Holmes is Where the Heart Is by Robert Seulowitz 22/7/00
Perhaps no other human being had as much influence on the development of Doctor Who - as both a TV show and as a character - than Robert Holmes. Certainly, no one else has put more words in the Doctor's mouth, nor nearly so many witty ones.
His career with the program spanned 6 Producers, 5 Doctors and 11 TARDIS Companions (4 of whom he introduced) plus the UNIT regulars over a period of 18 seasons. His total of 18 scripts (including 4 written with or based on stories by other writers) is, by far, the most by any Writer in the series' history (only Terry Nation had more than 9). His oeuvre includes many of the most frequently cited "Greatest Adventures of All Time," including Pyramids of Mars, Talons of Weng-Chiang, Caves of Androzani and the controversial but now highly regarded Deadly Assassin. He introduced Jon Pertwee's interpretation of the role and largely defined his relationship to UNIT; he created with Tom Baker the most popular and enduring version of the character; and concluded the versions played by Peter Davison (brilliantly) and Colin Baker (more about that later). In addition, his tenure as Script Editor with Producer Philip Hinchcliffe is often - rightly - identified as the apex of the series, from the classics Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks to the brilliant Talons.
Holmes was, indeed, one of the Doctor's two hearts.
Holmes Before (and After) Who
One would be hard pressed to find any novel written by Robert Holmes. He only wrote one Novelization for Doctor Who, and that very late in his career (and now long out of print). [The IMDB erroneously credits him for the novel on which the film Guns at Batasi (1964) is based; in fact that novel was by Robert Holles.] Likewise any short fiction he wrote has faded into the mists of time.
Prior to writing his first Doctor Who Adventure (season 6's unimpressive The Krotons) in 1968, an early science fiction story of his was filmed in 1966: Invasion. Despite the title, it is the story of alien beings who come to Earth not to conquer it, but to capture a fugitive criminal. Interestingly, part of the script, wherein the wounded fugitive lands near a British country hospital where doctors are befuddled by his strange anatomy, was successfully recycled into the regeneration sequence in Spearhead from Space - a sequence the writers of the Fox TV movie freely appropriated themselves!
Holmes' work for television, on the other hand, is prolific, including teleplays for The Saint in the sixties, contributing several episodes of Blake's 7 (who didn't?) in 1979 and 1981, and a 1981 TV miniseries called The Nightmare Man directed by Doctor Who veteran Douglas Camfield (with whom Holmes had worked on Seeds of Doom and Terror of the Zygons).
Ultimately, the work of his life was Doctor Who, and much that later writers took for granted came forth first and foremost from his pen.
Curriculum Vitae
His scripts, in order of transmission, are:
Troughton: The Krotons; The Space Pirates
Pertwee: Spearhead from Space; The Terror of the Autons; The Carnival of Monsters; The Time Warrior
Tom Baker: The Ark in Space (from a story idea by John Lucarotti)*; The Pyramids of Mars (with Lewis Griefer); The Brain of Morbius (with Terrance Dicks); The Deadly Assassin; The Talons of Weng-Chiang (from a story by Robert Banks Stewart); The Sun Makers; The Ribos Operation; The Power of Kroll
Davison: The Caves of Androzani
Colin Baker: The Two Doctors; Trial of a Time Lord, part I: The Mysterious Planet; Trial of a Time Lord, part IV: The Ultimate Foe (first draft only)
*=Episode 2 was the highest rated broadcast in the show's history, discounting the ITV strike in Season 17.
His innovations (as writer and story editor) include:
- The first Jon Pertwee story, arguably the most important Adventure in the show's history (Spearhead from Space). Coincidentally, this is also the first story in color, and the only one shot entirely on film.
- The first stories to feature recurring characters Liz Shaw & UNIT (Spearhead), Jo Grant (The Terror of the Autons), Sarah Jane Smith (The Time Warrior), Romana (The Ribos Operation) and The Master (The Terror of the Autons).
- The first scream-free female companion (Leela the Huntress), and the first non-human companion (K9).
- The first "Space Opera" story (Space Pirates), and the first story set entirely on Gallifrey (The Deadly Assassin) [also the only story in which the Doctor has no companions at all].
Holmes and Who History
Holmes' first scripts for Pat Troughton were edited by Terrance Dicks, who clearly liked them enormously. During the first two Pertwee years, Holmes' scripts were given pride of place, airing as the first Adventure of the season (comparable to airing during sweeps week in the parlance of modern American television). They did not disappoint. Pertwee's ratings were a significant improvement over Troughton's - an average of 8.22 compared to 6.98, though not quite matching the Hartnell years, which averaged 8.48 and peaked as high as 13.
Brought in by Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks to be the new Script Editor during Season 11, Holmes assisted Dicks for Invasion of the Dinosaurs and Death to the Daleks while Dicks and Letts were dividing their time between Doctor Who and another BBC series, Moonbase 3.
Holmes and Dicks were clearly in sympathy on how to develop the series. They shared a desire to broaden the scope of the series beyond the calcified formulae of Daleks and other uncouth ruffians from space up to no good by injecting stories with more compelling human characters and villains. They also shared the vision of a Doctor who was profoundly dedicated to justice and compassion, frequently at odds with UNIT's top brass Lethbridge-Stewart, and more than a little impatient with his companions and foes alike. They built these stories around the personality of Jon Pertwee, a charismatic and charming actor with a certain imperious quality, a passion for gadgets and action but a warm smile and deft, dry comic touch.
Holmes took over for Dicks officially at the start of Season 12, along with Philip Hinchcliffe, Letts' hand-picked successor as Producer. Letts would remain an unofficial Executive Producer and oversee the production, anxious to ensure a stability and continuity of leadership. Thus, Season 12 looks little different from it's predecessor, with one notable, obvious exception: The new Doctor, Tom Baker.
Hinchcliffe had never produced a series before, and so it fell to Holmes to set the creative agenda, providing the vision of the character and the tone the series would take over the next three years. The first three Adventures filmed were Robot (a Terrance Dicks' script, trying to give Holmes a leg up), The Sontaran Experiment and The Ark in Space (by Holmes himself). The creative trajectory in these three stories is immediately apparent, as the new Doctor forges his personality in fits and starts, finally settling into a rhythm just in time for what most fans consider to be the single greatest Doctor Who story ever, Genesis of the Daleks.
That script was, of course, written by Terry Nation, the first and best writer of Dalek material. But the Holmes touch is readily apparent, in the details of the characters, and the crispness of the dialog. One might believe that it was Holmes who penned the exchange between Nyder and the Doctor concerning alien life:
Nyder: Davros tells us it's impossible, and he is infallible.
Doctor: Infallible? He must be a remarkable fellow - even I am occasionally wrong.
After an obligatory encounter with the Cybermen, Holmes and Hinchcliffe could plan Seasons 13 and 14 entirely on their own, without direct guidance from Letts and Dicks. The results were staggeringly brilliant stories, breathing fresh life into the familiar formulas of danger and deliverance. Notable for their forays into the realm of gothic horror and the teasing of recognizable literary and film sources, Hinchcliffe and Holmes came up with many of the best loved and most memorable Adventures. They balanced a mix of humor and horror, with several Adventures noted for their strong adult content.
After the departure of Elizabeth Sladen, they introduced an entirely original companion: Leela the Huntress; a strong - one might say fierce - female who would just as soon stab a monster as scream at it (supposedly "popular with the dads," she gave many a young anorak a healthy shove toward puberty as well, if the truth be known). Her interplay with the Doctor - and her lack of worldly experience - resulted in many excellent sequences, some comic and some dramatic, that were genuinely surprising and great fun.
Fun, in fact, is the hallmark of the Hinchcliffe & Holmes years - it's clear that they were enjoying themselves, and that infectious joy permeates their productions. Their partnership ended on an unparalleled high point, Talons of Weng-Chiang, a marvelous, frothy amalgam of Victorian Penny Dreadful and science fiction serial, with perhaps Holmes's best dialog and one of the richest and most evocative production designs the series ever mounted.
Indeed, the level of witty banter and clever dialog reached a height of sophistication during this period that would, unfortunately, eventually unravel into silliness and self-parody in later seasons. It's important to note that while the Hinchcliffe/Holmes adventures are often quite funny - and occasionally cross into the realm of satire - they are rooted in the tradition of horror film and fiction, and always bring the story to a well-earned climax of good versus evil. Indeed, so successfully did they increase the terror-quotient of Doctor Who they came under fire from critics both within the BBC and without.
The increased hostility of Mrs. Mary Whitehouse and her band of video nasties in response to the dramatic intensity of Holmes' presentation of "body horror" and other images of violence, escalating dramatically after the airing of the infamous drowning cliff-hanger in Deadly Assassin, had brought pressure on the BBC to replace the production team. In spite of his tremendous success - ratings for seasons 13 and 14 set all time highs for the series, never to be surpassed - Hinchcliffe was reassigned to the new BBC series Target [Featuring Holmes fave Philip Madoc]. Holmes, apparently, was also anxious to move on, but new Producer Graham Williams (ironically, the original developer of the show to which Hinchcliffe was assigned!) encountered a sea of production delays and problems as Season 15 got underway; Holmes delayed his own departure until a replacement could be groomed. Anthony Read was chosen, and began assisting Holmes during filming of Image of the Fendahl and Holmes' only script that season, The Sun Makers. Holmes saw his own script through to completion, then handed over the job to Read (who concluded the season with the disappointing Invasion of Time).
Holmes continued to write scripts for the series in the next season, kicking off the Key to Time season with the drolly comic Ribos Operation, as well as the sadly risible installment, The Power of Kroll (which features what must be the most laughably inept use of split screen puppetry in the history of the BBC).
After 1979, Holmes concentrated on other television projects, remaining almost exclusively within the science fiction genre, with varying degrees of success. It was not until 1984 that Holmes would return to Doctor Who, providing a script to facilitate the transition from Peter Davison to Colin Baker, The Caves of Androzani. The result was so successful that, the following year, with the series on the verge of oblivion, it was to Holmes that Eric Saward appealed to help build what might have been the final season of Doctor Who ever.
Their original intention was that Holmes would write the first and last segments of the four-segment season, built around the concept of the Doctor put on trial for his life (as, indeed, as far as the Beeb was concerned, he was!), with other writers contributing two additional segments to flesh out the season. In a sense, Holmes would be returning to the creative position he had carried a decade earlier, fashioning the dramatic arc of the season and building a new persona for the Doctor (Colin Baker's first season having been poorly received).
Sadly, Holmes died in May of that year, before completing the draft script of the final segment. Producer John Nathan-Turner, having parted company with Saward, assigned the project to Pip and Jane Baker - to say these two were not up to the task would be an utterance of peerless understatement. The mangled, detestable result clouded the entire season, and reduced what had promised to be a new beginning into a muddled, incomprehensible mess. It remains the most roundly disliked season in the show's proud history, which is a tragic injustice, really - the bright spots in Holmes' original dialog show flashes of the Doctor the world had loved so long. Why, in some scenes, the Doctor actually seems to like people!
In a very real sense, Doctor Who died with Robert Holmes. Which is not to disparage the best of the later shows with McCoy, merely to recognize that they are markedly unlike what came before, to a degree that they might even be seen as an altogether different series.
Holmes as a Writer
Over his 18 stories, a number of themes, ideas and stylistic tendencies emerged repeatedly; some of which quickly became established as part of the very character of Doctor Who.
Satires and Genre Spoofs
Holmes had little interest in "hard" science fiction or analogy-laden parables. Instead, he showed an almost post-modern tendency to build his stories around the satirical skewering of film or literary tropes, from the obvious Frankenstein take-off that is The Brain of Morbius to the more subtle spoofing of The Manchurian Candidate in the darkly clever Deadly Assassin.
American Westerns are frequent grist for the Holmes mill. Space Pirates, with it's rusty, dusty miners and a law-versus-lawlessness plot, filches ideas from Treasure of the Sierra Madre (in the same way later Space Oaters like Outland would pilfer from High Noon). Power of Kroll with it's rather ham-fisted Noble Oppressed Savages schematic, could have lifted half it's story boards from Broken Arrow. Even Androzani (despite it's obvious Phantom of the Opera homage) seems to owe a debt to Fistful of Dollars (or perhaps that film's source, Yojimbo) in putting the Doctor between two warring crooks, both of whom he must defeat or die trying.
In addition to films, Holmes revisited his favorite books, such as Shelly's Frankenstein, the adventures of H. Rider Haggard (riffed upon in Pyramids of Mars and the sisterhood in Morbius) and, of course, Arthur Conan Doyle (in Talons, the giant rats are clearly a jokey reference to the unrecorded Sherlock Holmes adventure The Giant Rat of Sumatra - a story, Watson demurs, "for which the world is not yet prepared."). Talons is, as many have observed, actually less a Sherlock Holmes riff than an homage to Sax Rohmer's delirious Fu Manchu series (the classic Hammer horror, The Face of Fu Manchu, features a similar series of murders and the sinister significance of the river Thames).
Of course, his most playful satire is the hilarious Sun Makers, a stream of clever in-jokes aimed at the Inland Revenue: All the corridors have names taken from Tax forms. The oppressive aliens, called the Usurians, display a Swiftian attitude toward death and taxes. In the end, the Collector turns out to be a fungus - a parasitic growth which thrives on decay. It's wickedly funny.
Comedy & Tragedy
Holmes rarely let his love of a good joke, however, interfere with what he clearly understood was the essential formula for a ripping yarn: An ever-increasing sense of dread, as each episode presented a new twist or threat that builds toward a hair-raising climax. The tone, which invariably starts off light and airy, must become increasingly dark as the stakes are raised and the tragic possibilities begin to be made manifest.
His best scripts walk this tightrope expertly, and find comedy not in jokes per se as much as in witty retorts and sarcastic asides. His brilliantly crisp dialogue is often so perfectly pitched as to evoke cheerful giggling, even in the most dire of circumstances. Li H'sen Chang's stage banter during his magic act (in Talons) is genuinely funny, and entirely in keeping with the character and context - even though the viewer expects him to attempt to murder the Doctor at any moment!
Holmes is most widely recalled for his "double acts" - his pairs who play off each other as though in a game of verbal badminton. The impresario Jago and his stage manager Casey blather blithely about ghosts and murders. Li H'sen and his master, Greel, alternate between exposition and withering abuse in their exchanges. Irongron demonstrates his cleverness by defeating Bloodaxe in jousts of wit (despite the fact that both are clearly unarmed).
The Doctor and his companion du jour form a ready-made double act, and no one exploited this better than Holmes. Indeed, he introduced more companions than any other writer, and in his scripts, at least, they don't simply stand around and ask what's going on, waiting to scream at the first passing Dalek. They act, make decisions, escalate the action and challenge the Doctor to do the same. Liz Shaw is smart and cynical, subjecting the Doctor to the same level of scrutiny to which he usually subjects others. Sarah Jane, in her first Adventure (Time Warrior), is aggressive, opinionated and courageous, in many ways the Doctor's mirror image. Leela the Huntress is an inspired creation, a pure animus to counter Baker's posturing intellect. Her fish-out-of-water quality, especially in turn of the century London, creates marvelous opportunities which Holmes fully explores; he does such a good job of it in Talons that her appearance in a gown leaves both the viewer and the Doctor a bit breathless. The introduction of Romana (Mary Tamm) once again gives Holmes an opposite number for the Doctor who's every bit as smart - and arrogant - as he is, and their taught interplay of one-up-manship and smirkery gives Ribos Operation it's energy.
Rogues and Villains
But perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of the Holmes canon is the villainy. Rarely is this the typical, run-o'-the-mill BEM out to conquer the universe for no very good reason - Holmes wrote no Dalek stories, no Cybermen buzz through his sets, no Ice Warriors or Silurians lay traps for Time Lords they couldn't possibly have seen coming. No, where there are conquering aliens, they are almost invariably driven by a greater need - to propagate their species, or to meet a military objective that will provide security in the face of a larger threat, or to recover something that was lost.
Often the true villain of the piece is driven by an obsessive, but not irrational, need: greed or fear are only the results of an even more primary motivation for survival. Sometimes so desperate are these villains to achieve their aims, they willingly court their own destruction, let alone that of others in their path. The Graf Vynda-K, Greel and Sutekh have tasted power and are faced with oblivion or extinction if they cannot recover it. No wonder, then, they are willing to sacrifice lesser creatures in pursuit of their objective.
But there is almost always someone else, interposed between the "true villain" and the Doctor, who is trapped in events they can no longer control, suffocating in a relationship with evil they can not escape. It is this person, invariably the catalyst of the evil plot but themselves somehow sympathetic, almost heroic, that is the signature Holmesian element. Solon in Morbius, even when faced with inescapable evidence of the error of his judgement, must nevertheless revive the ancient Time Lord criminal because not to do so would be to abnegate his long years of suffering to achieve that goal. Sharaz Jek in Androzani is a vicious drug lord, but he is as much a victim of Morgus as of his own vice. Most touchingly, Li H'sen in Talons is motivated throughout the story to unspeakable acts of villainy not by lust or greed, but by gratitude and faithfulness! He proves himself to be more noble, in many ways, than Jago, who, even after being presented with compelling evidence that his star performer is a multiple murderer, can't bring himself to compromise his headlining attraction.
Ah, Henry Gordon Jago, the alliterative arbiter of amazing artistes. Garron the used planet salesman (by way of Somerset, squire). Milo >hack< >spit< >ping< Clancy, the salt of several earths. Irongron the Dim and his Knights of Very Little Brain. Vorg and Shirna and their Lurman Traveling Circus Onna Stick ("Roll up! Roll up!").
How Holmes loved the rogues, the con men, the thieves and brigands, the liars and cheats, the charming, back-stabbing, purse-lifting, scene-stealing swindlers who proliferate his scripts like advertising fliers. And, not surprisingly, the Doctor almost immediately takes to them, for they are, of course, birds of a feather. "He's one of us!" Vorg astutely observes instantly upon meeting the Doctor. The Doctor's solutions to sundry plot problems are almost always equal amounts of science and flim-flam, and his membership in the Interplanetary Brotherhood of Bamboozlers is recognized by his own kind. It's only the swindlers who take themselves too seriously, who have bought into their own lies and deceived themselves - Greel, Vynda-K, Lynx, Sutekh - who are his lifelong enemies.
And it's in that mold that Holmes created the Master; the Doctor's evil twin, his looking-glass self, the deceiver by himself deceived. At last the Doctor would have an opponent who is his equal. One who could match him feint for feint, trick for trick, witty retort for witty retort.
Well, that was the plan, anyway. But for a number of reasons, Terror of the Autons fails to live up not only to classic status but even to the standards of its author's own work. The Master would, like all the Doctor Who villains, suffer profoundly from overexposure and creative bankruptcy over the next twenty years, but even in that first season he is a notably unmotivated and predictable - not to say stupid - villain. Autons features other missteps - the screaming girl companion, the unnecessary reprise of a previously defeated monster, the unearned turnabout "twist" ending - that Holmes managed easily to avoid later on.
Holmes and the World of Who
In fact, it's not surprising, in light of his later work on the series, that after Autons Holmes didn't submit another script for two seasons. The charm and wit that characterize the initial Pertwee script a year earlier had been submerged into the Letts/Dicks "serious issue" agenda, best represented by Malcolm Hulke's environmentalist passion plays. Holmes had no interest in a Doctor who would rather preach pompously than puncture the pompous, and his two later Pertwee scripts give a peek at the course he would later helm. In Carnival of Monsters and Time Warrior, we have a more playful, teasing, jovial Pertwee than we're used to seeing. One can easily picture Tom Baker in those stories (but try to imagine him in The Daemons or Frontier in Space without a heavy rewrite).
In Baker, Holmes found full and complete expression for his muse - the two share many qualities, not least a visible delight in play, a love for great literature and a willingness to try anything. Holmes' brought out the best in Baker, and Baker unleashed the cleverest in Holmes. Too clever by half, as many contemporary fans would have said.
Holmes' attitude toward continuity and Whovian mythos ranged from benign neglect to outright contempt. Most of his best scripts avoided the subject completely: Holmes endeavored to place the Doctor in new situations, and concocted plots derived from external sources rather than the show's own previous adventures. Narrative exigency clearly took priority over fetishistic enshrinement of the dear, departed past. This may seem reprehensible in a story editor, but it's important to keep in mind that Holmes served the BBC at a time when even taped episodes from only a few years earlier were considered disposable and consigned to the incinerator. (Who knew anyone would want to see Tomb of the Cybermen ever again?)
A few of his most notable efforts to mine new veins of creativity break so violently with the previous traditions as to leave gaping wounds in the psyches of those fans for whom the world of Doctor Who is and must be a complete and continuous whole. The "previous incarnations" appearing during the infamous battle with Morbius come from Holmes' stewardship, as does the continuity-stretching quandary posed by the plot McGuffin in Face of Evil. These, however, are peanuts compared to Holmes' cavalier disregard for the ethos of the Time Lords.
Which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation to The Deadly Assassin.
It's almost impossible to overstate the significance of this Adventure in the evolution of the series. Certainly, it's impact on fandom, especially those for whom the mythology of the Whoniverse had already taken great hold, was catastrophic. Those outside the core fan base were mostly aware that Mrs. Mary Whitehouse found the violence so shocking she sought to get the entire production company sacked. Casual fans - and, by extension, the Americans who saw the story 4 years after everyone else - tended to find it strangely off-putting.
Had this story been set on Earth, in some future time, it would probably be regarded as a slightly better than average Adventure with a prescient use of artificial reality (called the Matrix, oddly enough) that predates Neuromancer by nearly a decade. The decision to place it on Gallifrey, with the attendant implications for the Time Lords, suggests not merely a disregard for the mythos of the Letts/Dicks era, but a strong desire to undermine it completely.
One might well ask, was this journey necessary?
In fact, it was.
Holmes not only brought the Doctor to Gallifrey, but resurrected (literally?) The Master from the dead to pose as his enemy, and to perpetrate a two-fold plot that threatens first the Time Lords and then their Universe. In many ways, this is the Master done properly, as Holmes had been unable to do six years before. He is grotesque, hateful and merciless - frightening in a way that Delgado's charming but basically silly mustache-twirling villain could never be. Although the story is still hamstrung by the catch in all Doctor/Master stories, which is that neither can be allowed a definite victory over the other, Holmes' innovative use of an alternate reality (the computerized network of the Matrix) allows for a far greater level of danger and ups the stakes considerably: The "real" Doctor won't die, but his projection into the Matrix might. And, in fact, the Matrix sequence - almost completely superfluous to the story itself - succeeds magnificently in bringing the Doctor to the brink of death. The prolonged fight with Goth is harrowing and quite grizzly; when before have we seen the Doctor bleed so much? Or use a weapon like a hand grenade to disembowel a foe? Or deliberately poison or drown someone?
Mrs. Whitehouse was quite right - this isn't for kiddies. Holmes was toying not just with Manchurian Candidate but other films of the Cinema of Paranoia so popular in the Watergate years of the mid seventies, such as Parallax View, Antonioni's Blowup and Costa-Gavras' assassination epic Z. These films reflected a widespread mistrust not only of authority, but in the very concept of truth; that those who have the means to corrupt the political process can and will use that power to define what "really" happened.
Where better to dramatize this concept but at the seat of the most powerful culture in the Universe? Even here, Holmes suggested, the ability to master the perception of reality (the Matrix, the staged assassination and frame-up, the very record of the Master's existence) effectively changes what is real. The Doctor is perceived by his fellow Time Lords as a renegade and criminal, while the Master - who is all but invisible to these supposedly omniscient beings - freely and surreptitiously manipulates their power to his will. Still constrained by the requirements of the Genre, the finale is at once of a piece with the theme of the Adventure (the wide and dangerous gap between the perception of Gallifrey's power source and it's reality) and a bit of a let down, since it devolves into another "Flash Gordon Saves the Day" show-stopping punch-up amid falling papier mache masonry.
Here, as in all his scripts, we see Holmes straining to move beyond the formats and conventions of the series, to pursue a larger agenda - and not necessarily towards a tidy conclusion. In Assassin, Holmes had, in fact, gone so far beyond the original scope of the series, even light-years past the tepid liberal politics of the Letts/Dicks years, that he takes it into a genuinely adult sensibility. The subtle moral complexities of Season 12 (Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks) are now being brought to the surface to become the crux of the story.
What Holmes attempted in Assassin is nothing less than heroic. He risked alienating his core audience in order to push the series into a more mature, more intellectual engagement with them. He boldly depicted violence as gruesome and unpleasant rather than merely a means to a plot device. The denouement sees the return to a complacent status quo (Borusa shows no signs of having understood the full implications of the events he swiftly covers up), and with no self-righteous sermonette from the Doctor (as Hulke would doubtless have added) to aid the viewer in feeling morally superior.
As an invitation to move the series into a more adult world, Assassin is mostly successful - although the failure of the core audience to embrace it is understandable. Still, the strength of the negative response can only have been a let down for Holmes, whose scripts after Season 14 are noticeably less rigorous. His only attempts at serious discussion, such as Kroll, degenerate into simplistic third-Doctor style solipsism or obvious, easy satire. It is not too difficult to conjecture that Holmes' disappointment in the reception his work received from the fan press combined with the reactionary clamor against violence on the show must have eroded his commitment to push the series toward complexity and maturity.
After his departure, later writers would continue to struggle with Holmes' conundrum - trying to tell stories that the 8-to-12s can follow while engaging the older audience in a more sophisticated conversation - with varying but by no means superior degrees of success. No simplistic style, be it hard science, soft fantasy, giddy satire or (increasingly, under Nathan-Turner) unvarnished melodrama, could ever fully contain what the show had, by 1978, become. [Tegan spoke for a great many Holmes fans when she announced that it "wasn't fun anymore."]
Fortunately, Holmes did manage to leave us one last, great script, The Caves of Androzani. Coming out of a four-year hiatus, he single-handedly reinvented Davison's Doctor, and revived the moribund franchise with more energy, urgency and excitement than it had seen in years. His script bristles with good dialog, complex characters and difficult decisions; not least of all in the amazing conclusion. Holmes had written the best companion send-off ever when he returned Sarah Jane Smith to her home in Croyden, but in Androzani he finally got to kill his Time Lord. And a beautiful, emotionally charged and magnificent death it is. [It was the death Baker's Doctor deserved and didn't get.]
Ultimately, Holmes was not a literary giant or visionary genius; he was merely a very good writer with a gift for dialog and a few clever things to say. His ability to re-imagine the series was limited by his own stylistic predilections, such as his penchant for filching film plots. But to a degree unmatched by any other contributor to Doctor Who, Holmes brought an amazing amount of new ideas to the series, opening it up to innumerable possibilities. And he did so with a commitment to treating his audience with respect, assuming that they would get even his most arcane, bookish jokes.
Robert Holmes took for granted that his audience was at least as smart as he was.
Would that we were!