dead just is not. It's not that it doesn't come up from scene to scene but the theme is not a driving force of the story until it very suddenly and awkwardly is.
The Unquiet Dead is a good episode of Doctor Who with a great sense of atmosphere and tonal consistency but is more than a little shy of greatness. The production quality is excellent, the corpses and wonderfully creepy, there are great performances from the whole cast and the only real holes in the production are the lack of ambition in direction and editing (it is cut very slowly) and the surprising lack of score from Murray Gold that is something I would never criticise a story with his name attached for otherwise. The final script here is something much messier than the rest of the production and favours individual moments over a cohesive bigger picture. It is entertaining, clever and the right story to be airing three weeks into the show's run but becomes, nonetheless, somewhat more and more insubstantial on repeat viewings. It is a solid episode of a promising programme that likely needed at least one more draft to tease out its most interesting ideas. And maybe tackle that inadvertently problematic bit. In other words, the consummate Gatiss. Start as you mean to go on, I suppose.
Nothing's just rubbish if you have an enquiring mind - Paradise Towers, 1987
At the time of writing, it is impossible to refute that the production history of Doctor Who in the 1980s is incredibly, thoroughly documented. Recently, I saw a video floating around fandom on Twitter from the now current production team being disparaging and critical toward the mid-80s period of the show. None of the talking points that came out of this were anything new but it did highlight, for me, the biggest problem of this era by way of how much it was not discussed. Mid-80s Doctor Who was bad. Mid-80s Doctor Who was also made exclusively for the fans. I think that fans feel, to this day, somewhat uncomfortable addressing this fact. After all, they are a significant and vocal subset of the programme’s audience and the ones who imbue themselves, or in the mid-80s were imbued by the production team proper, with a sense of ownership and understanding of the show that eclipses everybody else’s. We know how Doctor Who works because we’ve seen it all, we know it inside out. If it isn’t working for us, it must not be working.
Of course it goes without saying that this is completely tosh. Doctor Who did and does not exist solely for Doctor Who fans. It doesn’t even exist primarily for them. Doctor Who is a programme produced by a public broadcaster in Britain as part of their remit to inform, educate and entertain. No matter how much Russell T Davies and the BBC at large would prefer one to believe otherwise. At any rate, a programme with that comfortably met the BBC’s mission statement and was appealing across demographics of the British public was not the one they John Nathan-Turner had been producing for, arguably, four years at this point.
But this was, thankfully, to change thanks to A. the appointment of Andrew Cartmel in the role of script-editor and B. the enormous falling out between Eric Saward and JNT leading to the latter refusing to hire any old hands that would have previously worked with them as a duo. Incredibly, this decision led to an enormous uptick in quality for the next three years. Wild. One of the first writers that JNT sought after for season twenty-four was Stephen Wyatt, a promising new talent at the BBC in late 1986. Following the hiring of Andrew Cartmel as script-editor, in early 1987, JNT arranged a meeting between the two writers where they got to discussing their mutual admiration for the works of J. G. Ballard. The pair began to construct the basic plot that would become Paradise Towers with Wyatt taking particular inspiration from his own experiences frequenting council housing in London's East End.
Season twenty-four, and really beginning with Paradise Towers, would mark a significant shift in the style and tone of Doctor Who from previous years. Cartmel and his team of writers were heavily inspired by contemporary comics, specifically the series 2000AD and the works of its writers such as Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons, Pat Mills and John Wagner. The second major change Cartmel employed, however, was a distinct turn back toward Doctor Who's cultural role as key viewing for British families. Regaining the general audience, and by that I mean adult non-fans watching the BBC, is one thing (and arguably the much easier one) but the task of reframing Doctor Who as an important programme for children was surely the more mammoth and, I would argue, necessary effort. Let’s not kid ourselves, where would the older fans come from if not childhood passion for the show? This is really the sole reason why fandom can never be trusted for knowing what makes for good Doctor Who on television since the answer invariably returns to “the ones that are like what I watched as a kid”. I don’t mean to spend any more time ragging on the latter half of the Eric Saward era than I have to but fully appreciating Paradise Towers simply has to go hand-in-hand with the acknowledgement that seasons twenty-one through three were playing to an older audience than Doctor Who was ever designed for. Yes, it was conceived as a programme to bridge audiences between two programmes that were targeted at older and younger demographics and Philip Hinchcliffe was correct in refuting claims that his version of the show needed to be watered down by arguing that it’s not made the children’s department; it’s made by the drama department.
BUT this line of thinking was part of a wider rationale and objective for the show to introduce children and families to mature concepts and themes through the lens of a science-fantasy adventure serial. That’s what Doctor Who does best. The violent thrillers being told about video nasties and psychotic mercenaries being chopped up by cyborgs don’t cut it as family entertainment, even if they were really good. Paradise Towers is the Cartmel era at its most children's television. This is no way a discredit and certainly not something that disappears after this season; the balance simply becomes more nuanced. Despite its reappraisal over the years, I would find it would be hard to object to any adult viewer now whose opinion is simply that this was a bit too children's TV for their sensibilities but I think that this was still the right move. Even if this did swing too far into the realm of pure children's entertainment, Doctor Who had been so far away from that realm for so long at this point that an aggressive swing the other way was necessary. The show needed to even the scales before we could move back toward something a bit more overtly mature. Paradise Towers carries sense of a new era really beginning to fall into place (Time and the Rani is really a hangover from the Colin Baker era) but it's not quite there yet. It is similar in that way to a story like The Beast Below, for example.
With that family audience in mind, it is no surprise that the basic story of Paradise Towers is incredibly easy to get your head around; a dilapidated housing complex, that was designed by an evil mind who thinks his work is ruined by having people actually live in it, is out to kill the inhabitants. The foundational elements of this story, however, and the broader socio-political context is incredibly dense and opens itself up to thoughtful conversation about modernist architecture as an extension of urban renewal. Paradise Towers is, quite blatantly, a council estate, a place where all of the children and elderly were shunted into while the able-bodied were sent off to war. Contextualising the story in real-world history of Britain, we know that this is not what was really happened. What was actually happening under Thatcher's government, and buy no means ended with her, wax urban renewal of low socio-economic areas that largely neglected the people who actually lived there, redeveloping these parts pop England to be glimmering examples of perfect modernist architecture. Whether they were homes for those who needed them or not was a less important concern. In the case of Kroagnon here, the triumph of having built something is more important than it actually being put to use; "The whole place is polluted with flesh". And, of course, the more intellectual members of the audience would be quick to realise that Paradise Towers is obviously riffing on High-Rise. None of these things matter to a six year old though. What matters to six year olds is that the bad guys follow orders from a monstrous entity that prioritises a product and an aesthetic over living people. And, perhaps even more importantly, those same guys are just as capable of realising this is wrong and joining the good guys if they know that they should. The takeaway from this parable is as simple as 'Everybody should work together to take out the common enemy'. Which, in this case, is an actually life-threatening entity that is abusing, and symptomatic of, a larger system.
While Nicholas Mallet would never be my first choice for all-time best Doctor Who director, he does some very admirable work in this serial. Right form the off, there is a great juxtaposition between the devastated horror of the towers and a Yellow Kang being hunted and killed with the stark, shiny retro-futurism of the Doctor and Mel's, themselves an extension of those aristocratic adventurers of Victorian fiction, absorbing their bright and chipper tourist material. That being said, I love the Doctor's immediate resistance to the advertising material. The beginnings of Cartmel's interpretation of the Doctor as a scruffy defender of the lower classes are immediately apparent in this story.
The Kangs themselves are an incredibly simple realisation of what is unambiguously a political idea; they are the children neglected by the system who grew up to be warriors and hunters, just like the Rezzies did though in a much less malicious fashion as children would. It is a very dark idea but all of it is extremely pllatable for families. Speaking of the Rezzies, Tilda and Tabby are easily the most hilarious aspect of this story as an adult but they would surely be quite genuinely frightening for kids. When you are a child, there is something deeply unsettling and unnerving about the elderly. Their existence is so far beyond your scope of understanding that they are really quite alien and ripe for scares. Mel's kidnapping in episodes two and three is actually very unsettling considering the limitations on play here. For the adults, residents of the dilapidated towers descending into cannibalism is either going to come off as hilariously silly or the least apologetic Ballard rip in the whole serial. For those who really love this, it is obviously both. Tabby hilariously layering cream on Mel's biscuit is probably my favourite moment of comedy in the whole story.You can see the influence this era and this story specifically must have had on Russell T Davies' conception of Doctor Who. Gridlock and Dot and Bubble have far more in common with the stories of season twenty-four than any other in the show's history.
The 2000 AD influences are really all over this production. The aesthetic of this world and the specific socio-political subtext feel perfectly in-step with any of that house's publications. For all the Kangs' dialogue, their use of language, is silly and naff on-screen, it would be incredibly easy to dismiss on the written page. Is this especially different from, say, the language of the Mutants in The Dark Knight Returns? It is no surprise that this particular story inspired its own independent comic-book series later down the line.
But, that being said, the biggest problem here is the actual production which is, frankly, overextending its reach once again. Everybody involved is trying very hard to sell the story but this production team is not up to the task of realising Wyatt's world (Richard Briers is probably the sole exception to the claim that everybody here is trying their best to realise this material. Granted, his performance is well within the remit of children's TV villain but not in the right way). The sets are quite good though the lighting does ether cheapness no favours. The Happiness Patrol, for example, improves on this. Take the lighting in episode three's interrogation scene. The idea is there but it doesn't quite work. The cleaning robots are bloody terrible too. A redesign could have gone a long way to saving them. The legs hanging out the back are great but they're just not scary at all despite how great they are on paper. Pex is probably the biggest victim of this production not working. great character and Howard Cooke gives his all in it but he is simply the wrong casting choice for this. With that comic-book influence in mind, it is easy to see how Pex was intended too operate as this headstrong, hyper-masculine parody of the typical superhero/comic book action hero. Again, imagine him on paper being drawn like The Punisher or Judge Dread. The scrawny Howard Cooke is not the actor to convincingly sell this. I'm not entirely sure that this idea actually lends itself to the story being told. Pex is perfectly suited to the aesthetic of Paradise Towers, the tone is on point but this quite angry story about a very specific cultural context seems at odds with Pex's little story about being a deserter from war that tries to play as a superhero but is naturally ill-suited to it. It's very endearing but just its own little thing in this world rather than part of a greater thematic whole.
In his second story, Sylvester McCoy is great but, again, is plagued by that affect of being not-quite there. The script characterise shim well enough though somewhat generic and the matter is not helped but his performance still being in its infancy. It's not all pratfalls and mixed metaphors as some would lead you to believe but the multitudes that came to define the Seventh Doctor are certainly not here yet. Just like watching him parade around with a not quite right umbrella, the shape of it is there but the full definition isn't. The Doctor has so many excellent moments in this story. His outwitting the Caretakers by simply weaponising authoritarianism to suit his agenda. It's a very simple and somewhat obvious little scene but it perfectly illustrates the idiocy of blindly following inane orders; "Rules should always make sense". The shifting seats in the interrogation is also a lovely bit of theatrical play and there is a surprising glimmer of darkness when Pex volunteers for the mission that will kill him in episode four, as if the Doctor knew things were always going to play out that way. He doesn't even try to stop him from tackling Kroagnon and being blown up.
Then there's Mel. Mel sits awkwardly in this story. The world of a decaying, children's television dystopia is not an inappropriate place for a character such as Mel, who is already really just a kid's TV idea of 'the smart and plucky girl one", to inhabit. Bonnie Langford commits herself admirably but, in contrast to the Doctor, her presence is not much of a disruption to the narrative and the character is so thinly drawn that any attempt at thematic or subtextual threads to be drawn between her and the events of the story are so thin as to be entirely non-existent. Langford and McCoy play off of each other well enough but it is nevertheless painfully apparent that her character was conceived to play off of Colin Baker's Doctor and a lot of her role as a foil is nullified by the stark difference between their respective characterisations of the Doctor.
When I first saw Paradise Towers, I really did not take to it. Likely it was my previous conceptions of the Cartmel era as a fan, misconceptions that were likely informed by the impact of the New Adventures novels in fandom, that blinded me to how much good really is in here. The Cartmel era is not hard-edged science-fiction for mature audiences and Doctor Who fans. Like the best offerings of this programme have always been, the Cartmel era, and Paradise Towers, is an idiosyncratic little show for families that's punching above its weight.
Only One Race Can Survive! - The Daleks, 1963
Part I - The Mutants
Sydney Newman, 1986: "Being a real aficionado of science fiction, I hated stories which used bug-eyed monsters, otherwise known as BEM’s. I wrote in my memo that there would be no bug-eyed monsters in Doctor Who. And after a few episodes, Verity turned up with the Daleks! I bawled her out for it, but she said ‘Honest, Sydney, they’re not bug-eyed monsters – they’re human beings who are so advanced that their bodies have atrophied and they need these casings to manipulate and do the things they want!’. Of course, the Daleks took off and captured everybody’s imagination. Some of the best thing I have ever done are the thing I never wanted to do. It’s true! It’s worked out that way".
Like most periods of the show's history, Doctor Who's inception was a tumultuous time behind the scenes. Script editor David Whitaker, in what would quickly become a desperate hunt for reliable writers and workable scripts, approached writer Terry Nation having seen some potential in his script for ABC TV's science-fiction anthology Out of this World. Despite having, by his now admission, no faith in the programme, Nation soon found himself out of work and committed to a six-episode serial that would air fourth in the season's run.
Initially entitled The Survivors, Nation's original pitch to Whitaker was quite different to the story that eventually made it to screen but kept a lot of the same themes and allegory intact. Nation's serial originally featured three races; the Daleks, the Thals and a third species whose ancestors were responsible for the neutron bomb that devastated Skaro and had returned to the planet to make amends. The set-pieces were more extravagant in initial drafts and the Daleks less definitively villainous but producer Verity Lambert was impressed with Nation's work, offering him a seventh episode to allow greater expansion of his ideas.
David Whitaker, 1979: "Terry Nation didn’t want to write for us, considering it rather demeaning that he’d even been asked." Terry Nation, 1987: "I had no faith in the show. It was the old writer’s axiom, ‘Take the money and fly like a thief’."
As Nation continued to work, the programme's production elsewhere became more fraught. The two serials commissioned for writer Anthony Coburn required increasing rewrites, the initial first story that would become Planet of Giants was deemed unworkable and budgetary concerns had ensured John Lucarotti's epic Marco Polo would not fill the intended third slot. Much to the dismay of Donald Wilson and Sydney Newman, two of Doctor Who's three founding fathers, Nation's The Mutants suddenly became the strongest contender for the second serial.
Verity Lambert, 1980s: “The crisis came when Donald Wilson saw the scripts for the first Dalek serial. Having spent so much time defending ‘Doctor Who’, he saw the Daleks as just bug-eyed monsters, which went against what he felt should be the theme of the science-fiction stories. There was a strong disagreement between us, in fact it went as far as Donald Wilson telling us not to do the show. What saved it in the end was purely that fact that we had nothing to replace it in the time allotted. It was the Daleks or nothing."
David Whitaker, 1979: "Actually, that Dalek story was educational in a subtle way – it showed the dangers of war, pacifism and racial hatred. It contained many admirable and idealistic truths in it, and it was also a jolly good adventure story."
To this day, Terry Nation is somewhat of a divisive figure in the Doctor Who fandom. On the one hand, we have the man who penned what is arguably Doctor Who's most important, formative and defining serial. He is the creator of, not just an iconic monster but, iconic worlds and the core spirit and characterisation of Doctor Who itself and its leading ensemble. Yet, on the other hand, we have a writer who made no bones about his disinterest in the scripts he was writing. It has not become controversial among fans to condemn Terry Nation as a lazy, even hack, writer. One of these things is probably true; Terry Nation was a very lazy writer. But to call him a hack? Not in my opinion. Terry Nation is a very simple writer, certainly. The man's approach to structure was very traditionally rooted in the sci-fi serial format, his style of dialogue would not seem out of place in then contemporary comic books and his plots could never be described as complex or involved stories.
But why should any of these things be flaws? So, the man could write in the mould of classic sci-fi serials? Doctor Who was in the mould of a classic sci-fi serial and what Nation understood so well was that week-to-week structure that so many of his successors, and a good deal of his contemporaries, failed to get a hold of. Sure, Terry Nation serials are awkward stories to binge but they were never designed that way. Ever tried reading Oliver Twist more than one chapter at a time? It is horrible. Every individual chapter is truly an episode unto itself with great moments of character and action that effectively recap the story and move the grander plot forward. This is why, despite the unusual length of seven episodes, The Daleks still holds my attention for the whole runtime. Possibly more than any other writer's work on the original programme, Nation's episodes are consistently great to jump into just as single episodes. This also goes hand in hand with the very direct and simple dialogue really works as well. It is never subtle but it is always efficient and perfectly compliments the flavour of adventure serial that Nation consistently captured. Terry Nation is a good writer. Obviously. He is so good that even when he could not care less, and most of the time he did not, he could always deliver fun and beyond competent scripts.
Terry Nation, 1978: "It was quite a good eerie beginning and, at the end of it – the last frame of the picture – we saw a bit of a Dalek. We didn’t see a whole Dalek. And the phones started to ring. People saying, “Christ, what is that thing? A week later, the Dalek appeared."
The Daleks is a masterful blend of serialised action/adventure, thought provoking science fiction ideas and positively chilling horror that is well beyond the brief that Nation was given. From the moment it begins, this serial is unsettling. There is, of course, a brilliant dramatic irony baked into the premise that operates as both a clue to what is really going on and a genuinely compelling danger for our heroes. There is a school of thought that has concluded that The Daleks is too long but, again, I feel that this is a very contemporary mindset that somewhat misses what this story is going for. Say what you will about Destiny of the Daleks, for a not-at-all random example, but the first episode of this story, titled The Dead Planet, is not an exercise in killing time until the Dalek shows up to menace Barbara at the end. Despite what we know now, The Dead Planet does not have a reveal at the end. There is no frame of reference for the audience to project onto what is happening at all. Instead, the episode is a slowly rising crescendo of intrigue and tension that spans from the sparseness of a silent, dead forest to the gradually more claustrophobic and unfamiliar terrain of the city until Barbara gets cornered in an unknown corridor by an unknown terror. It is beautifully constructed adventure fiction that plays on the natural marriage of primal horrors, being the least creatures alive on the planet, and the imagery of contemporary nuclear warfare.
An Unearthly Child is a story defined by juxtaposition and survivalism which are both ideas that Nation picks up on beautifully in his story but he also brings themes of morality, identity and action. The Daleks is an almost biblical parable. With An Unearthly Child and The Daleks, the two core identities of the show appear to emerge. The former is a cynical and unrelenting programme that believes in unstoppable forces of nature that, no matter how hard we try to escape them or destroy them, will always be there at the core of our beings. With the latter, it is something more optimistic. A programme that is insistent, no matter how devastating the situation, that we can affect our destinies and help those around us to strive for better lives where we learn from our mistakes, can change and move forward. It is this version of Doctor Who, unsurprisingly, that the majority of the franchise believes in.
One thing Wilson did insist upon this serial was an experienced director whom he could trust to steer the ship and Christopher Barry was called in to take the job. Barry, however, was in the midst of other commitments leading to the unique situation where he only directed part of the story – episodes one, two, four and five. Richard Martin made his directorial debut with episode three and went on to direct episodes six and seven as well as the following serial and the Daleks' immediate next two appearances. Barry would also return to the series directing serials infrequently until 1979. As excellent as Martin's work in this serial is, and he realises some pretty spectacular imagery and visual effects for a little programme and with no experience, I could sing the praises of Christopher Barry all day. His choice of camera shots are incredibly dynamic throughout the episodes he helms with some particularly creative uses of angles and composition that really get the best out of these tiny sets. So many classic Doctor Who stories are hampered or even ruined by flat and uninspired direction (and eventually Barry will be the culprit of such a thing) but The Daleks, for my money, stands proud as one of the most cinematic serials of its era.
The cast are all excellent with great moments to shine. William Russell is always on good form and one of my favourite moments of the serial is when he smashes Susan's flower. It's a brilliant and revealing character beat for him. Jacqueline Hill is great and has some epic girl bossing toward the end ("Do you always do what Ian tells you?" "No."). Carole Ann Ford sells the desperation of Susan's mini-quest very well but let ustake some time to single out for praise is William Hartnell who turns in possibly the defining performance of at least his first year in the leading role and steals every single scene that he’s in. Considering the overly aggressive and immoral characterisation of An Unearthly Child, it was not necessarily a given that Doctor Who would be a likeable character any way moving forward but this is the story that first truly defines him. He is still arrogant, selfish and perhaps a little morally ambiguous but he is also shown to be deeply passionate, delightfully witty and shows more than a handful of moments of genuine charm. I love how character driven the plot ultimately is with little more than the Doctor's selfish, stubbornness to please himself that puts the whole crew in danger. It is worth mentioning too how the fluid link saga things on the TARDIS' identity as a machine, in the literal human understanding of the word. Very rarely beyond this serial would the TARDIS actually be treated in this way by the narrative, as opposed to simply being a magical element that carries us from A to B. The Doctor's actions are cruel and self-interested but by the time he is encamped among the Thals and one can see his delight in getting to know their people and their science, he suddenly becomes such a fully realised person in ways that he was not before. The Doctor is a scientist and an explorer, not some vindictive wizard with indefinable motives.
While the presentation, and perhaps core value itself, is a little dated, I also appreciate the Doctor's, and the rest of the main cast's, push for the Thals to be proactive as a peoples. It is a little clunky on the whole and comes off as a pretty pure endorsement against pacifism (though Ian's line "Pacifism only works when everybody feels the same" is a difficult claim to refute) but the nature of the message, insisting that standing up to oppressive forces and taking control of one's own life, is one worth conveying and an essential step in the development of the Doctor's morality. We are not entirely there yet, this is not a heroic character (indeed, he actively causes the Daleks to die), but this is the biggest leap we will get until the Daleks' next appearance.
Speaking of, let's get into the Daleks themselves. It is remarkable how close they are to being fully formed in their debut story. It disappoints me no end that this version of the Daleks, the calculating Nazi scientists allegory, is so ill-frequently represented in subsequent media appearances. The Daleks barely kill anybody at all in this script, largely seen just deliberating and experimenting in the labs of their cities, making the few uses of their weaponry a genuinely awesome shock for the audience. It is also a lot of fun seeing the original educational edict play out, for the only time with the Daleks; they cannot leave the floor of their city for they are powered by static electricity.
The true unsung hero of this production continues to be Ray Cusick, the BBC designer who somewhat infamously took over from a young Ridley Scott who was too busy to take on the job. Before even getting to the main event, we should note that the production design all around is stunning on this story. All of the sets and costumes that are dripping in glorious futuristic aestheticism that would make Star Trek jealous. The Daleks look incredible and, again, it is too easy to take for granted how truly iconic they are. The most radical redesign in the entire barely strays at all from their original realisation here. Even watching them today, it is unbelievable watching them in action. Just how smoothly and freakishly the creatures glide around their home world. They are just so thoroughly alien and it was one of the best choices of the production that their true nature is never actually revealed. How is it possible for the Daleks to be so far from anything resembling humanity? It is left purely for the imagination and to great effect. While Nation was very keen on the image of a gliding creature, allegedly inspired by the the Georgian State Ballet, Cusick was the one who really created the visual identity of the Dalek creature.
Terry Nation, 1987: “Raymond Cusick made a tremendous contribution and I would love to be glib enough to put it into percentage terms, but you can’t do that. You start with something that’s a writer’s dream, that he’s put down in words, and amended, and added to in conversations. Something starts there... I think they may have given him a hundred pound bonus, but he was a salaried employee... The copyrights resided with the BBC and myself... he made a tremendous contribution. Whatever the Daleks are or were, his contribution was vast."
Ray Cusick, 1992: "Everyone was rushing around corridors saying ‘Oh, there’ll be Dalek films, Dalek soap, Dalek tea towels’, they thought there’d be lots of money. I was very friendly with Terry Nation and we appeared on a very famous show called ‘Late Night Line-Up’, and I remember asking him after the show ‘What about the films, Terry?’. And I never saw him again!"
As well we know, Terry Nation is not a subtle writer. In a lot of ways, Terry Nation's scripts seem to defy analysis. Funnily enough, this is something that he has very much in common with, a remarkably different Doctor Who writer, Russell T Davies – neither of them are particularly keen on subtext. As noted above and well documented at this point, there are parallels to be drawn between the Daleks and Nazi scientists. These cold and calculating survivors of a long and brutal war who skulk about in their underground bunkers, preparing to exterminate an entire race that poses no threat to them. As Ian describes them; "They're afraid of you because you're different from them" These are parallels that Nation was very intentionally drawing in his work (and would draw even more intently come Genesis of the Daleks)but there is a particular quote from Nation about his creations that I find deeply tantalising;
Terry Nation, 1978: “I can’t isolate one character [that the Daleks are based upon]. But I suppose you could say the Nazis. The one recurring dream I have – once or twice a year it comes to me – is that I’m driving a car very quickly and the windscreen is a bit murky. The sun comes onto it and it becomes totally opaque. I’m still hurtling forwards at incredible speed and there’s nothing I can see or do and I can’t stop the car. That’s my recurring nightmare and it’s very simply solved by psychologists who say you’re heading for your future. You don’t know what your future is. However much you plead with somebody to save you from this situation, everybody you turn to turns out to be one of ‘Them’. And there’s nobody left – You are the lone guy. The Daleks are all of ‘Them’ and they represent for so many people so many different things, but they all see them as government, as officialdom, as that unhearing, unthinking, blanked-out face of authority that will destroy you because it wants to destroy you. I believe in that now – I’ve directed them more that way over the years."
This is a deeply interesting and revealing excerpt, in my opinion. Nation was a child during the Second World War, a fact that he often mentioned in interviews and something that continued to permeate his work. It would be hard to describe him as anything other than a man with liberal political values, many of which are on display in The Daleks. That being said, it is incredibly easy to read The Daleks as a condemnation of Nazi fascism, totalitarianism and racial hatred. Perhaps not is too easy. Let us take moment to consider the politics of The Daleks as a condemnation of, not the Second World War but, the post-war climate and even more directly on the UK itself. After all, it is not without note that the Thals are of typically Aryan physicality and even had German names in earlier drafts of the story. In real-world history, we all know that it was not the Nazis who dropped the first atomic bomb – it was the Allies and, while the plight of the Thals has a great deal in common with the Jewish in World War II, it is not especially difficult to shift the lens of the Dalek allegory onto the 'good guys' watching the programme. When considering this with the above quote, there becomes something almost anarchistic about The Daleks. Nation's story is a survivalist thriller in many respects (with a lot of the natural horrors, of course, being directly resultant of man-made atrocities) but his self-confessed anxiety for the future perhaps fuels the story's optimistic insistence that when everything is torn down and destroyed, life will prevail and we can begin again, better than before.
The Daleks presents strong ideals of community which makes perfect sense given the quote above. Nation's self-proclaimed fears seem keenly tied to isolation and that paranoia runs rampant in the terror of The Daleks. Take the sequence in The Survivors where Susan is racing back to the TARDIS on her own. The journey is horrifying and tense as she has no support or reassurance on her side. She is a young woman who is already dying and anything could be out to get her.The person who does find her, of course, is Alydon, a man from a kind, supportive and united community. The kind of community that could take on the Daleks. There are a lot of problems with this too though. The Thals are presented as, in Susan's words, perfect. They are peak physical performance, they look like humans and the villains, the irredeemable monsters, are physically inhuman.
Terry Nation, 1978: "[Survival] is a theme that’s actually gone through my work enormously... I’m in that aeroplane and I’m waiting for the moment when they say, 'Can anybody fly this aeroplane?' – And I can’t, but I know that finally I’m going to be the one that has to do it."
On Saturday the twenty-first of December 1963, the fifth episode of the BBC's new science-fiction adventure serial, Doctor Who, aired in front of an audience of 6.9 million viewers. The episode was penned an up and coming Welsh comedy writer named Terry Nation and it was the first of seven chapters in a saga entitled The Mutants. Following a thrilling cliffhanger and the unexpected reveal of the serial's bizarre antagonists, something unexpected happened – Doctor Who suddenly became incredibly popular. Between episodes two and three, 2.5 million more viewers tuned in for the adventure with another 1.5 million accumulated by the serial's end. Doctor Who might have debuted four weeks earlier with An Unearthly Child but The Daleks, as it came to be known, is where the programme that has lasted sixty years actually premieres.
David Whitaker, 1979: "When it was shown, not very long after being recorded, we were, and I don’t mean this to sound smug, proved quite right."
Peter Cushing, 1970s: "I thought it was very good. Very well made."
David Whitaker, 1979: "The Daleks were a smashing invention, and I took to them at once. I would say they’re worthy of Jules Verne."
Verity Lambert, 1980s: "What was very nice, though, was Donald Wilson coming up to me after the Daleks had taken off and saying ‘You obviously understand this programme better than I do. I’ll leave it to you’."
Part II - Dr. Who and the Daleks
Terry Nation, 1987: "After the Daleks, I was for a short time the most famous writer on television. The press interviewed me, there was mail arriving in great van loads. There was stuff coming to my house that said ‘Dalek Man – London’, and I was getting lots of them. Almost all the kids wanted a Dalek, and nobody was quick enough... My God, was that to change! Within the year, there were Dalek everythings."
As we all know, the Daleks were incredibly popular with the British public. In a manner cheekily compared to the Beatles, the Daleks dominated pop culture with all assortments of merchandise and spin-off material quickly emerging on the market. Between Nation and Whitaker's The Dalek Book, TV Century 21's comic strips (also credited to Nation), Whitaker's novel adaptation Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks and any number of toys, costumes and promotional tie-ins, the impact and legacy of the Dalek serial was immediately felt. Nation was swiftly commissioned for a second serial, the decidedly less culturally penetrating The Keys of Marinus, and eventually asked for a sequel Dalek story but what could have been the most high-profile exposure for his creations that one could ask, strangely enough, came without much involvement from Nation at all.
In late 1964, American film producer Milton Subotsky approached Nation and the BBC about purchasing the film rights to The Daleks. For a fee of £500, Subotsky secured the rights and set about producing Dr. Who and the Daleks. As well as co-producing with Max J. Rosenberg, Subotsky was also credited for the screenplay with not insubstantial uncredited contributions from David Whitaker. The film was one of ten theatrical efforts by prolific television director Gordon Flemyng and marks the first of only two times (to date) that Doctor Who has been adapted exclusively for the silver screen.
Tom Baker, 1975: "There have been two Doctor Who films in the past, both rather poor."
I find Dr. Who and the Daleks to be a deeply fascinating cultural oddity but that fascination surrounding its existence ultimately fails to translate to the screen itself. Even if it was just rolled into production as a quick attempt to capitalise on the enormous success of the Daleks in yet another form of media, it is admittedly impressive how much of the picture really works. Bill Constable’s art direction is quite breathtaking at times, working beautifully with the luscious technicolor presentation. This is a gorgeous film just to look at and it really effortlessly realises the fullscreen, explosive world of the Daleks that previously only truly existed in the aforementioned comic books and annuals. I particularly love the latter sequences as our heroes scale Skaro's landscape amongst some gorgeous matte painting work. That being said, there is still something that speaks to me more about the 4:3 black and white glimpses offered in the TV version. The feeling of peering through your TV screen into these small corners of what feels like a larger, more dangerous world behind and beyond the camera is much more captivating for me than these much grander sets presented without ambition or flair.
Since I neglected them in my main review, let me quickly sing the praises of Peter Hawkins and David Graham as the voices of the Daleks. With the assistance of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Brian Hodgson, the pair created the unique electronic tones of the creature's voices using a ring modulator. Their voices are immediately recognisable and they put in great performances though it is clear, in hindsight, that the sound of the Daleks still had some work to do. Hawkins and Graham's initial Daleks are much more monotone than they would later become with the pair only later landing upon the rising pitch and angry tones that would truly define them. They are excellent in the film as well but, it has to be said, the story is not served by how many scenes they have of dialogue amongst themselves. Obviously it makes sense to showcase the full-colour, enormous Dalek props at every possible opportunity in your big screen Dalek film but there is just no way around the reality that Daleks rolling about and talking amongst themselves as slowly as it seems possible they could is not compelling cinema.
Worse than just looking at Daleks are the flaws of Terry Nation’s incredibly serialised storytelling being put on full display here. While the screenplay effectively trims the fat, save for the Dalek scenes, the general structure of this story does not work well as a single feature film. It is a similar problem that a lot of novel adaptations have where the filmmakers just cannot get the chapters to effectively translate to scenes and sequences. Dr. Who and the Daleks also has a bit of a bland core cast. Barrie Ingham is a good Alydon and Peter Cushing works magic with his dottery version of the Doctor but Roy Castle's doofus take on Ian leaves much to be desired and Jennie Linden's Barbara feels so surplus to requirements that she just gets folded into Susan's character and then a generic love interest. The film is entertaining but a bit of a lacklustre watch on the whole. It is not a poor or even unnecessary addition to the Doctor Who canon. This is as good a 90 minute adaptation of The Daleks that could possibly exist. It is just also true that the best version of that story is, regrettably, not this.
Roy Castle, 1990: "[I]t was quite unusual. Very unlike anything I’ve ever done... [The Daleks] were brilliant. I think if you’d said to the producer, you must get rid of the humans or the Daleks, he’d have got rid of us humans in a flash."
Peter Cushing, 1990s: "Those films are among my favourites because they brought me popularity with younger children. They’d say their parents didn’t want to meet me in a dark alley but ‘Doctor Who’ changed that. After all, he is one of the most heroic and successful parts an actor can play. That’s one of the main reasons the series had such a long run on TV. I am very grateful for having been part of such a success story.”
In 2024, the prevalence of Dr. Who and the Daleks in the greater story of the programme has dwindled but it is worth remembering just how significant an event it was. While not a critical darling, the film was a box office smash in the UK and was often repeated on television over the following decades. For so many fans, Dr. Who and the Daleks was more readily viewed than great swathes of the television show itself. Even though The Daleks is the story that happened on television, it is not unfair to say that Dr. Who and the Daleks is the story many of us remember happening.
Part III - The Daleks in Colour
Russell T Davies, 2023: "I've got to be blunt, I've watched this, as a fan, a hundred times as a black and white show and I've never enjoyed it so much as in colour."
And so, we fast forward, to 2023 and the sixtieth anniversary of Doctor Who. Showrunner Russell T. Davies has made the entire back-catalogue available for streaming in the UK, three new specials are about to air and the boldest, most publicised attempt to bring the original series to the general audience since 2005 is taking place. Thanks to the work of fans such as Rich Tipple and Benjamin Cook, RTD spearheaded an all-new colorisation and re-edit of The Daleks down to a seventy-five minute length to offer an alternative "blockbuster" version for potential new fans. How many of the uninitiated took any notice of its appearance on iPlayer and sprucing on breakfast television remains to be seen but, nevertheless, Doctor Who: The Daleks in Colour arrived in our screens on the 23rd of November, 2023.
The film in question is an interesting but flawed experiment. Certainly, the possibility of colourising the ancient history of Doctor Who has been a tantalising one for decades now and something many fans, myself included, have been eager to see. In and of itself, this is a fine thing to strive for and, in this respect, The Daleks in Colour is incredibly successful at it. The colourisation is breathtaking. Not only is the colourising itself incredible but the choice to eschew real world reference points for the sets, costume and lighting in favour of the most vibrant, almost psychedelic options that they could possibly think of is the correct choice. The entire production has a sense of 1960s pop and visual style that slots in seamlessly with then contemporary productions to the extent where it looks like this could always have been the plan.
What feels very much not like it was planned, however, is the runtime. On paper, chopping up the serial makes a good deal of sense. Seven episodes is a big commitment to somebody uncertain of the original show and with 1963 pacing being what it was, the decision to pare things down matches well with the mission statement. Alas, the editing in this film does not work but not because the idea is bad. Dr. Who and the Daleks has proven that paring down the script can lead to a generally well-received and, for many, preferential product. Yes, Dr. Who and the Daleks is, in many ways the elephant in the room. While the decision to choose the debut of the Daleks as a story to hook in new fans makes a lot of sense on paper, the fact that the Subotsky adaptation exists at all makes it a little difficult to justify.
The direct comparison is ultimately unfavourable and not just because of how many of the colour choices seem direct inspired by it. The Subotsky film's existence awkwardly lampshades the fact that what one is watching here is not an eighty-two minute feature designed to watched in one sitting. This is an almost three hour one awkwardly cobbled together with jarring new musical cues. Many of the technical choices employed such as speeding up the film, tightening up gaps in the dialogue and recording new Dalek dialogue to disguise swathes of cut material all amount to a very obviously cobbled together experience.
Still, this experiment was necessary and this is a great little curio of the franchise but the awkwardness of the production and its core appeal as an alternative proves it unlikely, in my opinion, to ever actually attain its goal – enticing new viewers to watch the Hartnell era. What The Daleks in Colour is is an alternative to the original and a glimpse into an alternate history for a captive fanbase. It could have been an amazing leap forward but remains, instead, a noteworthy first step into uncharted territory.
But what of that original serial then? Well, in my opinion, The Daleks still holds up today as one of the best stories in the history of Doctor Who and a landmark moment in science fiction storytelling. But this is not for everyone. BBC television of the 1960s is certainly not for everyone; I watched this with my partner and we both did feel the length when watching the episodes in close proximity. Even so, I do strongly implore checking out the first two episodes in the serial for some of the most intriguing and moody sci-fi adventure storytelling you might ever see in Doctor Who. In December 1963, Terry Nation and the Doctor Who team created some wonderful episodes of television. And that was not the end of the story.
Terry Nation, 1987: "I don’t know to this day what the enormous appeal of the Daleks was. I’ve heard all sorts of ideas about it, but they were slightly magical, because you didn’t know what the elements were that made them work."
Sydney Newman, 1986: “Someone once told me that there was a question in Trivial Pursuit, ‘Who created Doctor Who?’. You turn the card over and it says the answer is Terry Nation! I wrote a rather stinging letter, demanding the destruction of all the Trivial Pursuits that had that mistake in them, hinting at some fabulous compensation that they should give me for demeaning my contribution to (laughs) world culture! I got lawyers and everything, but I didn’t get anywhere. They just said they would withdraw the card. I even wrote to Terry Nation for his support, and he sent me a very nice letter back.”
*This title would be adopted by fans despite not appearing on any documentation at the time. It became officially endorsed with the 2001 VHS release