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Lytton
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Reviews
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Lytton
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"Don't plead no special case for me..." by Thomas Cookson 4/9/19
Lytton embodied Saward's more extreme violent show vision. First as perpetrator, then finally as victim. He's a mercenary character who can cross genres - from seedy, dystopian sci-fi adventure to Euston urban gangster dramas - and feel at home. One must rummage through a stew of influences to reach the heart of Lytton and Saward's intent.
I'd suggested Lytton's arc from murderer to romanticized tragic hero echoed a 1980's zeitgeist that venerated criminals and rioters as working-class heroes against the state (The Clash's 'Bankrobber', Yosser Hughes, McVicar). I now believe Resurrection's Euston-grime pastiche was more based on being an affordable, visually imitable style. Nothing more. Significantly, by Attack of the Cybermen's finale, that element's discarded like it never mattered.
Eric Saward's 1982-86 stewardship seemed to emulate Star Wars' universe of mercenary criminals. This naturally gave us Lytton. Saward envisioned the Daleks using killer mercenaries as proxies. Being now an endangered species, reliant on humans to do their dirty work. Lytton in fact recalls Genesis' most disturbing aspect. Humans being actively complicit in the Daleks' evil, like Nyder throwing escapees back into Dalek fire. Lytton also seemed Saward's way of getting around the Daleks' restricted mobility and impersonality.
It's become a cliche among fans who over-emphasise special effects that Star Wars was why 1980's Who was losing popularity and perceived as cheap and unexciting. The strongest evidence being Season 18's ratings drop, as viewers turned over to ITV's import Buck Rodgers (aged 13, I probably would've). Which wasn't great television, but did give viewers something of the Star Wars experience again.
Then Empire Strikes Back came out, demonstrating that our heroes could lose. Ending in downbeat limbo, leaving audiences stunned and hungry for next instalment but dreading the worst. A family film that didn't shy from grim violence or death. Earthshock suggests Saward felt Who must compete with those gritty sensibilities. In terms of Star Wars' next instalments, rescuing Han could've been a film in its own right, with the omnipresent galactic empire resolved in later entries. But reconsidering how long they could've sustained that quality, perhaps it was better wrapping on 1983's Return of the Jedi.
This potentially opened opportunities for Doctor Who to fill that void. If fans like me would watch the Ewoks movies for another Star Wars fix, why not Attack of the Cybermen? Well, 1980's Who had become so insular. Perhaps only Terry Nation could've replicated that Lucas-esque throwback space adventure appeal. The problem I feel was JNT/Saward's era seemed too bloody serious about itself. Whilst Star Wars was good at presenting its exotic settings as a unified vision of a whole universal tapestry, Saward's blend of Euston grime and futuristic space adventure wasn't so immediately coherent enough to be intriguing.
So what could the show offer? Potentially something different. Genesis and Planet of Evil presented a more dangerous, haunting universe than anything Star Wars had, with a hero who abstained from weapons, preferring wiser methods to blaster-ready Han's.
The Five Doctors returned to those basics. Recreating via microcosm, Hinchcliffe's dangerous universe of savage evils the Doctor couldn't always win against. There's a reason the violent Raston robot sequence is a highlight. It brings the danger vividly to life. As Star Wars immersed viewers through its ILM magic, the idea seemed Doctor Who would transport the viewer into its universe through shock, awakening them to a different experience and more worrying storytelling possibilities.
Unfortunately, under Saward, these instead became depressing probabilities that alleviated the boredom but cut against everything once inspiring and galvanizing about the show. Trying to artificially recreate Genesis' uncertainty of storytelling by lazily having the Doctor deliberately let armies overwhelm him. Saward's Lytton's focus sadly demonstrates his disinterest in the Doctor (arguably reflecting his bland, simplistic understanding of the character).
Resurrection just wasn't the Star Wars family adventure audiences had enjoyed. It was far nastier and niche. Too buried in continuity to speak to channel-hopping casual audiences. As though Doctor Who responded to Star Wars' impact by becoming more cultish, more dependent on a core fanbase willing to unconditionally sing its praise when everything else in cinema was giving it a kicking.
It had lost its mystique. Rather damningly, the Daleks themselves don't feel magical. They remain in one control room making dead-end plots, then conclude the story killing each other. There's rarely any Planet of the Daleks-esque thrill at the idea of sneaking into Dalek territory. It's lazy. Davison's captivity just drags. The era had become a series of limp-runarounds occasionally punctuated by graphic disfigurements. The adventures of a hero who doesn't lift a finger to save the day because he'd rather whine afterwards how there should've been another way.
Resurrection was originally intended for Season 20. Tellingly, there's not yet any suggestion Lytton has any redeeming features. He survives based on ruthless tenacity to calculate his odds. His victory's a self-serving one. Although there's perhaps the question now he's no longer under the Daleks' pecking order, whether he's so dangerous anymore, with no commander ordering him to kill. Maybe he could retire peaceably.
Perhaps there was no interest in showing Lytton redeemed until presumably seeing Return of the Jedi convinced Saward to emulate Vader's redemption, with the hero dutifully trying to save him, whilst narrative convention dictates he tragically fail trying. That's likely why, under Saward's ham-fisted edits, Warriors ends with the Silurians proven unreasonable to the last, despite Davison spending the story insisting otherwise. Seemingly imitating Luke's lengths to try redeeming Vader, Davison doggedly attempts the same with Ictar. However, Luke principally aimed to save Vader from a more evil puppet-master, not save the warmongering Emperor himself.
Luke believed it's possible because he telepathically sensed Vader's conflict and family ties compelled him. It also gave dubious audiences a genuine sucker-punch. Neither's the case with Warriors, making Davison's imitative, insistent attempts seem far more cultishly berserk. I emphasise this because it demonstrates how poorly Saward understood that source material.
Attack at least has Lytton overcoming the Cybermen's will. But really, how much was he under their control anyway? Hardly at all during the serial's length. Vader's death was a genuinely iconic redemptive one. The Emperor was doomed to die with the station, but principally Vader's redemptive act was saving his son. He responded to compassion rather than revenge, in a surging moment which still gives me chills. Lytton doesn't really die redeeming himself so much as taking revenge on the Cybercontroller by maliciously wounding him. Unlike Vader's iconic redemption, Lytton barely dies onscreen at all, and Colin's trigger-happy Doctor doesn't need saving.
The whole chaotic direction resembles Saturday morning live kids' entertainment like Ghost Train. Only with paint guns replaced by real ones, so we get jarringly horrific violence within that wobbly format. Depressing events in a format usually about the joy of adults embracing their inner child. The entire sequence (right from Colin's reckless attempts to tear out Lytton's implants) come off as mindless recklessness that's contrived to conveniently not get the Doctor killed.
Blade Runner 2049's climax saw its protagonist having to commit several harrowing cold-blooded killings (so graphic and distressing it took me hours to recover), to achieve a similar prisoner rescue. But, crucially, we know he must improvise in a chaotic, dangerous, one-shot scenario of overwhelming odds and be twice as fast as his near-indestructible, unyielding enemies.
Attack's climax doesn't convince us of this. The attacking Cybermen seem woefully clumsy. Colin always seems to have the upper hand. Like the scene's giving him all the time he needs to fire, rather than him being genuinely seconds from death. Blade Runner's climax leaves us on a high, having survived such odds. Whereas Colin doesn't achieve anything; Lytton dies anyway. The hand-crushing leaves a nasty aftertaste, because it's almost teasing our hopes for a rescue that never comes. It's like Lytton's entire Cyber-conversion was contrived just to emulate Vader. The man-machine finally breaking from the machine to die a redeemed man. He's Cybernized solely for that lazy homage.
Colin's last-minute transformation of opinion about Lytton (echoing that distracted kid's TV format, where guest stars pop in and out) almost suggests that, like Luke, he somehow instantly became telepathic and sensed Lytton's goodness, which instantly changes his priorities completely left-field. Crucially, we actually understood why Luke cared about salvaging his father. His link to the past. With Lytton (like Ictar), it makes almost no sense why the Doctor suddenly cares.
Yes, some will claim the fact this makes Lytton a bad match for Vader proves he's no carbon-copy imitation. But frankly I'd argue Lytton's mess of an arc doesn't make sense otherwise. Whilst some like to think Saward had more edgy, adult and dramatic aspirations, the truth is he was just a hack.
It's easy to believe it was possible for Saward to tack on Lytton's redemption, because Star Wars made it seem easy. A cynic could think Vader's redemption was equally last-minute contrivance that worked because everything around it was so operatic. But if you look closely, the hints were always instinctively there. The Empire Strikes Back's conclusion subtly hints at Vader's more forgiving turn. Furthermore, we've learned Kenobi somewhat disingenuously exaggerated Vader's evil deeds to Luke, and there's another side to that story. But the directing in Jedi helps enormously. When seeing the Emperor torturing Luke, we're actually looking through Vader's eyes, feeling our emotional reaction become his.
There's never any point that seems true of Lytton. He uses Griffin, sells him down the river and ultimately still seems only in it for money. The Cryon cause seemingly doesn't matter to him beyond that. A shame, given this otherwise could've cast Lytton as Lawrence of Arabia or, more contemporarily, those brave Brits who travelled to help Syria's Kurdish resistance fight ISIS. Worse, rather than any atonement, there's a sociopathic refusal to acknowledge Lytton even was so bad in the first place. Like the Silurians, his sins are simply treated as cold necessity to get his position in the plot from A to B. That's not redemption.
Attack's greatest failure is that, unlike the Emperor, we don't come away thinking the Cybermen are particularly more evil than Lytton. Jedi's ending is an emotive one, going straight for the jugular with how horribly cruel the Emperor is and how desperately Luke needs his father to save him. Attack's ending is just two hooligans blowing up hapless Cybermen and the Doctor essentially coming to the rescue, only to make things worse.
Typically, Saward pushes things that extra bit more cynical. Having the Doctor, unlike Luke, not even see Lytton's potential for redemption and instead completely misjudge him until last minute. Ending the story not validated in what he believed but disillusioned at his mistake. Like many downbeat Sawardian endings topped off with a moronic statement of the obvious, it clumsily fails to mean anything. It's a sloppy rip-off, wrapped up in enough continuity factoids to still feel like an authentic, solidly important, irremovable part of canon for continuity worshippers.
Were Return of the Jedi mishandled, it could've been a nihilistic, hopeless disaster. It could've easily been made a hash of, particularly given Hollywood studios then. Being a rare redemption story during a cynical time, where cinema's emotional drive was for revenge, not redemption, it's very difficult to invert that without seeming clumsily pretentious. There's a laziness to Attack that betrays Saward's illiteracy concerning characterization. He thinks having the Doctor merely say how 'noble' Lytton or Ictar are is enough.
In GSCE English Literature, I had to write an historical newspaper about the events of Thomas Hardy's The Melancholy Hussar, where the romantic hero's caught deserting the army with others. He takes full responsibility for influencing the younger soldiers astray, pleading leniency for them and faces execution for it. To give that gallant act of bravery a despicable tabloid spin for the baying mob, I mendaciously worded it "They shamelessly admitted their treachery". If it's that easy for persuasive, emotive literature to characterize supposedly despicable characters nobly, or vice versa, why did Saward seemingly have less understanding how, than me age 17?