"Magic moments" by Thomas Cookson 8/4/17
Upon much pondering, I've come to realise Graeme Harper isn't just the best director the show was blessed with. He's also the very reason 80's Doctor Who is an era I have a tendency to go back and forth on.
The Caves of Androzani and Revelation of the Daleks not only represent the best stories of their respective seasons but also something of a loose mini-Harper era, existing as an island of unusually high quality within the wider, otherwise horrid JNT era.
This was a common phenomenon in the 80s. Season 20's saving graces were both Fiona Cumming-directed efforts that stood light years apart from the dour season and made you sorely yearn for a far longer Cumming era. Before that, in Season 19, the same was true of Peter Grimwade's directorial efforts, making that rather plastic season feel that bit more real, lively and human.
It was a strange paradox where certain directors were afforded a high level of autonomy over their stories, whilst JNT's fan-pleasing, navel-gazing sensibilities around them managed to be simultaneously aimless and yet overpowering.
This is, of course, the source of frustration. That in isolation, the loose Graeme Harper era absolutely deserved to exist but could only exist within a wider, terrible wastrel show that didn't deserve to.
I won't focus too much on The Caves of Androzani. Frankly, I feel its virtues have been hyped to death. But certainly Caves is so good it consistently manages to fool fandom into thinking that the entire preceding Davison era was too. And Revelation of the Daleks likewise for me comes devastatingly close to justifying everything we had to suffer before it. Not just to see Doctor Who become in that moment a great show, but a show with a bittersweet, acidic, sour strangeness that no other TV series could achieve and no other era prior of Doctor Who could've been.
And in that light, I do share fandom's frustration that the show was sabotaged by Michael Grade just at that moment, meaning we never got to see that direction continued with or fulfilled, and instead the show became a lot more sanitised and straight. No matter how many fans try convincing me how brilliant the successive McCoy era or RTD and Moffat eras supposedly were, even at their best they'll never be what it appeared the show and its morally ambiguous central protagonist was on the cusp of becoming in 1985.
Of course that's just wild speculation. Prior to Revelation of the Daleks, Season 22's output had been largely crap or at least misjudged. So who's to say Season 23 would have been anything but more of the same, with Revelation proving to be just something of a one-off?
Tat Wood has addressed this strange anomaly at Revelation's heart. How did the same script editor who let the quality slack so badly this season ever pull off something as good as this? And Tat's answer is that it's down to Harper himself doing more with what's on the page and displaying wiser creative instincts than the writer does. I don't quite buy it, but I do think Harper's vision as a director makes a major difference here.
When Eric Saward defended Attack of the Cybermen's violence, he cited one scene he was particularly fond of, where Griffin, Stratton and Bates come devastatingly close to their final lap, to reach the Cybership that offers salvation from this hellish world. They get there, and it's a trap and they're all gunned down. Eric pointed out that actually it's a quite poignant dramatic turn that they got so close and were just about to break out the celebrations but were ultimately doomed.
And perhaps on paper it should be poignant, and if done with the kind of flair of a Douglas Campfield story, it probably would be every bit as sad and haunting as Inferno episode 6's cliffhanger. But as directed it just comes off as flat and sordid and leaves another rotten taste in the mouth. Harper perhaps would've got to the heart of what Saward was going for here.
Likewise, if you examine Revelation of the Daleks properly, you can see how even in Orcini there's always a mean-spirited streak to Saward's writing and a sense that he's got some skewed ideas of what represents honour and nobility.
If you look at Orcini's actions throughout the story, he is actually pretty snide and dirty in his methods, sometimes without good reason, such as when he deliberately sets up the bodysnatchers to be his fall guys and is instrumental in their deaths by giving them an exhausted laser weapon. And that can be read as the core reason behind the problem with the Doctor's character and actions, and his twisted loyalties in Warriors of the Deep, and with Saward's drive to ensure senseless deaths happen.
There is something about Saward as a writer that just isn't on the ball, and often this translates into a dismissive, cavalier treatment of his characters, which either puts the Doctor in the position of having to compensate with vulgar sentimentality and coming off like a hypocrite or just being an avatar for Saward's own sociopathy and misanthropy.
But with Revelation of the Daleks, things are made that bit sharper through the lense of Harper. Greater emphasis is placed on character action and cut in a way that maintains a momentum and a consistent, spontaneous element of cause and effect. The Doctor and other characters seem more proactive here than they've been in ages. Harper is very good at managing and mastering the blending contrast between stoic naturalism and visceral action, to the point where the latter actually becomes so kinetic it's almost magical and transformative.
And in that it becomes a people's story about the part everyone plays in this inter-connected drama and in a way that Doctor Who just hasn't been since The Ribos Operation.
The set-up is more or less the same as Attack of the Cybermen, but in that pretty much every sub-plot became depressingly inconsequential. Here they all converge in the centre of Davros' labyrinth. Each failed plot or attempt to breach it gives something of an advantage and head start to the next party. Much like with Earthshock, it plays with the idea of breaking the fort bit by bit until the final invasion by the Skarosian Daleks feels like a climax.
Again, compare this to Warriors of the Deep where the raising stakes just have nothing to balance against with an impotent hero and seem to make no difference to the actions of the Doctor, who could stop this at any moment but is just waiting for his cue to make a moral speech over the corpses of everyone he could've saved, condemning the very bloodshed he deliberately enabled.
Although Logopolis was an incredibly bleak end to the Tom Baker era, we can actually see how, in stories like Kinda, Black Orchid and even Time-Flight, Eric Saward had inherited what was still a naturally sunny and optimistic show. When Saward brings an element of darkness to the era in Earthshock, it feels like a violation, but one that's all the more effective for it, but also all the more jarring when it's over and it's back to enlightening frolicks like nothing happened.
But by Season 21, it just feels like Saward has come to resent the upbeat side of the show so much that he's now taking the whole series off the rails with him and being endorsed in this by JNT who seems to think a bit of violence and controversy will do the show's publicity some good. The season is only saved from being total grot by the presence of Bidmead and Holmes.
So maybe in truth, Revelation of the Daleks should not stir any good feelings in the viewer either. Maybe it should on paper be just as dour as Attack of the Cybermen. On paper, the sequence where Natasha and Grigory have their gruesome discussion about torture and dissection before meeting her decaying father in a Dalek casing should just be sickening viewing all round.
Harper, in the way he lights, frames and scores the scene, captures the strange futuristic wonder of it. Making it an almost miraculous moment of future medical science performing a resurrection, creating what feels like one of the most genuinely beautiful, forward-looking moments in the show since Kinda.
The moment where Stengos tells Natasha that even the Dalek conditioning could never erase his memory of her, is for me the moment where Doctor Who was on the cusp of becoming a full-blooded emotional drama long before RTD was getting tongue baths from fandom for apparently doing the unprecedented. Harper is the one who really sustains an emotion from framing a great naturalist performance, and two decades later he carries the same skill into Turn Left. And in doing so, that scene for me is even more of an endorsement of 'here's to the next twenty years' than even anything in The Five Doctors was.
Harper gives this story a real character and a sense of 'cool'. And I think he is the key reason that Colin's Doctor comes off far better here than usual. Harper enhances his best moments and subtly buries his worst. He downplays and softens the usual bitchiness between Doctor and companion where other directors would overdramatise it, making their banter feel considerably more natural. By the same token, he luxuriates in Jobel's cruellest put-downs in a way that paints old Sixie as the better man here.
He maintains the tension and anticipation well when he frames the Doctor trying to hypnotise the mutant into calmness. He makes it feel like we're being confronted with the Doctor's benevolence and philanthropic will.
The story as a whole is so stylistically promiscuous (as Tat Wood argues), that it feels like an extension of the Sixth Doctor's volatile character. It's in places sour and maladjusted, much like our Doctor. But also simultaneously grand, virtuous and imbued with class. There's a sense here that Colin's Doctor feels just right for this strange, maladjusted universe, and that justifies who he is and what he's become, with every supporting character taking their own moral stance that it's now the Doctor's job to evaluate which is best of all. And as such the Doctor here doesn't feel like a do-gooder idiot anymore but a genuine pragmatist. That there's a time and place for Doctors like him, and this is it.
We've never quite seen this side or nature to the Doctor before. Even at his worst, when gloating over Davros' exploded hand and kicking a gun Orcini's way, there's a satisfying bite to it. That like us, Davros has been led to underestimate what a bastard this Doctor can be as an enemy (Davros is placed in the same position as the viewer, laughing at the Doctor's plans to sneak in unnoticed in a manner just demented enough to deliver a hilarious sucker punch). And it's honestly thrilling in ways that the character of the Doctor can sadly never be again.
Harper's work in the New Series is still highly watchable given how he just absolutely luxuriates in the material he's given. But comparing Revelation of the Daleks to Journey's End makes the latter look comparatively more characterless. Davros is no longer quite the deep character he was in the 80's, and the Doctor is far more of a straight lily-white, much-adorned hero, lacking Colin's uncompromising, darker shamanic magic or bite.
It's ironic in an era obsessed with digging up the past, the one time JNT's era achieved something new and unique with the Doctor, it got immediately axe-murdered by Grade, effectively marking the end of the short-lived Harper era. Never quite as long-running to be properly immortalised in the same way as the Hinchcliffe era or Season 18's arc. But one that could momentarily turn the wastrel years of the show into vital, absolute gold, even if only for a fortnight.