Eric Saward's contribution to the show by Rob Matthews 3/4/02
Revelation of the Daleks is for me one of the top five stories in Doctor Who's run. It's also perhaps the bleakest in terms of worldview, and the most littered with scenes of violent death. Now, I'm not a particularly morbid person, and Doctor Who is not a pessimistic show, so this is quite anomalous, but that's partly why it's a success. There's a good quote about this story to be found in David J Howe's TV companion -
"One could point out that the story was not only laced with gratuitous horror, but had main and subsiduary plots which could easily be called unsuitable for a young audience. But using these points as criticisms would, it seems, be missing the point somehow. While they would all be fairly damning to a normal Doctor Who story, the mere fact that all could be levelled at Revelation indicates that it was trying to do something different"Extend that argument across Saward's whole tenure as script editor and you'll see what I'm about to try and get at. Doctor Who was an essentially fun and optimistic show, so its transformation over the course of four or five years into something grim and occasionally sickening in its depiction of violence was bound to raise hackles and yells of disapproval. But that novelty, that difference, is the main reason why I consider the era successful. The Saward years are well-known for their abundance of continuity references - though really the producer was responsible for them -, but the show's history was actually important to those seasons in a far deeper and more subtle way. Matthew Brenner raised a good point in a review of the Fifth Doctor, arguing that where once the universe was a basically wonderful place with a few bad apples trying to spoil it, it became in the Saward era somewhere that was completely rotten until proved otherwise. I agree completely with the argument, but not with the assertion that this was a bad thing.
How can I put this - after many years of battling against bad guys, and seeing innocent people killed in every single battle, you'd have to be unbelievably resilient not to let it get to you in some way. At the risk of weaving everyone's reviews together here, the point was well made by Mike Morris in his Visitation piece that Saward brought a sense of moral tension into the show. The Doctor was no longer getting away from his adventures unscathed because he no longer had a script editor who would let him. Saward addressed certain issues that arose when you looked hard at the history of the show - particularly its attitude to violence -, and a lot of fans perhaps think that in doing so he was just taking Doctor Who too seriously. But I personally don't think there's anything wrong with that approach. The Doctor develops more than ever before as a real character in season 21 precisely because of it. It's only by really challenging the Doctor and his actions that he can remain relevant as someone you view as a hero as opposed to a superhero. The difference of course being that a hero doesn't have the odds stacked in his favour from the start (I've never understood the appeal of Superman). This challenging of the Doctor and his actions was central to the show for all its remaining years, it defined the Virgin NAs, and is still relevant to the BBC books, which are currently (at the time of writing) engaged in making the Doctor more human, less powerful. It was Saward who first started doing this for real. The show was reinvigorated by the dark streak he introduced; it kept the Doctor and the show from resting on their laurels, munching on jelly babies and toppling dictators without a care in the world. It shouldn't have been unnecessarily prolonged, this 'darkest hour' of the series, but fortunately - though more by chance than design - it wasn't. It ended naturally after four seasons, #19 to #22, not a story arc but a thematic arc. And the moral core of the show was strengthened by its willingness to outstare 'the abyss which looks back also'. Think about it - there wasn't a single successful Doctor Who story between the end of season 22 and the beginning of #25. Saward provided the tension and the sheer buildup that made Andrew Cartmel's vision for the show successful.
(that's success in terms of creativity as opposed to audience figures).
Ah, that's the other thing. Vision. I was thinking recently that Eric Saward's contribution to Doctor Who is analogous to Lawrence Miles', in that no-one else can render his vision quite as successfully. The only real way for the novels to stay true to Miles' vision would be for him to write every single one of them. And in the same way, Saward's style is so singular that it occasionally slots awkwardly into scripts that aren't his own. As a script editor he's fascinating but flawed. But as a script writer, he's great.
And as with Lawrence Miles, the main problem is that it's hard to justify letting one man's hugely individualistic vision railroad the whole property. Especially when so many people just don't like it.
Saward hit a good and necessary compromise by scripting several pivotal stories himself - Earthshock, which reinvented the Cybermen and killed off a companion for the first time since Hartnell's era; Resurrection of the Daleks which somehow managed to simultaneously make the Daleks more credible and undermine them, picked up thematic threads left dangling from Genesis, and gave another companion a downbeat departure that was completely without precedent; and Revelation of the Daleks, which closed the show's darkest season with an utterly superb illustration of Saward's maxim that 'when you show violence, you should show that it hurts'.
Saward's a morbid scribe. There's no point in denying that - it's simply the way his writing is inclined. Hell, Revelation is set in a giant funeral parlour on a planet named after death. But that for me is why dark subject matter never seems gratuitous in his hands. It's simply part and parcel of his worldview. And that's not actually a crime, you know. I believe he's fascinated by it, but refute utterly that he revels in it. Revelation is a story that's noteworthy not simply because of the number of violent death scenes, but because of how uniquely memorable they are, how shocking in spite of their frequency. We're used to Daleks yelling 'Exterminate' and zapping people, but when the DJ is murdered you truly feel you've just witnessed something utterly obscene. Jobel's and Tasambeker's pathetic deaths (that's pathetic in the sense of pathos, by the way) are nothing short of poetic in their sad pointlessness. The mutant's forgiveness of Peri and her reaction to it bring a lump to the throat. Then there's Orcini's cuddling up to Bostock's corpse as he detonates his bomb, and Stengos' horrific/heroic entreaties to his daughter to kill him as he transforms into a Dalek. It's an emotionally exhausting story and demonstrates Saward's complete confidence in his own vision for the show.
Of course, it's quite well known amongst fans that Saward was reaching the end of his tether with the series at that point and that he actually wrote the Revelation scripts while on holiday. That he was becoming rather careless about other people's scripts is evident from Vengeance on Varos and Timelash, and that he then lost interest completely is clear from the utter hash he made of Trial of a Timelord. So Revelation was a last, glorious gasp and in an ideal world have been his final script for the show.
As things stand, he stayed too long. But for a while there he was very opposite of the purveyor of cynicism he's made out to be. He was the show's conscience.
"The Fault is in our Stars" by Thomas Cookson Updated 30/9/23
Eric Saward's controversial run as script-editor (1982-86) saw an emphasis on graphic violence, provoking complaints from BBC management. He rage-quit during Trial of a Time Lord and torched his career with a vitriolic tell-all Starburst interview slating John Nathan-Turner, an interview that's long divided fandom between those appalled to learn of JNT's obtuse, petty-minded management and those who'll never take Saward's side at any price. The latter consider Saward's behaviour disgraceful, snide, unprofessional and likely reflective of his job performance throughout.
I've frequently flip-flopped on Saward. But it's odd how fans of an anti-authoritarian hero claim Saward should've done as he was told without complaint and continued scouring for good writers his paranoid boss hadn't yet blacklisted. Perhaps that's the question. How ruthlessly professional can JNT's management become before it expunges all heart from the show? Conversely, how personal can Saward's writing get before we're just watching a bitter, mean-spirited product of a miserable workplace?
Sadly, we got the worst of both worlds.
It's worth remembering Saward was originally rather an emergency hire. Throughout the 1970's, the show was predominantly blessed with the consistent presence of Terrance Dicks or Robert Holmes as script-editor. However, after Holmes left, the show underwent a rapid turnover of script-editors who quickly departed for greener pastures too. When Anthony Root left for Juliet Bravo early into Season 19, JNT quickly needed a replacement. Eric Saward had submitted the script for The Visitation, and JNT offered him the job impromptu. Eric maybe wasn't the ideal candidate, merely the best available. JNT was stuck with him.
Initially, the two seemed on the same page about reemphasising serious drama and threat after the comedic Williams era. Perhaps where they slowly diverged was to do with JNT's side interests in pantomimes and conventions.
In both The Visitation and Earthshock, Saward demonstrated good understanding of how to apply action to a story. Giving each Davison companion a purpose, and in Earthshock's case, even a higher calling.
It's a brief patch where the era seemed to understand what family audiences wanted. So Saward's credentials seemed all good. But it was early days, with signs already that his tropes might become problematic through overuse. Earthshock could've potentially spearheaded a beautiful resilience narrative. Unfortunately the reset button always got pressed.
Davison's futile attempts to reason with the Terileptils seemed valiant and understandable the once but will become infuriating when he never learns from experience. Earthshock delivers hard on its action climaxes. However, it ends abruptly, feeling half an episode short of proper resolution.
In one hard-hitting scene, the sympathetic Professor Kyle is killed by a determined Cyberman breaching the TARDIS. It speaks to harsh realities of war and shows the super-strong Cybermen being very dangerous to disarm. However, it's a moment Saward will recreate constantly hereon. Characters we'd followed all story dying anticlimactically. A perishing enemy spitefully taking a victim with them (Vorshak, Lytton, Natasha). Each time it'll mean less, and say less about the powerful enemy and more about the idiocy of our heroes and nasty predictability of Saward's writing.
Saward's early stories demonstrated a sobering simplicity that directors could grasp and translate, unlike Bidmead's preferred high-concept messes. But the show was still getting plenty of the latter, with no one less suited to doctoring them into shape than Saward.
Saward had rush-written Earthshock to replace Christopher Priest's The Enemy Within. This left him little time to fix Time-Flight's insurmountable problems, illustrating how bad commissions that should've fallen by the wayside would become reprioritised by JNT anyway.
Often Saward did have the righter instincts, but JNT continually overruled him. The Master should've been killed off. Davison would've benefitted more often from veterans like Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes who Saward had to fight for against JNT's stubbornness.
As Saward witnessed Season 20 repeatedly fall flat, he seemingly resorted to trying to recreate Earthshock's brutal impact, with laboured, contrived results. He admittedly wrote Resurrection of the Daleks' violent excesses to overcompensate for Season 20's pantomime feel. Unfortunately, when strike action put Resurrection on hold, a frustrated Saward decided to force that downbeat tone from Season 21's outset.
Warriors of the Deep was already misanthropic trash, with the action largely depending on the Doctor deliberately withholding the Hexacromite solution from the humans until they're mostly dead. Preston and Vorshak's survival could've somewhat redeemed him, but Saward contrived them both to perish taking a bullet for Davison instead. Professor Kyle's death conveyed something about Cyberman superior strength. Vorshak's death to a vengeful Ictar demonstrates only the idiocy of Davison's insistent mercies to the enemy.
It highlights the worst of Saward's approach. He seemingly believed fickle audiences won't get this is serious drama unless we're bombarded with constant deaths to ensure we get the point. Worse, he seemed to consider the Doctor hopelessly fickle too and needing a surrounding pile-up of corpses to wake him up.
Finally, Resurrection of the Daleks did air. Occasionally the final product does vindicate Saward. It does vanquish the pantomime feel of the era, feeling much more authentically Who in ways Davison's time cried out for. Giving Davison some strong material and cosmic stakes to reckon with.
But it crosses the line repeatedly into unpleasant excesses. Too many convoluted sub-plots overload it. The prison-break material could've made a perfect standalone Dalek Cutaway episode. But Saward seemingly didn't know what to do to stretch out the story's restrictive setting, so the whole thing just becomes a prolonged, miserable massacre.
When shoving a Dalek out the window, Davison briefly seems the kick-ass hero this story needs, who'll turn the tide and make this worth our while. Unfortunately, he largely spends the story captured, and everything just becomes an unending, tiresome parade of misery.
The deaths become horrid noise. No one explains the massacred fugitives at the beginning. It's possible to buy Stein being a malfunctioning sleeper agent, but his shifting motivations sabotage any investment in his redemption. The Daleks deciding to exterminate Davros feels in character but also feels a waste of an interesting powerplay. Even Davison's assassination mission on Davros before bottling it, resembles a filler development drawn from a hat.
I think I understand why it feels hollow. The Daleks begin and end the story near extinction level. This desperation appropriately makes them dangerous and determined to take as many innocents with them as possible. Unfortunately, we're given a Doctor who can't stop them taking the entire guest cast with them. Nor can he refute Davros' misanthropic worldview of the human race all being collectively deserving sinners.
Davison's resort to the Movellan plague is unsettling but probably necessary. Yet it feels all the show's offering now is mindless overkill to the point it's just unpleasant. Worse, giving the Daleks such a prolonged, sadistic demise completely undermines their immortal stature after all that work. Ultimately the story's so busy backlashing against the Williams era, it never feels 'for' something.
Death is abused as a dramatic tool so much that you stop caring or trusting that the writer knows what he's doing. The most inexcusable is Professor Laird's death, particularly the cruel way she's exposed by her tinnitus condition that was never evident before. The entire premise just seems to be having everything go wrong and hope for the Doctor's salvation come to nothing.
One Gallifrey Base poster likened Saward to a heckler spoiling a magic trick. Taking our idealistic fantasy hero and exposing how his peace-loving methods would obviously fail horribly in the real world.
It's generally assumed JNT wanted simple superficial light entertainment, whilst Saward and Levine's petulant input only confused and immiserated things. JNT was a colourful razamataz figure. That his early era feels so dour and nasty seems at face value to fit Saward's worldview more (despite JNT's own explicit anti-Williams backlash). However, JNT didn't actually oppose Saward's violent approach. On Resurrection's DVD extras, JNT rubbished fan complaints about the violence and seemingly welcomed the controversy and publicity. In fact, the era's nastiest moment, Peri's death was JNT's edict, not Saward's.
Attack of the Cybermen seemed a logical next step after Earthshock's success. However, Earthshock worked because Eric had to withhold the Cybermen's appearance until the first cliffhanger. This gave the story a sucker punch and discipline.
Attack has neither and actually renders the Cybermen insipid. They lack any grand plan, they're frequently killed too easily, often by their own mind-numbing incompetence. The story feels unfinished and blurred by too many sub-plots railroaded into the main action. It's hard to know where to begin with them. Saward clearly didn't. He also didn't know how to resolve them except by killing everyone off.
Lytton's redemption is the intended sucker punch, but it doesn't make sense and feels a desperate leap. Maybe Lytton should've remained a villain. He lacks the depth to be anything else. It feels Saward can only belatedly declare an ambiguity and hope killing everyone off will stop us questioning its veracity. Again, the Doctor seems callous to everyone else's death but becomes required to act perversely overwrought at the demise of a murderous scumbag.
Revelation of the Daleks is probably Saward's best story. The kind of acidic, off-the-wall television only he could deliver. Crucially, Graeme Harper makes its psychodrama world of ubiquitous lunatics work. The multiple subplots are paced well, building toward several climaxes in Davros' fort, before finally Skaro's Daleks succeed where all others failed.
It has issues. Tasambeker's subplot resembles a pointless sadistic mind-game from a Saw movie. Certain important points aren't made lucid. Only the novelization clarifies that Kara's real goal was assassinating the visiting president. In another era, Natasha might've become a companion, harbouring a secret revenge quest against Davros. Saward had crueller plans for her. The Doctor somewhat does 'the right kind of a little' here, but still Colin feels cheated out of his first proper Dalek story.
If some find Saward's era attractive, perhaps it occasionally tapped into 'positive' nihilism. A liberating abandonment of restrictive roles, standards and societal judgments. Season 22 embraced a moral fugue where Lytton, Takis and Lilt could be heinous yet still noble.
There's a tragic sense of what if this era were done right, and Saward's nihilism honed better? The problem seems to be this. Creative executives like George Lucas tend to only be as good as their creative team's willingness to oppose their dafter ideas. Unfortunately, rather than curbing each other's worst creative instincts, JNT and Saward seemingly frustrated and embittered each other into doubling down on them.
Barry Letts always recalled long creative pooling sessions with Terrance Dicks. But JNT was apparently spending more time being gassed up by fan praise than finding common ground with Saward. JNT got arrogant, Saward got resentful and conniving. JNT largely cut Saward off from the mentorship of Holmes and Dicks, who could demonstrate how to write the Doctor with proper fortitude against adversity.
It's possible had JNT left after Time-Flight, leaving Saward a freer hand to recruit writers he wanted, he would've performed the job far better. Maybe under JNT's paranoid control, Saward simply wasn't allowed to perform his best. But maybe Saward would've always been a problem who resented the show's pre-existing 'children's show' stigma, and connived to disprove it. Maybe all that really changed after The Visitation was that Saward watched Blakes 7's finale.
Besides, JNT's likeliest successor would've probably been Terence Dudley. Likely a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".