THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS
The Toclafane
Reviews

"Bad Eggs" by Thomas Cookson 10/1/16

This isn't an overview of Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords, but more a hypothesising about the Series One Toclafane stories that never happened and ended up featuring Daleks instead.

Whilst Doctor Who's revival was certain, difficult negotiations with the Terry Nation estate for using the Daleks in New Who at one point broke down completely. It seemed a depressing prospect indeed to have Doctor Who without Daleks. But it wasn't inconceivable.

Doctor Who had more potential to run as a success independent of the Daleks than the Daleks did of Doctor Who. Daleks had never been able to take off in a TV show of their own. So Nation's Estate probably realised that ultimately their only benefit would be to agree.

Nontheless, RTD prepared the Toclafane as emergency Dalek substitutes. The Zeroids from Terrahawks turned evil. Future humans existing as disembodied heads in deadly flying spheres, slaughtering all in their wake 'for fun'. But originally they were the ones who destroyed Gallifrey, not the unmentionable Daleks.

I wonder if maybe certain things about Series One and the Ninth Doctor might have worked better or made more sense that way. Conventional readings are that RTD's first season was always penned with the Daleks in mind, and the Toclafane only a spur-of-the-moment alternative. But it feels more to me that Series One was always written for the Toclafane.

Sure Dalek was always based on Jubilee, a Dalek story and a Dalek character study. It remains the ne plus ultra of New Who's Dalek stories. Which in hindsight makes it rather misplaced, beginning with the 'final end' and a revolutionary reappraisal of the Daleks, which perhaps should have been preceded by a more traditional Dalek story for the masses, to avoid putting the horse before the cart.

Perhaps 'the last Toclafane' would be far more believable than 'the last Dalek'. No-one really believed the Daleks could ever be gone from the show for good. In hindsight, Dalek looks like a 45 minute trailer for every RTD finale. And I can't help feel that has made it a lesser, smaller story. The Toclafane might indeed have only appeared for the one season. They might have only worked with Eccleston. Perhaps the Toclafane was always a concept too horrifying to dwell on.

The Toclafane make a horrifying kind of sense. Probably RTD's most sci-fi idea and unmistakably his in its spiky, hedonistic misanthropy. Humans existing in total survival suits as mentally stunted children, born and existing without love or nurture, and being raised by humans of the same maladjusted kin. Living off angry, unleashed hedonism of destruction and death, without empathy, for the hell of it. The most frightening mindset of a Doctor Who villain: the pack mentality.

As Johnathan Hili asserted, the Ninth Doctor's vitriolic contempt for humans, referring to them as 'stupid apes' was hard to digest and seemed incompatible with any other incarnation of the Doctor (the unforgivably mischaracterised Fifth Doctor of Warriors of the Deep excepted). Sure the Ninth Doctor was bearing a lot of bitterness over the Time War, but why was his bitterness particularly directed our way? What did we have to do with the war? Was it somehow our fault Gallifrey was destroyed? Well if the Toclafane thread played out as intended, the answer would've been resolutely yes.

It'd make sense why the Doctor is particularly vengeful at Cassandra, and seems gleeful at Earth's destruction in the supernova. Therefore Rose's journey would be about reminding the Doctor of the better points of humanity and what we were before we were corrupted into something evil that he couldn't forgive.

The more I think about it, the more Series One seems written with the Toclafane in mind rather than the Daleks. Particularly the Tennant-era backpedallings on those bits. Gushing about 'brilliant humans!' as if to overcompensate for the blunder, to ignore the dramatic thread that now never happened, and systematically the Ninth Doctor's character was erased and undone. Cassandra's death was undone, and the Tenth Doctor declared himself in a transparently revisionist way 'the man who never would'. This was billed as a development, the consequence of his guilt for what he'd been and done as Eccleston and embracing the easy redemption. But I find myself wondering if it was more a case of scrapping the development and starting again, once RTD realised the Doctor didn't have a reason to despise humanity anymore.

Now it's a tricky issue. Hitting the Doctor close to home.

In Genesis of the Daleks, it's significant how the Doctor and companions react to Skaro's horrors. All those horrific events and deaths have happened. Yet at the end the Doctor and Sarah seem their usual jolly selves, grinning as they spin away around the Time Ring. Is that tasteless? Has the experience meant nothing to them? Well, it comes down to that thin line between being stoic and callous. At 11 years old, that particular dance on that thin line made it all the more thrilling, but it was clearly simply the way these characters lived (like in Planet of the Daleks when, after the Doctor thinks Jo's dead, he decides to sacrifice the recording of her last words to make a weapon against the Daleks, not because he doesn't care about her last words, but because he's an alien and he's being pragmatic) They're used to living amidst danger and death. And there's something admirable and reassuring about that, and it's the very note of hope the story needed.

Then JNT decided the Tom Baker era's comedy and laughter needed eliminating and that this display of jolly stoicism was too complacent and not dramatic enough, so it was time to hit the Doctor and companions closer to home in ways they couldn't just laugh off. Hence Adric's death.

But the emotional aftermath was handled so ineptly and sociopathically that it's worth pausing to wonder what the point was. It just comes off as emotionally false, which is the opposite of what the show was going for.

True, Hinchcliffe planned to kill Sarah Jane in The Hand of Fear. How would that have been handled? Maybe Tom's moody performance would be enough to convey the wounding loss without words being said. But in Time-Flight, when the whole TARDIS crew has to display the same grief, it rings as false. It'd be more believable if Tegan wasn't affected beyond initial shock. She didn't really know Adric that well, and you can't convince me they were ever friends. Her hysterical pretence at mourning is as unconvincing as her changing the subject after the outburst.

So the characters themselves don't end up seeming stoic, but just apathetic and emotionally stunted. And it becomes clear we're not seeing admirable examples of tough humans who keep going and stay pragmatic no matter what but rather characters who don't seem to have a clue what they're doing, much like the show's makers. We were basically watching reckless, stupid children incessantly doing reckless, stupid things and you know they'll carry on regardless of how many times they're told to behave, no matter who gets hurt. When the Fifth Doctor was presented this way, it destroyed the very 'hero's journey of discovery and wisdom' myth that made the show work in the first place.

In Series 6, it was decided yet again to hit the characters close to home. But Amy's reaction to the events was so apathetic. No, worse, there just wasn't a reaction. And in terms of the question of the dance between being stoic and callous, or rather tasteless, well, Let's Kill Hitler actually seems determined to cross every single line of good taste. And it cements my theory of Moffat's era being made with the same kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde mindset as JNT's was.

The whole predestination paradox business of Series 6 actually neutered the drama. Because it's set out where River's life is going, all the characters can do in the end is leave River to carry on her pre-determined life, and then spend the next bunch of stories waiting for anything else to happen with her. So one can only watch the events of her story from a sense of unfeeling passiveness, unable to engage with it (just like with the ineffectual Davison Doctor), because the characters are unable to do anything about it or, for that matter, feel anything about it, because to do so would be a useless waste too.

Between that, the war-damaged Eccleston Doctor was as right as they ever got this idea. Where the damage ran through him, and the whole point was being with him on the journey to recovery, and in his search for purpose and enlightenment after his disillusioment. The trauma that clouded his mind and left him without faith in what he used to believe in.

But perhaps there was a missing piece that was the Toclafane. As the real focal point of the Doctor's emotional rage, and, by their removal, things got blunted.

With the Toclafane, it makes more sense why the season was so Earthbound and about charting human history to its worst conclusion, where The Long Game's cyberpunk society of psychotropic implants is a precursor to the total Toclafane conversion. Why the season focused on domestics so insufferably, to be about the horror of what happens to humanity when nurture and parental boundaries cease to be.

Finally there's Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways. On the surface, it was seemingly always meant as a Dalek story. But more I think about it, the less I believe it was intended as anything but a Toclafane story that since went through sloppy revisions.

Yes the story riffs heavily from Resurrection and Genesis of the Daleks (or at least episode 6), but only on their action sequences and a moral dilemma for the Doctor that, the more I think about it, really would make more sense concerning the Toclafane. Even the idea that these Daleks are harvested humans is barely a revision. But by making them Daleks, rather than Toclafane, it makes less sense. It'd make more sense for the Toclafane to subtly, successfully infiltrate human societies or develop a God complex than the Daleks, the ultimate materialists. Likewise, Daleks wouldn't put the Doctor to the test over whether he can press the button and kill them all; they'd just kill him first.

I never knew how to take that moment. I kept expecting the Doctor to come to his senses and press the switch before the Daleks could destroy it. Neither happened. Maybe RTD was defying expectations in ways only this show could, reinforcing the Doctor as an unconventional anti-hero who knows some things he can't prevent, that the universe and future events are bigger than him. Or maybe he hoped somewhere in those Dalek-human hybrids was the potential for humanity and redemption in the long run. But that's flimsy and ultimately just questions all the Doctor's capability and worth.

Replace them with Toclafane, and it becomes clearer. If it were the Toclafane, humans at their worst, not Daleks that were once human, then the Doctor's refusal to press the switch, to sacrifice humans to save humans from humans, and destroy mankind's only future survival option makes sense. And yes, maybe knowing that humanity is what they are makes the hope of future redemption clearer.

I don't buy that the horrific implications of the Toclafane were resolved by the Tenth Doctor's "Tell me the human race is degenerate now." The horrors of humanity becoming their worst in a hopeless dying universe aren't cathartically resolved by a minute's 'thinking good thoughts'. But, Rose's speech to her family "That fight's happening now", just might've done. She's not just refusing to let it happen to the Doctor, she's refusing to let her species become the Toclafane. And maybe one shopgirl's words to her family about making a difference and leading a better life, won't change that in the course of history, but maybe it's still hope.