What can we expect from Moffat-Who? by Emily Monaghan 8/7/08
"Life is short and you are hot"
The greatest asset Steve Moffat will bring to the role of Head Honcho is his skill for character; in particular, establishing very likeable characters in a short period of time. Quite a talent for a show where half the extras exist as cannon fodder. Top prize goes to Blink: Kathy "you told him you were 18!" Nightingale, everyone's inner geek Larry, and especially Billy Shipton. He only has a few lines to cement his identity, yet minutes later people across the country are pretending they've just got something in their eye. He can write leads just as well: the charming Sally Sparrow, supporting Blink so well you barely miss the Doctor; Madame de Pompadour, getting away with kissing, "dancing" and the Doctor being in love(?) with her, all those things Grace Holloway caused heart attacks with back in 1996. The Empty Child introduced us to a Captain Jack who genuinely hasn't been so interesting since leaving Moffat's hands. Silence in the Library has introduced six characters all with the life expectancy of a Spinal Tap drummer, yet he dredges sympathy for sacrificial lamb Miss Evangelista seemingly from nowhere, and gives Proper Dave and Other Dave real character just through their names.
"I let you keep Mickey!"
This goes for the regulars too. Lovely, lovely sparkly Doctor-companion dialogue. The good naturedly antagonistic Doc-Rose-Jack love triangle in Doctor Dances. The other good-naturedly antagonistic Doc-Rose-Mickey love triangle in Girl in the Fireplace. It didn't work so well for Blink, where Martha vanished in the mix, but I've always thought she was an ineffectual and dull character except when placed center stage (she's brill in Human Nature and Last of the Time Lords, but most authors gave her nothing of substance to do in series 3). It seems it's impossible to go wrong with Donna, especially watching her react to the future of face-donation and neural communicators. Don't make me quote it all, I'm sure you have your favourite bit...
"Are you my mummy?"
Expect more catchy phrases in series 5, as every episode so far has been anchored in a key line or command. "Don't blink, blink and you're dead", more recently "stay out of the shadows". Silence in the Library also had the nerve to give us creepy repeated phrases "Hey, who turned out the lights?" and "Donna Noble has left the library. Donna Noble has been saved" at the same time. He's even started with his own running jokes in advance - bananas and dancing (see below for more of that).
"One day, just one day, maybe, I'm going to meet somebody who gets the whole "don't wander off" thing."
Nothing beats having someone who loves and understands the show at the head. Just as RTD's claim that the new series of Doctor Who would feature "the same man who fought the Drahvins, the Macra, the Axons, the Wirrn, the Terileptils, the Borad, the Bannermen and the Master in San Francisco on New Year's Eve 1999", so Mr M. has constantly proved he knows what he's dealing with. Silence's "spoilers", "Why does nobody ever just go to the police!" and Billy pointing out the TARDIS windows are the wrong size. I don't just mean in terms of humour; sneaking in all those cryptic hints about the Doctor's real name just because it feels right, giving him the "lonely angel" tag, and "everybody lives!" show a good understanding of our favourite Time Lord.
"It was raining when we met"
Expect a smart mix of comedy, heart and... ah hell, no interesting analysis here, I just wanted an excuse to use my favourite quote. It's still a good point though; he doesn't sacrifice tragedy for laughs, or vice versa - even the affecting Girl in the Fireplace had its share of smart wit.
"Why is it pointing at the light?"
Name me some great scenes from the new series. Chances are, you're thinking of the moment the tape runs out in The Empty Child, maybe the opening of Blink with the writing, the whole sequence with the DVD easter egg or the lights beginning to flicker in the basement... If there's something the man can do really well, it's set pieces: little chunks of brilliance scattered about. Expect more great solid and memorable sequences from series 5.
"It's not the books, is it? I mean, books can't be alive, can they?"
A universal theme in his episodes so far has been terror in the everyday. Doctor Who likes to do this one a lot, from Atmos to Autons, but the emphasis here is TERROR in the everyday. The earpieces were just a way to get the Cybermen into the story, Atmos a massive Macguffin, and Magpie's TVs weren't scary. Ticking clocks, statues, the dark, small children; all obvious targets, but very well exploited. Expect more in the same vein.
There's a flipside to this praise. Steven Moffat's episodes have all focused on very contained concepts, the sort of "monsters under the bed" horror which incidentally worked so well in Torchwood the few times they tried it instead of bolting an unlikely invasion into 45 minutes. Sorry, rant over. Doctor Who, being at its heart a kids' show about an alien who considers celery the height of fashion, can get away with putting the Earth into dire peril. Having not yet seen him try, it'll be interesting to see how he can handle the biggies, the end-of-series climactic double bills, and how they turn out. Moffat has so far had the luxury of interesting episodes; he can be experimental, because ultimately he's never been in a position where he has to be generic. The same can be said for other fan-fave Paul Cornell; let's see them make challenging television when landed with an "invasion Earth" plot, eh? (and as a flipside to that, wasn't it fun to watch the Davies-detractors shut up and gulp after Midnight?)
He'll certainly bring his own touch to the Big Episodes: the question is, will he merely kink the cliches or go for something completely unusual? Already Silence in the Library has given us the paradoxical casting of the Doctor as the villain (bursting through the doors before the credits, traditional monster role; not to mention sonicing the security camera), the mock reveal of the books as the bad guys and a door the Doctor can't sonic - not deadlocked, just wood. Another question is whether he'll be able to handle an arc. Daft question in my book, when you count the number of concepts he can bung into a single episode and still remain effective.
But it's not all sunshine and roses. Despite my enthusiasm for a change - I always loved RTD, but if he feels it's his time to go then I'm excited to see what new blood will give to the show - I refuse to ignore the drawbacks. The following are all based on actual events and genuine quotes.
"Half this street thinks your missus must be messing about with Mr. Avistock - the butcher. But she's not, is she...?"
Behind the Sofa.org recently published a pre-reboot interview with some new series writers, before there was even a new series for them to write for (reread it here: http://www.behindthesofa.org.uk/2008/05/is-there-a-plac.html) One of the most disturbing quotes was our new Producer claiming it was, first and foremost, "A children's programme. No ifs. No buts. Definitely!". In fact, the way he put it was "Now, a few of you might not like what I'm going to say next. Grip the arms of your chair, grind your teeth and wrap your head around this", and he's absolutely right. We like to have it both ways: we watch this stuff aimed at the 9-13s market, but we praise it when it gets challenging and dark. Which is why the farting in Aliens of London gets consistantly derided, while the edgy, grim "real sci-fi" Genesis of the Daleks is held aloft as our highest beacon.
Despite the quote, I don't quite believe him - at least, not from available evidence. Mr M. has written some of the most defiantly child-unfriendly pieces so far. Most obviously, the terror factor: Blink scored "Off the Scale" on Fear Factor and Empty Child/Doctor Dances came with a warning for parents to watch it in the daytime. A warning I, as an oh-so-brave 15 year old ignored, and then found I couldn't sleep after watching the last ten minutes from behind a cushion. But children do secretly like being scared (Empty Child's in my top 20), and there has never been anything I felt went too far. Maybe Doctor Constantine's transformation was on the line.
No, I mean the sex 'n' violence, and adult themes. Miss Evangelista's fading struggle is virtually a one-off death scene in a kids show. Fine, she's already dead; that's the excuse. But imagine the same scene, only she wasn't killed in "less than seconds"; instead, she's got a wound in a major artery or a bullet somewhere unpleasant. You could leave the scene untouched, and the emotional impact would be as powerful. Only you couldn't show it on kids' TV any more. How many other characters, in the whole history of the show, get three minutes of panicked last words before passing on? Daleks and Cybermen hit you with a nice, clean, fall-over blast; so do new series Sontarans.
What about the other themes? The Empty Child/Doctor Dances combo packs the most gay agenda of any episode yet, not to mention seduction, drunken threesomes, love triangles, the eponymous "dancing". Girl in the Fireplace gets the Doctor closer to a proper canonical shag than ever before, packed full of hints for people who remembered what "dancing" was all about last time around, along with being about loss, death and misery. Expect him to lighten up now he's responsible for everything... maybe? After all, it can't be this creepy all the time... can it?
"Kids want to see Narnia, not the wardrobe!"
I remembered this pithy quote of his for two reasons. The first is that it is well phrased and witty. The second is that it is wrong. The fundamental difference is that a wardrobe really is just a wooden box; the TARDIS has a swimming pool in Evolution, a garden in Genocide, lovely big, leafy cloisters in the TV movie and Logopolis, endless corridors in Castrovalva, companion bedrooms in The Visitation. The most the new series has given us has been the console room and an oversized wardrobe. With the changeover, looks like we're even further away from seeing that massive, ancient, chaotic library which we all know must be in there somewhere.
It's an especially mean comment from one of the few people writing for the new show who have actually used time travel as a plot device, in both Girl in the Fireplace and Blink. The TARDIS is at its worst as a walking plot randomiser. Most episodes follow the pattern of land-leave-lose, have adventure and then conveniently find it in time for the "next week on". But maybe all is not lost; if I recall correctly, the powers that be vetoed his idea of his keeping Arthur the horse in the TARDIS stables. So I'll keep my fingers crossed.
"Children are no respecters of reputation and are bored by tradition, so keeping faith with the past they never knew means nothing. They want, and are entitled to, their own hero and their own show."
Fair enough. But that doesn't mean he's going to cut gratuitous referencing out of the series? Does it...? Despite the fact the word Gallifrey didn't get in until the end of series 2, old-series referencing has steadily been on the increase. Now, naturally, the new series lives and dies on its own merits. But it doesn't negate the flush of love we all feel when the Master reminices about Sea Devils and Axons.
I'm a passionate, flag-waving member of that cabal that believes there is no "classic" or "new", and certainly one is not better than the other - it's all one ongoing canon. Letting the Eternals round up the Carrionites, or walk out on the Time War just give me ammunition to prove it's the same chap who was striding about in Enlightenment. Will Steve Moffat ditch old series referencing entirely? I hope not, although it has been absent in his regular episodes so far. On the other hand, he did get to head up Time Crash - and that gave the new series "Nyssa and Tegan, Timelords in silly hats". Nice to see the Doc remembering Arc of Infinity, even if we'd rather not. We can only live in hope. And speaking of living...
"Everybody lives!"
When this line first came out in The Doctor Dances, it was a true airpunching moment. Because the last thing you want to be is an extra in Doctor Who, and after decades of gutpunching misery as they are wiped out in droves, finally a complete and joyful success. It's what came afterwards that worries me.
Jenny's departure from the show annoyed me by trying to have it both ways: a tragic death, but one undermined by her then resurrection. He didn't write the episode, but he did persuade the author to keep her alive. A few weeks later we had River Song - even more affecting for not involving the lame "step in front of a bullet" trick. But, again, we were cheated of real death. The horrific otherworld that we and Donna were meant to fear, that Miss Evangelista stalks in black with dire warnings, suddenly becomes a glowy-white afterlife. The image of the Doctor realising his future self had come up with a way to save her was priceless, but the way it was done, and the voiceover in particular, undid the pathos of their parting. Even in Blink, the emphasis for both Billy and Kathy was not that they had died, but that they had had good lives
Girl in the Fireplace has proved he can do uncompromising tragedy properly. So please, no more lame almost-deaths. Either kill them or don't. Most of my favourite episodes, both classic and new, are the downbeat massacres; the ones where things get so dire the Doctor starts shooting things, the ones where he has to abandon whole parallel worlds to destruction or resign himself to losing the entire cast at a rate of one every two minutes. And while we certainly can't have that all the time, one every now and then is pretty good.
In the excitement of the new series most acclaimed writer getting into a position where he gets more than two episodes a series, let's not forget to give thanks where thanks is due. He put emotion back at the forefront of the show, when in the past we mostly had to grip subtext (and, as flickfilosopher.com puts it, sometimes we had to imagine the subtext too). For the first time, he put the focus on the emotional cost of such a life for both the Doctor and companions; whether the attempt to broach an openly romantic plot and giving companions a family was too kitchen sink for you, or the highlight of the show, it remains a brave effort to do something new. It'll be fun to see what influences stay and what goes - both from his own work and the series plan set up so far.
The Davies-era end-of-season finales by Steve Cassidy 25/8/08
To be honest, the RTD finales have been some of the worst examples of Who anywhere. Big budget, big effects, big production design but somehow puny stories. I said in my review of Last of the Time Lords, how come the bigger the peril gets the smaller the programme gets?
Considering what was to come, this was more than OK. Despite the fact that the entire nation was brought up short by "Super Rose" destroying the Dalek fleet at the flick of her wrist. It was projection of the worst kind. It was RTD's projection of a 19 year old girl who is as important and destructive as the Doctor; the whole plot and peril didn't matter because it could be done with pixie dust. Still, Eccles played a blinder and Jack was enjoyable. Bad Wolf had the whiff of a safe bet just in case the ratings had plummeted by programme 12. Big Brother and Davina McCall would get them back on the TV Quick covers.
AoG ain't too painful, apart from the appalling celebrity cameos. There's a nice buildup with the Genesis Ark and the appearance of the Cybermen. Doomsday collapsed under its own writer's witterings. The big clash of the titans with Daleks versus Cybermen was more of a whimper, with them barely being on screen and some terrible Dalek dialogue ("pest control"), but this was nothing compared with the writer's obsessive love for Rose and her obsessive love for the Doctor. Millions died, London burnt, there were Cybes at the Taj Mahal but all that mattered was Rose, that crappy beach on the Gower and the crying towel.
Utopia/The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords
Utopia works because Jacobi is a class act. The director and fellow actors had a lot of respect for him and gave him space and room. Once John Simm arrive it all goes to pot. It reminded me of Moonraker where every action scene ends in a silly joke and so torpedoes the entire effort. If I cannot take the menace of Simm seriously then why bother watching? The Earth invasion story was tired and hackneyed by now, the Toclafane lacked menace and the Master's antics were childish. LOTTL is close to unwatchable. Too many painful scenes to work. And Dobby Doctor and "Messiah Doctor" should confine Davies to the 666th layer of hell. Where a script editor awaits him.
The Stolen Earth/Journey's End
The RTD end-of-season panto. Let's get the whole cast together, link arms and sing "we're riding along on a crest of a wave" while high-kicking at the audience. The Stolen Earth isn't so bad as the climax. There is some good stuff here and at one point the mass companions work when Harret Jones contacts them. The rest is just a result of pot-pourri writing, where nothing is resolved and nothing is taken seriously - so whats the point? The parameters of Whodom are shat upon and once again we have the mother of all deus ex machinas, this time instigated by the Doctor's chavtatic assistant. Still, Ms Tate finally leaves so it isn't all bad.
The finales give you a bad taste at the end of the season. If the season ended on a two part Tooth and Claw or a Human Nature, then so much the better but, as it is, I came to dread them under Davies, not look forward to them.
Why the new series has hit the mark several times over! by Nathan Mullins 13/11/08
Since the revival of Doctor Who, we have been treated to some of the best epiodes screened since the show disappeared in 1989. The show hasnt recieved such acclaim since it was brought back by one of the most influential writers in the TV industry, Russell T Davies. I never in my right mind thought that Doctor Who would make a comeback but it has done and now, having already completed a fourth series that has already gone on air, the fifth is promised to be spectacular, though without a full series in 2009, we're treated to four or five specials that are said to be 'Wicked!'
Since the show has returned, we've seen the regeneration between the 9th and 10th Doctors which I felt had its ups and downs concerning Christopher Eccleston's time spent on the show but we're now left with David Tennant as the 10th, who is simply the best since the 4th Doctor as played by Tom Baker. He's carried the 10th Doctor for three series already and has proved a success amongst millions of people and fans alike who are now enjoying the series weekly on Saturday nights.
We also now have the luxury of watching the show on Christmas Day which is a joy as we get clips of what's to come and it's just something we've become used to since the show returned. Also, the many faces we've seen who have been on the box for how long have come to be a part of the show as the old show once had. For example, Rula Lenska in Resurrection of the Daleks, Ken Dodd in Delta and the Bannermen, Derek Jacobi in Utopia and John Simn as the Master following Derek Jacobi in The Sound of Drums/The Last of the Time Lords.
The show's ratings have been phenomenal and that's down to the quality of the acting, scripting, the writers and the show's popularity and that's why I believe Doctor Who has hit the mark several times over. It's certainly struck a chord in the hearts of viewers around the world.
How we can all expect change! by Nathan Mullins 15/6/09
How many of us tuned in to the National Television Awards recently? That's where we Doctor Who fans would have heard the news of David Tennant announcing he's officially leaving the TARDIS behind. But, we don't seem to be very shocked by this. Especially as there was so much hype last year when Catherine Tate spoke of his decision to leave, or was she referring to his regeneration in Journey's End? Who knows? Though, I do know one thing. Tennant deserves a lot more praise than we fans dish out. The man's fantastic for staying on for not one year but three, including specials due to air soon, so we have yet to see what they will be like.
As much as I like Christopher Eccleston, his Doctor didn't thrill me like Tennant's, who I just love. The Tenth Doctor has been made into an icon. I don't know how or in what way Steven Moffat shall take the show now Tennant has left, but hopefully Matt Smith will stay on for as long or for even longer as Tennant, depending on how good he is.
Steven Moffat has given a number of interviews, talking about making nostalgia for the future, by getting rid of icons that have been a staple for Doctor Who for many, many years. For instance the Daleks and Cybermen. This is not a bad thing, as the Daleks in particular have been, for far too long, overused in the new series. The episodes given to them have been fantastic, but Mr Moffat is right, we can't have them all the time. To keep the show going, we must intrigue the younger generation, by giving them something to look forward to every time; also, Mr Moffat was talking of making the show much darker and scarier. I think this would be a brave move and I'm glad to see that there has been talk of change, as much as I'm loving where were being taken at the moment.
What with everyone behind the scenes leaving... Russel T, Phil C, David T, we're getting lots of new people filling the gaps. I am sad to see David Tennant leaving but he has said he will most certainly come back, for an anniversary special. Which I'd love to see him do. Until we see the next Doctor return to our screens, in 2010, let's enjoy whats yet to come, and look forward to the future and what it holds!
Visions of the future by Joe Ford 29/8/09
1945, and the Second World War is over. The death toll is inconceivable, the destruction extraordinary and the world has to heal the wounds of 6 years of brutal conflict. Technology progresses in leaps and bounds during wartime and the people were promised a better, brighter future. In fiction, looking to the future was a two sided coin. In Doctor Who's formative years there were a number of television series that promised a brighter future. Star Trek presented a world where man was no longer bound by any limitations and vices and frailties have been overcome, Thunderbirds realised a technological wet dream and the Jetsons lived in a futuristic utopia. To counteract these idealised portrayals of the future, we have the more thoughtful novels of Bradbury and Wyndham featuring a dystopian society where critical thought is outlawed and a post-apocalyptic world where hideous plant creatures have devastated the globe. On the big screen, Forbidden Planet had taught us the lesson of unleashing our darkest urges with the use of alien technology and The Day the Earth Stood Still left us with the warning that our extreme violence has come to the attention of other planets who will not tolerate it extending to their worlds.
Where did Doctor Who stand when it came to exploring the future? Did it surrender to a Roddenberry-esque ideal, with the human race holding hands with every alien species it came into contact with? Did the human race of the future repress their urges and work for the best of humanity? Of course not. There is a swinging pendulum of good and bad times ahead with Doctor Who's vision of the future. It is not always happy place. It often saw the future as a dangerous, unpredictable place where technology was responsible for devastation and the human race failed to learn the lessons of wars gone by. Alternatively, there are times when we are hungry explorers of the universe, where technology is used to benefit mankind and we are given a second chance to make things right.
You need look no further than The Dalek Invasion of Earth in season two for a powerful example of a writer still haunted by the Second World War. This post-apocalyptic world must have been a terrifying reminder of the events just 20 years previously. The parallels are manifold: a bombed-out city, the frightened resistance groups struggling to fight back, the Daleks parading through the streets as literal Nazi substitutes brandishing the Hitler salute and all this from the same author who gave us a morality tale about pacifism and the effects of dropping a large bomb to end a war just one year previously. You could also suggest this scenario is a riff on a similar fictional piece, with England in the grip of invaders and all resistance beaten down, Dalek Invasion of Earth shares similar themes with Wells' War of the Worlds penned in 1898. If you roll these interpretations into one, you have a gripping story which uses past horrors and snatches at fictional works for inspiration to create a disheartening glance at future of the human race. Weak in the face of a superior alien force. Whilst we might win out against the Daleks at the close of the story, there is no denying that without further alien intervention (ie the Doctor), the human race would have continued to be abused and slaughtered until our numbers were exhausted. Watching Dortmun wheel his way out onto the street with his new bomb only to be cut down by Dalek firepower is a terrific visual metaphor for the annihilation of wartime spirit. The Dalek Invasion of Earth could be seen as a parable of how our future could have had looked had the Nazi's won the war. This is a warning, next time we might not be so lucky.
With the opener of season four, we were treated with a number of fascinating approaches on the idea of technology pushing the future of the human race forward, but not always for the better. The man responsible for this outbreak technological pessimism in Doctor Who is Kit Pedlar, a British medical scientist and unofficial scientific advisor to show. With a remit of injecting more hard science into the show, Pedlar encouraged a number of stories that focused on science evolving and endangering human lives. The War Machines promotes the idea of linking up all of the world's computers to a central intelligence, just like the internet, but three years before the ARPANet went live in 1969. Writer Ian Stuart Black (dramatising Pedlar's ideas) explores the dangers of such a move. The Doctor, cutting to the chase as ever, asks "Are you seriously telling me, sir, that you have invented a machine that can think?" and the attempted invasion somewhat ponderously answers the questions of the consequences of artificial intelligence. The real question posed is what happens when a computer is sufficiently clever enough to decide when it can do without people. In the world of embryonic science, it is worth considering that we might be responsible for creating the tools of our own destruction. Whilst I find the idea of creating giant boxlike tanks to spread terror across the world hardly the most sophisticated attempt at machine intelligence taking over the globe, Pedlar's next stab at technohorror strikes much more of a chord in its attempts to terrify with the development of technology.
The Tenth Planet suggests perhaps the ultimate horror, the future of the human race as faceless beings, biology replaced with technology, emotions superseded by logic. The Cybermen were born and for a generation of children it would never be safe to go under the knife again. It echoes the educational nature of The Day the Earth Stood Still; after all, Mondas is revealed to be Earth's twin. This is another warning: there are limits to replacing body parts with artificial alternatives; a line will be drawn where our identity as human beings is lost and our ability to feel is sacrificed. The main draw of the Cybermen for me is that fear that they will forcibly strip you of your identity, peel away the emotions and leave you a robotic slave. One of millions, with nothing to define you. "You will be like us" is a chilling Nazi-esque creed, and their instant and lasting popularity proves that then and now, the idea of losing our self awareness and being shuffled into a pack is still hitting home.
Pedlar takes this idea of technology controlling our lives to a new level in his next contribution, inventing a giant weather controlling device situated on the moon. He practically ignores the main strength of the Cybermen here, failing to use them as bodysnatchers but as an invading force wanting to wipe out all life on Earth. This is an attempt at a claustrophobic thriller, but the stakes are only so high because the device they are protecting is controlling the world's environment. Once again, this is the human race playing God and using technology to control the uncontrollable. Reports of storms, hurricanes and floods devastating the planet throughout the story prove how disastrous this level of technology could be when it malfunctions. With these three stories, Pedlar examines the dangers of messing with nature, he looks at how we communicate, our identity and the environment and suggests the terror that lies ahead if we start playing doctor and try to control them with technology. In all three cases, he pre-empts similar warnings made about technology in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the troubles that can crop up when man builds machines, the inner workings of which he does not fully comprehend and the danger of creating technologies that are not fully controllable.
Alternatively, there is a spurt of stories towards the end of the Troughton era that revel in the giddy 'we are about to step on the moon and look at what it will bring us' optimism. Promoting its revelations about the future in its title, The Wheel in Space sees Space Wheels set around the solar system benefiting the human race with a variety of functions (monitoring stellar phenomena, weather data and a resting place for deep space vehicles). There is a strong feeling of a people who are obsessed with what is come rather than what has been; Zoe's education is narrow and career-obsessed, with logic and memory superseding any historical teachings. The sense of excitement around the luxury of space habitation echoes the nail-biting space race that was taking place at the time.
Possibly the most positive portrayal of our application of future technology is explored in The Seeds of Death. Famine and the exhaustion of fossil fuels have been conquered by synthesized carbohydrates and protein (sounds delicious) and solar batteries. T-Mat travel revolutionised the distribution of people and materials around the world, while it was an effort to rid the world of its pollution (petrols cars are now confined to museums) and famine (now the world's goods could be fairly distributed). Whilst this application of technology allowed us to iron out worldwide issues, the human race became narrow minded about the idea of space travel. As the story unfolds, we see the danger of relying solely on one form of technology and the go-ahead is given to build a fleet of rockets and once again reach out into space. Again, the future looks bright indeed.
The Space Pirates hops forward even further into the future and sees the human race so accustomed to space travel that we have regulated space ways and divided areas of space into administrative and strategic sectors, monitored by Beacons. Atomic motors power the most impressive of vessels and the Space Corps are on hand to fight space piracy. Like the desire to buy the latest car design today, emphasis is put on the acquisition of the hottest space vessels and only reactionary old plods like Milo Clancey want to see a return of the old days. The Space Pirates aired just a few months before the moon landing and sees Robert Holmes predicting a vast expansion into space beyond its first step on the lunar surface.
The early 1970's and the Cold War has been raging for 20+ years. The US and the Soviet Union are locked in a state of conflict, propaganda flies, coalitions are formed and weapons development has become the order of the day. Defensive spending goes through the roof and the nuclear arms race becomes a public and terrifying threat hanging over the world. One writer who seems particularly moved to educate the science-fiction community to the horrors of such a war is Malcolm Hulke, author of some of the most gripping morality tales in Doctor Who's canon. Doctor Who and the Silurians is noted for refusing to tell its story in black and white, with both the human race and the Silurians causing atrocities in their attempt to lay claim to the planet. The use of plague weapons and attempted genocide as storytelling tools mark this as a particularly hard-hitting piece of science fiction. The climax is especially damning of humanity and whilst I mirror the Doctor's appalled reaction when he realises that the Brigadier has blown up the Silurian base, I have to wonder if in reality would we do anything less if we felt threatened enough.
Frontier in Space is a less subtle but more optimistic attempt to examine the Cold War, with two superpowers locked in an escalating dispute. The entire conflict is revealed as a proxy war, with the Master masterminding the conflict between Earth and the Draconians to weaken both sides sufficiently for the Daleks to step in. Similar conflicts were brewed during the Cold War to avoid direct conflict between the two factions and the escalation to a nuclear war (the Greek Civil War, the Korean War). Two very strong statements are made during this story, which relate to the conflict that was taking place in real life. The Master's weapon of choice is fear and he manages to create an atmosphere of terror that is far more effective than an entire arsenal of weapons. Fear that the other side has an advantage and that they are edging into your territory; with the use of a (slightly) melodramatic newsreader, Hulke comments on the use of propaganda to fuel the people's hatred and their unity in forcing the government to act. Hulke's ability to humanise the enemy is perhaps his most positive statement here. As portrayed in Frontier in Space, both the humans and the Draconians are seen to be honourable races, only showing strength when their hand is forced. It was worth remembering that by the time Frontier in Space aired the Cold War had been entangled by politics and propaganda and despite what was being reported neither side was a black and white enemy.
This period also saw the Soviets and the US in a race to forge more and better nuclear weapons and it is in a story steeped in nuclear pessimism that Hulke makes his most damning appraisal of humanity, The Sea Devils. Hulke populates his story with a ridiculous and bureaucratic buffoon in the form of Walker, Parliamentary secretary whose only ambition within the confines of the story is to destroy the Sea Devils with nuclear missiles. Whilst the Doctor strongly (and verbosely) opposes yet another attempt at genocide, the story urges us to consider if we will ever step out of an age of such conflicts whilst close-minded conformists like Walker are in power. Shockingly, it is only when the Doctor appeals to the politician's ego, suggesting he can prevent a war and give all the credit to Walker, that the nuclear strike is momentarily halted. Walker throws away any chance of a peaceful resolution and leaves the Sea Devils with the opinion that the only language the human race use is violence. The missiles are fired and species annihilated. Despite the feeling of the majority, one man's actions dooms the human race to be guilty of genocide. Again. The actions of one man blight us all.
Whilst Frontier in Space is set in 2540 so can afford to be a more positive spin on warfare, the Silurian/Sea Devil stories are supposed to be set in the 'near future'. Hulke's assessment of humanity seems to be that we are easily manipulated into war; we position congenital idiots into important positions and that we are ready to apply desperate measures with enough provocation. Rather than share our knowledge, culture and environment, we would rather stick a knife into the belly of those that would threaten to reshape them. Hardly the most cheerful appraisal of our future. Hulke's stories teach us we have face up to our instincts (to destroy what is different) and learn from them.
Again, this is an era that looks at both sides of the coin. Colony in Space sees the Earth in the grip of future shock, Alvin Toffler's imaginatively coined term for the acceleration of technological and social change that leaves the human race shattered and disoriented. 100 billion humans are living like battery hens with 300 floating towers housing 500 million apiece. It is a communist future, free thought is outlawed and the Earth has been polluted beyond recognition. The story follows a group of colonists who have chosen to break free of such a restraining society and make a life for themselves on another planet. One of the colonists states that back on Earth they didn't have a room but now they have land and fresh air. Tellingly, the only threat to the colonists is IMC Corporation, ruthlessly strip mining worlds now the Earth's resources are exhausted. Colony in Space pits the two sides against one another, resourceful progress against reactionary destruction in the style of a land-claim western. With the colonists triumphing and seeking political approval at the climax, it is an optimistic peek at a terrifying future.
There are stories that attempt to paint the human race as the good guys but reactionary characters stand in their way. The Sea Devils was a good example of this and The Mutants is another, set near the end of the Earth Empire where the human race is waking up to its mistakes, having exhausted the Earth and pulling out of worlds it has colonised to return home and rectify these problems. In the character of the Marshall (Paul Whitsun Jones giving an operatic performance), we have an antagonist who wants to continue to hold another race in the grip of the Earth Empire. The Marshall's order to bombard the surface with deadly rockets to make the air breathable to human life (regardless of the fact it is poisonous to the natives) is a rather unsubtle metaphor for British colonialism in the past, walking up to other cultures and stepping on them for their land and resources. Whilst it seems that the human race in the 30th Century is starting learn that this method of expansion is not morally acceptable, the reactionary decisions taken by the Marshall threaten to hark back to a darker time. One man is all it takes to have delusions of grandeur and wipe another species out and we have seen plenty of dictators in the shape of Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler with the ego and the creed of the Marshall. Look at the legacies they left us with.
Forget reading a textbook; if you want a history lesson about the seventies just watch the Pertwee Doctor Who stories! Politics reared their head in seasons eight and nine, about the time the Cold War was heading into its most politically charged period. Day of the Daleks suggests a Third World War, where the deaths of a number of politicians could ignite the already-rising tensions. The story takes the idea of the Earth on the brink of War to its grim conclusion, hopping 200 years into the future and displaying the Earth after two centuries of war, a wasteland of fear and depravation. It is one of the rare uses of time travel in the show to teach us a lesson about sorting out our future; there is a particularly didactic scene at the story's close where Sir Reginald Styles and the Doctor might as well look out of the television and talk to us directly about creating a better future. Whilst a science-fiction plot device sees this war averted, the message is that we are more than capable of doing this on our own.
Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks have made no secret of their desire to promote the environmental concerns in the early 1970's and pumped for a number of near-future stories that dealt with these issues. The three stories I feel best illustrate what they were trying to warn us about tackle the problem at all ends of the spectrum, the subtle, the obvious and the downright bloody ridiculous. Inferno takes the idea of searching for alternative energy supplies to a demoralizing extreme. In the near future, a scientific institution knocks on the door of Lucifer himself, drilling down into the Earth's crust to release untapped energy in the form of volcanic gas. Ingeniously, the story takes a leap a few hours into the future (a literal glimpse at what is to come and an enthralling plot device which adds a new dimension to the story) where the project is completed and the drill has practically cracked open the planet like an egg and unleashed a primordial force deep from the heart of the planet. Houghton might elaborate on the savage intelligence of the deposits for fictional purposes but his warning about penetrating deeper into the Earth's crust to find a fresh energy source are right on the nail. He cautions us from injuring and exhausting the planet beyond its toleration. The Doctor succinctly points out once the world has gone up in flames: "Listen to that! That's the sound of this planet screaming out its rage!" As far as Doctor Who is concerned, pioneering natural resources destructively (thrusting a knife into the surface of the planet to see what comes out) ultimately destroys rather than supports life.
Far less subtle and even more condemning is The Green Death. Environmentalism is stamped all over this story, a story which doesn't just use an allegory of modern-day concerns but actually has its characters debating pollution and allows us to see a horrific by-product of its waste. Episode one sees Doctor Who abandoning its escapist roots and engaging in a real concern (that is possibly why the Doctor is crow-barred out of the action for much of the episode) and a lot of what it tries to say is still relevant today. If the Earth was reliant on alternative technologies such as wind farms and drawing energy from the tides in the sea, would we have faced the sickening images of wildlife drowning in thick black oil during the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989? The Brigadier sums up the majority opinion of exploiting the world's fossil fuels: cheap petrol and lots of it. Raping the planet of its natural elements, just so we don't have to walk. Perhaps fronting this eco-revolution with a bunch of welsh post-graduate hippies was not the most restrained of attempts to tackle pollution and, just like Day of the Daleks, there are a few moments where (if you squint) you can see the characters stop talking to each other and start wagging their fingers directly at you. Over 400 nuclear power stations are still active and there are approximately 250 million vehicles on the road today. With CFCs and petrol fumes eating away at the ozone layer, eventually this will become a global catastrophe. The Green Death was rooting environmental concerns into children, the trouble was it never succeeded.
When we come to Invasion of the Dinosaurs, all attempts at credibly handling the idea of environmentalism are thrown out of the window. It is possibly Doctor Who's most ambitious script (Time-Flight excepted) and certainly the most original way of dealing with population control. With the use of time travel, beam dinosaurs into London and force its evacuation whilst simultaneously convincing a group of celebrities that they are on a spaceship en route to a new planet (when in fact they are smuggled away in a fake spaceship in one of Britain's nuclear bunkers) then, using the same time-travel technology, roll back time to a pre-industrial Earth where those same celebrities can repopulate a clean and free planet. You have to wonder what the reactions were when Grover and Whitaker were workshopping this idea in the planning stages. Putting it simply, murdering 99% of the world's population so we can try again and get it right. On screen, this is a colourful and dynamically executed adventure but its handling of its theme is by far Doctor Who's most far fetched. With its strong opposition to progress and attempts to return the Earth to its previous state, this is one of Doctor Who's most reactionary stories. Its ideals are optimistic but wiping out the people who caused the problems this planet faces is not the answer.
Late in the show's run with the arrival of Eric Saward came a number of ideas of how the show should present the human race in the future. Like most of his scripted stories, he pumps for mood over intelligence but he shines a light on a militaristic, rough-edged humanity, one that is used to fighting for what they have. Earthshock sees the military storming in on what they believe to be a massacre at an archaeological site and Resurrection of the Daleks is set primarily on an Earth prison ship. The former is populated by aggressive soldiers, tactically minded and ready to shoot first and think later. The latter is even more depressing; the crew of the prison ship sit about smoking, complaining and generally getting slaughtered by the Dalek taskforce that attacks. The death count in both stories is alarming; it is like a Tarrantino flick in space and the continual combination of humans and guns suggests a human race that has headed out into space and taken a few knocks. The ultimate expression of this dystopian future is Warriors of the Deep. Possibly a comment on the Iran-Iraq War that was devastating the Middle East or perhaps the still-raging Cold War, two power blocs are at odds and the one we visit in this story have an underwater sea base with nuclear weapons aimed and poised to fire at the other side. As a love letter to Malcolm Hulke's contributions to Doctor Who, this script is just about perfect, featuring an attempted proxy war, the deliberate systematic destruction of one species by another and the threat of nuclear destruction. The story culminates in one of the finest endings of any Doctor Who story, the pacifist fifth Doctor surrounded by corpses, having stopped the missiles being deployed and simply stating, "There should have been another way." Such a simple statement but one that drives home the pointlessness and devastation of war. Whatever its shortcomings are on screen, Warriors of the Deep remains in print one of the best lessons of the hopelessness of war that the series attempted. Pleasingly, neither of the power blocs is named, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks.
Why did this sudden level of violence and hardware infect Doctor Who's glimpses ahead? Eric Saward's comment on the future seemed to be that this was the consequences of nurturing a bloodbath like the Cold War for so many years, that we would as a society be infected by violence and point a gun rather than shake a hand. Or were these stories written by writers who had become accustomed to brutality in the media and were taking the next step to inviting it into entertainment? The eighties was a time of loud, brash, colourful statements (the sixth Doctor was just around the corner) and this bloodthirsty take on humanity is as shocking a statement as Doctor Who ever made.
Underrated at the time but a story whose ideas are far more interesting on paper than they were executed on screen, The Mysterious Planet reworks the ideas from The Face of Evil into an encouraging look at the far future. We are presented with an Earth knocked from its orbit and nearly devastated by a solar fireball caused by the Time Lords. The cause of this calamity is not as interesting as its consequences, which see the human race split into two factions: subterranean technocrats vs. a tribe of savages. It's nice to see a writer thinking about the effects on the human condition if a natural disaster struck, rebuilding with the tools of the body or with the tools of the mind. Post-holocaust imagery (the abandoned underground station, the lush overgrown surface of the planet) and suggestions (Peri being considered for several husbands to help repopulate the planet) help to build a picture of a world where the human race has survived and prospered under extreme condition. Even in Doctor Who's escapist years, there was space to explore the human condition in the future and see us come out smiling.
I really enjoy stories that suggest an optimistic future but still have their dark undertones. The Ark enjoys a variety of strong concepts, featuring a giant spaceship relocating the civilisations of the Earth to another planet because of the expansion of the sun. An awesome achievement by any standards, but this thrilling exodus is tempered by the strict regime of this society, conformity or death and the treatment of the Monoids, who whilst living peacefully with humans are tantamount to slaves and doing much of the dog work. Inferno, Day of the Daleks and The Ark all enjoy the narrative leap into the future, be it a few hours or 700 years. This affords the viewer the opportunity to see what will happen if we don't change things for the better. In the case of The Ark, the human race sees the error of treating the Monoids as second class citizens, their roles being reversed.
The Ark in Space and The Sontaran Experiment allow us to see the application and the consequences of class selection. The former story shares similar ideas with The Ark and seems to be Robert Holmes portraying the human race with much confidence. The idea that the human race has put all of its differences behind them, abandoned racism, sexism and all the other isms that keep us at odds is extremely appealing, echoing Gene Roddenberry's ethos in Star Trek. However, it soon becomes clear that certain advantaged people were selected for the cryogenic process, leaving the rest of the population behind to cope. In The Sontaran Experiment, we meet the descendents of those that were left behind, who have created an expansive Empire of their own, leaving the Earth unpopulated for the privileged to return to almost as a statement of their dismissal. The Doctor might make impressive speeches about the human race being indomitable but he should have reserved it for the next story; those who embarked on the Ark were supposed to prosper by leaving the less desirable elements behind. It would appear in the future we cannot escape what it means to be human. Even when humanity abandons its own, it thrives.
There are so many other examples of humanity's hiccups and triumphs. The Sensorites sees both sides of humanity, the greed (a handful of humans attempt to poison the Sensorites) and compassion (after dealing with this mistake they promise to leave them in peace). The Macra Terror sees a human colony brainwashed in an Orwellian nightmare. Fury from the Deep offers a time of great prosperity with no wars and plenty for everyone. The Enemy of the World features an Earth in the grip of famine and political games where one mans lust for power would allow suffering on such a huge scale. The Ice Warriors again sees us mastering technology that can hold back a new Ice Age. The Sunmakers features invasion by economy; who would have thought how we spend our money could bring the human race to its knees? The Invisible Enemy sees the human race leapfrogging across the galaxy like a tidal wave. Frontios is humanity's last colony, fighting to stave off extinction. The list goes on.
Looking at these stories as a whole, it becomes clear that the achievements of the human race in the future are extremely optimistic. The evolution of technology is boundless; from our first steps into space to habitation on the moon, from colonisation on other worlds to regimenting the space lanes, from an expansive Earth Empire to an exodus of biblical proportions, we never stop learning, achieving, adapting to new environments. Doctor Who sees the human race with a drive and ambition to expand and survive. So many stories in the classic series parallel the events of the time, taking them into future and escalating their consequences. Looking forward at our future, we constantly have examples of the human race looking backwards to past conflicts for inspiration. The stories bounce between the optimistic and the reactionary, with the positive angle losing out as much as it wins. The new series is still enjoying this formula today, with the Ood stories exploring and conquering slavery and the Utopia arc suggesting an unhappy answer to the humanity's quest for salvation. Doctor Who enjoys a wealth of future-based stories that refuse to take a monochromatic approach to storytelling. Humanity will always triumph ultimately but it will also take some knocks on the way and, despite leaps in progress, we will never escape what it means to be human, for good or for ill.
"Beau Brummel always said I looked better in a cloak" by Neil Clarke 6/2/10
I can't say I'm desperately well-dressed, but I do like clothes, and therefore I like that the Doctor likes clothes. It's unsurprising clothes are important to the character; given his variants, it's natural that the outfits he wears define and differentiate his incarnations.
I'm not aware of any major discussion of the Doctors' costumes, but as a visually minded person I tend to notice elements of 'visual continuity' as much as I do the regular kind. It's not ordinarily something I'd think about in a conscious way, but I can't help but inadvertently mentally cataloguing Hartnell's different cravats or Colin's waistcoats; it's just part of the way my minds works, so it's an aspect of the character I find interesting. What's really got me thinking about clothes is Matt Smith's costume. At first, I was immediately relieved that something old fashioned had been chosen (as opposed to, say, a 'yoof' hoodie uniform or regulation-trendy skinny jeans); the Doctor's costume has always been such a signifier of his unconventionality that I still feel cheated by Eccleston's outfit.
Since it was initially revealed, it's become more and more apparent how trendy Smith's costume is - but I don't think it really matters. It's fashionable in terms of a specific Topman/i-D demographic, so in fact it's quite clever of the production team to have smuggled in an 'old fashioned' costume under the auspices of what is currently fashionable. I imagine the 'old fashionedness' will outlast the trendiness; in future, people will probably only see its student/professor contrast, rather than the preppy/tweedy trends it's derived from.
It is strange how very 'on-trend' it is; the All Saints work boots, the jacket, the bowtie; you can't get away from models dressed exactly like that in every magazine going. In fact, when the costume was released, The Guardian (yes, yes, I'm such a bleeding heart liberal; it's okay, I didn't buy it) did a little satirical piece introduced with the line 'Here is the latest Burberry model...' going on to cite the look's overall trendiness - or rather, berate the costume designers for such blatant box-ticking, saying that the Doctor should be above such things (a concern I find pretty funny coming from a mainstream newspaper).
As I say, the costume will likely become so ubiquitous it'll surpass the styles it's mirroring (it already feels very familiar), though I am ambivalent about the decision to make it so close to current trends. (As opposed to, say, the Fifth Doctor's outfit alluding to the 80s Brideshead thing, rather than completely lifting a style.) It does make it harder to judge objectively, too; I really like it, but is that partly because it's fashionable, you're exposed to similar things everywhere at the moment, so it just seems 'right'? No matter, in purely DW terms, it works: the fusty tweediness, yes; the boots have a good strong Pertwee/Tom precedent, but, being laced, are also different enough, and give the whole thing a bit of edge, contrasting with the Troughton-like bowtie (sort of skinhead-cum-academian). Nice range of textures, too; presumably a high definition consideration, or am I reading too much into this? Good to see something other than a white shirt, anyway. Hilariously, The Sun (and, no, I definitely didn't buy that) did a spread rather desperately trying to make out that the costume includes elements of every single previous Doctors' outfits, including the Seventh Doctor's white shirt (which is hardly a defining element of his look anyway). Even though Smith's is clearly not white in the picture they'd published. Ah, The Sun. Bastion of accuracy.
I love the Doctors' costumes, actually - all of them. I'm really pleased that the Eleventh Doctor's been given a look - potential Hoxton wankerishness aside - that chimes with his predecessors' eccentricities rather more than the Ninth or Tenth do. The way the Doctor dresses really does mean such a lot within the programme, as shorthand for his 'otherness,' not just as an alien, but as a TV hero. With the exception of the Ninth's, each costume very plainly states that this isn't a character who's going to function in exactly the way you'd expect.
The First Doctor's outfit is, rightly, the most straightforward, and, although it's easy to consider them broadly similar (check trousers, black jacket) the Second's is a deceptively clever variation on it. It manages to be an anarchic subversion of the original 'Edwardian' silhouette, whilst also maintaining enough continuity to not be alienating. Similarly, the Third Doctor's initial, season seven costume is another fairly minor twist on the same basic approach (interesting though that Pertwee favoured a plain Nehru jacket): still Edwardian, black jacket, just dressier, with the addition of an opera cape. Capes are fab; all kudos to Pertwee for pulling that look off. Especially in his later costumes, when he obviously had the run of the costume department, he should look awful (coloured ruffled shirts, velvet jackets, AND checked Inverness cloaks?!), but he does actually look pretty cool.
In fact, it's impressive that somehow he avoids looking like a total ponce, perhaps because he's often quite dour and plays the role very straight. I guess, to an extent, his style is akin to Matt Smith's in that it chimes with general tendencies of the period: frills and velvet and so on. (At least he avoided flares.) I'm not sure about the bouffant - although at least it's kind of unique and doesn't date as readily as other contemporaneous 70s dos; the 70s did no one any favours - but I'd like to be able to stride around like that when I'm 55. (Martial arts might also be a bonus, then.)
Of these costumes, it's the little variations that I particularly like (something there's been less and less of as the marketing of the show has become more controlled and canny); for example, I really like the white version of the First Doctor's astrakhan hat, and his Panama, and he looks particularly great when he wears his cloak and little wire-framed glasses (like the Fifth and Tenth Doctors in their brainy specs). I must also be one of the few people who actually loves the Second Doctor's early 'stovepipe' hat (or, more accurately, according to DWM, a Paris Beau, Capotain, or bird-catcher's hat - not as catchy, though), partly because of its bizarreness, but probably also as it was so short-lived and only few picture exist of it (perhaps I'd be less keen if it had become totally ubiquitous). Even tiny variations like the Second Doctor's fur coat or cloak, down to his woolly hat in Fury from the Deep, are representative of the series' earlier off-the-cuff production, in a way that wouldn't really happen later on.
The Fourth Doctor's various costumes are odd, really, because no one looks beyond his almost cartoon-like features, hat, and scarf; the costume itself just isn't that defining. Consider that no one ever really describes him as being Victorian in appearance, even though during season thirteen, that's exactly what his outfit is like. I'm not so keen on the initial short jacket, though I love his cardigan and straggling necktie. Baker's costume is great in terms of its variability; it gives the character a richness, not to mention a realism, and, pleasingly, especially early on, really looks like he's been raiding a charity shop. Lots of detail too: cravats, neckties, the TARDIS key as a pendant, high waisted trousers, different hats and coats. Lovely. I'm less keen on the simpler coat and open-necked shirt of seasons sixteen and seventeen, but the variation is nice.
I'm also a big fan (again, one of few?) of his stylised season eighteen look. It's interesting though that John Nathan-Turner initially wanted a completely new look; wonder what they were considering? It is fairly ridiculous - and take it as read that the question marks are hideous - but it works as a reinvention of an existing look. The massiveness of the Russian-army-style greatcoat looks great on Tom (nice green patterned lining, too!), and the red shoes and argyle socks/burgundy boots is a nice variation.
The Fifth Doctor's costume, on the other hand, I absolutely loathe, for a variety of reasons. More so even that the Sixth's. It's the first time a Doctor wears a single unchanging costume, which is just a terrible idea (at least Tennant's, though essentially the same, has some variation). I'm not sold on the 'sporting motif' thing anyway (a polo outfit would've been better), but it's so flimsy and badly made, especially those pyjama bottoms! And the jacket doesn't even appear to be lined. The whole thing looks like a fancy dress version, not the real thing! Actually, having said that, purely from the point of view of the design, it works (in the DWM strip it's quite effective). It's just that, in practice, the red and beige is horrible, and as an Edwardian cricketing outfit, it's so patently inaccurate; I hate that it's someone's contrived idea of that concept (a frock coat with a cricket jumper), when they could have done some research and put him in a more believable jumper and stripy blazer combo. His panama hat is quite good though, if underused. The high-waisted trousers, shirtsleeves and braces look of Planet of Fire is an improvement, too.
I really do think the Fifth Doctor's outfit trumps the Sixth's as worst ever. The Sixth I've come to like if you view it as a magician's outfit, and in its brashness creates a nice tension with Colin Baker's difficult persona. In fact, I like it more the more ridiculous it gets (ie, the starry necktie/metallic purple striped waistcoat combo from Terror of the Vervoids). The problem with it, though a little more substantial-looking than its predecessor, is that it's so obviously a designed whole, like it was bought as an off-the-peg outfit. If it looked like various thrown-together items, that'd at least make more sense.
The other thing is that no one ever reacts realistically to it. In a physical sense, there's no reason why he couldn't turn up in The Godfather or a kitchen sink kind of scenario in his patchwork coat - as long as people reacted realistically to it. Personally, I think that'd make it easier to swallow; as it is, with most incidental characters not even mentioning it, it damages suspension of belief; it feels like the show is being dishonest to us. Even if it happened everywhere he went (which actually couldn't be a worse running gag than series four's, 'We're not married!'), at least that'd add a veneer of realism, knowing that the people he meets are thinking the same as the audience. In fairness, it is probably true of all the Doctors' outfits that people seldom react realistically to them, but this is most apparent when it comes to the Sixth. It does seem the production team realised it didn't function in a realistic sense, but then shot themselves in the foot by trying to ignore that, rather than acknowledge it. (His cloak in Revelation looks great though.)
I know a lot of people dislike the Seventh Doctor's costume, too, but I have quite a soft spot for it, perhaps cos I find the pullover a lot easier to ignore than the shirt collar question marks (although, coincidentally, I did just come across a load of rehearsal photos from Ghost Light where McCoy is without the jumper and it does look a billion times better). It's a bit too bright and light to start with, but I do like how genuinely dishevelled it is. Interesting too that it's much later than any of the others; I wonder if this was commented on at the time? It's quite thirties in style, and the tie, as opposed to cravat or bowtie, is quite modern. I read that it was meant to look normal from a distance and then stranger close up, which I think works: the paisley overload, lapel watch, etc. And how cool are the two-tone brogues? His TVM costume is interesting as a variation, though I agree with what McCoy said at the time about it being 'an American idea of an English gentleman'. I prefer his white linen suit from the NAs though; it bugs me that we'll never get to see that in real life. The godawful montaged effort on the cover of The Shadow of the Scourge doesn't count.
As for the Eighth Doctor, there really isn't much to say. A lazy Edwardian default, but made a bit Byronic, to mix in some sex appeal. Fine, whatever. The Ninth, however... as I say, I'm ambivalent. As a one off, I like it for how unusual it is; I'm just glad it didn't set a precedent. Now we've had a suited Doctor and are about to get a tweed-clad one at least the Ninth's leather has become a variation rather than a new precedent for "modern" Doctors' outfits. It does sort of work - the hard-wearing traveller thing - but I just wish he wore a shirt or sailor jumper (and completed the U-boat captain look) rather than those horrible Next tops. I suppose at least they avoided the frock coat silhouette - unlike the TVM - which there has been far too much of up to this point, to the extent that it's become a shorthand default for the Doctor's eccentricity, and as such, stopped meaning anything (cf any spoof you care to mention, and David Morrissey's 'next' Doctor outfit - which made it immediately apparent that he wasn't a real Doctor, as it's just too by-numbers).
The Tenth is a bit Next too. Bad times. I remember being so relieved when pictures of his costume were released, but now it does seem rather banal and safe - and not just through overexposure. Apart from anything else, the world and his wife wear Converse All-Stars! Probably up to and including Amazonian Indians. They just don't have the hip edge they're presumably meant to inject. Also, like the Fifth and Sixth Doctors, it looks a bit too obviously run up by the costume department, rather than being a real tailored suit (and coat). The coat I kind of like, but is a bit too contrivedly 'iconic'; long, for flapping in dramatic breezes, etc.
I don't know quite what to feel about the blue suit either. I tend to like the atypical variations, so there's something to be said for it for that reason, but, although it's unusual, again that feels like a slightly cynical stab at automatic 'Doctorishness'. It's a bit too bright. In fact, Tennant's just a bit too clean and perfect really. Bit too modern. Especially his hair; trying a bit too hard to be cool. At least Smith's hair is kind of inexplicable already, so it can't really date. (On the subject of hair, Troughton wins hands-down for coolest do - though Hartnell's wig is pretty inspired, as it's the most atypical element of his costume as a whole.) I sort of wish they'd made more of the 'punk with a hint of rockabilly' thing from Tooth and Claw, given Tennant a bit more edge (what, Elvis quiff, signet rings, tattoos, eyeliner?). Having said that, his quiff in The Idiot's Lantern looked a bit rubbish. Edginess isn't something you could really say comes naturally to David Tennant.
So, what have we learnt? I'm not sure. But I enjoyed talking about it! While I'm at it, I always see costumes in films that make me think, "Aha, that'd be great for a (hypothetical) Doctor": particularly Toshiro Mifune's white suit and flat cap in Kurosawa's Stray Dog; the short, 1930s wide-shouldered checked jackets from Brighton Rock; James Dean's simple jumper and chinos with a watch on his trousers from East of Eden (which is strangely iconic); or even Paterson Joseph's steampunk gentlemen from the BBC's Neverwhere, with half-bleached and half-dreaded hair. That'd be a bit of a departure, but that'd make it ace. Think of how many numerous options for doing something unprecedented there are. Better still, regenerate him into a woman and let the fun really begin!
Revenge of the Frock Coat Dogma by Andrew Wixon 5/3/10
There are some soft spots it seems you can never completely protect, and for the likes of us one seems to be the always-contentious issue of what the new guy's going to wear. I last put finger to keyboard on this topic just after Chris Eccleston's casting in a (by my standards) well-received item entitled the Frock Coat Dogma, wherein I argued... well, ye editor has gone to the trouble of hyperlinking said article, so you might as well pop back and see for yourself.
Of course, a few months later the joke was on me, as my glow of self-regard as a forward-thinking fan evaporated in the face of a leather jacket and jeans. I remember sitting rather disconsolately at a local group meeting where we all huddled round nursing our pints trying to persuade ourselves that that wasn't actually The Costume, it was Eccleston's own gear he'd been wearing for a photo-call... Slightly embarrassing to recall it now, of course, but back in 2004 the world was a hugely different place. The Frock Coat Dogma still held sway, whereas now...
Is the Dogma finally dead? Have we freed ourselves of Doctorly preconceptions? In the wake of the casting of young-me-laddo with the crazy hair, it seems appropriate to revisit the subject. So. The Frock Coat Dogma in the Rusty Years.
Well, obviously, the first thing to be said is that the Doctor himself barely wears anything remotely resembling a frock coat throughout the four seasons and associated specials just concluded. I say "barely", as there is of course that photo of the Eccy Doctor we get a glimpse of back at the very start of things... and one can argue that this doesn't really count as he's just adopting local dress (although one inevitably wonders what was so special about this particular occasion). I think we can put this down to Rusty's very sensible desire for our hero not to look like John Leslie (as he put it himself) and to generally tone down the "frothing eccentric" angle of the character.
It is, though, interesting that apparently Dave Tennant's first stipulation on taking the role was "I want to have a big coat down to my ankles!" Interesting, but hardly surprising given the great man's fannish pedigree. He is, of course, a fantastic actor, and took the show to new heights, etc etc, but I suspect that part of the reason he's been so comprehensively crushed to the bosom of fandom is because he's never tried to hide the fact that he is, to some degree, one of us, and gets excited about Doctor Who in a way that - most obviously - Chris Eccleston visibly didn't. I think it will be interesting to see how the reputations of the ninth and tenth Doctors' eras change over the next few years now that they are both complete. I suspect that no matter how much we may admire the Eccleston series, we will never really love it in the same way we do other, less-accomplished seasons with Dave T in them.
The Rusty Years have been notable for their "nothing's sacred" approach to characterisation and plotting, and the show did do things with the Doctor's character one would never have seen coming; he actually has a character, for the first time in decades, rather than just existing as a set of plot functions and personality quirks. He becomes emotionally scarred! He has sort-of romances all over the place! He goes on (oh dear) emotional journeys! All a very long way from the rigid, set-in-stone Frock Coat Doctor, who just runs down corridors a lot and shouts.
And yet, and yet... there are Frock Coats in the Rusty Years, and they are indicative. I speak not of those in The Unquiet Dead, as these are merely period detail, and it would have been odd not to include them. The same is true of most of those in The Next Doctor... but not quite all. I am really talking about the two most significant frock coat inhabitants of our time, Jackson Lake and Professor Yana. (It is a fair point to say that the Professor never actually wears his coat on screen, and you'd be hard pressed to notice he even has one unless you look for it. It's still there, though.)
The most obvious connection between this duo beyond their choice of apparel is the fact that neither of them is quite who they believe they are when we first meet them. Is Rusty therefore using the frock coat as a symbol of self-delusion? I think not. The other thing that they share is a deep and initially unarticulated connection with the Doctor, and this is where the frock coat becomes an interesting symbol.
One of the many brilliant incidental things about Utopia is the way Professor Yana is built up as a Doctor-analogue, but not just the modern Doctor; Yana's basically wearing a variation of the Hartnell costume, he has that old-school "Well, my dear..." diction, and so on. The frock coat is of course part and parcel of this.
Even for a prosperous Victorian gent, Jackson Lake's choice of frock coat is bit ostentatious, but let's not forget that he's a Victorian gent who's trying to be the Doctor. For this story to work at all, it has to seem at least possible that Lake could in fact be a future incarnation. Imagine if Lake had come on with a bow tie, tweed jacket, and crazy hair; that just wouldn't have worked in that particular story. For The Next Doctor to work (which I still don't think it actually does, but anyway) it needs a "next Doctor" who's that kind of stereotype figure.
Which is a very long-winded way of saying that, for all his reinvention of the Doctor as a dramatic figure, when Rusty wants us to start thinking of the Doctor as an archetype, or another character to echo him in some way, then he wheels on the Frock Coats. When I started writing this I was all set to conclude with a stern warning to the effect of "not dead, only sleeping", or "the price of good characterisation is eternal vigilance", or whatever. But now it seems to me that rather than trying to kill the Dogma dead - which I doubt is possible or even really desirable - Rusty has found a way to use it to energise and improve his writing. Good for him.
And, as I mentioned up the page, young-me-laddo is in a tweed jacket and bow tie (which inevitably got some bad press when it was unveiled; some things never change), which indicates that Moffy at least is not in the sway of the condition that he helped to name. Which promises to be good for all of us.
The Russell T Davies Era of Doctor Who by Daniel Saunders 18/4/10
It has become a commonplace to begin all discussion of Russell T Davies' achievements on Doctor Who by noting that he took a show that had become a laughing stock and returned it to its place as a national institution and not only that, but that he also single-handedly revived the family drama format. This is all true, although the case can be overstated. For instance, it was BBC 1 Controller Lorraine Heggessey who took the decision to bring back Doctor Who, before Davies was involved in the programme in any way. It was also people other than Davies who took the decision to give the programme a far more substantial budget than it had ever had previously, which (combined with improvements in special effects technology) have helped even the most pedestrian episodes of the new series look more impressive than much of the original series. However, in this essay, I want to look at the Davies era in the same way we look at the Williams era or the Cartmel era, that is to see it in the context of Doctor Who as an evolving television series, not in the wider context of the television environment.
Stronger characterization than in the original series, manifested in greater 'emotional realism' (a somewhat loaded term) is often said to be the greatest contribution of Davies' Doctor Who, not just by fans, but by non-fan commentators too. There is more than an element of truth in this assertion, but it is not entirely accurate. Characterization was certainly the key strength of the 2005 season. Across that season, for the first time since the early Hartnell era, we saw the Doctor grow as a character; not the sudden change of a regeneration or the appearance of the dark seventh Doctor in season twenty-five, but a gradual, story-by-story development that saw the battle-scarred ninth Doctor come to terms with his survivor syndrome and turn down the chance to destroy the Daleks for good. We also witnessed the emotional impact of travelling with the Doctor on those around him, both his companions and their relatives who stayed at home.
However, not all of this was good and not all that was good was subsequently maintained. The novelty of looking at the companions' home life soon wore off and scenes of Jackie and Francine complaining about the dangers of TARDIS travel soon became repetitive. The fan criticism of these types of scenes - that they were just a way of attracting a new audience (usually said, resorting to gender stereotyping, to be female), rather than stemming from any creative need - seemed to be true. This is a little unfair. Stories like Dalek and Father's Day showed that moving, emotionally-literate stories could be told within the traditional Doctor Who format of fast-paced adventure stories. It is also true that over time the 'domestic' aspect of the programme was reduced. Donna's family was far less a feature of the series than the Powell Estate. Nevertheless, the programme at times seemed to be manipulating the viewer in an attempt to produce an emotional response often helped by hammy acting and unsubtle incidental music.
Worse yet, the strong characterization of Davies' first year was not maintained. Instead of witnessing characters grow in a progressive fashion, they have moved back and forth according to the demands of the production team, not the internal logic of the narrative. Rose, a confident, independent young woman in the 2005 season, became jealous and possessive of the Doctor the next year. The Doctor seemed to achieve catharsis and leave his survivor syndrome behind at the end of Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, yet the production team seemed to like it so he relapsed regularly through the tenth Doctor's lifetime. The Doctor's Daughter was commissioned specifically to show Stephen Greenhorn that the Doctor could change, yet the events of the story have no lasting impact on him, not least because the story was followed by a comedy episode (that said, the production team had already neutered the story when it was decided that the titular daughter would not be the Doctor's 'real' daughter; imagine the impact if Susan's mother was reunited with the Doctor, but turned out to have betrayed his ideals).
Other characters did not fare any better. When she first appeared in The Runaway Bride, Donna was an unbelievable caricature, a woman so stupid that she failed to notice the Earth being invaded on two separate occasions. Such stupidity was clearly untenable in a regular character (although it might have stopped the usual tedious and inaccurate newspaper reports that the new companion is the "most independent one yet"), but we are supposed to believe that the events of her first story altered her outlook on life into something radically different by the time of Partners in Crime.
Equally disappointing was the appearance of the Master. After the 2006 season, I opined that Davies would find no room for the Master in his version of the programme. The Master was too poorly motivated, a caricature villain with no real depth to hold the audience's attention. However, if by any chance I was wrong and Davies did resurrect the Master, it would be as a much more complex and interesting character than he was in the seventies and the eighties. Unfortunately, I was wrong on both counts. The Master was brought back, but the subtextual motivation of the original series was brought to the forefront: the Master does what he does because he is mad, pure and simple. This is not very satisfactory. Madness as used here is a catch-all term to allow Davies to do whatever he wants with the character. It does not bear any relation to real-life mental illness. We never get a sense of what the Master wants to get out of his plans. Does he want power, or revenge on the Doctor or what? Why is he so intent on building a "Time Lord" empire when he never liked the Time Lords before? Is he also suffering from survivor syndrome? We are never told, and while it is not good to spoon-feed your audience, not answering any of their questions is not a good alternative.
The best example of Davies' increasingly broad-brush approach to characterization can be seen in his treatment of women. Davies only writes about two types of women: the selfless heroine who is willing to give up everything for her lover and the stubborn, argumentative 'battleaxe.' In the former category come Rose and Martha. In the latter category are Jackie, Francine and Sylvia (Donna is a sort of battleaxe-in-training), as well as guest characters like Yvonne Hartman, Harriet Jones and Cassandra. The only real exception is Lady Christina in Planet of the Dead, who is not quite either. There is no one in a Davies script like River Song or Professor Rumford, a character defined primarily by her intellect.
A more insidious example of Davies' approach to characterization has come in his reconstruction of the Doctor-companion relationship. Once, the Doctor travelled with his companions because they were platonic friends. It was that simple. Now we are supposed to believe that the Doctor "needs" his friends to stop him turning into some kind of monster. The idea that he just likes their company was quietly abandoned for the first three seasons that Davies worked on and was only partially returned to with the arrival of Donna.
Perhaps to fill the vacuum once taken up by platonic friendship, the Doctor-companion relationship has also been sexualized. It is harder to talk about this subject than any other connected with the new series. In my experience, those fans who like this development can make quite unfair and irrelevant assumptions about the psychological needs, not to mention the personal lives, of those fans who dislike it. Obviously, to anyone who grew up with the original series, this cannot help but seem a massive change to the programme's format. The early experiment of The Aztecs aside, the Doctor's asexuality was a key character point, making him almost unique in contemporary fiction. The idea that he travels with his companions simply because he fancies them (as seemed to be the case with Rose) or because they fancy him (Martha) changes the whole dynamic of the format. The Doctor was once a wise old man, a Merlin, a Gandalf, a Sherlock Holmes, the type of person who did the thinking and let more conventional heroes like the Brigadier and Jamie handle the mainstream heroics. This has now been undermined, but nothing particularly interesting has been put in its place. Where once the Doctor was distinctive, now he is just like every other hero on TV. Even if his libido is never mentioned again, we now know that it is there. The casting of ever younger and more attractive Doctors is a symptom of this rather than a cause.
It is difficult to tell if turning the Doctor into a conventional square-jawed hero is a cause or an effect of the cult that Davies has created around the character. It first appeared in his speech at the end of Bad Wolf . ("I'm gonna rescue her. I'm gonna save Rose Tyler from the middle of the Dalek fleet. And then I'm gonna save the Earth. And then, just to finish off, I'm gonna wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky!"). However, it was only with the arrival of the tenth Doctor that the Doctor began to be presented as godlike, almost as a force of nature. It can be seen in his pompous speech to the survivors of the Titanic. ("I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord. I'm from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. I'm 903 years old, and I'm the man who's gonna save your lives and all six billion people on the planet below. You got a problem with that?") Other examples include the Doctor's apparent apotheosis at the end of Last of the Time Lords, in which, revived by the power of prayer (essentially), the Doctor floats around dispensing justice and mercy, and his being borne aloft by a host of angels in Voyage of the Damned, but a more pernicious case is the end of The Fires of Pompeii, in which the Doctor is actually deified, which rather goes against the programme's usual message that anyone setting themselves up as a god must be evil. Frankly, it seems that it is not just Rose Tyler who is in love with the Doctor; the production team seem to be besotted too.
Perhaps as a result of being presented as infallible and indestructible, the tenth Doctor often comes across as smug and self-satisfied. This is particularly the case in the 2006 season, in which he and Rose only have eyes for each other. The nadir is Tooth and Claw, in which they laugh about werewolves minutes after someone has been torn to pieces saving their lives. They leave making jokes about haemophilia in one of the most tasteless moments ever in Doctor Who. In other stories, the tenth Doctor often overwhelms other characters by his sheer presence and occasionally comes across as a bit of a bully, although this may be because the incidental characters are often reduced to ciphers. At any rate, he certainly believes his own legend, telling the Vashta Nerada to look him up in the library.
All this is not quite as unprecedented as it might seem. The Doctor was increasingly legendary within the fiction of the programme from at least The Three Doctors. The Doctor is usually a little arrogant and occasionally pompous. Several incarnations have even been accused of bullying. I suspect the difference is twofold. Firstly, the fiction is actively supporting this legendary interpretation of the Doctor's character. The third and fourth Doctors would often boast about their abilities, but when they did you knew that something would go wrong (see the Doctor's lashed-up radio transmitter in The Sea Devils, for example). That never seems to happen to the tenth Doctor, who is almost always proved right. The second problem is David Tennant's performance. I know that Tennant is apparently number one Doctor to both fans and the general public, but I have never warmed to him. This is not dislike of the new, as I was raving about Christopher Eccleston within minutes of Rose. I find Tennant's performance a mixture of unfunny false eccentricity and arrogance with occasional despair - not an appealing mixture, especially given how self-centred it seems. The eccentricity seems designed (by writers and character) to make us think "What a wonderful, quirky guy! I love him!" Even the despair is self-centred; he seems to care less that Gallifrey is gone and more that he is alone (even though he seems to have more friends around than ever before). I have tried desperately hard to like the tenth Doctor and it is true that David Tennant is giving his all in a role he has coveted since childhood. But I find the character to unlikeable, too loud, too full of himself. I finally know the bewilderment and isolation felt by people who do not like Tom Baker's performance.
The plots of the Davies era have also been an area of innovation. Despite starting with a remake of Spearhead from Space, several of the stories in the 2005 season were innovative, at least for televised Doctor Who. Dalek, although based on the audio Jubilee (which I have not heard and so can not compare) cast the eternal conflict between the Doctor and the Daleks in a new light, highlighting the way that the Doctor's values had been distorted by the Time War. Father's Day was a time-travel story (itself a surprising rarity in the original series) that was cast in much more personal terms than usual. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances was extremely original in the details of its plot and especially its surprising ending. Even Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, which superficially starts as a remake of Vengeance on Varos before moving into a standard invasion of Earth, has some unique points, notably the postmodern use of real television presenters (before this kind of thing became tedious) and the subplot about Rose being sent back to the twenty-first century and trying to return. The following season built on this originality, giving us the playful Love & Monsters (which neatly deconstructed the experience of Doctor Who fandom), a rare parallel-universe story in Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel, and quirky and moving time-travel story in The Girl in the Fireplace.
However, recent seasons and the specials have seen the programme become more set in its ways. It was probably to be expected that some innovation would be lost as the audience's preferences became clear, in the same way that the radical experimentation of the Hartnell years was replaced by a series of alien invasions and bases under siege for much of the Troughton era. Even so, too often the production team seem to be making Doctor Who by numbers, producing exactly what the audience wants with nothing surprising or unusual. Even The Waters of Mars, praised by many for its examination of the Doctor's actions, is really playing with ideas previously seen in The Fires of Pompeii and even Father's Day (although the earlier story seems to be working from a different - and less problematic - theory of time). There are only four stories since The Runaway Bride that seem to me to be at all innovative: Human Nature/The Family of Blood, Blink (both of which are based on stories from other media) and the late surprises of Midnight (which felt like an experimental fringe play, in a good way) and Turn Left, both of which were a shock coming so soon after the deeply traditional The Doctor's Daughter and The Unicorn and the Wasp.
Obviously one can not experiment every episode; there needs to be a baseline of consistency to maintain an audience, but recent years have seemed very tired and derivative. The production team seem increasingly to hold to the narrow view that the programme is mainly about the monsters and perhaps about the Doctor-companion relationship, a rather narrow view even if it was held by certain production teams in the past.
Corresponding to this lack of innovation in the plot has been an over-reliance on returning characters. The last five years have seen the return of the Autons and Nestene Consciousness, the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, the Macra, Sarah Jane Smith, K9, the Ood and the Slitheen (this site's spoiler policy prevents me talking about The End of Time, but I am sure that by now you have heard what happens there too). Many of these have been reused more than once, with the Daleks being seen in every full season. Fanboy ideas (Daleks vs. Cybermen! A crossover with Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures!) have been brought to life with no solid plot to give substance to them. Worst of all was The Stolen Earth/Journey's End, which, like The Five Doctors before it, resembled a convention more than a story.
Returning characters can work if we see new dimensions added to their make-up, but this has rarely happened. It was perhaps forgivable for Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks to remake The Evil of the Daleks, given that the Troughton story is forty years old and largely missing. Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways raised the possibility of religious Daleks, an interesting idea if done subtly, but this was apparently thrown out as a quick jibe and later ignored; a pity, as a writer like J. Michael Straczynski might have done something interesting with it. Likewise, the Cybermen had an origin story, but afterwards were reduced to simply being muscle. The Master, as I mentioned above, is now simply insane, while School Reunion remoulded Sarah (or Sarah Jane, as she now prefers to be known) into Rose twenty years down the line. The independent journalist who used to launch investigations independently of the Doctor (see The Time Warrior, Planet of the Spiders and Robot) is now lovelorn and unable to move on with life without her Time Lord.
This lack of attention to the originality of the premise of each story has been matched by a slapdash attitude towards the plotting. Convenient plot devices and deus ex machina endings crop up everywhere. This is a problem dating back to the "anti-plastic" that saved the day in Rose. This is simply cheating the viewer. The author of any fiction, but particularly this kind of semi-intellectual adventure/mystery hybrid, is supposed to give the audience an ending they did not expect, but that they could have predicted if only they had been thinking as astutely as the hero. Producing a solution by magic (or pseudoscience) makes it impossible for the audience to guess what will happen, thus breaking the unspoken agreement with them. As H. G. Wells said, if anything can happen, then nothing is interesting.
Many of these plot devices are based on scientific inaccuracy. The production team have been criticised a lot for this, but it is worth looking at why a programme about a time-traveller (not exact a scientifically accurate premise) can get away with some things and not others. In my opinion, what is needed is consistency. The author needs to establish the rules of the fiction early on and stick to them rigidly; remember Wells' point about needing to keep things interesting. As a case study, it is worth comparing The Evil of the Daleks with its twenty-first century near remake, Daleks in Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks. The black and white story is, scientifically, nonsense. Maxtible and Waterfield create a working time machine out of a cupboard full of statically charged mirrors! Human nature can be recorded on a bit of wire! Yet, having established the rules, the story proceeds in a straightforward manner. There are twists, but nothing we could not have seen coming if we had been as clever as the Doctor. Moreover, everything sticks with the mock-Victorian aesthetic. The result is deeply satisfying. The twenty-first century story, on the other hand, does not seem to know what it is doing. Is its plot device a solar flare, gamma radiation or lightning? Moreover, a crucial bit of plot - that the Doctor's DNA can somehow be transmitted electrically down metal - comes out of nowhere just to provide an ending. By the time the Doctor is throwing together random chemicals to save Lazlo, the audience is feeling cheated (there is no good reason, in narrative terms, why the Doctor can save Lazlo's life but not make him human again). The story simply does not cohere.
Where the Davies era has experimented is in the nature of its settings. The 2005 season was criticised at the time for taking place entirely on Earth or on space stations orbiting the planet. Later seasons widened the programme's scope somewhat, but the stories often returned to Earth's past, present and future. Despite the criticism, this is not necessarily any more limiting than the Earthbound UNIT stories of the early seventies or the emphasis on 'outer space' stories in the late seventies. In some ways, it is less limiting, as Davies has made much use of the time-travel element of the programme to explore the Earth's history, both real and a projected future history. Every season has seen at least one historical story, contrasting with the seventies, which saw only six stories set completely or partially in the past (and that is including the S.S. Bernice scenes from Carnival of Monsters). The historical stories have shown an unfortunate tendency to focus on familiar eras and people, but this accusation can be levelled at all Doctor Who.
However, the (comparative) attention to detail in historical stories has not been matched in science fiction ones. None of the writers are particularly interested in giving us detailed alien societies. What we usually get are simplistic metaphors for contemporary issues (Planet of the Ood, The Doctor's Daughter) or jokes. Davies in particular is more interested in silly names than world-building (to be fair, he does come from a part of the world that considers Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch to be a sensible place name, if only to attract tourists; in this context, names like Raxacoricofallapatorius and The Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe begin to seem sane). When Davies tries to be a serious science fiction world-builder, most notably in Gridlock, he fails due to his inattention to detail. In Gridlock, the world outside the motorway is supposed to be dead, yet within minutes we have met the pharmacists and the woman buying Forget. If people being outside their cars is a rare as Brannigan implies when he sees the Doctor, how do the pharmacists make their money? And where have Milo and Cheen come from, given that they are only now joining the motorway? (I could also point out that the recycled food does not really work, given that energy would be lost to cater for the bodies needs, not to mention entropy.)
It is difficult to tell from this whether Davies is significantly better at writing in a known setting, whether past or present, or whether he is just not interested in science fiction world-building. The two possibilities may be linked. It is also interesting that other writers have largely followed Davies' lead and avoided alien societies, preferring for the most part to set futuristic stories in human-dominated environments, although this may be a product of Davies' unprecedented control over the creation of the stories in each season.
However, Davies' use of contemporary settings is not without its flaws either. There is a real problem with the level of verisimilitude in the present day stories. The thrill of the contemporary stories, which Davies insists is a crucial part of the appeal of the programme, is that of a world which is recognizably that of our own coming under attack. However, this has been undermined by the number of public invasions that have taken place in the programme's version of the present day. In Doctor Who, only an idiot could not believe in aliens (this is the central joke of The Runaway Bride), something that is not the case in our world. This should produce a world very different to our own, yet - perhaps because of Davies' reluctance to build worlds - this has not been explored. The implication would seem to be that the production team do not know what they want, verisimilitude or their own particular version of the twenty-first century. The result has been some rather confused stories. The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky is supposed to be about a down-to-earth menace in a realistic setting, but then Captain Scarlet's Cloudbase appears to blast the aliens with ray guns.
Of course, one way in which Doctor Who has attempted to achieve an air of verisimilitude is through pop-culture references. This is not entirely new, going back at least as far as the appearance by The Beatles in The Chase and being used a lot in the spinoffs of the nineties and noughties, but their use in the new series is notable on several counts. The references are very frequent, the Doctor is often the source of the references and real celebrities have made cameo appearances in the programme. These references certainly help to ground the programme in the present day. However, postmodern in-jokes are arguably not clever now that so many different novels, films and television programmes have used them, doubly so given that they are no longer making a point about the nature of fiction or intertextuality but are just there for a cheap joke and a bit of publicity. They will certainly make the programme seem more dated in just a few years time.
What is interesting is that the 'high cultural' references that were once so much a part of the programme (especially during the fourth and sixth Doctors' eras) have almost totally vanished, now being restricted to the celebrity historical episodes. As many people noted, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead sees the Doctor land in the biggest library in the universe and talk about... Jeffrey Archer, Bridget Jones and Monty Python's Big Red Book (who thinks "books... ah, yes, Monty Python"?). It is difficult to avoid the impression that Davies and the other writers are deliberately championing popular culture over 'elite culture'. Whether this is a good or bad thing is another question entirely, of course, and not part of this essay's remit, but it is difficult to avoid the impression that Doctor Who no longer offers the solace it once provided for clever, bookish children.
As I have noted several times in this essay, in many ways the 2005 season feels very different to subsequent seasons and specials, and not just because a different lead actor sets a different tone (in fact, the ninth and tenth Doctors have a lot in common in terms of scripts, with the differences arising largely from the actors' performances). It is difficult to avoid the impression that the authors of the 2006 season, although themselves fans (more so than some of the other writers who would later join the team), were desperate to avoid alienating a non-fan audience. To this end, they kept continuity to a minimum and concentrated on establishing a new direction for the programme. Like most of the greatest Doctor Who writers, producers, script editors and directors, they were just trying to make good television and left the 'essential Whoishness' of the programme to be formed by itself.
Gradually, Davies and the other writers and producers realized that they had a hit. They began to buy into the legend that is Doctor Who, to produce Doctor Who that is like Doctor Who, or at least like Doctor Who would have been if it had had CGI and a big budget in the seventies. Davies in particular began to live the fannish dream, giving us a Cybermen vs. Daleks battle, the Master conquering the Earth and Davros trying to destroy all universes, only to be defeated by a team up of favourite characters, new and old. Shipping, once a minority pursuit, has moved from a fan activity to subtext in the television programme and then on towards the main text in the cringe-worthy ending to The Stolen Earth/Journey's End. Now there is less need to sell the programme to the public with strong, original plots and good characterization, now that it has become a National Institution, Davies has become a Doctor Who addict needing a bigger hit each time. Just look at the way the season finales (a word I had never heard used for British television until the trailers for Last of the Time Lords) get bigger each year.
Despite all this emphasis on spectacle and epic stories, for me it is the small-scale, unusual stories that have tended to be most successful in recent years, stories like Blink and Midnight - and it is worth pointing out that however negative I have been about the past few years' output, the programme has produced a couple of worthwhile stories each season, albeit not always written by Davies. I just hope that the new production team takes the 'back to basics' approach of season twenty-seven, rather than the 'bigger and bigger' tactics of recent years.
The Russell T Davies Era of Doctor Who by Billy Barron 3/5/10
In every past era, I could pretty much be positive or negative. Davies made me happy and later so unhappy.
I'll start with the good. Series 1 is the absolute best season of any Sci-Fi show ever in my book. The only one that could come close is Babylon 5 Season 3. The acting was fabulous. All but one of the episodes were interesting (Boom Town was a big nothing). We had good comedy. We had character development. We had action. We had well-thought-out stories. We finally had a second good Dalek story after all these years (Genesis of the Daleks being the other). We had the Bad Wolf thing sneak up on us. We had the no deaths story;when was the last time that happened? The Edge of Destruction? Eccleston surpassed the Bakers as my favorite Doctor. Rose was my favorite companion of all time.
Beyond Series 1, casting continued to be pretty good through the Davies era. Even Kylie Minogue did a good job in another otherwise terrible story. The FX people did excellent work as did the music.
But I really feel like Davies had one great season in him and that was it. The general problems were that most of Davies' stories suffer from the same issues. First, he knows how to build a problem but no clue how to solve it. Out comes the Davies Ex Machina. Second, he is not subtle. I was really tired of having the same themes being shoved down my throat: the Doctor is lonely, Rose is the love of his life, etc. Third, I've always felt that Doctor Who was the best when we didn't have reoccurring villians all the time (e.g. Tom Baker era). Fourth, the show started making the Doctor too important in the Universe. And finally, the need to try to outdo the previous season in scope.
What happened in Series 2? Tennant was excellent, but everything else went downhill. To start with, Rose became totally irritating. I was happy when she was gone. How could this be when a year earlier I thought she was the best ever? The only other companion I ever remember souring on before was Adric although that wasn't nearly to this extant. But the other big problem was with the stories.
New Earth was a snoozefest. Tooth and Claw was generally good but why were the Doctor/Rose so childish? School Reunion was complete fanwank. It retconned Sarah Jane and not in a good way. The only good bit is that it helped get the Sarah Jane Adventures on the air which I do enjoy. But then again it probably helped cause that awful K9 series as well.
Then came the most annoying regular episode of the season: The Girl in the Fireplace. Most importantly, it completely threw the Doctor/Rose relationship out the window and felt out of place. Maybe sometime I need to write a review to describe how much I hate that episode.
The next episode of note was The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit which was the highlight of the season. But then it was followed by the trainwreck of Love & Monsters.
The two-part finale had only one good scene which was the Cyberman/Dalek trash-talking scene. Some of the concluding scenes might have worked if I still cared about Rose by that point, which I did not.
Series 3 hit the highest highs and the lowest lows. Smith and Jones was a great episode. Blink is my favorite Doctor Who episode of all times. But to counter that, Gridlock was pure torture to watch. Human Nature/The Family of Blood is enormously overrated (I thought they were boring).
But the run of episodes from Utopia to Voyage of the Damned was the worst string of Who episodes in the entire history of the program. Season 19 is the only thing that can come close. However, as much as I hate every episode in Season 19, they are better than The Sound of Drums, Last of the Time Lords, or Voyage of the Damned. And the exception to the good casting: Simm was pure Over The Top awful. Note: I wouldn't tag them with the worst episode ever; The King's Demons and Mindwarp are worse, but they are not far behind either.
Series 4 was very odd in that every story was average as were the first two 2009 specials. Rose came back and I didn't care in the slightest. The Waters of Mars was pretty good. The End of Time was completely forgettable, probably because it had almost zero plot (common Davies failing).
One thing that bothers me to no end is that I feel that Tennant was top notch but largely wasted on quite a bit of subpar material. On the other hand, if we had a subpar Doctor (e.g. Davison who I can't stand), how many more of the Series 2-5 episodes would have been unwatchable.
One final semi-side comment about Sci-Fi in general: I can't stand the half-assed story arc. Shows work best when there is no arc (e.g. classic Who), you don't realize there is an arc (new Who Series 1), or completely commit to the arc (Bablyon 5). When you tried to have an arc but don't really stick to it, it hurts a lot. Deep Space 9 is a non-Who example of this - it was a good show but how much better could it have been if they either stuck with the arc or completely got rid of it. Series 2-5 was pretty much the same issue though Series 3 was the worst. There was the Saxon hints that would sometimes show up but were just irritating and did not add anything to the plot of the season.
In conclusion, I thank Russell for outstanding Series 1 but wish he had walked away immediately after hiring Tennant as his later work was a case of the bad outweighing the good. I hope the Moffat era is better though the repeated non-subtle Moffat themes are already showing up.
Change is here by Nathan Mullins 10/6/10
Recently, the unveiling of the new Doctor Who logo has sparked a lot of interest among fans. Some like the new logo, whereas others hate it. I myself love it. It looks, or so according to some fans, like the 70's logo, combined with the 1996 TV Movie opening logo. So the combination of both, in thinking that both are classic logo's, in today's new age, gives the show a new dynamic. The show is always changing, and moving forward, yet there are still nods to the past. If we happen to have the lead actor's head in the title sequence, like the 'old' days, then I would be satisfied.
But that's not to say that I'm not impressed, because I can honestly say that I am. I've seen images, taken from online websites, where Matt Smith and Karen Gillan are seen strolling down a street, and the character of Amy Pond is seen sporting a policewoman's outfit. I like the idea of a police woman travelling through time and space, in a Police Box. I can almost imagine how the two happen to meet. Here's how I see the Doctor and Amy meeting....
The episode sees Amy chasing a criminal, and she captures him, and finds a police box standing on a street corner. She captures the criminal, and sets him inside the police box, when she realises where she is, and then she meets the Doctor. That's what I am guessing. Of course, that may not be the case, and I may have just ruined the start of the new series for myself, but at the moment, everyone I know seems to be thinking on the same lines as me.
But we're moving away from the article itself. In response to the change of logo, and the leaked pictures, most of us have a fair idea of what we presume the Doctor will be wearing. We've all seen the pictures in DWM (Doctor Who Magazine) and we all have our own opinions on his outfit. I personally love his new outfit. The tweed jacket won me over, as did the bow tie and the trousers. His whole attire is wonderful, and fabulously different to David Tennant's Doctor. However, there is something I'd like to see more of in the new series, and that is a change of 'costume' every now and again. Bear in mind that John Pertwee's Doctor use to have a change of costume almost every episode. As did Tom Baker's Doctor, in relation to a new season, and Sylvester McCoy's Doctor had a change of jacket, to add to his darker personality.
That's just a small request, aimed at those from the offices in Cardiff, working under Steven's reign, if you happen to read this.
Matt and Karen look awesome together. From what I have already seen, the new era of Doctor Who looks set to be brilliant. The new TARDIS too, is another nod to the past. By that I meant the outside of the TARDIS. If you thought I meant the inside, I'm afraid that whilst I am writing this, there are no pictures available of what the inside of the TARDIS is set to look like, for 2010.
But overall, I think the BBC have kept the whole production, covering the new series, firmly under wraps. They have let loose some pictures, and information, and even given us a small treat, in response to Matt Smith shouting back at a Dalek, in what lots of fans have said may be from Matt Smith's first episode. Heck, the BBC had to cancel a Doctor Who book not long ago, as it gave away too many references to the new series, starring Matt Smith, and a possible return of the Daleks.
But in response to everything I have said above, I honestly cannot wait for the 2010 series of Doctor Who. In 2009, we had David Tennant's finale as well as a new season of the Sarah Jane Adventures as well as an animated treat and even the Waters of Mars.What a year! To say that we did not have a full series of Doctor Who in 2009, is unbelievable.
The year has been and gone so quickly, or so it seems. Roll on 2010!
Why I feel there should be an alien companion by Nathan Mullins 21/9/10
So far, since Doctor Who's revival back in 2005, we have had companions come and go. From Rose Tyler to Donna Nobel, with few who actually stay on long enough to fully flesh out their characters and for us to get to know them. Billy Piper is the only actress who has repeatedly returned, on countless occasions, but to have a companion return so often is not only irritating, seeing someone who, frequently, has been given very well done send offs, but also having her outstay her welcome and taking over as the main star, whereas this role should belong to the Doctor, and to the Doctor only.
However, we have had all human companions who all have the same views and so on and so forth. I feel there should be an alien to travel with the alien we all know as the Doctor. I think that would really stretch the boundaries and push the Doctor beyond the limitations the production team have set out all ready. Now, they've done this in DWM and Big Finish. However, a variation of companion on TV would be nice. I mean, lots of fans agree that the Doctor should be travelling with an older companion, someone much older than previous companions, and I do have to agree that that would be interesting, seeing how a relationship would be drawn up in the scripts and how the characters would play off one another. However, I think there should be a male companion, as there haven't been many so far. What with Adam leaving an episode after Dalek, he was an interesting setup, but that's all he was, a setup that really wasn't going anywhere fast at all. Like Frazer Hines said in an interview, either bring someone back from the Doctor's past, like Sarah Jane Smith, or take someone who will bring something incredible to the show.
They should resort to someone who, like the 11th Doctor, is relatively unknown, who hasn't a big career and who can mould themselves around the part they are given, to really show their true potential as an actor/actress. From reading DWM 404 - The Stockbridge Child is a fantastic read - the character of Majenta Pryce is so intense that reading into the story feels like an actual episode being screened on the box. Things are so easily done on paper, but on television people are less likely to tackle something they don't feel too sure of. I hope that we get a companion who isn't human and doesn't necessarily have to be green, but someone or something else, that will continue to drive such a fantastic show such as Doctor Who.
The Doctor Who Ratings Guide by Nathan Mullins 16/1/11
What we say-goes!
First off, I'd like to show my appreciation for there actually being a Doctor Who Ratings Guide, where you can send in your publications, on what you either like or dislike about a certain something to do with Doctor Who. What I like about the guide is that you're allowed to send in your own stuff and submit work on anything at all to do with the show and its spinoffs. Having become a regular member, I have written quite a few reviews on televised episodes and the like, and have read other peoples, who have also written splendid reviews themselves and should be given a round of applause. Those who contribute to this website obviously have something to share through either what they're writing about and/or something they've closely analysed and deliberately taken account of. The reviews I have read - all written by those who have contributed since the very beginning of this site, have written over 7000 reviews - can be classed as professionals. Having only begun last year, sending in reviews like there was no tomorrow, but then, having to really acknowledge that those who do submit their work take an enormous amount of time in doing so, but only because they want to send in quality reviews on subject specialities they know well.
Sometimes, you get reviewers who, when they send in a review, they sometimes comment on those who last wrote in under a particular heading. When I read what people have to say, there's always a positive vibe and you are sometimes being praised for something that you've acknowledged and written in your review. I also like the fact that our editor Robert Smith? also sends in reviews, to say or comment on what he likes and dislikes, when he to sends in work.
Overall, the whole Guide is just terrific, if I'm to be frank. I love to hear what people have to say when they review something they have recently seen or heard, and enjoy writing for the website myself.
The Time Lord Aging Process: A Theory by Kaan Vural 4/3/11
A minor canon contradiction: in The War Games the Doctor explains that the Time Lords "can live forever, barring accidents". Yet in his first incarnation the Doctor is physically old: more energetic than he seems at first, but frail nonetheless. This is arguably the cause of his first regeneration in The Tenth Planet, but even if he isn't, it certainly affects the role he plays in his early appearances.
So what's the deal here? Is the Doctor immortal or isn't he?
The most sensible explanation for both accounts, as best as I can manage, is laid out below.
To begin with, it's more or less accepted that regeneration is a process whose origin is artificial; not native to Gallifreyan physiology, but a Time Lord innovation. This claim is easily substantiated with instances of non-humans training as Time Lords (The Invasion of Time) and Gallifreyans being granted additional regenerative cycles (The Deadly Assassin, The Five Doctors).
Less accepted, but still perfectly acceptable, is the notion that symbiotic organisms within the body of every Time Lord make the regenerative process possible. Mawdryn Undead contradicts this, but then the idea that the Doctor's body can store enough energy to reconfigure his body twelve times is a lot more difficult to swallow, considering the Doctor's statement in The End of Time that regeneration cannot bring him back from the dead; death should be more material to a biological process than an energy-based one. As for the TV Movie, it's relatively easy to speculate that the the anesthetic forced an involuntary respiratory bypass (or healing coma) that triggered a regeneration when prolonged.
The theory is that these organisms might also be responsible for the decreased or halted aging rate among Time Lords. Until the host's first regeneration, these organisms are more or less dormant, and are kick-started by the first grievous injury the host experiences. Once active, these organisms maintain a low-level version of the regenerative process, halting a Time Lord's aging and physical decay indefinitely. The healing coma the Doctor experiences in Planet of the Daleks might be an example of this low-level process at work. Note also that in The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood the Doctor says that organisms the Earth Reptiles consider pathogens are the ones keeping him alive: of course average humans have symbiotic relationships as well, but the fact that the Doctor experiences real pain is consistent with the idea that tampering with active regenerative tissues is a hazardous business.
What we've seen on television so far upholds this explanation to a degree. While actors age, as far as continuity is concerned the Doctor doesn't. If he does, it's through an artificial process (as in The Leisure Hive or The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords), and the argument could be made here that these processes interfere with the Doctor's biodata; thus, the low-level regenerative process is still at work, but is preserving a different sort of physiology. While the Doctor's first incarnation ended 450 years in, he doesn't die when aged twice that amount, implying that his biology protects him from old age in a way it did not before his first regeneration.
As a side note, this theory has the bonus advantage of explaining the continuity "error" of the first incarnation having one heart and not two: organ duplication may be a simple side-effect of the process, or the result of Time Lord "programming" intended to tinker with certain weaknesses in the natural Gallifreyan phenotype.
If there's any real issue, it's that the Doctor's subsequent incarnations have varied in apparent age. But when you think about it, never does this apparent age have any important effect on the Doctor's abilities. Never again is the Doctor physically limited by his age; in fact, in his third incarnation (arguably the oldest-looking after his first), he displays familiarity with certain martial arts. The argument would then be that the Doctor has something of a Greek-god physiology: though his face and external appearance give varying impressions of youth and strength, he is more or less physically fit throughout.
Now let's hope Moffat doesn't totally contradict me on all of this a few years from now.
How Does Regeneration Work? by Hugh Sturgess 22/5/11
Since we've entered a new regeneration cycle with Matt Smith, I thought it was about time that I wrote something about the regeneration process within the reality of the show itself (i.e. not from a production point of view). It's possibly the biggest key to the programme's longevity, since it removed any potential constraint on the length of the series and, like so much with Doctor Who, the production team had an amazing stroke of luck with the explanation they gave: i.e. none at all. Originally, the Doctor was to have his face changed by the Celestial Toymaker, but what we got was far superior. Since it is a natural process for him rather than a freak accident, the show was given the option to do it again and again.
The more I looked at regeneration from a fictional point of view through the series, the more I came to look at the TARDIS, rather than the Doctor, as the key component of the process. Indeed, this diversified to the extent that I've come to see the TARDIS as the source of a Time Lord's power, rather than anything inherent in a Time Lord self. In Power of the Daleks, the Doctor says that his "renewal" is "part of the TARDIS"; he follows that by saying "without it, I couldn't survive". That's meant to mean "without the renewal", but it could just as easily mean "without the TARDIS". The many "Time Lord gifts" the Doctor displays (regeneration, temporal copyright-protection, universal translation), in my view, result entirely from the TARDIS, hence the "symbiotic link". A gift, after all, has to be given by someone to someone else.
In the Doctor's original regeneration, and in the New Series, he demonstrates a determination to get back to the TARDIS as quickly as possible. In Parting of the Ways, he abandons Jack in his haste to get back to the safety of the TARDIS and the Vortex, and in The End of Time he struggles painfully back to the Ship so that he doesn't die outside. This is normally assumed to be because the TARDIS helps the process along and makes it smoother, much in the way that Cho-Je does in Planet of the Spiders. It's interesting that these Shipboard changes (first, sixth, ninth and tenth) are also the smoothest, with the Doctors being able to rush about and continue their conversations right after the regeneration (though number 10 has some problems later on). Conversely, his most difficult regeneration, his seventh, is outside and far from the TARDIS. If that has anything to do with his eighth incarnation being half-human, we'll find out later. The implication is that regeneration is not a one-man, no-props show; it always takes two to transform. (Sorry.)
The Doctor's body evidently takes some time to settle down. The novelisation of Power of the Daleks mentions the Doctor's bones sliding into place after he has woken up, and both the fifth and eleventh Doctors are "still cooking" some way into their first story. The fifth Doctor's synapses aren't fully-formed, meaning that he picks up all sorts of random electrical signals that confuse the hell out of him, and the same could be said for the fourth (he doesn't recognise Sarah or the Brigadier), the eighth (amnesia) and the sixth (his trademark looniness). In Castrovalva, he says that the regeneration nearly failed; presumably it only succeeded because of the Watcher, another bizarre addition to the regenerative process. Cho-Je in Planet of the Spiders and arguably the Valeyard and even the "weird" Romanas in Destiny of the Daleks are all expressions of this same concept. Both the Watcher and Cho-Je disappear when the "real" Time Lord regenerates, and the Watcher sort of merges with the Doctor to form a kind of chrysalis. Based on a description of a similar thing in Interference, I'm going to suggest that Watchers are the next incarnation in line, existing as pure "life force" or regenerative energy; since K'Anpo is a Buddhist, he naturally has managed to sculpt his Watcher into something more fully formed than the Doctor's meagre efforts, and it's only when the Doctor's much older that he can focus enough to create the Valeyard as an independent being. (Unless, of course, it's the Watcher that sculpts itself, and so the Valeyard created himself to that he could become a real person, like a sort of self-made Pinocchio.)
Something else that seems to aid in regeneration is the first Doctor's ring, which is used quite a bit for different things throughout the Hartnell era but is never fully explained. He's clearly very attached to it and almost refuses to lend it to the Menoptra, even when the situation's desperate. It can interface with the TARDIS's power systems - providing power to open the doors in the face of the Animus's influence - and can repair the TARDIS lock after the Monk's interference in The Daleks' Master Plan. He flatly refuses to explain what it does; yet, as soon as he regenerates into Troughton, he can't get rid of it fast enough. The Monk is also seen to be wearing an identical ring. It seems that these are "batteries" of the energy used to drive both the TARDIS and regeneration itself.
The Two Doctors is the mother lode of our modern understanding of the relationship between Time Lord and TARDIS. To recap briefly to those not in the know, the Doctor explains that a Time Lord pilots the TARDIS through "symbiosis", with symbiotic nuclei, which are physical entities located within a Time Lord's cell structure, and Dastari believes he's able to isolate and replicate them. These symbiotic nuclei are also called the Rassilon Imprimatur. (It's definitely meant to be imprimatur, not "imprimature", which isn't a word - this was the result of a meeting of the actorly inability to know how to pronounce words (see Pertwee's rendering of "chitinous") and the scriptwriter's inability to spell them.) Imprimatur means "let it be printed", so here refers to the "permission" of a Time Lord to pilot the TARDIS. There seems to be a semi-physical connection between the Pilot and the Ship. This is all rather confused by Journey's End, which states that the TARDIS is meant to be piloted by six Time Lords (one for every side of the console), but a handwave easily solves this. TARDISes are meant to have symbiotic links with multiple Time Lords, who - using the superganglia and reflex link mentioned in The Invisible Enemy - communicate telepathically with each other as they pilot the Ship. Renegades, loners by definitions, have lost their reflex link and can only pilot their Ships with significantly more difficulty. The rather enjoyable novel The Taking of Planet 5 states that TARDISes are normally piloted almost exclusively by telepathy, but that this leaves a "fingerprint" of the pilot's symbiotic nuclei on spacetime. Renegades, seeking to avoid leaving these clues wherever they go, bypass the symbiotic link by installing controls made of real matter; hence the rather low-tech look of the TARDISes we see in the series.
What's interesting about the way we have accepted The Two Doctors is that the Doctor himself admits that he made some of it up. No one has ever managed to work out quite what he was lying about, since his deception of the baddies later doesn't require him to have lied at all (Robert Holmes simply makes up a bit of technobabble and "pares the interface"). The stuff about symbiotic nuclei is undoubtedly true, since he says that in Part Two to Peri, and Dastari believes in it from the beginning.
Symbiosis is a mutually beneficial relationship. So who gets what? The Doctor gets the ability to travel through time inside the Ship. Well, that's not really "symbiosis", any more than a man riding on a horse is a symbiote. Again, we come back to "part of the TARDIS, without it I couldn't survive". I'm going to suggest that the Doctor receives a boon of "Time Lord gifts" from his Ship; he is a Time Lord because he has a TARDIS. This has even been borne out in the series, with the Doctor's universal translation ability converted into the TARDIS's "translation field". The Christmas Invasion revises this again, with the translation "engine" being the TARDIS, but with the Doctor "part of" the circuit; the conduit as it were. Again, the Doctor is "part of the TARDIS". The Doctor also has the ability to withstand temporal shenanigans like in Invasion of the Dinosaurs; in The Time of Angels, he says this is shared by all time-travellers. However, when Amy's personal history is rewritten in Cold Blood, she doesn't remember but he does. Interestingly, a physical trace of that lost history remains inside the TARDIS, her engagement ring. I think there's a link.
So, what does the TARDIS get out this relationship? Can it travel without a Time Lord having "deflowered" it with his symbiotic nuclei? Does it get some kind of telepathic nourishment from having a Time Lord on board? This latter option is slightly sinister in its implications: the TARDIS keeps its crew, even the Doctor, as pets. Lawrence Miles, in Toy Story (which is yet another one of his stories in which someone from the Time Lords' future comes back and says "I've got a secret but I'm not going to tell you what it is"), says that a TARDIS has the ability to, or, rather, the property of, blurring the boundaries between its own matter and that of its occupants and their belongings. Our own Mike Morris suggested this back in 1999 as a way to explain what happens to Kamelion when the TARDIS explodes in Frontios. While the TARDIS tries not to do this to its inhabitants, it will do it to their stuff. This would explain how all the knick-knacks like the hatstand and the recycled items on the new TARDIS console exist when surely they would have been mashed up when the TARDIS went into meltdown in The Eleventh Hour; the TARDIS holds their "pattern" in its memory and is reusing it. Like the engagement ring in Cold Blood. The ring has become part of the TARDIS interior, which isn't real matter and doesn't exist in the real universe. As the Doctor says in The Hand of Fear, "we don't exist in here". Thus, the outside universe can't alter it. By the same token, the Doctor's memories survive, but to explain my reasoning we will have to return to regeneration.
In Planet of the Spiders, K'Anpo says that he "regenerated and came to Earth". Tat Wood says in About Time 3 that he says this "as though they were cause and effect", when he blatantly doesn't. You might as well say the same thing about the sentence "Josef Mengele changed his name and went to South America". What does make me think there's a relationship here is that there is no mention of a TARDIS and the Doctor later says that he had to steal a Ship because he "didn't have [K'Anpo's] power". Terrance Dicks (no doubt with huge amounts of input by Barry Letts) says in The Making of Doctor Who that regeneration is a yogic exercise, and K'Anpo - yoga-meister extraordinaire - may have refined this into an ability to project himself across space with the energy of the regeneration. So regeneration and space-time travel are linked? Well, both seem to be the subject of that mysterious stuff "artron energy". Artron energy seems to be present in the mind of Time Lords, and gives the Doctor great mental strength within the Matrix, but it also seems to be part of the Time Lords' guidance of a TARDIS and can be affected by magnetism in Four to Doomsday (and the Doctor admits he doesn't really understand it). Some fans have suggested that it is a kind of energy soaked up by time-travellers during flight, and that explanation gets onto the screen in Doomsday, when it is mentioned that the Daleks have adapted it into a power source, but the stuff itself is not named. It seems to be the same colour as the New Series' regeneration energy, but it is different to the explicitly named "artron energy" in The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith, where it is all blue and crackly. Is this just a visual effect for our convenience, and really looks like neither of these? In the Torchwood episode Reset, Martha's antibodies have been mutated due to exposure to this "background radiation"; in Dalek, Rose's DNA seems to have been altered to become extra-nutritious to the titular creature. Most spectacularly of all, the Doctor keys into the artron energy inside Clyde in Death of the Doctor to swap places with him across time and space.
So artron energy, whatever it is, seems to indicate a link between life force and time travel itself. As Time Lords do more time travel than everyone else, they have the largest amounts of the stuff, but it can affect human passengers too. In The Christmas Invasion and The Eleventh Hour, the Doctor is still brimming with energy and spews golden stuff around the place for a while after the regeneration. Is it a coincidence that, in both instances, the TARDIS seems overpowered? In the 2005 Children in Need Pudsey Cutaway, the TARDIS engines are so full of juice that it results in the dramatic crash-landing in The Christmas Invasion; in The End of Time, the Doctor's regeneration seems to make the TARDIS overload and its engines phase. In The Eleventh Hour, the Doctor tries to take the TARDIS five minutes into the future to, effectively, "cool off" the engines, but the Ship jumps forward twelve years instead, indicating an overly active power source. Retroactively, the TARDIS seems a bit energetic shortly after Old School regenerations as well, in The Ark in Space (and Revenge of the Cybermen, where it drifts through time as it homes in on the Doctor), throughout Season 19 (as the Doctor makes constant, chronic misfires with the guidance) and The Moonbase, and has problems in Vengeance on Varos.
Artron energy, then, seems to promote regeneration and time travel, and even non-Gallifreyans can benefit healthwise from its effects. Most notably for our purposes, it also seems to flow freely between the Doctor and the TARDIS. As the Doctor gets older, is the amount of artron energy involved in the process increasing? That would make sense; if it comes from time-travel then the more experienced the Time Lord the more he has absorbed artron energy. Perhaps if you cut off Patrick Troughton's hand within fifteen hours of The Tenth Planet it wouldn't have regrown, while Matt Smith's would've. So his energy-regurgitating activities are much the same process as the TARDIS needing to jump forward in time to stabilise the engines: releasing excess energy.
The most recent significant piece of regeneration-related stuff is the "biological metacrisis" in Journey's End. Here, the orange swirly stuff is shown to be a physical presence rather than a visual effect for our convenience, and it can be focussed and diverted. The Doctor is healed but not changed. The remaining energy grows into a copy of the Doctor, with his memories, albeit infected by Donna's human biodata. So there seems to be two stages in regeneration: one is purely biological (the Time Lord is healed; this is seen in The End of Time too), the other changes the whole body and mind. The Doctor stopped after just the first phase in Journey's End. By channelling the rest of what I'm going to suggest (despite being a different colour to the officially named stuff) is artron energy into the spare hand, he allows it to become the focus of a "generation". The first stage isn't unique to Time Lords. We've seen the Minyans use it in Underworld, where it appears to be a reversal of the aging process (the old lady is restored to youth before our eyes). Rose, Martha and Sarah's vortex-derived resilience might also fall under this category.
The other case is that of Captain Jack. The Doctor has called him a "fixed point", "a fact" that can't be altered by the rest of the universe. Two explanations come to mind; firstly, that the Bad Wolf has somehow removed his "life force" from the normal flow of time (this fits with the description itself), or, secondly, that he has been given the involuntary ability to rewind his personal timestream to right before the moment of death. The second might make more aesthetic sense, as wounds are seen to go into "reverse" (bullets fall out of him, he's said to "heal", etc), and the process seems to cause him great pain, just as temporal shenanigans do to the Doctor in Invasion of the Dinosaurs. In a sense, he has been given a limitless cycle of "stage one" regeneration energy, but can never achieve "stage two", explaining why he's such a miserable git in Torchwood Series 1. Harold Pinter described a cancer as "a cell that's forgotten how to die", and Lawrence Miles recently compared that to Jack's own im-mm-mortality, and wondered whether he really was a threat to the health of the universe (as the Doctor and the TARDIS seem to think) that could spread (and he noted that Owen "coincidentally" becomes immortal and the rules of death seem more malleable than usual in the vicinity of Torchwood throughout the series). The Time Lords certainly have the ability to avoid Stage Two Regeneration and just rebuild their bodies based on the old pattern (as the Doctor does in Journey's End), but the only one who has this as a permanent arrangement - Rassilon himself - has locked himself away in the Dark Tower and refuses to come out. And, of course, Jack received this ability from a TARDIS. Once again, it's not where you come from but whether you're on good terms with a TARDIS that matters.
If it was because of artron energy that Jack is immortal, then it would presumably be pretty easy to 'fix' him, since the Time Lords must have some experience with artron-overdosing. So his undeadness isn't the same thing as regeneration, but perhaps it's related. Stage One seems to be just rejuvenation, as time is wound back over the Time Lord (or other being), healing injuries. That is the easy part.
In Journey's End, Doctor Blue, as he could be called, received the original Doctor's memories - and so did Donna. This, to me, suggests that the Doctor's memories don't remain inside his body during a regeneration. They are "held" somewhere and are returned to him once the process is done. The most obvious place is, of course, the TARDIS; the Ship would seem to retain a copy of these memories, and so we end up with three sets of them in Journey's End. Another time the Doctor has his memories extracted is in Human Nature, when he uses the chameleon arch to rewrite his biology, and the arch appears to be part of the TARDIS. In Shada, Chronotis has his mind destroyed by Skagra's brain-eating sphere, but when he is 'resurrected' without much explanation (probably not like Captain Jack, as neither the two TARDISes nor the two other Time Lords in this story seem queasy in his presence), he has all his memories and faculties back again. The TARDIS "holds" the memories of a Time Lord during the rebuilding of the body. Normally, it's intended for just the pilot/s, but it can be extended to any Time Lord, provided they're inside. I wonder whether the metacrisis is the only time biodata got mixed up during the process. It's worth noting that Romana's second incarnation is less aloof and more skittish, and dresses like the Doctor, while his next incarnation is young, blond and pert. In Utopia, the Master regenerates into a persona a lot like the tenth Doctor's (and it is only after this that the Doctor can hear the Master's drums when they meet minds). This raises an interesting point in light of Journey's End and its six-pilot model of TARDISes. If they all use the TARDIS both as a vehicle and a regeneration "source", then their biodata must mingle constantly. Is this why there are so many renegades in the Doctor's cohort? Did the Doctor, the Master, the Rani, the Monk, the War Chief and Drax all share a TARDIS and they came away infected with embarrassing independence? Willful speculation, I know, and feel free to discount it venomously; indeed, even I may, if only because it reminds me horribly of Divided Loyalties.
If the pilots' memories are drawn out by the telepathic circuits, we have our final link that "explains" why the Doctor remembers when Amy doesn't. The interior of the TARDIS isn't part of the real universe, and thus can't be affected by it, and the Doctor's memories - his mind, in some ways - are protected in the same way, because they are part of the TARDIS. The Doctor and the TARDIS are a Venn diagram, overlapping partially due to their symbiosis. Could this explain why the chameleon arch in Human Nature bears a distinctly similar name to the TARDIS's chameleon circuit? This raises the question of how the chameleon circuit works and whether it would work on something that isn't composed of block-transfer-computation-generated numbers. If the Doctor is "part of the TARDIS", is he at least partially composed of block-transfer numbers, and thus able to be "rewritten" by the chameleon circuit? Is the mysterious resurrection of Professor Chronotis a more extreme application of this? We could ask rhetorical questions until the cows came home, but I will say that - if this is true - then you would think that regeneration would be more a matter of TARDIS's "rewriting" their pilots, rather than the violent and garish volcano of golden energy that we see, but there are ways around it.
It seems that the process of regeneration "opens" the Time Lord's biodata, the way skin pores open under heat. Elements of foreign biodata can be incorporated into the prime biodata strand. Perhaps it isn't a coincidence that companions who witness a regeneration tend to stick around longer with the new model (Polly gets on really well with the second Doctor; Sarah is the fourth's "best friend" and that Doctor is the first to call the Brigadier "Alastair"; Rose and the tenth get touchy-feely...). A line cut from The Christmas Invasion (or was it Pudsey Cutaway?) stated that Rose gave the Doctor his Mockney accent, "imprinted" on him like a mother chicken on an egg, or some strange analogy like that. The process cuts both ways, with those nearby having their DNA altered as a result of exposure to a Time Lord near a regeneration (either shortly before or after, considering that these are TIME Lords we're talking about). Rose, Martha, Sarah and Amy are all near a Time Lord (in Martha's case, the Master) shortly before or after a regeneration and all display altered DNA sequences (I suppose that's a bit worrying in Martha's case); Donna even absorbs some Time Lord biodata and the Doctor's memories (in a biological metacrisis, the "host" TARDIS just goes nuts).
It's usually been assumed that regeneration is an involuntary process for a Time Lord, and that he or she will regenerate even if they're already dead. Indeed, this happens to the Doctor in the TV Movie, in which the general anaesthetic delays and nearly prevents the "regenerative process". This suggests that the trigger is chemical, an enzyme or a hormone. The New Series, on the other hand, alters the process so that it is conscious. The Master refuses to regenerate in Last of the Time Lords, and the Doctor says that if he dies before he regenerates he stays dead. Maybe it's half-and-half. If a Time Lord is injured, his body triggers a regeneration automatically (since it would be a bit of a weakness tactically to force an injured and/or unconscious subject to be responsible for the process), but he can abort it consciously. The TV Movie is an unusual instance, anyway, so maybe the delayed regeneration has something to do with the eighth Doctor being half-human and being such a loser in the first half of the EDAs.
One more thing that I think might be relevant. In Daleks in Manhattan, the Doctor grabs onto a lightning rod and somehow his Time Lord DNA is passed down the conductor with the "space lightning" and infects the Dalek/human hybrids. This is obvious bunkum (and frankly not very good bunkum at that), but it suggests, on the face of it, that Time Lord "biodata" (a catch-all term for anything vaguely like DNA that doesn't behave like DNA) can give shape to raw energy. Bizarre, but it might give a clue to how the body is rebuilt during regeneration. After "Stage One" rejuvenates the body, the "host" TARDIS holds the memories of the Time Lord within itself while stimulating the Time Lord's biodata to give shape to the massive amounts of energy flowing through it. A completely new body is formed from this energy, as an "anagram" of the old. The freshly minted neurons and synapses receive a "download" of the held memories, producing a new consciousness in a new body but with old memories.
Wisely, the programme itself has never tried to provide a definitive, all-round explanation for regeneration, primarily because anything shared in forty-five minutes of television would, by necessity, have to be pretty simply and basic, but also because it's just funner for fans to come up with their own explanation. Doctor Who fans love doing that. The weirder the better, frankly. The closest there has ever been to an "official" explanation in in John Peel's The Gallifrey Chronicles (an earlier and sorry namesake of Lance Parkin's novel). Here, Peel "explains" to us that the Time Lords discovered regeneration when someone wandered into Rassilon's office one day and said, "Hey, these are some nanites that let you regenerate." What a load of toss. Nanites?! Thank you for providing such a fascinating idea, John...
DWA: The meaning behind what's truly an interesting comic to get into by Nathan Mullins 17/7/11
Doctor Who Adventures has always been a staple of Doctor Who and its lifelong history. Though, Doctor Who Magazine had taken its place, before the BBC gave permission for a monthly comic to be brought out for younger viewers and readers who enjoy the adventures of the Doctor and his faithful companion, be it Rose, Martha or Donna - mainly because they have been the Doctor's telly companions since the return of Doctor Who. Apart from Jack, though they could have slipped his character in somewhere. Still, the comic has been just one of those 'staples' that I have consistently collected, right from issue 1.
For some time now, I have been told that I might be too old for the comic itself, but, as I say, there are many reasons Doctor Who Adventures works for so many people. The comic has dished out little insights into some of the Doctor's youthful adventures, when he was somewhere between 700 and 800. These adventures are perfect for consistent fans of the new series to pick up on the old series, so they can get a better understanding of the show and its long history.
Also, the comic strips deliver the goods each week, ever since the comic went weekly. What I like about the comic strips since the comic first launched is that they have been quite unusual, not as childish as some but, on occasion, they do interest and excite the reader as he or she is witnessing an adventure of the tenth Doctor in action. What I think some fans forget is that just because these comics are for younger readers, they get rather put off, but these Tenth Doctor Adventures are as just as important as what the comic strips are in Doctor Who Magazine, and are just as official as the television episodes, which I think are just as good... Well, kind of.
Another aspect of this terrific comic is that, as well as Doctor Who, the Sarah Jane Adventures are previewed and, as a fan of both, it's something that interests me and makes me want to watch the episode before it's even aired, which is always a good thing. I suppose you could call it a teaser of what's to come next and what we have to look forward to. As well as a double page of news and the cool posters that are an every week essential to this comic. It may not be as brilliant as Doctor Who Magazine, as that's for older readers and is a little more grown up and has a lot more to give. This comic can be fun and entertaining, and for a school kid to get back home and to read after a hard day at work, this magazine succeeds in wetting the appetite of any Doctor Who fan. I'm one, so I should know!
Who Started the Time War? by Hugh Sturgess 6/12/11
On Doctor Who Confidential in 2005, Russell T. Davies states that the Time Lords 'fired first' in the Time War, by sending the Doctor back to prehistoric Skaro in Genesis of the Daleks to abort the creation of the Daleks. That may be 'true' (and, since he invented the Time War, he should know), but it perhaps doesn't tell the whole story.
When people today complain about how powerful the Daleks are in the New Series, they miss the fact that even in the old days their development was wildly promiscuous. In their first story, they are depicted as an isolated group of war-ravaged and paranoid survivors who can't even leave their own city, and yet they've quickly conquered Earth (in The Dalek Invasion of Earth, appropriately enough) and developed a method of time-travel on a level of sophistication close to the TARDIS (The Chase). By Season Three, they are a galaxy-conquering force of darkness threatening humanity in every era of history (The Daleks' Master Plan). They suffer several crushing defeats (The Daleks' Master Plan, Evil of the Daleks, the Movellan war, Remembrance...) and yet they always come back, stronger than ever. Even after the Time War, their grand potential for genocide and havoc is never truly reduced. Just four Daleks are able to subdue the Earth, if we believe the Doctor in Daleks in Manhattan. Even in a story as deplorable as Death to the Daleks, mention is made of Dalek colonies with "millions" of inhabitants.
In Genesis of the Daleks, the Time Lord 'handler' on Skaro tells the Doctor that the Time Lords "have foreseen a time when [the Daleks] will have destroyed all other lifeforms and become the dominant creature in the universe". Some have suggested that this is merely a potential timeline that (presumably) the Matrix predicts, and that they aren't the Daleks we've seen but the ones we never got to see, but that's not how it's said. As far as the Time Lords can see, the natural path of Dalek development will end with them achieving their hearts' desire (as articulated in Journey's End): to become the only species in creation. That's presumably why the Time Lords go to such extremes, intending to abort the Daleks right at the moment of birth and thus pull a vital part of the universe out of history, rather than just a more elegant nudge towards a relatively stable co-existence.
Nowhere else in Palaeo-Who are the Time Lords seen to take such desperate actions (even the whole 'shunt Earth across space and screw over some videotape pirates hiding there' thing is done millions of years in the future when the Earth has perhaps outlived its usefulness), so they're obviously scared.
It should be remembered that, prior to the Time War, the Time Lords don't have anything approaching a military. The Vampire Wars seem to have been the last actual fighting they've done, and the Chancellory Guard is woefully incapable of defending Gallifrey even from losers like the Vardans. In most periods of history, it is inconceivable for the Time Lords to send troops to physically contain Dalek advances. Presumably, that changes at some stage, and the Time War begins. Time technology is still the best leverage they have until then, and the Doctor is the ideal agent: experienced, unconventional and with something of a vendetta against the Daleks.
What actually is a Time War? There are generally two options. The first is a war in which the two sides are separated by vast tracts of time, while the second is a more complex conflict in which time itself is used as a weapon, history is rewritten to win battles, and all parts of space and time are up for grabs. While the former option might square with some of the information we're given (the Crap Daleks in Victory of the Daleks announce that they will "return to their own time" from 1941, indicating that they still have a 'home era'), but after The End of Time there can be little doubt that the Time War was the latter. As Captain Jack says in Parting of the Ways, the Daleks "vanished right out of time and space" as they went off to fight the Time War, on a battlefield virtually invisible to lesser species.
Dalek chronology is confused enough, but the most difficult thing for pretend-historians trying to make a coherent timeline is that the Old Skool stories in which they're at their most advanced (The Chase, The Daleks' Master Plan, Evil of the Daleks...) are also the ones in which they seem to know the least about the Doctor. Even as they use their first DARDIS to pursue the Doctor through eternity, they call the TARDIS a "human" vessel and refer to the crew as "the humans" on several occasions. We can blame Terry Nation for not knowing the Doctor was meant to be an alien, but by the time of Evil of the Daleks, even David Whitaker has the Dalek Emperor think the Doctor is a human who's been altered by time-travel. In The Daleks' Master Plan alone do they know that the One They Call The Doc-Tor is an alien who just looks like a human weakling? Out of the remaining pre-Genesis Dalek stories, they're never threatening enough (you'd think) for the Time Lords to take an interest in. Oh, come on! You really think the isolationist Time Lords of The Deadly Assassin or The Invasion of Time would be interested in the losers in Death to the Daleks?
Perhaps it's neater on one level to say that Dalek history changes between certain stories. In Genesis, obviously, the Doctor is sent to abort the Daleks right at the beginning, but are there more "Dalek Histories" than the two posited by The Discontinuity Guide? That might make aesthetic sense - are the super-powered but surprisingly ignorant Daleks of Day of the Daleks, Power of the Daleks and Evil of the Daleks part of a self-contained timeline that doesn't include (say) Resurrection of the Daleks or Planet of the Daleks? - and it would add gravitas to the Time Lords' prediction of eventual Dalek domination if it is the inevitable end-point of all their histories.
It's true that the Daleks in Troughton's stories display abilities and militarist efficiency unseen outside the later Davros stories and the New Series, and yet in the latter stories they're up to speed with Time Lords, the High Council, TARDISes, everything. Well, The Chase and Master Plan could come right before the Time Lords introduce themselves and blow the lid on the whole "the Doctor isn't human" thing. Or, alternatively, the increasing interventionist streak in Time Lord politics has rewritten the histories of the lesser species (like the Daleks) and left their fingerprints all over them, explaining why no one breathes the name 'Time Lord' in the first six years of the series and by the end every species worth its salt (the Sontarans, the Cybermen, the Vardans, the Third Zoners, the Usurians, even the bloody Bandrils) is aware of Gallifrey. This suggestion is probably a terror for a lot of fans, as we're an obsessive lot on the whole, since it would mean that Lance Parkin couldn't write a single definitive timeline for the universe. And no one's written "Crisis on Infinite Skaros" to make sense of it, yet.
A fun idea based on "Crisis on Infinite Skaros" to answer "which Dalek timeline fought in the Time War?": all of them. Going from hints in Rise of the Cybermen about the Time Lords' relationship with parallel universes, and the absence of Time Lords from both Pete's World and the Inferno world without any great cosmic differences, it would make sense if Gallifrey is the nexus-point of all the parallel universes (or at least a number of them), and the Doctor and chums are just running around in one of them. So when it comes to the final scrap between the Time Lords and the Daleks, it's not just trans-temporal but multi-dimensional. All the Daleks from all the parallel universes fighting the Time Lords for the centre of creation. That would get around the continuity gaffe regarding Davros: he looks as did in Revelation of the Daleks and is not a severed head bolted inside the Emperor Dalek casing, because he is a version of Davros who didn't go through Remembrance of the Daleks, remained the Dalek Emperor and was munched by the Nightmare Child in the first year of the Time War. And since regular contact between parallel worlds often leads to local mutative effects (like the anti-matter crystals in Planet of Evil and the dead TARDIS in Rise of the Cybermen), any nasty side-effects of this meeting of timelines could explain the Doctor's namecheck in The End of Time of "the Skaro Degradations" as one disturbing development towards the end of the war.
If we go with Russell T's idea that the Time Lords start the War by trying to abort all of Dalek history in Genesis, then Resurrection of the Daleks must be the Daleks' first counterstrike. Not only do they intend to assassinate the High Council with a duplicate of the Doctor, they make sure they strap the original down and scan his memories. In Remembrance of the Daleks, both sides in the Dalek Civil War try to grab the Hand of Omega, but the attempt backfires spectacularly for Davros and his faction, which controls Skaro until the Hand blows it up. But what does War of the Daleks have to say about all this? Well... I guess it makes writing Dalek history easier if Skaro is never blown up and everything since Destiny is a trick for Davros's benefit. Pity that you can tell that's why Peel wrote the book in the first place. It doesn't really make much sense, so it might be best to assume that the Dalek Prime really had altered history by becoming the Movellans' creator and was trying to convince a Time Lord that he hadn't, explaining his uncharacteristic tea party with the Doctor on Skaro, and why he doesn't put much effort into (say) killing their greatest and oldest enemy while he can.
Anyway, the old TV series ends the Dalek story with Davros hoping to make the Daleks "the new Lords of Time" and calling for an attack on Gallifrey. Even the 'spin-off' media neglect to show us the build-up to the Time War. The 2006 Doctor Who Annual piece on the Time War references Lungbarrow (leading into the otherwise bizarre "handover" of the Master's ashes to the Doctor mentioned in the TV movie) and The Apocalypse Element (which is confused in itself about when it takes place, since it has the sixth Doctor meet President Romana before - from his perspective - she returns from E-Space in Blood Harvest), in which the Daleks invade Gallifrey, use the Eye of Harmony to sterilise an entire galaxy so as to create a new base of operations and then basically sort of apologise and leave.
Russell T's piece in the annual says that the "Etra Prime incident" led directly to the Time War, and it's easy to see why: the Daleks show that they hate the Time Lords, who vow to prevent any further Dalek aggression at the end of the story. The eighth Doctor audio Time of the Daleks depicts the Daleks as a temporal power to rival the Time Lords, with their own Eye of Harmony, but this is as far as it goes. There's a 'real' reason for this, of course: Big Finish is contractually obliged not to say anything about the Time War. In Parting of the Ways, Captain Jack describes the Daleks as "the greatest threat in the universe" before they "vanished right out of time and space". The beginning of his statement matches the Dalek Empire series, in which a horde of Daleks rampages through our galaxy and blows the hell out of everything. By the end of Dalek Empire III, a devastated and depopulated Milky Way is about to be attacked by a huge Dalek force with no way to defend against it.
Dalek Empire depicts the attack on our galaxy that the Time Lords swore to prevent. So what happened to them? No one's really sure how the audios and the books fit together, but I will say that the books have Romana's presidency (the one she presumably resumes in The Apocalypse Element) end rather suddenly when Faction Paradox attacks and the Doctor reduces Gallifrey and Kasterborous to sub-atomic particles the size of an electron. For at least 113 years after that, there are no Time Lords. If the two spin-off media can be integrated, then this would be an ideal time for the Daleks to grab hold of as much of the universe as they can get their grubby little protuberances on. So once the Time Lords are resurrected at some point after The Gallifrey Chronicles, they are probably appalled at the chaos that's happened while they were "away". Perhaps infected with ideas inherited from the Doctor, they might see the cliffhanger to Dalek Empire III to be the time to intervene in the affairs of the Dalek Race before it is too late.
Throughout pre-War history, the Daleks have always had a disadvantage against the Time Lords, as they - despite their time-travel - are still limited in their abilities. While the Time Lords can send their agents anywhere in time and space, including into Skaro's past (though presumably not its future, as it intersects with their own), the Daleks can only assault Gallifrey in the Time Lord "present" (which is presumably linked to Skaro since the Time Lords made themselves known to them), and can only have a go at it once (Blinovitch etc). Time travel is impossible on Gallifrey, so it would just be a conventional military assault against the universe's ultimate defensive position. In The Five Doctors, the Doctor notes that the ancient Time Lords used to snatch Daleks to take part in their games, and stopped only because they were so good at playing those games. Gallifrey itself is at a remove from the normal flow of time (witness the fourth Doctor's claim to hail from "inner time" in The Stones of Blood, pretty much canonised by the books and audios), and thus the Time Lords have a formidable bolthole. For the Daleks, paranoid by their very nature, having any rival - however peaceful - capable of interfering in Skaro's past must be a huge concern.
Is the Daleks' disappearance from time and space ("thousands of years" before 200,100 AD) the result of Dalek application of the same procedures the Time Lords used to remove Gallifrey from history altogether? In Remembrance of the Daleks, Davros intends to transform Skaro's sun "into a source of unimaginable power"; is that what eventually happens, whenever the Daleks disappear from the universe? (I'll say prior to the fifty-first century, as Jack knows about the disappearance, though, as a time-traveller, he might have picked it up from the space-year 17,000.)
If Genesis of the Daleks really did create a new Dalek timeline (which is the view of A Device of Death, in which Time Lords watch the timelines reshape themselves - they also use "time dams" to make sure that history still has the same shape, which is handy), a probable effect would be to make the Daleks aware of Gallifrey as a rival temporal power, as the Bunker must have CCTV and the Daleks would be wise to review it while they're digging their way out through the blocked tunnel. This might explain their continued interest in the Doctor throughout history and why they scan his mind first chance they get (Resurrection of the Daleks); they want to amass as much information possible about the Time Lords, in preparation for what they consider to be an inevitable war. The Dalek Race, imbued by their creator with a reductive Social Darwinism, simply cannot entertain the possibility of a "superior race" that isn't them. "After" Genesis of the Daleks, the Daleks view the Time Lords to be the biggest threat. This means, with a certain amount of irony, that the Daleks become deeply hostile to the Time Lords and paranoid about being retro-annulled because the Time Lords want them dead, and the Time Lords want them dead because the Daleks are deeply hostile to them.
The Daleks seem to have pumped themselves up for the Time War, with a completely redesigned casing and more strength and abilities than previously seen. They have the ability to extract brain-waves via sucker (though Ron Mallet says that, in his expert opinion, the way they do it is unrealistic) and have some kind of forcefield that can disintegrate even bastic bullets, although the CGI effect to represent it looks more like the bullets are actually removed from time rather than just melted. But basically these are cosmetic differences. More interesting is the suggestion that they have evolved to turn the "background radiation" created by time-travel itself into a power source. If we decide that this mysterious golden sparkly stuff is the elusive "artron energy", then it raises interesting possibilities about Dalek biology.
Ever since The Two Doctors, it's been assumed that time travel as Gallifreyans understand it (i.e. advanced, easy, history-threatening) requires a biological component, the Rassilon Imprimatur. The New Series has built on this hugely: now, anyone who travels in time is altered on a biological level. The Torchwood episode Reset claims that Martha's immune system has been upgraded due to her exposure to time travel and in Dalek Rose's DNA has been altered by time travel to become acceptable to the Dalek. In The Sound of Drums, the Doctor provides inherent stability to their journey by vortex manipulator, and in The Big Bang he's flitting to and fro with total accuracy despite constantly saying what a crap form of travel it is. While the Daleks' "cheap and nasty" time-corridor technology seems effective enough, presumably there's some advantage to be had from symbiotic nuclei. Flesh and Stone holds that time-travellers (even novices like Amy) are "complex spacetime events" who can, to a degree, resist changes to the timeline, and that seems backed up by The Daleks' Master Plan, in which the Doctor, Steven and Sara are aged by the time destructor (and then "youthened" again in the case of the first two) but the Daleks pursuing them are de-evolved into an earlier form.
Have the Daleks upgraded themselves with this time-travel "gene" to become immune to this temporal drubbing? If so, that might explain how the Cult of Skaro shifts itself around time and space with "Em-Er-Gen-Cy Tem-Por-Al Shift!" with no ill-effects, or even why the Progenitor in Victory of the Daleks fails to recognise the Time War models, provided the Progenitor is old enough. Throughout the series, the implication is that it takes a lot more than a time machine to call yourself a Time Lord. There is a biological side of things, an inherent relationship with time and an ability to "feel" the workings of history. It's this that the Daleks are after when they want to become the new Lords of Time; sure enough, the Daleks that invade Earth in Journey's End seem to be able to sense a subject's relation to history and so decide not to shoot Adelaide Brooks as a little girl to preserve the timeline (although that doesn't make too much sense, really, as they're planning to annihilate reality itself and, surely, abort all future history anyway).
The Time Lords also seem to have upgraded themselves for conflict as well. In Doomsday, the Doctor says that he survived the Time War "by fighting on the frontlines", and throughout the New Series he displays more random superpowers than Tom Baker during the Williams era. He can regrow whole limbs up to fifteen hours after a regeneration, and his new hand is "a fightin' hand". He has become immune to certain types of electricity (Aliens of London/World War Three) and has shown a previously undisplayed ability to absorb and transfer various kinds of energy: he shuffles Rontgen radiation around his body in Smith and Jones, he somehow uses up ten years of his life to recharge a TARDIS power cell and he removes the energy of the Time Vortex from Rose and returns it to the Heart of the TARDIS in Parting of the Ways (though this kills him).
Most remarkably, he can manipulate and divert the energy involved in a regeneration into a "handy bio-matching receptacle", namely his spare hand. Some people asked why he hadn't done this lifetimes ago; maybe it was a Time War innovation sown into his genetic code while the series was off air. After all, the half-regeneration doesn't leave him confused, unstable or spewing golden energy everywhere. On the contrary, he's perfectly normal and can say "right, where were we?" and depth-charge dramatic tension within seconds. Useful in a combat situation when you don't want your troops so confused after their regeneration that they get killed. Best of all, it produces another, full-briefed and -trained soldier instantly. (Yeah, yeah, Doctor Blue said he was "unique". So we're expected to believe that no Time Lord in history has ever considered funneling their regeneration energy into a bio-matching receptacle and growing a duplicate from it, even during the Time War when this would be a positive boon? To that I say: bullshit. He's talking out of his arse, like he always is.)
His ability to recharge the TARDIS with his own life-force seems to coincide with a massively rejigged TARDIS as well. It pretty much always ends up where it's going, with a precision unseen in Old Skool Doctor Who, it can cross the universe and travel 100 trillion years into the future with apparently no strain, despite hints in Frontios and in the novels (most notably The Infinity Doctors) that ordinary TARDISes don't normally have that great a range. It's clearly been upgraded for greater range, precision and durability, which might explain the stripped-down, organic quality of its innards, if these are recent "implants" that caused the Ship to mutate.
In addition to the Daleks and the Time Lords, other races have been wiped out or decimated in the battle. There's the statement in The Unquiet Dead that the Time War was harmless to the lesser species but devastated the higher forms with its fallout. Russell Tiberius's piece for the 2006 Annual is coy about the reason for it, but he states that the Nestene Consciousness loses its protein-planets, the Greater Animus died when its Carsinome walls were destroyed, the Gelth lost their physical form and the Eternals fled the universe in horror. The implication is that the damage to reality (both normal spacetime and the Vortex) was so great that many of the more advanced entities, who exist in more than the usual three or four dimensions (the Animus draws the TARDIS down from its "astral plane" in The Web Planet, the Eternals exist outside time and space), were injured simply by the war being fought.
The Forest of Cheem are aware of the Time War, but they exist in the year five-billion and so are beyond the bounds of Gallifrey's "noosphere" (Frontios); hell, maybe they're the enemy from Alien Bodies, as they come from Earth. The Sontarans are aware of the Time War, and seem completely annoyed that they weren't allowed to take part. Who stopped them? It's hard to imagine either the Daleks or the Time Lords turning down a ready ally (one they could deal with afterwards), so maybe the conflict was simply on a level beyond the Sontarans' ability, which would make sense.
It's never stated anywhere how long the war lasted and maybe, by its very nature, a Time War can't be measured in such terms. The End of Time's depiction of a conflict so obscene and so repellent to Nature that the dead were walking, battle-deaths dragged back into a monstrous parody of life (rather like Captain Jack...), suggests a war that simply couldn't be measured in human terms, since Time itself is a weapon and so open to change. The inter-dimensional possibilities would also make it difficult to write a history of the Time War, and that's probably for the best. It's simply impossible to imagine a story - at least a Doctor Who story - written around the kind of war envisaged by The End of Time, a never-ending battle of chaos, paradox and denial. The conclusion of the Time War is also best left ambiguous. The Doctor does something that annihilates both the Time Lords and the Daleks, meaning that he and the few Daleks seen in the New Series to have survived are the only ones to pass through the "back-wall" of the time-lock and into the post-War universe. If it became any more specific, it would be an anti-climax.
Think of it this way: it really would be the ultimate Davies ex Machina.
A Glossary of New Series Reviewphemisms by Hugh Sturgess 17/4/12
In the 1980s, producer John Nathan-Turner was known for his catch-phrases, like "wit rather than slapstick", "the memory cheats" and so on. All of these were euphemistic statements, layered with code, intended to plug their deeper meaning into the listener's brain like the keywords in a Terrance Dicks novelisation. "Slapstick", naturally, meant "humour I didn't like". "Monty Python humour" was worse, meaning "humour I didn't understand". "The memory cheats" can be translated as "stop complaining". In retaliation, fandom also developed its catch-phrases and code-words to describe Nathan-Turner. Hence, "continuity-obsessed", which translates as "Warriors of the Deep was crap", and "cynical", a much-loved buzzword that means many things to many people, but often means that the story/writer/producer in question played to the audience's emotions, which is somehow "cynical" rather than "naive".
Does modern fandom still speak in code? Why, yes indeed. The New Series, liked or loathed, is often described/praised/deplored in code, with a series of catch-phrases and watch-words intended to say more than they appear to. This can be difficult for the uninitiated, so I have helpfully listed some of the major ones, and a rough translation of them.
"Real Doctor Who" - Everyone has a favourite Doctor Who story. Popular ones are The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The Caves of Androzani and Ghost Light. One is a tongue-in-cheek pastiche of Victoriana, one is a full-blooded down-beat fight-to-the-death and the other is a violently weird work that is part pastiche, part horror and part social satire. It thus follows for some fans that "their" Doctor Who story should be the model of all future Who stories and that any deviation (in setting, character, tone, mood, ethos, etc) should be punishable by excommunication. For instance: "The Unquiet Dead is real Doctor Who," because it's set at night in an historical setting, which apparently means that it's a bit like Talons. However, it is a fine line between Real Doctor Who and rip-off. For instance, Tooth and Claw is also set mostly at night in an historical setting, but it is apparently a "rip-off" of Talons and not "Real Doctor Who". Maybe it needs to be written by Mark Gatiss in order to work.
"Classic" - Atypically good, used by fans. For instance: "Blink is a classic Doctor Who story."
"Classic" - Typically bad, used by the media. For instance: "The Green Death is a Classic Doctor Who story."
"Fantastic" - Good.
"Brilliant" - Good, but after 2006. An annoying thing to note about Doctor Who fandom is that we now speak like the tenth Doctor.
"Very him/her" - Another tenth-Doctor-ism. This is used to describe anything important done by a character, with the implication that it was deeply in character and nothing else was possible. Not very useful.
"The Doctor is dressed like a character from Queer as Folk" - Russell T Davies is gay. See Queer as Folk.
"The Doctor looks like a middle-aged rent-boy" - Russell T Davies is gay.
"The Doctor looks gay" - Russell T Davies looks gay. Because HE IS!!!!
"Too PC" - Too gay.
"The title sequence is bad" - And the channel ident beforehand was even worse.
"True fans" - People with whom the speaker agrees.
"Queer as Folk" - A mystical, unfathomable place where all RTD's hideous excesses and faults are piled up, laid bare and paraded naked before the non-viewer for money. In other words: "I haven't seen Queer as Folk."
"Russell hates fans" - I hate Russell.
"And you know something?" - I know everything.
"Emotionally retarded fanboys" - Used by Ron Mallett to mean people who liked Love & Monsters, and by Lawrence Miles to mean people who didn't. The New Series, for some reason, attracts the most heated of discussion. It's no longer enough that someone is wrong, it is essential for an ad hominem insult to be thrown in as well. Try to make up your own at home, kids.
"Rose is an annoying slapper" - Everyone I know is a whore.
"Rose's character is very shallow" - Whereas Jamie was my best friend.
"Eccentric" - What the Doctor used to be, and thus good.
"Eccentric" - What the Doctor used to be, and thus twee.
"Deus Ex Machina" - An ending provided by Russell T Davies. When Steven Moffat does this, it is called "fairytale" or "uplifting".
"Dues Ex Machina" - Same as above, but spelled wrongly. May be ironic.
"Buffy the Vampire Slayer" - I haven't seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer but I hear it's like Boom Town or something.
"Bitter old fanboys" - The opposite of "true fans".
"A colourful cast of characters" - Author is trying to be Robert Holmes.
"Rip-off" - Could be reminiscent of, if viewed in a bad light by someone who hadn't seen either before. For instance: Satellite 5 is a "rip-off" of the Nerva Beacon. Tooth and Claw is a "rip-off" of The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Torchwood is a "rip-off" of UNIT. (These are all real examples.) In fact, we can all join in with this one. Pick an element from the New Series and then link it by this meaningless term to the element of the old series that least resembles it. For example, Captain Jack is a "rip-off" of Sabalom Glitz. We see here the way rip-off works: Both Jack and Glitz are broadly "rogues in space", but Glitz is a seedy, overweight thief, and Jack is a suave, flirtatious, criminal nymphomaniac. Ergo, Jack is a "rip-off" of Glitz. Often used as though the reviewer thinks that Bob Holmes / Terrance Dicks / Barry Letts / etc came up with every single SF concept ever, and so anything remotely like it is stolen from them rather than (say) H.G. Wells. Betrays the reviewer's parochialism and ignorance of other works of SF and literature generally. Not to be confused with Real Doctor Who, which is a good kind of rip-off. Ignore.
(On a more serious note: I think that "rip-off" is generally used by reviewers who disliked the story but can't work out why, so they're attacking surface elements. Condemning Revelation of the Daleks as a "rip-off" of The Caves of Androzani because Lilt is a rip-off of Stotz ('cause he's a bit crazy and has a Beard of Evil), or Ghost Light as a "rip-off" of Pyramids of Mars because both feature a burnt-down house is useless, because it looks like you're playing nothing less than a game of Doctor Who bingo: "Powerful alien presence! Ooh, just like The Daemons!", "Victorian man with facial hair: OH! MY! GOD! Reverend Matthews is a rip-off of Professor Litefoot!!!" Don't try it, 'cause it makes you - and your review - look stupid.)
"Immature" - Children smell.
"Plays God with / breaks the rules of Doctor Who" - Author is not a real fan. But I am.
"Pressing concerns" - Trivialities.
"Mixed bag" - The telltale sign of the indecisive reviewer.
"Why do the Daleks bring the Doctor to the Gamestation...?" - To misquote Stephen Colbert: "I hate Davies too. I think he's a bad writer. And we should make up any crazy plot-hole we can think of to justify ourselves."
"Jackie Tyler is a chav" - Said for the classic boo-hiss "I-am-a-snob" look.
"Painfully funny/sad/poignant/long" - Demonstrates the deep appreciation that the reviewer has for good writing and complex themes. If it is used by a semi-professional Doctor Who fan (i.e. Jon Blum, Lance Parkin), it means: "Russell/Steven please can I write an episode please please thank you."
"Traditional" - See Real Doctor Who. The desire for tradition will increase in inverse ratio to the reviewer's actual familiarity with the old series (note: the reviewer must claim to be an Old Skool fan for this to work).
"Overfast pace" - Some Doctor Who fans haven't watched television since 1989. As a result, they are unfamiliar with the advances in storytelling in the intervening sixteen years. In the episode Dalek, we cut from the Doctor saying "release me if you want to live", to him again at liberty, racing into action. Some fans, it seems, wanted to spend five minutes watching him getting his clothes on instead.
"Concern with aesthetics over substance" - Echoes criticisms of the JNT era for being "style over substance", suggesting that the the New Series is a similar pit of horror and despair. This is used by reviewers who usually talk about how much they dislike the TARDIS set, the Doctor's costume, the title sequence, the episode titles themselves, etc. That is, reviewers who are more concerned with aesthetics rather than substance.
"Excessive humour" - This is the inverse of "wit", which is an ill-defined substance extracted from the glands of Bob Holmes, and only appears in stories set at night in an historical setting.
"One could over-analyse it" - If you like an episode, this neatly prevents another reviewer from criticising it, on the grounds that it's dumb.
"Imaginative" - Used by fans to describe a story that they enjoyed, or by detractors to describe a statement by RTD that they do not believe.
"Fan thought-police" - Used by people who seem to understand the concept of "free speech" to mean "I have a right to an opinion, which no one else can criticise, argue with or abhor". These are people who find differences of opinion so abhorrent that their very expression threatens them. They can be in either corner of the ring in regards to the New Series, though they both sound the same. They will employ "emotionally retarded fanboys" as a literary technique, throw insults at everyone who disagrees with them and then act disgusted that some strangers on the internet put them down. They will make you curse George Orwell for creating a term that can be so easily used by creeps to dismiss every other argument. They all state their opinion on the world's most accessible information network and then act angry when people show them the respect of actually reading, assessing and responding to those opinions, albeit to rubbish them. Dickheads, in other words.
"Well aren't you well-versed in Doctor Who lore?!!!!" - I have no idea what this one means.
May a Thousand Canons Bloom by E. John Winner 4/7/12
The notion that a fictional hero could have a canon of stories that effectively form the basis of a biography of the hero was actually an invention by fans of Sherlock Holmes, to account for the 60 stories written about Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle. Transposing the notion onto the adventures of a centuries-old Time Lord inspiring an untold number of creative minds to pour forth a seemingly endless river of stories in all available media can create unnecessary conflict among those trying to articulate their interest in that Time Lord. In his 2007 blog post on Doctor Who canonicity at PaulCornell.com, Cornell dismisses the notion that there is or can be a Doctor Who canon (a rather odd claim from the co-author of The Discontinuity Guide, which in its very nature is an attempt to establish some sort of canon, even if it's one to poke holes through). But he goes further, deriding the demand for canon as a bullying rally cry in a struggle for authority. There is some truth in the claim. Certainly, the desire for a canon could best be satisfied if some authority were appointed or accepted that could establish a canon and determine which stories belong to it. But the fact that there are fictional heros whose fans feel no need for a canon - like James Bond - indicates that something is at work for Doctor Who fans other than just the unctious need for power or control.
The most obvious of these, I should think, is a need for community. James Bond permeates modern culture; it's impossible to walk down a crowded street and not meet someone - actually quite a few people - who have seen at least one James Bond movie and have a general sense of the Bond schtick. Doctor Who's development and distribution, on the other hand, has proven problematically sporadic. In the US, this has been especially true; in the 1990s, I lived in a city known for its large number of bookstores and only one of them carried the Virgin NAs. But even in the UK, apparently, fans have had to suffer through hiatuses and public backbiting between producers of the TV show, between them and the book writers, licenses coming and going, and long periods when the most available Who was Doctor Who Magazine's comic series. Essentially, Who fans have frequently had to deal with unavailability of product, and uncertainty as to whether there would be any in the future. That would inevitably intensify the need to have a shared base of knowledge with which to communicate with others of like interest. Knowing that no one on the street where you live even knows that there is such a thing as Doctor Who undoubtedly intensifies the desire to communicate with someone who does. And a canon, obviously, would form the knowledge to be communicated, discussed, debated and agreed upon.
But I think there also has to be something about the phenomenon of Doctor Who, as hero, that attracts interest in the possibility of a canon of stories concerning him. Many fans obviously want Doctor Who to have had a history, that of a life that developed his character; that quirky something about his personality that can rightfully be found in all his incarnations. They want to be able at some point to read his biography and get to know something about the man.
Again, other fictional heros do not inspire this in their fans. The American hero Nick Carter, in all his differing appearances over nearly a century, as detective, spy or adventurer, had no biographical background. Dashiell Hammett created a private eye known only as the Continental Op; he wouldn't even tell us his name. This odd lack of personality development actually creates an intriguing enigma for many fans.
The failure to interest fans in the biography of a hero can also be the result of the formula used for the stories about him or her. If a formula is too pat, it may prove successful in selling itself as a product, but it doesn't really invite deeper interest in the characters involved. The Doc Savage novels, for instance, evidence enough variance to keep a fan reading them, but one doesn't really feel terribly interested in the private life of Savage, only in the ritual performance of the formula.
There are formulas used by the many writers of Doctor Who (in various media), but none so rigid that they are all we expect of our hero. And there is undeniably an enigma to the Time Lord whose real name we don't know, but he's no anonymous private eye.
No, there's something about the Doctor that makes fans want to know him, and know about him. That goes to the question of the essential personality of the Doctor, and that would take a much longer essay than this to articulate. Without offering it as a theory, but merely as personal opinion, I suggest that the Doctor evokes much the same feelings we have for a beloved but occasionally errant older relative: a prodigal older brother who finally returns home and proves not as bad as his reputation, even if he is a little crazy; an adventuring uncle who comes to visit bearing gifts from other lands; a cranky but charming grandfather with endless tales to tell of other times and other places. (It's not surprising, then, that the most endearing Doctor-Companion relationships are those where the Companion sees the Doctor as a 'best friend'.) Given that, the desire to get to know this person, learn something of his history, keep track of his exploits, make sense of the tales he has to tell, is completely understandable. Alas, that we can have such a desire does not make it satisfiable; wishing itself will not make it true.
When the original TV series was cancelled, I did not, as many fans apparently did, hang on to hope against hope and try to find suitable substitutes. I said goodbye to the Doctor and went on with life. Then, in 2008, I discovered that the BBC had rebooted the New Series, and gradually I became interested enough to begin looking for more Who in various media, partly to discover what had been happening to this old hero of mine over the years, to make what was currently happening more comprehensible (since clearly there were major differences between the Classic and the New series). In the process, I found myself growing more and more frustrated and disturbed with the whole problem of canonicity and what constitutes 'real Who'. The first real difficulty encountered concerned the Virgin NAs. When I first read three of these novels, I accepted the notion that they were canonical, and filled a gap in the narrative of the Doctor following the end of the Classic Series and the beginning of the New. The trouble was, I couldn't finish any of them. The Virgin NAs seem to be written in a convoluted, soap-opera-ish, somewhat padded generic horror/fantasy/sci-fi style that was widely popular in the late '80s and '90s, but which never interested me. So I accepted them as canon, but I couldn't read them.
Then of course there were the adventures that I really came to love, that other fans tended to dismiss out of hand; like Seven Keys to Doomsday, a story I can listen to over and over, and which is as 'Classic Who' as one could want. And the main reason it's not canonical is because it has a regeneration scene at the beginning that contradicts the original series timeline.
These multiplying conflicts and contradictions finally came to a head when I at last got hold of a copy of the Doctor Who comics written by Steve Parkhouse - a name mentioned in awe by many fans. And I admit that these stories - including Neutron Knights, Tides of Time, Stockbridge Horror - are certainly entertaining. Nor can I say, given their general acceptance by so many other fans, that they are not 'real Who'; of course they are. But the fact remains that the universe depicted in those stories - with its demons and sorcerers and elementals, its resurrected Rassilon and Merlin, its intrusive alternative hero Shayde - has nothing whatsoever to do with the narrative threads discernible in the original series. Even the depiction of the Fifth Doctor seems unrelated to the Peter Davison Fifth Doctor except in physical appearance and a love of cricket. There is no way to construct a narratively ordered canon of Who stories that could include both Resurrection of the Daleks and The Stockbridge Horror. Clearly, Steve Parkhouse had taken the essential character of the Doctor - the irascible adventuring elder relative from Gallifrey - and set him off on a series of adventures in another universe, regardless of any bearing that could have on the continuity of the TV series.
Of course canon-obsessed fans have a way of generating numerous theories to account for discontinuities like this. Paul Cornell remarks that any discontinuity or canonicity difficulty can now be explained by the Time War; e.g., Resurrection of the Daleks happened, then during the Time War history was changed and Resurrection didn't happen but The Stockbridge Horror did, then later in the Time War The Stockbridge Horror suddenly didn't happen and some Past Doctor adventure or Big Finish audio happened instead - and so on. The Time War can thus be used to settle any debate over canon and incorporate any story. "Well, that's just ridiculous!" one might exclaim; but that's Cornell's purpose, to overstate fan theories that seem to explain canon discrepancies to the point where the very notion of canon itself is made to look ridiculous.
I have considerable sympathy for Cornell's basic position. However, I feel a sympathy for those fans who feel a real need for having a canon of essential texts they can communicate about with others. I have two suggestions to make that might allow those fans that privilege, without pretending that arguments against canonicity are somehow irrelevant.
The first is, if there must be THE CANON of Doctor Who, let the BBC's legal authority over its property be the final word on the matter; if the BBC holds that the continuity of the television show effectively establishes the episodes of that show as THE CANON (as so appears), let it. Everything else can be spin-off, 'what-if?' or supplement or complement or 'somewhere in the same universe' or 'different universe, same person' - and so what? All right, it's not 'canon'; who cares?
For those who feel this just leaves us without any accounting for the many non-television Doctor Who stories, my next suggestion is to allow the differing media appearances of the Doctor to form their own canons. Wouldn't it make getting along with other fans easier if we allow that there is a canon of Virgin NAs; a canon of Big Finish audios; a canon of the Classic Series, and now a canon of the New Series? They obviously feed off each other, but are essentially independent. We don't even have to argue about, say, the relationship between the Target novelizations and the Classic Series; there is a canon of Target novelizations, and one can spend a lifetime reading them, enjoying them and trying to get their continuity to make sense somehow, without any reference to the television series.
If fans can't generally agree to these suggestions - and there's no reason why they should, presuming any even read this essay - then I must side with Mr. Cornell and simply reject the notion of a Doctor Who canon all together.
Doctor who is a fictional hero with the essential personality of an irascible elder relative, who happens to be a Time Lord from Gallifrey; he bounces back and forth through time and space in an old blue police box, encountering various adventures while righting wrongs. Well, that's it. That's all one needs to know about Doctor Who.
Adams vs. Bidmead: What's the Difference? by Hugh Sturgess 17/7/12
Fan consensus is often a fickle thing. The "received opinion" is subject to fashions, nostalgia, and so on. The abrupt change in status of recovered "classics" like Tomb of the Cybermen and The Celestial Toymaker are a case in point: fan opinion, with only the barest of supporting evidence, held both to be works of genius and so everyone involved took as much of the responsibility for them as possible; after they were (at least partially) recovered, viewers realised they weren't the epitome of terror or demented genius, and everyone involved tried to shift as much of the responsibility for them onto other, preferably dead, people. Fandom's relationship with the JNT era is far more complex, and most complex of all is the attitude towards Season Eighteen.
In 1980, John Nathan-Turner and Christopher Bidmead walked into the Production Office and said "right, clear out this junk". JNT's wish to defeat the "wobbly walls" cliche, Bidmead's hope to infuse the Youth of Britain with a Love of Science, and their shared desire to remove the "silliness" and "undergraduate humour" that had crept into the series during the Graham Williams era were, we mustn't forget, genuinely welcomed by the "fan politic". Say what you like, the stories of Season Eighteen were fan favourites for a number of years after the event. In recent years, there's been a bit of a swing of the pendulum back again, with Lance Parkin leading the counterattack, with Gareth Roberts, Jonathan Morris, Tat Wood and even our own Mike Morris and Thomas Cookson pitching in with differing degrees of enthusiasm, but I think probably "fan consensus" is still vaguely in the JNT-Bidmead camp.
The problem is that the loudest voices (Lance and Tat, for instance) are always voicing the most exclusionary, "I'm-right-and-you're-wrong" opinion, maybe because it's hard to shout "well, let's look at this in context and moderation, and I'm sure that there are others who will have their say, and please let me finish, if I might just begin by saying, before we start looking at the appropriate criteria..." with any degree of venom; as a result, the two sides can barely be made to see eye-to-eye. For instance, I've seen the colossal drop-off in viewing figures between Seasons Seventeen and Eighteen (to emphasise, BETWEEN the seasons, not in the middle of them) used to justify both sides' arguments. Lance apparently thinks that the British viewing public clairvoyantly watched The Leisure Hive before it was broadcast and so abandoned the show in droves while it was off air; Lawrence Miles says that it was a horrified response to The Horns of Nimon, even though the audience figures for that serial remained consistent throughout.
Obviously there's a difference between Season Seventeen and Season Eighteen, beyond the title sequences, the Doctor's costume, and so on. The argument is usually framed in Bidmead's terms (even by his detractors): Season Seventeen is "silly" (however you define that) and "cheap-looking", filled with "undergraduate humour" and "whimsy", while Season Eighteen got rid of the "jokiness" and replaced it with "real science" and "high production values".
I think we can all agree that there is a dramatic increase in production values between seasons, despite recent claims to the contrary. Lance Parkin churlishly hypothesises that a modern audience wouldn't be able to spot the difference in production quality between The Horns of Nimon and The Leisure Hive (an erroneous comparison, since neither serial was made for an audience in the twenty-first century), while Tat Wood claims that he showed Nightmare of Eden and The Leisure Hive to some of the "Not-We" and most of them thought that Nightmare came after The Leisure Hive. This is most probably one of the bald-faced lies for which Wood should be famous, as it assumes that ordinary British viewers believe that Tom Baker ages backwards, for starters.
However, the difference between the two seasons isn't as great as (say) between Seasons Six and Seven. Nothing else in Doctor Who history can match the sudden and totally unexpected jump between The War Games and Spearhead from Space. The recent changeover between Russell Tiberius Davies and Grand Moff Steven is another, though lesser, example of dramatic tonal shift between seasons. And yet, I've never heard of fan debates over whether Troughton's final season or Pertwee's first is the "good one", and - as far as I can tell - fans seem less willing to repeat what might be called the "Blink cliche" - that Moffat is a genius and Davies a hack - after watching a whole series produced by the former. So why does the Williams/JNT divide create such animosity? (And animosity it is; witness Lance Parkin's increasingly shrill denunciations of Bidmead and Bros. in Time, Unincorporated Volume 1, or Thomas Cookson's vague condemnations of "JNT apologists".)
Well, I think it stems from the attitude both Nathan-Turner and Bidmead evinced (and continue to evince to this day, in the case of the latter). Derrick Sherwin was motivated by cost in making the Doctor Earthbound (and, probably, by the knowledge that they could have done Season Five entirely on present-day Earth anyway); Moffat was undoubtedly motivated by what he thought Doctor Who "should be like", but he has never uttered a bad word about Russell and there's no hint that he considers the original New Who interpretation to be any less valid than his. The new team for Season Eighteen, however, came out guns a-blazing at Graham Williams and Douglas Adams, never giving quarter and never considering that their predecessors might have had even one idea worth a damn.
Bidmead and JNT said that they were reacting against the "jokiness" and "undergraduate humour", that Doctor Who had previously been too "silly". It's worth defining what this actually means. "Undergraduate humour" is often bandied around, always negatively. It's always a criticism, but of what, exactly? Well, undergraduates have a reputation for pranks, for jokiness, for not taking things too seriously and not respecting those in authority. There's also a general dislike of undergraduates in society at large, for being faintly decadent and lazy (see Rose, in which the title character believes that only students would dress up as Autons and try to scare people for a laugh). Bidmead himself deplored such people, commenting that, at thirty-six, he realised he was "a bit fed up with arty people and wanted the discipline of science back". The stereotype of the student is a tousle-haired fellow with a scarf and bohemian clothes thinking deep thoughts but making crap jokes: in other words, the fourth Doctor himself. In what is clearly something of a handicap for him as a script-editor, Bidmead just didn't like the kind of person the fourth Doctor was.
He also didn't like the kind of person Douglas Adams was: totally undisciplined, not inclined to take things seriously and more interested in abstract ideas than down-to-Earth, hands-on, you-can-do-it-too science that Bidmead found fascinating. The fourth Doctor of Season Eighteen isn't that different from that of Season Seventeen, just spectacularly less entertaining. He still has jokes, physical humour, the same presence, but the playfulness that he had ever since Robot has been smoothed away. The result is something faintly sad, a worth-out hero from our childhood, and while he has brilliance in every story (particularly Full Circle and State of Decay), for my money "the Bidmead incarnation" only comes into his own in Warriors' Gate, when he evolves into a sombre, twilight figure moodily resigned to his fate.
(There's a fascinating article to be had out of a comparison between the Doctors as they approach their own deaths. The fourth, larger than life, gregarious, unstoppable, gives up the ghost and sulks; the tenth gets angry and scared. The third Doctor is stripped of his pride and greed for knowledge and is left with nothing but his simple heroism and selflessness; the fifth Doctor is ONLY heroism and selflessness, and so dies as he lives, a man of goodness in a bad universe...)
At its heart, it's a basic anti-university dislike of people who spend all day thinking but not doing. In this, Bidmead could not be called a uni-bashing halfwit; indeed, he came from a rich pedigree of classically anti-intellectual English intellectuals. George Orwell, perhaps the defining intellectual of the English-speaking world in the twentieth century, hated "the chattering classes", thought of them as semi-traitors and once described Jean-Paul Sartre as "that French bag of wind" that he'd like to "box on the nose". Douglas Adams, on the other hand, loved universities, loved philosophers and loved students. Adams uses philosophers to talk about the meaning of life, Bidmead uses them to construct Logopolis, a place where mathematics genuinely makes the world. In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when creating the B Ark, Adams puts "the thinkers" in the A Ark and "the doers" in the C Ark. Tellingly, he puts both scientists and philosophers in the A Ark. Bidmead simply wouldn't have.
In Bidmead's view, scientists are doers. They discover the secrets of the universe, they make things or fix them so that they work better. Again, Logopolis is the key example: the Logopolitans are mathematicians, but their mathematics are so powerful they literally change the world. A comparison of the stories also shows up some interesting differences in their portrayal of scientists. The ones in Season Seventeen are Kerensky, Tryst and arguably Soldeed (not counting the many esteemed persons who have their intellects drained dry by Skagra in Shada); Kerensky is a moron so dim that he needs the Doctor to suggest he switch the machine into reverse; Tryst is a drug-runner (again, with a comedy accent); Soldeed is just plain mad, bad and dangerous to know. In Bidmead's tenure, there is Hardin in The Leisure Hive, Dexeter in Full Circle, the clique of scientists in State of Decay, Tremas in The Keeper of Traken and the Monitor in Logopolis. They are all intelligent, dedicated and, with the exception of Dexeter, all allies of the Doctor. It is the Monitor's programme that saves the universe.
This actually fits quite closely with Sydney Newman's original conception of the Doctor as an engineer without an "arty-philosophical mind". But was Bidmead correct to say that the series was "silly" before he took over? His arguments are often reduced to a perceived duality between his own work and crap stuff, but what he actually had to say about Doctor Who was more detailed. He admired the original remit of the show to be remotely educational, but deplored the "hippy-style fantasy" (again, a dislike of arty-farty "deep-thinkers") it had devolved into in the 1970s, in which "you could achieve anything by waving a magic wand". It's this attitude towards what is considered to be Doctor Who's "golden age" that, I think, gets a lot of people off-side.
I don't think you can really find examples in 1970s Doctor Who of "hippy-style fantasy". There are hippyish overtones in The Time Monster (the Doctor's zen-like story about the daisiest daisy when he's imprisoned), the overtly Buddhist Planet of the Spiders (if we assume that Buddhism was practiced with any degree of depth or accuracy by real-life hippies) and most spectacularly The Green Death... but I defy anyone to read into any of these stories a conclusion that "a magic wand" is the solution to everything.
The Time Monster's model of interstitial time is, ironically, far more in line with modern theories (quantum loop gravity, in fact) than most things in the Bidmead era; Planet of the Spiders almost explicitly states that "magic wand" endings hurt the Doctor's karma and the solution is to abandon his pride and be eaten away by radiation. Most damningly of all for Bidmead's argument, The Green Death itself is defeated by a serendipitous scientific discovery. As a man who had studied science (and would therefore know all about Alexander Fleming), Bidmead would know the significance of discoveries made purely by chance. In a much criticised scene, the Doctor confounds the Bimorphic Operating Systems Supervisor (which even sounds like a Bidmead name) with a display of circular logic.
So we can dismiss the "hippy-style" claim as nonsense. But what about fantasy? Of course there was fantasy. Planet of the Spiders is a Buddhist parable about the dangers of pride and meditating for material gain rather than spiritual fulfillment. In Tom Baker's era, the Doctor faces more than a few ancient evils from the dawn of time. Sutekh, unlike Azal, remains a mythical figure even when divested of his robots and Osiran war-missiles, as he really is a god of evil able to destroy history purely through the strength of his hatred of life. Hmm, fantasy maybe, but not too "silly", nor "hippy-style".
Fantasy has always been a part of Doctor Who, ever since the quest narrative in The Daleks. Phillip Hinchcliffe, when taking over the show in 1975, wanted to draw the series more into "science fantasy". It's undeniable that fantasy featured prominently throughout the Graham Williams era; what makes Bidmead's comments so telling is that he completely misunderstands the concept. He confuses Fantasy-with-a-capital-F with "fantasies", that is, private delusions of wish-fulfillment, as though all fantasy must have pixies that take you away to Never-Never-Land where you never have to go back to school, so long as you believe in fairies and clap your hands.
Interestingly, Bidmead oversaw plenty of fantasy during his tenure. Famously, he hated State of Decay and tried to rewrite it to be Eggs in Space, but Peter Moffat phoned up crying and JNT put all the gothic stuff back again. Bidmead would forever bitch about this, and would never realise that he had - purely by accident - made perhaps the finest example of science fantasy in Doctor Who. The set-up is pure Hammer Horror, with an isolated village, routine and mysterious culls of young villagers (who are, by way of coincidence, all young men with floppy fringes) and three sinister aristocrats in a dark tower. Behind this, there are the sword-and-sorcery overtones of a war between the Time Lords and the Giant Vampires in the embryonic cosmos. The Giant Vampire doesn't even have Sutekh's minor toys, he only uses the fuel tanks of the rocket to store blood. He is presented as an ancient, inexplicable symbol of terror, but the Doctor can defeat him because he knows how to fly a spaceship well enough to drive this colossal artefact through the creature's black heart.
Similarly, Logopolis (Bidmead's first story with himself credited as writer) isn't a sterile scientific discussion, but a deliberate modern myth about life (the Doctor) versus anti-life (entropy, the Master). For all the pseudo-science of block-transfer computation, there's no sane reason why the Logopolitans should dress up in monks' robes and mutter incantations to themselves; it's done because it's mythic. Entropy isn't green, nor would it accelerate at the rate we see in the story. Most notably, the Master is not portrayed as an immoral scientist; Bidmead makes no effort to explain his psychology or present him as a genuine being. Instead, for the first two episodes at least, he is a monster, far more than a mortal man and killing innocent bystanders because he thinks it's hilarious to squash us like ants. In the opening scene, what's he doing with that policeman's arm? I had nightmares about the Master of this story when I was a little 'un (and it were all fields, round 'ere). Bidmead himself writes "fantasy", much more than Adams did, he just doesn't have the wit to realise it.
Actually, that's a mite unfair. It's not that he looked at Logopolis and said "that's completely realistic", it's just that he a) didn't understand what fantasy was and b) hadn't seen Doctor Who beyond the most cursory channel-flicking. Listening to his commentary for The Leisure Hive, he begins by bitching about Lovett Bickford, Lalla Ward (both of whom are in the room with him), Tom Baker and everyone else involved, but ends up saying "this is actually quite good", applauding the script's "mature" discussion of fascism and so forth. The Leisure Hive's discussion of themes like fascism is significantly less mature than plenty of other stories from the "hippy-style fantasy" period.
Why did Bidmead say this? Because I strongly doubt that he'd seen a single episode of the series before he was asked to become script-editor. He dismissed the show as "silly hippy-style fantasy" when he also had high praise for Executive Producer Barry Letts ("a distinguished producer of the show in its earliest days," as he later described him, even though Letts had been producer until 1975; five years, and two producers, before the JNT-Bidmead regime), i.e. the man more responsible for any "hippy" stuff in Doctor Who than any single other individual. I can only imagine he saw a little of it and then switched off his TV and read a book instead.
His irritation at the slightest amount of humour on Tom's part in The Leisure Hive betrays a writer who just can't understand the concept of humour in a story. The idea that a writer might use humour to illustrate a point in a drama, or to provide texture, or as a moment of contrast against serious stuff, is beyond him. As Adams once responded to an irate viewer, the idea that "thinking and laughing are mutually exclusive activities" is slightly disturbing. The point of satire, after all, is to laugh and think at once. City of Death isn't "a comedy"; there is plenty of humour, but it never defines the story. There are no plot points that only make sense if we assume that the rules of the story are to be funny as often as possible. The Doctor always takes Scarlioni seriously, even if he's smiling while he does it.
Bidmead is deeply disingenuous when he applauds Tom for taking it "seriously" in Season Eighteen, with the implication that the old Tom Baker wouldn't even take the end of the world with appropriate gravity. Again, Bidmead betrays his total lack of familiarity with Doctor Who. He mistakes humour for what he churlishly calls "silliness". The Doctor always uses humour as a defence mechanism, as a weapon against his enemies. As the audio ...ish has it, he is armed only with his wits and his wit. If the tenth Doctor has a single, major fault, it's that he often takes himself too seriously and frequently skips into loud "This ends tonight!" speeches. Tom Baker's first encounter with Scarlioni in City of Death is a circle dance, as the two opponents fake joviality and pretend to believe each other's levity to test each other. Simply put, of the Doctor's three most admirable and emulable qualities (the other two, I'd suggest, are his xenophilia and his selflessness), one of them is that he laughs in the face of fear, even if he really is scared. Bidmead couldn't see beyond the surface.
This is shaping up to be an assault on Bidmead, which it isn't meant to be. Season Eighteen isn't a high-point for Doctor Who, but Bidmead is only part of the reason. The Leisure Hive is effectively a Williams-era story without its playfulness, but it's also at least an episode too long. Meglos is a bad story by definition, and by Bidmead's account he barely had time to do anything to the script beyond changing a word here and there. Full Circle and Warriors' Gate are fantastic stories, both with themes that blow the Williams era out of the water, and State of Decay is a wonderful mood piece. Logopolis is a genuinely iconic story about a hero of our childhood being driven into the grave by anti-life itself, and is the only regeneration story of the old series apart from Planet of the Spiders to feel like a gotterdammerung. Bidmead's fault is that he basically didn't understand the nature of previous Doctor Who and insulted the people who liked it. That got a lot of people's backs up.
The result is that a lot of fans hate Season Eighteen, not just because of what's in it but because of what its creators said. People like Lance Parkin and Tat Wood spring to the defence of Season Seventeen stories, applauding even The Horns of Nimon as "deliberate" pantomime. This kind of rabid escalation is understandable, because - in a way - Bidmead fired first.
Because of his unreasonable tone, the counterattack is even more unreasonable. No statement is too extreme. Witness Thomas Cookson's piece about... oh, God knows what he was reviewing that time, possibly a New Series episode... in which he absolves The Sun Makers and The Creature from the Pit for having the heroes kill the villains in cold blood because there it's presented as a comedy moment. The JNT era takes vigilantism seriously and is thus unconscionable. Parkin at one point declared that the "Monty Python humour" was "the baby and not the bathwater". This is obviously crap. No view of Doctor Who can plausibly say that Adams-esque humour was the very point of it, since that would mean that it was only "real" Doctor Who between 1977 and 1980. And I'm sure that Parkin doesn't mean it, but it's in retaliation.
On the City of Death DVD, Steven Moffat says "bluntly, the stories [Adams] script-edited weren't that brilliant". Of the five stories in Season Seventeen, only City of Death works. Shada, if it had been finished, would have been another one. It's no coincidence that they were both written by Adams. The stories are crafted to include humour where it's appropriate, they know when to stop, they know the tone they're going to have. Adams was a great writer, but not a good script-editor. Destiny of the Daleks is one of the weakest Dalek stories out there, because it dumps Douglas Adams humour onto a Terry Nation script.
Nation Dalek stories are grim fights for survival where there is no room for humour, quiet moments or really much characterisation before the characters die horribly. Done right, as with Genesis of the Daleks, they have a terrible, apocalyptic power that manages to fly over their other limitations with sheer energy. Break the tension for one moment and you end up with something po-faced and Flash-Gordon-esque. Destiny of the Daleks is a spectacular failure because Season Seventeen does not do "grim" and it does not do "tense". Everything's so relaxed. Read Finn Clark's review of the story for a much better summary than I can manage here, but for now I'll just say that only Season Seventeen could make a "nightmarish radiation-drenched hellhole" like Skaro into the perfect place for a picnic.
Adams fails to understand what makes Nation stories powerful, and so fills any slack moments with humour that undermines rather than underpins the story. A good script editor would eliminate those slack moments, would restructure the story in order to avoid them, rather than just reinflate it with his own breath. Humour is a wonderful thing, but it can't be put into any story without warning.
(The thing is, I'd love to see a genuinely Adams-esque fight-for-survival story. In this, I mean the black humour and bleak hysteria in the face of a meaningless existence. A televised version of Eternity Weeps, but even funnier. Done right and it would be unbelievably awesome and people would be crying even as they laughed. That version of Destiny of the Daleks could be remembered as one of the best Dalek stories ever. In the real version of Destiny, it's just the Adams humour without the Adams worldview.)
Creature from the Pit, Nightmare of Eden and The Horns of Nimon are plagued by Season Seventeen's hallmarks: bad acting and dull comedy. Beyond the deplorable production values (this is when Doctor Who gets its reputation for wobbly walls), every story is filled with excruciating cliches so that the show can mock them, but no one seems to have thought that this means that the viewer is being forced to watch excruciating cliches most of the time.
The Horns of Nimon has a good idea at its heart, but it's ruined by execution. I don't just mean that the sets are wobbly, or the acting for that matter. Neither of those factors help the story, but it's not as though it would be I, Claudius without them. The minotaur story is neutered of anything that made it interesting to begin with, and the idea that we're meant to be excited by the lame translation into SF is, like Underworld before it, insulting. The idea of Romana taking much of the story as the protagonist is a good one, but that means that the series's hero is left in a massive void of improv. It's like watching the adventures of an empty space. The Nimon are also a good case in point. You know the story that their costumes suck because they're meant to be unconvincing masks covering something even worse? That's a myth (possibly a conscious lie by someone hoping to improve the story's reputation): that was the original plan, but the production team thought this was too confusing for the audience, and so half-arsedly "improved" the masks to become real heads. In other words, something good was created, then changed until it wasn't good, and then ended up on screen.
Lance Parkin, as part of his campaign to rehabilitate the era, points out that very few stories took place on present-day Earth and this shows the programme's imagination. If so, why do all three of these stories feel so similar? Regardless of the setting, there are the same Doctor-and-K9-in-the-TARDIS scenes, the same SF in-jokes that aren't funny and the same running-around-and-getting-captured routine. Tom Baker becomes a zombie whose function is to shout "K9!" when anything gets difficult and say "come on!" when leaving a room. The Horns of Nimon is actually saved from total crapness by the Tom-foolery, as without it we'd have a tedious SF "myth" like Underworld, but I wouldn't recommend showing it to anyone with taste. The guest cast of these stories is the worst in Doctor Who history. Admittedly the last bit isn't Adams's fault, but the rest is. He has a problem with narrative: basically, he's not very good at it.
Having Douglas Adams as a script-editor has problems that he himself understood. If you have plenty of humour in your scripts, actors will invariably have lots of funny ideas that warrant nothing but suppression. Actors are often very good at saying other people's lines, but just as often crap at coming up with their own. Every time you see over-acting in the Williams era, be it Kerensky or Tryst with their ludicrous accents or Soldeed, the Skonnon guard ("weakling scum!") and the Pirate Captain, that's the reason: they think they're being funny. As Adams knew, you have to deadpan a lot of humour for it to work. Look at City of Death again: even though the Doctor and Scarlioni know they're jousting with wit in their first scene, neither of them is overplaying their part, neither is talking with a comedy accent or indulging in crude slapstick. Now look at any other story from Season Seventeen: the opposite is the case.
With the arrival of JNT, "nobody could be a stupid as he seems" goes back into the box, and it's not too bad a thing. If you want to pull off that level of humour, you need a producer with a far greater grasp of what makes wit witty and with a far tighter hold on his actors. Graham Williams had lots of good ideas (and stories like Shada are reminiscent of some of the developments of Seasons Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six, with ancient Time Lord artefacts and a companion equal to the Doctor), but he was terrible at the day-to-day management side of producing. In his first season, Doctor Who went from Horror of Fang Rock to The Invisible Enemy overnight. It took JNT four years to manage the same thing with the excellent scheduling of The Twin Dilemma right after The Caves of Androzani.
It was the Williams era that created the impression of Doctor Who as cheap and laughable. He was unable to hire good directors, selecting instead Pennant Roberts, Derrick Goodwin (who knew nothing about SF and only gave in when Williams begged) and Norman Stewart (despite the man protesting that he wasn't fit to be a director). The acting in the Williams era, particularly from the cute-young-things type characters in The Pirate Planet and The Horns of Nimon, is abominable. Graham Williams is occasionally compared to RTD in terms of tone and content, but the big, big difference is that Davies is competent.
In comparison to Williams, so was JNT. Ignore the accusations from mean-spirited people like Thomas Cookson that Nathan-Turner was a "bean-counter". For God's sake, a producer's job is to put the money on the screen in the most effective way. City of Death looks roughly 1000% better than the rest of the season because John Nathan-Turner calculated that it would be £25 cheaper to film in Paris than mock up sets for 1920s Monte Carlo. Season Eighteen looks much better than Season Seventeen. Don't bullshit us, Parkin, and try to tell us that it looks worse. He once said that the jungle set for Tigella is worse than Chloris, but he didn't think to mention that Alzarius looks better than either. The set for The Leisure Hive should, by all rights, look just like the cardboard corridors in The Horns of Nimon, or Nightmare of Eden, but they don't. They're boring, but they're better than their similarly boring counterparts the previous year. For one thing those hideous triangle-patterns have gone.
It is politics that shape fan responses to Bidmead's era. He fired first, got dirty and slagged off something that 14 million people watched. JNT started by saying that he hated K9 and wanted to get rid of Romana and the jokiness. A lot of people liked Season Eighteen, a lot of people didn't, but it was Bidmead's witless and superior-sounding comments that got people really offside. Which is why it's appropriate that he would later come to criticise the New Series for its "silliness", a silliness that is - horror of horrors - even more silly than Douglas Adams. Oh! My! God!
What he particularly took issue with is the "lots of planets have a north" brush-off in Rose. In all seriousness, his problem with it was that it wasn't true. Eccleston's accent is from the north of England, not from the north of Gallifrey. That was his objection. I'm not making this up. Christopher Hamilton Bidmead was so witless that he failed to see what this line was doing. It's a) clearly a brush-off, b) a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of Eccleston's obvious accent and c) a jibe at Rose's parochial use of "the North" to mean "the north of England", rather than an absolute geographical description. Bidmead couldn't grasp this. This, from the man who waves away the question of how the Master would know what the Doctor is planning with "he's a Time Lord, in many ways we have the same mind". Again, he fails to see the function of humour in drama, to provide texture, to provide lightness, to provide range.
(He wrote an article for the Daily Telegraph on 26 April 2005 in which he managed to insult his thirteen-year-old daughter within the space of a few lines by suggesting she would be incapable of picking up the not-too-subtle hints he was dropping about Doctor Who's quality. He also appears not to recognise that modern TV doesn't make flagship dramas in twenty-five minutes episodes; indeed, Doctor Who was the exception even when he was writing for it. It has nothing to do with audience attention-spans. He also compares the series to Buffy the Vampire Slayer (translation: I haven't watched it but I hear it's like Boom Town or something) and equates The Prisoner with Benny Hill. Yep, he's mad.)
RTD is "silly", Douglas Adams is "silly". These accusations are obviously bunkum. RTD is "silly", but only if you believe that Rose's stultifying life before the Doctor, the faded nobodies of LINDA and the human race ending up as psychotic severed heads in a dying universe are inherently hilarious concepts. A lot of Russell T's humour comes from laughing at death. Tell Rose or Love & Monsters without any humour and you'd have something as bleak as Damaged Goods and probably unbroadcastable. And Douglas Adams, "silly"? It shows how utterly devoid of critical faculties or subtlety Bidmead was that he can think of Adams as "silly".
Like Russell, Adams explains big concepts and tells bleak tales with humour to lift them. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is remembered as a comedy, but the true meaning behind '42' being the answer to the Ultimate Question is nearly always forgotten. With a single number, Adams reduces humanity - its loves, its hopes, its hates and fears, its achievements and culture and attempts to understand the cosmos - to the universe's biggest joke. When someone learns all the truth in the universe, he laughs so hard he dies. Showing a living being itself in relation to the size of the universe is enough to kill them. It's explicitly stated that the universe is infinite, and since any number divided by infinity is virtually zero, there is nothing in the universe of significance.
The humour in Adams's work is the gallows humour of someone laughing at the stupidity of believing that what they do matters in any way. Adams and Bidmead are, actually, very similar people. Adams also saw entropy as the great anti-life opponent of the Doctor. Logopolis is effectively an Adams story done with a straight face. Adams would have found the bleak humour in the idea that the universe is going to end because of the deaths of a few random old men, and that the universe is ultimately saved by disconnecting a cable. Once again, Bidmead just saw Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android and dismissed it as silly rubbish.
Contents of the Fourth Doctor's Pockets by Joe Briggs-Ritchie 22/8/12
The Fourth Doctor had famously capacious pockets and I seem to have rather a lot of time on my hands so why not...?
Sonic Screwdriver
Jellybabies
Yo-yo
Deck of trick cards
Scroll granting freedom of the City of Skaro
Honorary membership of the Alpha-Centaurian Table Tennis Club
Pilot's licence for the Mars-Venus rocket run
Jeweller's eyeglass
Ball bearings
Large toy bird
Goggles
Cricket ball
Magnifying glass
Handcuffs
Piece of yellow rock
Etheric beam locator
Rotten apple core
Empty toffee tin
French lock pick
Radiation detector
Pruning shears
Fireworks
Toothbrush
Football rattle
Magician's wand
Clockwork egg timer
Chocolate
Mirror
Torch
Conjurer's handkerchiefs
Toy batmobile
Duck whistle
Dog lead
Liquorice Allsorts
Telescope
Dark glasses
Coins
Hairpin
Lawyer's wig
Tongs
Hammer
Anti-radiation pills
Origins of the Universe by Oolon Caluphid
Instant camera
Felt tip pen
Spoon
Matches
Ass jawbone
Stethoscope
Climbing hooks
Everest in Easy Stages
Teach Yourself Tibetan
Toothpick
Gold stars
Rosette
Red rag
Chalk
High-frequency dog whistle
Chinagraph pencil
Magnetic tweezers
Patterned knitted gloves
Extendable ruler