"Creation and destruction" by Thomas Cookson 22/8/13
Johnny Byrne was one of the few 80's writers brought onboard as part of JNT's fatal new-blood policy to have proper credentials as a TV sci-fi writer.
The question is whether he really 'got' Doctor Who.
His first story, The Keeper of Traken wasn't intended to be the game changer it became, until JNT insisted on the inclusion of the Master, as JNT believed that revisiting the Doctor-Master rivalry might win over the fan audience to a new and radically different (i.e. regressed) Fifth Doctor. The original idea of Johnny's story was to tap into old folk legends of millennial dread, the collective fear that everything would change and fall into chaos. I don't think The Keeper of Traken is a particularly compelling story. In fact, coming off the more dynamic Warriors' Gate, it feels especially slow.
But it's also a curious road not taken. Given the fixation with redefining the show for the 80's, and that JNT was particularly proud of this production and how Traken was envisioned (before, oddly, The Twin Dilemma stole his fancy), and wanted to retain Anthony Ainley and Sarah Sutton, it boggles the mind why Traken wasn't turned into a recurring planet, with Tremas and Nyssa forming something of a new UNIT family. You could have had a long running arc of Beevers' Master repeatedly menacing Traken, and maybe even had Tremas eventually driven to take revenge on him, against his pacifist principles. You could also have a developing romance between Adric and Nyssa each time they're reunited. Because really, having the Watcher arbitrarily plant Nyssa on the Doctor in Logopolis was terribly done.
Frankly, the emaciated Beevers Master works far better than the Ainley Master, precisely because his handicap forces him to rely on his intelligence and powers of manipulation, making him a formidable foe. That dynamic between hero and villain should have remained. But once the Master becomes fully abled, he very quickly becomes less interesting and more prone to being stupid, and by extension made the Doctor seem inept in his continual failure to vanquish him, making the show a tedious, unending one.
Every time it looked like the show was moving dramatically forward in Earthshock or Enlightenment, it'd be all ruined when another Master-centric pantomime story comes along, dragging us three steps back. Presumably causing many viewers to lose interest and give up. Destroying Traken was a huge mistake, because it was an event the show was never equipped to deal with on a character level, in terms of either Nyssa's emotional reaction or the Doctor-Master rivalry, and it just made the show seem sociopathic.
Johnny Byrne's next story, Arc of Infinity, was one of the rare exceptions that plays very much on Nyssa's orphaned nature and how fiercely protective she is of the Doctor. Because Johnny Byrne once again put thought into the character. The problem is, Johnny would develop these resonant ideas, yet his writing style would be so parochial and clinical that it barely comes across and just feels like a dull string of pact cliches. The Frankenstein-inspired scene where Omega sees the world of Amsterdam through Peter Davison's eyes is a moment of sheer beauty. Yet it makes the whole story almost seem microcosmic of the Davison era, where somehow the precious jewel of a good moment somehow didn't escape above the surrounding dreck but got swallowed up by it, making the whole thing feel worthless and best forgotten.
Then we come to Warriors of the Deep. There's a part of me that suspects this wasn't really Johnny Byrne's fault, but was more down to the editorial interference of Eric Saward and Ian Levine. But I'm not convinced anymore. I think Eric's additions of yet-more contrived deaths makes the story unforgivable. But I don't think it was on a hiding to anything anyway.
I can read defences of stories I personally disliked, and come away appreciating their finer points and thinking it may be a keeper after all. I've even developed something of a soft spot for Terminus. Warriors of the Deep is one story where any defence made of it makes me hate it more, because of the kind of pretension and stupidity that the story seems to breed like a contagion. For instance, Mike Morris argued that, far from being ineffectual, the first thing Davison does when he knows the Silurians' plans is to go immediately to the chemical store. But he only does this so we can have a scene there of the humans noticing the gas weapons and suggesting using them just so the Doctor can rant at them for wanting to make use of the very arsenal he himself led them to. It's a stupid, vindictive, spiteful piece of work, and for some reason fandom remains forgiving of what's actually a mean-spirited, unforgiving story.
But is that what Johnny Byrne intended?
Apparently, Johnny Byrne's inspiration for the story was a Space 1999 episode where Moonbase Alpha comes under attack and is nearly devastated. Barbara is taken captive by the aliens, and they show her a vision of 'a world without fear'. In the end, time is reversed to the moment of the attack and the commander orders all defences to stand down, and the ships vanish. Demonstrating that man has overcome his fear.
Presumably Warriors of the Deep was meant to have the same message, that the very presence of mankind's global nuclear war machine and inability to co-exist with itself was what led to an understandable fear response from the Silurians.
The problem is, this is used to justify everything that happens after, and this asinine justification is forced into the Doctor's mouth. But it's more than that. The Space 1999 episode ultimately ends on a note of naive whimsy. But at this point, JNT was enforcing a ruthless backlash against any of the whimsy of the Tom Baker era, or symbolism, which made the story impossible to achieve anything other than repellent preaching. Furthermore, Johnny Byrne himself had picked the most ill-fitting inspiration for his anti-war story in Earthshock.
The result is unforgivable, and frankly the Myrka is the least of its problems. You know a story's a lost cause when the Doctor sets off the base's nuclear reactor and yet inexplicably his characterisation actually goes further downhill from there. And whilst most of my dismissals of Davison fans have been mean-spirited, I can almost admire the willingness to defend this incarnation. However, this story makes all defences of him meaningless. It destroys all point in the show.
This is a story that destroys everything the Doctor symbolises. Where human characters actually have to die senselessly before the Doctor comes to his senses and realises the Silurians aren't so nice, even then he's still determined to delude himself once again. What's truly depressing is how the Doctor stands for nothing here. Nothing he says or does inspires anything positive for a moment; even in his folly, there's seemingly no lesson to be learned, because the story seems fixated with proving his moronic outlook to be unquestionably right, somehow. If you ever wanted to kill a TV hero, this was how. I cannot fathom how fandom has okayed this total disgracing and destruction of near twenty years' worth of work by writers and producers to develop and build the Doctor into a competent, reliable, intelligent hero worth championing.
I don't think this was Johnny Byrne's intention. Maybe the very fact of the Doctor wasting time in the chemical store looking for a non-lethal solution whilst people are being massacred was always in Johnny Byrne's script, and would always have been insultingly out of character, given that there has never been a prior example of the Doctor placing the lives of killers over the lives of their victims. And yes, the conclusion was always going to end with the Doctor breaking those principles anyway, which means he lets those people die for the most fickle of reasons. But that wouldn't reduce the Doctor completely to nothing. Not like Saward's edits do.
It probably wasn't Johnny Byrne's intention that the Doctor's promise to Preston (that they wouldn't abandon Vorshak when sneaking away) should be broken later when the Doctor insists on saving the life of the very Silurian who ends up killing Vorshak, proving the Doctor incapable of honouring anything. I don't think the Sea Devil that entered the chemical store and forced Preston to take a bullet to save the Doctor was ever meant to occur. The problem I think is that Eric Saward was convinced by Ian Levine that the Doctor would be totally against using the gas, and he seemed to think the Doctor needed more reason to do it than the threat to the entire planet. And so he had to contrive more killings to justify the hero's retaliation. Most of Eric Saward's writing revolves around insatiable revenge narratives.
The irony is that a story that's supposed to convey an anti-war message manages to insult anyone who's ever had to fight for their life, whether they won or lost. It also proscribes a Doctor who'd overtly side with the UN council's refusal to intervene during the Rwanda genocide, despite all Paul Cornell's bullshit attempts to paint Davison as a beautiful, tragic, left-wing hero. This is supposed to be a story about trust, yet it catches the full wave of JNT's narcissistic paranoia about fan loyalty. This story tries desperately to force the fan viewers to be on side with this irredeemably dishonourable Doctor, and to accept that whatever it's saying is important. It became the point where Doctor Who, like so much of 80's violent entertainment became so belligerent and ugly that it was enough to make you never trust the show again.
Why this happened is presumably that Johnny Byrne's writing was old-fashioned and parochial enough to convince fandom that this was a traditional story whose only sins were those typical of most Doctor Who, and even fooled them into thinking there was a serious worthiness and (God help us) integrity to what it was trying to say. Unfortunately, times had moved on, and violence and repugnance were seen as the only way to register with the audience. So the production team inherited a story so old-fashioned it should have been scrapped but was instead forcibly reworked and mutated into a travesty of vile misanthropic sociopathy and contrived stupidity, where the Doctor seems to not care a jot about the dying humans whilst horrified by the thought of killing the Silurians. And all topped off with a sickeningly sentimental and hypocritical final word. One that somehow fooled fandom into seeing it as an iconic defining moment, and into believing that somewhere was a hint about this 'other way' because the script said so, or that it's all right because the story somehow makes its nihilistic pointlessness the point. But there are no excuses. It all happened because of rushed deadlines to get stories ready, which should be understandable except it was made worse by JNT's narcissistic, pathological insistence on making things impossible for Eric Saward to find and use experienced writers.
What's really offensive is that generally the show's message comes from the Doctor's reactions in a violent situation demonstrating what the right thing to do is. When to fight, when to open a dialogue, when to hold back. Even generic action fare like Rush Hour or The Transporter demonstrates the hero's ability to use violence as a means to subdue without killing. Warriors of the Deep is written with the conceit that if the Doctor sticks to the pacifist way, everyone will inevitably die, but we can call it a 'tragedy' and use it as an excuse to not have him even try.
The irony is this was only one story after Doctor Who seemingly had a bright future ahead, and only three stories after Enlightenment, a story on which the show could have died happy.