And then it happens. The streams of energy, the column of flame, the revelation of the new Doctor--and her sudden, surprised gasp, of "Oh, brilliant," upon seeing her own new visage.
***
But I'm not here to celebrate the arrival of Jodie Whittaker just yet. You wait a moment, Doctor. Because first I have to say goodbye to my Doctor.
I've been a fan since I was a teen, and never thought that my old favorites would be shouldered aside by the angry Scot. The new series, well I've loved it since it began, but who could dethrone the Doctors of long ago, when I was so impressionable and innocent, and--young.
Peter Capaldi, that's who. With Steven Moffatt's writing, with his own tremendous acting, even when the scripts were less than perfect, the journey of the Doctor from emotionally disconnected to "hate is always foolish…and love, is always wise." The Doctor who punched his way through the wall because he had a duty of care, who couldn't give up on Missy, and never knew he had succeeded, with her dying to stand with him.
This last adventure, with no villains, much gentle humor, the two Doctors contrasting with each other, with a last run-around--it was a fitting send-off to the Doctor and the actor who pulled such emotion from his own depths that the young-ancient, weary-exuberant, old Doctor touched my heart in his last moments.
In an increasingly cruel world, the Doctor's last speech gives us words we so desperately need. And, we must hope, sets the expectations for his successor.
Long may she reign.
***
Jodie Whittaker is a superb actress, and "Oh, brilliant," with her wide eyes and a rapt smile is an encouraging welcome to the world of her era. And I'll be there for it, rooting for her and Chris Chibnall. If Chibnall can overcome the occasional misanthropy that makes his vision jar with Doctor Who, he has it in him to be a brilliant show runner, and to infuse the Whittaker era with a whole new brand of magic.
Welcome, Thirteen. Make it lucky thirteen for us. We're counting on you, Jodie. And you, Chris.
Phil Sandifer's observation about the end of The Tenth Planet that "what is about to happen is not the end of the First Doctor's tenure. No. It's the end of the Doctor. William Hartnell only played the First Doctor once, in 1973. Otherwise, he was always simply the Doctor. And what is about to happen is not the replacement of the first version with the second. It's the replacement of the only version with something completely new" is quite important. Because Hartnell labors under the utterly unfair burden of being judged in comparison to all those who came after him. But they, you see, had the advantage of seeing his three distinct versions of the Doctor, and being able to pick and choose from his templates--or create something utterly new.
But the show itself had a certain form that allowed for tremendous freedom, while delivering certain expectations.
Not so when it first began. That early rush of stories, the first two seasons, what I like to call Auntie Verity's Pandemonium Shadow Show, kept you guessing. The Doctor: friend or foe? Daemonic or demonic? Was the TARDIS a place of refuge, or a dimensionally transcendent madhouse, where an eerily mature Susan stalks the corridors, scissor blades protruding from her clenched fist? Were these travels meaningful or could you not rewrite history, not one line. Along the way, Barbara and Ian played a key role in transforming selfish, sometimes cowardly old man into a hero, and the show mixed hard sci-fi with BBC costume dram, or even the Carry On series, with perverse invocations of s Méliès's 1902 film A Trip to the Moon. Balletic ants, a magic police box, and a grumpy wizard?
Who knows what could happen?
After Ian and Barbara leave, we get the middle period. The Doctor is more of a straightforward hero, albeit a deeply flawed one: the 12-episode long arc, The Dalek's Masterplan, leaves us surrounded by death and loss: Bret, Katerina, and, most agonizingly of all, Sara. All gone. The epic tragedy aside, it's an effort to do Auntie Verity's show without her, and its flashes of genius can't hide the fact that the show needs a paradigm shift.
Finally, we get the Doctor who shows up at the OK Corral, crashing into the Western genre, and shaking it up, who comes to contemporary earth's aid, takes a hero's stand against WOTAN, and, finally, falls in the wake of Mondas's destruction.
Hartnell managed to make it all seem consistent, but in fact his performance anchored the show through a bewildering series of changes and formats, from Verity Lambert's free-wheeling Hall of Mirrors to he more straightforward sci-fi of the fourth season.
When I was a teen, I loved the idea of Hartnell as conveyed in the Target novelizations. Then I was disappointed by the dying old man in The Three Doctors, and Richard Hurndall's evocation of the original. After I'd seen a handful of the original Hartnell eps, before stumbling on BritBox's far more complete catalog, I thought I had the measure of the man. I was wrong.
It's hard to rank him now, with so many successors riffing off his contributions, but i want to say this: I enjoyed him far more than I thought I would, I loved Jacqueline Hill's rapport with him, and her ability to up his game, and I found his comic episodes stand up even now.
If you enjoy any version of Doctor Who, Hartnell deserves a sincere thank you for pioneering so many ways to be the Doctor, for making the character and the police box the epitome of English magical realism.
Then loudly cried the bold Sir Bedivere:
“Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy Elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolv’d
Which was an image of the mighty world,
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.”
And slowly answer’d Arthur from the barge:
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have liv’d my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure!
I have to start with an insight garnered from Phil Sandifer's essay on this story: trying to scrape all the history of the show and its mythology from this story is very hard, but worth doing. Ideally, you want to watch the story that aired, and not retroject the future of the Cybermen and regeneration as staples of the program. (Sandifer's essay is excellent by the way, and I'll try not to cover too much of the ground he did--but at a minimum we must begin with fresh eyes). Or, in the words of the somewhat germane Mr. Roboto, "forget what you know."
Why do I bring up the 1980s "Mr. Roboto" with its rather nastily stereotyped-faced robots? Because the 1980s, not unlike our own era--and the mid sixties, for that matter--was an era where the vitality of pop culture, like Doctor Who, like "Mr. Roboto," like The Handmaid's Tale (the novel from which it was drawn was published in the 1980s), came from the paranoia and fear of change, of an impending breakup of an established social order, to be succeeded by something far worse. As we snapped back into the long 1980s, the forces trying to move beyond them revisit the fears of that era, and so it was in 1966--long held verities (sorry!) were collapsing and fears of what would fill the void were rampant, reflected in books like A Clockwork Orange (1962), and the ambiguity toward both authority and protest displayed by The Prisoner (1967-1968).
Look at the changes in companions--from Barbara and Ian (twinset and pearls (metaphorically, at least), suit and tie, received pronunciation) to Ben (a cockney sailor) and Chelsea girl Polly. The old order changeth, yielding place to new, Tennyson wrote, but not easily, not without pain, and not without fear. Ben and Polly are the acceptable faces of the Youth Revolution, meant to reassure that "the kids are alright," but the verdict in England at the time was still very much out.
"The Tenth Planet," then, is a response to a fear of loss of humanity through technology changing the very nature of humankind. (No, really--that's what was the catalyst of the story and the Cybermen. But if General Cutler puts you in mind of Dr. Strangelove (1964), remember that Doctor Who was engaging with nuclear war and its potential for devastation as far back as its second story arc.
Sandifer notes that the Cybermen are "an alternative version of humanity - the dark mirror of humanity, who went on a quest for spiritual enlightenment and succeeded at terrible cost," and points out that they win the debate with Polly over "caring." And he's right. They are body horror because of their human origins and remnants, and they are spiritually horrific because they have a point of view that is not easily refuted. Indeed, they offer twice--the second time after the first wave of Cybermen have been killed by Ben and the staff of the base--to save humanity and bring them to Mondas. They just want to guarantee their own survival (and do not reject out of hand the Doctor's offer that they stay and share Earth with humanity). They are horrific because they reject what makes humanity good by pointing to its shadow side.
They have a point of view, as I said. And Polly can't quite muster a defense why "caring" about General Cutler's son is noble and human-defining when There are people dying all over your world, yet you do not care about them."
Meanwhile, General Cutler is preparing to use the "Z Bomb" (Which sounds awfully reminiscent of the "Q Bomb" in The Mouse that Roared (1955), filmed 1959, starring, like Dr, Strangelove, starring Peter Sellers and featuring William Hartnell, by the bye).
We're in body horror territory with the Cybermen, a genre that "arguably can be traced 1950s horror/science fiction hybrids," but we're also in the uneasy land of Leonard Wibberly, Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, and Slim Pickens.
-2-
"But now farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seëst—if indeed I go
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)—
To the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound.”
Arthur's words to Bedivere are the last words he speaks in Idylls of the King. Wounded, confused, the old hero is unsure, unheroic; he is weakened unto death.
And so too is Doctor Who--or, if you must have it so, the Doctor. The effect of this last adventure has been the sapping of his strength--his "old body is wearing a bit thin," he says. And, after Polly wraps him in his cloak, he hurries back to the TARDIS, acting up in a way it hasn't since The Edge of Destruction. After managing to let his companions in, he collapses, they rush to see him, to see the old order changing, giving place to new.
Doctor Who is dead, but not Doctor Who. And just who is this new man, and what will the new order be?
-3-
Love is very fruitful,
Both of honey and of gall.
--Pautus, as translated by Barnaby.
I'm a little suspicious of the old story that Hartnell was fired for ill health. His performance in "The Gunfighters," in "The War Machines," "The Smugglers" and in "The Tenth Planet" itself are vintage Hartnell--he's funny, he's powerful, he's angry--to steal great characterization from Sandifer, in Episode 4:
Hartnell rumbles back into the story full of fury and passion. The strong sense is that he stopped the Z-Bomb (though all reason says Ben did) and saved the day. He gets, in other words, the hero's entrance, full of terrible rage. This is absolutely the same man we see at the end of, for instance, The Family of Blood - a man who, when put with his back against the wall, roars back even stronger.
But there's a sense that something isn't quite right as well. The Doctor complains of an outside influence effecting him, and murmurs that his body is wearing a bit thin. Still, that is quickly set aside as the Doctor manages to finally completely unhinge General Cutler (who is quickly gunned down) and take over the situation. It's a fantastic sequence, and it's tough to remember when we last saw Hartnell this in control and decisive.
I agree with this, except for the last sentence. He was this decisive in The Savages, furiously rejecting the Elite's exploitation of the outsiders. His standing up to the War Machine creates a template that the show has returned to again and again. The Doctor may be sick, but Hartnell, when not sidelined by the producers or the script, delivers until his very last scene.
The infamous "Billy fluffs" don't strike me as worse than those any other actor on the show, when you consider the amount of lines Hartnell had to deliver. He's often considerably less gaffe-prone than the guest stars 9watch "The Gunfighters" again). And yet--1n 1973, he was indeed very ill, barely able to participate in the anniversary show. Needcoffee.com's "Doctor Who Essentials" quotes Hartnell:
We did Doctor Who for forty-eight weeks a year but I loved it. I couldn’t go out into the street without a bunch of children following me, like the Pied Piper. People used to take it terribly seriously. I’d get letters from boys swotting for exams, asking me complicated questions about time ratios and the TARDIS. I couldn’t help them. A lot of the scriptwriters used to make The Doctor use expressions like “centrifugal force” but I refused. If it gets too technical, the children don’t understand and they lose interest. I saw The Doctor as a kind of lama, one of those long-lived old boys out in Tibet who might be anything up to eight hundred years old but only look seventy-five.
Perhaps the theory suggested there that he wore himself out, and wore out his welcome with the production staff too, is true.
The Cybermen, with the organic body parts, singsong speech, cloth masks, either work for you or they don't. They did for me, except on the combat scenes in the snow where they were required to use there arms as clubs. But that strange, unexplained visage gazing into the camera at the cliffhanger for episode 1? Genius. The voices, so distorted, and yet so logical, so musical, yet so inhuman--much more creepy than the standard deep voices later used. These Cybermen are weird. And that makes them scary.
Finally, two production notes. This story begins to build the order that will house UNIT--a world-wide cooperative system between nations, with people of all races and nations sharing authority. It's not flawless, as presented (the Italian stereotypes are pretty over the top), but it's clearly an effort to envisage a future of international cooperation, and treats its nonwhite characters, especially Earl Cameron's calm, measured performance as Williams, who keeps his white counterpart Schultz from panicking at least twice.
Finally, critics often mock the American accents of General Cutler and his son, and they do seem pretty off-base in 2017. But Robert Beatty was born in Canada and lived there until he was 37. Born in 1909, he played Americans and Canadians throughout his career, including a highly regarded portrayal of Ronald Reagan in Breakthrough at Reykjavik in 1987. Beatty may have been recalling an earlier era of American history, the Damon Runyon New York of his youth, made famous in film and literature. But whatever he was doing, it was an American doing an American accent, not an Englishman.
"Long Ben" Avery, whose name does not appear, in fact to have been Ben, or Avery, for that matter *Henry Every is apparently correct), casts a rather longer shadow in literature and pop culture than might seem reasonable. The Pyrates (1983), George MacDonald Fraser's "burlesque fantasy on every swashbuckler I ever read or saw," portrays Avery as an unabashed hero who pretends to go rogue in order to rescue his lady love and her cantankerous father. He's about as nuanced in Fraser's telling as The Great Leslie in Blake Edwards's The Great Race. Under his own name, he appears as the sympathetic antihero in 2011's Doctor Who episode The Curse of the Black Spot, and later sails to the Eleventh Doctor's side in A Good Man Goes to War.
But his treasure is the chief bone of contention in The Smugglers, a four-parter in which the Doctor, Polly, and Ben find themselves in 17th Century Cornwall, landing on a beach near a church tended by the lone churchwarden Joseph Longfoot, a former member of Avery's crew. Longfoot, at first suspicious of the the travelers, comes to trust the Doctor, and, swearing he has reformed, trusts him with a riddle that will unlock the mystery of Avery's lost treasure.
The Doctor, Polly, and Ben go into town to an inn. Meanwhile Longfoot is ambushed by his old cremate, the inaptly named Cherub, who fails to get the secret from Longfoot, and kills him, having learned that travelers had spoken with him recently. Cherub kidnaps the Doctor, the local Squire jails Polly and Ben, who cannot account of their whereabouts and are thus suspects for Longfoot's murder, and the evil pirate Captain Pike (also an alumnus of Avery's ship), lulls the Squire (a smalltime smuggler, along with the innkeeper Kewper) into a "partnership" that will be very one-sided. Oh, and the pirates have managed to capture and tie up Josiah Blake, the "King's revenue man" sent to end the smuggling, a more somber performance from John Ringham who you really must remember from The Aztecs, where he played the barking mad, scenery-chewing Tlotoxl.
I think of all the lost episodes, this is the one I wish would be found. The recon I watched for parts 1-3 was not up to Loose Cannon's standards, but even Part 4, which was LC, was harder than usual to follow. It's a pity, because this one is action packed, with plot and counter-plot, and I strongly suspect it might rank near The Gunfighters for sheer entertainment value. It's less funny--though Hartnell flattering and charming the half-aware-he's-being-gulled Captain Pike (a splendid performance by Michael Godfrey is very funny, as is his scene faking out the pirate guard Jamaica by pretending to tell fortunes so that he and Kewper can escape.
The story darkens as it goes on, and has some pretty grim death sequences--Jamaica's death at Pike's hands is pretty rough, to name but one, but this is the sort of pirate story Fraser was lovingly lampooning in The Pyrates, and it's a pretty good job, insofar as we can see from the recon and the audio. The notion that everyone mistakes Anneke Wills's Polly for a boy (seriously, even the tele snaps give that game away) is treated as a running gag,almost as if anticipating Strax's inability to recognize human gender.
Escape is important here; Polly and Ben get back into the game by rather cruelly convincing the village idiot left to watch them that he is cursed by the Doctor--a warlock--and that only they--his apprentices--can save him. So that gets them free.
The story has a three sides seeking the treasure--Cherub, Pike, and the Squire/Kewper nexus, and Blake, in consultation with the Doctor, trying to prevent Pike from massacring the townspeople. As Blake is delayed gathering a militia, and the pirates begin to load treasure (while drinking heavily on the job), the Doctor plays for time. He makes an agreement with Pike to give him the clue to Avery's treasure in return for Pike's guarantee that the townspeople will not be hurt, he keeps his word. How far we have come from the Doctor who would break faith and even kill to protect himself and (only incidentally) his companions in The Cave of Skulls!
The Doctor keeps his word, but will Pike? We never find out, though we're pretty sure the answer is no, because Avery's riddle and Cherub's treachery delay him long enough that Pike and the few of his pirates who were sober enough to not get killed in Blake's initial support, are caught in a losing battle with Blake. Pike fits to the end, nearly killing the Doctor with his last breath--the wounded Squire, who never meant things to go so far helps stop Pike. As the mop up ends, the TARDIS takes off and lands in an area so cold that the travelers can feel the chill inside.
Yeah, to those of us fans who, as adolescents watched Tom Baker and Peter Davison, insisting that the character was known simply as "The Doctor," the traditional billing was a problem, but this--The War Machines is a death blow. WOTAN, the super-computer that has possessed its creators, and means to forward progress on Earth through culling humans and focusing on mechanical evolution--well, WOTAN says, as you can see above, "Doctor Who is required." As does the (admittedly possessed) Professor Brett. So that would appear to be that. Debate over.
More to the point, the new creative team--Innes Lloyd, Gerry Davis, and Kit Pedler--are ready to put their own stamp on the program. Where the interval from Verity Lambert's departure through The Savages has had some classic episodes, frankly it feels like pastiche--they were still trying to make Verity Lambert's program without her. There was no distinctive vision or voice, and so the show overall felt increasingly fusty, despite the fact that many stories, taken on their own worked, and quite well.
But this--this story marks the birth of a new show. A show much more like the one we know today than Verity's Pandemonium Carnival was. The War Machines represents a first in many ways--it's the first time that the Doctor comes to the aid of the present day (at time of airing, 25 June-16 July, 1966, in this case) UK Government (as pompous as that of the UNIT era) and is set entirely in a menaced London of the present day. Without the need to be bound to cheap sci-fi sets, this story feels free, roaming through real landscapes and using real details. (Although the designers of the War Machines lack Ray Cusick's flair, and rather lamely model the weaponry on the Dalek guns Cusick designed.)
Even the "modern" graphics labelling each episode by number marks a declaration of freedom from Verity's style. (That special "computer" font used to turn up on book covers and other media as late as the 1970s, as my own memories of school books and other books I read as a child attests.) And we get the first of many scenes, the Doctor calmly confronting the alien menace, challenging it to come for him. Hartnell, looking iconic in his seldom-worn cloak and fur hat, stares down the War Machine in a way very similar to what we'd expect from David Tennant, or Matt Smith:
Ok, not quite--Tennant or Smith would have had an awesome speech of awesomeness to deliver, but Hartnell's stoic, poised courage in the face of the destructive machine rumbling toward him? Yeah, that's as modern as Peter Capaldi.
Polly and Ben are introduced much more naturally than Dodo was. Alas, poor Dodo! Banished without an onscreen farewell! Still, if it makes you feel better, Jackie Lane got her revenge:
“I think (Innes Lloyd) had definite plans for the series which neither Steven nor Dodo really fitted, and half way through my first year I was told that Dodo was to be written out. I would have liked a dramatic ending and my farewell just two episodes into ‘The War Machines’, and not even on camera but in reported speech, was a bit of an anti-climax. Still, I got my revenge. I now run a voice-over agency and Innes Lloyd once asked me to find him work. I reminded him that he had once sacked me from ‘Doctor Who’ and said a very firm ‘no’!”
Can't say I blame her, really.
Despite the unceremonious dumping of Dodo, the story does the job well. But more to the point, this Doctor Who is breaking loose in a new direction. And it needs to. Striking out with a new vision of Doctor Who is the salvation of the show. But it may very well be the death of the Doctor. At least this version.
As old patent remedy nostrums used to say, "the mixture as before."
So, stories. We could no doubt find more apt stories than those told by Doctor Who, but that is the path we've been walking together these past months, and there is a value to consistency.
And, as chance would have it, we have arrived at a story where our TARDIS travelers, the Doctor, Dodo, and Steven land in an advanced civilization where they are welcomed as long-awaited heroes in the idyllic city, offered gifts and entertainment, but forbidden to wander into forbidden areas. Outside, you see, there are savages. Savages who are armed with clubs and spears, but little else. While in the nice, clean, crisp city, the guards keep order and repel savages with their fearsome "light guns."
Except they don't, you see. They capture the savages, bring them, one at a time, into the City, drain most of their life force out of them, releasing them into the wild, like animals to be captured and drained again after they have recovered.
It turns out that the only difference between the savages and the civilized is the power of the gun. The Light Gun, that is, but, for today, let's just view it as what it is--the gun.
When a lone guard tries to capture the escaped TARDIS team, the savages hide them (including the Doctor, whose life force has been drained into Jano, the leader of the so-called civilized elite, but who Steven and Dodo have rescued), at much risk to their own lives.
The gun has turned Exorse, the guard, cruel. Power to kill or to dominate with the finger on a trigger can do that, you know. When Exorse is outwitted and captured by Steven, some of the savages want to kill him, but his most recent victim, a woman named Nanina, takes pity on him, and will not let her tribe kill him. "It will do no good," she insists, showing that the so-called savages are actually the ones with an ethical grasp on the situation.
Jano, meanwhile, finds himself imbued with the Doctor's ethical qualms and reflexes, and begins grasping toward a better way. Exorse, aware of Jano's intention to betray the City, escapes--only to be confronted with his victim, who nonetheless saved his life:
EXORSE: Why did you follow?
NANINA: If you betray Jano, what will become of us?
EXORSE: It is Jano who is the traitor.
NANINA: What have you learnt, Exorse? That we are people like yourselves. What chance will we ever have if you speak?
EXORSE: You think I can keep silent about what I've heard?
NANINA: You owe me your life, Exorse. I have a right to ask you. If you are against us now, you condemn us forever.
When the Doctor, his companions, and Jano try to overthrow the City by destroying the machinery that allows for the stealing of life force, Exorse is asked to take up the gun again by his superiors. Instead, he joins Nanina in destroying the machinery of death that kept the City-dwelllers dominant and the outsiders--we can't pretend they are savages anymore, can we?--oppressed.
***
Channelled into hunting, skeet-shooting, target, or other basically harmless uses, the gun is just a tool. And it can be used for self-protection, although not as often as we might think.
But in this tale, the poor and oppressed are closer to the truth than the powerful and comfortable, and the basically good are corrupted by the power of their totemic guns. For Exorse, as Steven''s repeated taunts bear out, the Light Gun and the power that gun gives him helps him cover his fear of the so-called savages, of the Other. It helps him cover his fear of his own inadequacies.
I'm reminded of the similar corruption of the basically decent Logan 3 by the power his Gun (always capitalized) gives him in the novel Logan's Run (1967); filmed in 1968, and thus after this episode aired in May and June 1966).
The totemic power of the Light Gun, of Logan's Gun, of the gun in American culture, breeds a desire to wield it, to exercise that symbolic power. It corrupts, as power tends to, the more it becomes a totem.
The gun is very much a totem for many people in in today's America. So "The Savages" may have something to teach us, after all: We cannot find our truest, best selves until we are able to lay down our weapons, and meet as equals, equal in vulnerability as well as in law.
***
Some episode notes, for the blog's consistency. We're back to recons, I'm afraid for this story, and of them all, I recommend Loose Cannon; the CGI versions just don't work for me, and the captioning and clever use of the telesnaps the Loose Cannon team (except for the lame spears effect) do.
I don't get all the dislike for Dodo. She was the best thing about The Celestial Toymaker, was quite funny and plucky in The Gunfighters, and here she is the one who figures out the rot at the heart of paradise, while Steven is oblivious to its signs--she seems to work it out as quickly as the Doctor does, as the alternating scenes between him among the Elders and Steven and Dodo being carefully escorted by City-dwellers Flower and Avon. Jackie Lane is quite good in the part, really.
As is Peter Purves as Steven--even though he has to grasp the idiot ball early on, it's Purves's most heroic performance, cool in the face of danger, willing to spend his life mediating between the two tribes, yet believably unsure is he's up to the task. Purves sells the maturation of Steven over these episodes, and he's touching at the very end.
Hartnell is solid--this isn't his best story ("The Gunfighters" is a tough act to follow), but he's solid, and his rage when he discovers the use the Elite put he "savages" to is reminiscent of the fierceness Tom Baker could bring to the role, or even Peter Capaldi.
In sum, a well made story, with a lesson we could benefit from today.
It's one last multi-part tale,
With episodic names,
It's recovery after the fail
of undistinguished games.
Though the Doctor's time is ending,
and Troughton's coming soon,
Hartnell's dignity is mending
In The Last Chance Saloon.
The familiar theme music suckers us in; we're watching Doctor Who, traveling in Space and Time--but wait a second--the theme gives way (listen above) to a ballad, sung by Lynda Baron (she'll be back. More than once.) And we're led into a Western. But not any kind of Western; it's tongue-in-cheek approach inspired by the 1965 film Cat Ballou, which also uses a recurring musical ballad as a narrative framing device:
Notably, the "Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon" is much less bouncy than "The Ballad of Cat Ballou"; the story is dramedy, not full-fledged comedy. For a long time, this story had the unfortunate designation as the worst Doctor Who story ever. It's reputation has been reviving, as witness Sandifer and Neil and Sue Perryman.
Count me in with the revisionists.
After the flawed but interesting The Ark and the weak,deeply problematic Celestial Toymaker (Hartnell is literally silent and invisible through much of the story), the show surprises us with what I will defend as a stone classic. Here we see the Doctor and his companions spelunking through a comic Western, Cat Ballou style for the first two episodes, as the stakes slowly begin to rise. By the third episode, "Johnny Ringo," the comic sequences taking off Western memes are turning deadly serious.
Hartnell, stuck in the 19th Century west with a toothache, resigns himself to getting it pulled (I suspect knowing that the TARDIS could take him to even more primitive times and places, so he just gives up and goes with it), and staggers through the first episode unclear about Doc Holliday and his machinations. Anthony Jacobs is a conniving, witty Doc Holliday, but one who has some scruples; John Alderson provides solid support as Wyatt Earp (the Doctor keeps addressing him as "Werp" to the lawman's confusion). Earp is played straight, a stolid lawman, who wants to protect his friend Holiday but also the Doctor, who he is letting the Clantons think is Holliday (sort of a less ruthless version of Gene Hackman's Little Bill Daggett; he's ready to lie and break the law to keep the peace).
Steven and Dodo shine in this storyline--Steven starts off overly exuberant, donning ridiculously theatrical costumes, only to find himself forced to live out the real life consequences of a Western story. Meanwhile, Jackie Lane, whose pity for the Toymaker's earlier victims was the best thing about The Celestial Toymaker here gets to be funny, brave, and is paired well with Jacobs and with the excellent Sheena Marshe. Marshe is great, playing Kate as a Western stereotype at times, then showing us a real, wry woman within. Peter Purves manages the shifts in tone seamlessly. He's marvelous in the part, with double takes that are funny but in character, and his comic timing is excellent.
As things get grim, the whole cast up their game. The showdown, the inexorable march to bloodshed, began long before the darkening tone. From the very first bars of her ballad, Lynda Baron has been warning us how this will all end: Blood on the sawdust in the Last Chance Saloon. And yet it's shocking when it comes, a tribute to an excellent script, the regulars at their best, the excellent guest cast, and Rex Tucker's direction.
This is the last time you'll hear me refer to a "story arc" or "the story known as"; after The Gunfighters, there are no more individually-titled episodes in the classic series. I won't miss the long titles for these posts necessitated by respecting that convention. But I think I will miss the echoes of old-fashioned serialization--the original viewers had no idea when one story would end and another would begin.
It's funny that I referenced Squire Trelane's parents in the last entry, because here we get a story that predates The Squire of Gothos (aired January 12, 1867) by eight months with a rather Trelane-like character (These episodes ran from April 2 through April 23, 1966). Also, in a small milestone, I was born the day after "The Dancing Floor" aired. So while my first encounter with Doctor Who is still decades off, we are now discussing a world I inhabit, and as we go on, the cultural referents the show draws on will increasingly be to the matrix (sorry!) that formed me.
In short, the backdrop I'll be increasingly looking at is the familiar, not the unknowable except for at second hand.
So, the main discussion about the story arc called The Celestial Toymaker nowadays is whether Phil Sandifer (and others, but Sandifer makes the best case) is right when he dismisses this story arc as irredeemably racist, and expels it, and The Ark from canon. Now, I admire Sandifer's work immensely--I've bought all of the TARDIS Eruditorum books he published, and in fact was a Kickstarter backer of the first three. But I have a few questions about his analysis on these two stories.
With The Ark, Sandifer describes the Monoids as "minstrel characters," pointing to Dodo's description of them as "savages" and describes the story as "a sickening, vile piece of racism and neo-colonialism that, while not wholly out of step with its times, was reactionary and nasty in 1966, and is only worse in 2011." Sandifer goes further and argues that in The Ark:
They're [the Monoids] incompetent because the whole point is that savages like them can never actually run a country, and we'd be fools to turn one over to them.
In fact, even being nice to them - giving them more power like speech and weapons - is wrong. The Monoids deserve to be a race of servants, because that's all that savages like them are good for. And when, at the end of the story, the humans are ordered to make peace with the Monoids, one does not sense that it will be a peace of equals, but rather the return of the Monoids to being a well-treated servant class.
I have to say, I don't see the story quite this way. Dodo is clearly wrong when she calls the Monoids savages--they are able to communicate with the Guardians, albeit not by voice, and they mourn their losses with dignity, and don't join the revenge seeking crowd of Guardians out to kill the Doctor, Dodo and Steven. The Commander tries to ensure that they are treated with respect, and their second-class citizenship reflects poorly on the Guardians, who are riding for a fall. The Monoids in the latter two episodes are corrupted by power, and overweening and overconfident--just like the Guardians in the first two episodes, they are riding for a fall. The thing seems to me more a reflection on the corrupting influence of unchecked power--we see that the Commander's efforts to retain some equality between human and Monoid will not outlast him, but that's because the younger generation of humans lacks his understanding of its importance. It's more Planet of the Apes than The Birth of a Nation.
The Toymaker, though--what about this character? Sandifer is right about the double meaning of the word "Celestial" to refer to Chinese people as well as its more common meaning of or pertaining to the heavens, In his Anno Dracula, Kim Newman appropriates Fu Manchu under the title "the Celestial." So, yes, that and the robes support the designation of the storyline as racist. But Michael Gough does not play him in any kind of "yellow face" makeup, or change (as far as I can see) his normal clipped tones in playing the part. The Toymaker, a bored, alien immortal, has adopted a persona that amuses him--not unlike the ersatz Trelane, the Squire of Gothos. (I wonder if Lafcaido Hearn was in the mind of the writer, as well as Fu Manchu?) Just as the Doctor has adopted the persona as a Victorian gentleman-scientist, when in fact he is an alien, of unknown origin in either time or space--he and the Toymaker are presented as opposite numbers, enemies who are only now squaring off against each other.
Of course, none of this stops the Toymaker from being at least in part a racist caricature--while John Dorney commented on Sandifer's post, he wrote one of the Big Finish revivals of the Toymaker, and was "ashamed to admit that I wasn't aware of the double meaning of the word 'Celestial' and had just thought of the 'cosmic' meaning. Oddly, in the script the character was simply named 'The Owner' throughout (Charley was also listed as 'The Girl') and the word 'Celestial' never appears (he does refer to himself as 'The Toymaker' at the end, as does the Doctor). Although this is not done as a result of any delicacy (as I'd no knowledge of the dual meaning," the original episodes aired in a period when the last Fu Manchu novel was less than a decade old. So it might have been intended, just as it was decades later by Newman, to signify or at least suggest, Chinese and not cosmic.
Neither the Monoids nor the Toymaker, any more than Trelane, are human. Sandifer may well be right--the Monoids could be a neo-imperialist parable. Or they could be a study in the corruption of power, as the Guardians themselves are. Or--and here's a thought--it could all be a refinement on the Eloi and the Morlocks in Wells's The Time Machine, but in less extreme form (which could, of course, be a point in Sandifer's favor--are the Eloi and the Morlocks racist? Or are they, as Wells seemed to intend, a depiction of mutual degradation through a class system? Note that, in Wells, both are decaying--the beauty of the Eloi is undermined by their physical and mental fragility, the Morlocks are increasingly debased over time as well.
Fiction bears the hallmarks of its age, though, and both stories could well be racist despite better intentions than Sandife sees in either.
***
The Celestial Toymaker is not good Doctor Who, I'm afraid whatever it's racial politics. The games are tedious, especially the waste of the Doctor on the silly "trilogic” game. But it's not as bad as Sandifer suggests in its storyline because of a feature he neglects: Dodo's mercy. This is a story in which a seemingly all-powerful being will keep the Doctor unless Steven and Dodo win their games, arbitrarily set up by the Toymaker before the Doctor wins his "trilogic” game. The competition liven up things a bit; Steven and Dodo are first set against the Clara the Clown, the Queen of Hearts, and Mrs. Wiggs (Carmen Silvera, of 'Allo 'Allo fame) and the Joey the Clown, the King of Hearts, and Sgt. Rugg (Campbell Singer). Silvera is especially good, and Singer has some funny moments. But that's not what got me. In each case, Dodo's compassion is moved--these are, she believes--and the narrative supports her--victims of the Toymaker, who have become dolls, playing cards, whatever the Toymaker wants them to be, by losing when, like Steven and Dido now, they first arrived in the Toymaker’s domain. Their efforts to win, and obtain their freedom move her, making her less ruthless than Steven in the competition. Stevrn denies this, viewing them as mere constructs of the Toymaker, and yet, as Dodo points out, each time they lose it’s because of a human weakness. She pities these souls lost to the Toymaker. It's the one thing that adds a frisson and a feeling of risk to the story. They could be as we are, the playing cards and dolls seem to say.
There is, if you squint, a ghost story in The Celestial Toymaker, and only Dodo sees it. And the ghosts may be hungry, but they are also tragic.
So we're back--for this story--to BritBox, with its nice, crisp copies of the episodes in question, and, yes, it's a relief to be granted a reprieve from recons, helpful though they are.
Aired in March, 1966, The Ark has two great ideas at its core, but only one gets any traction. The first idea, that of the "sleeper ship" voyage gone awry, dates at least back to A.E. Van Voght's Far Centaurus (1944), and this story arc bears some generic resemblance, but actually is more reminiscent of "Think Blue, Count Two" by Cordwainer Smith, published in 1963. (In point of fact, Robert Godard postulated just such a "colony ship in 1918, but as that manuscript wasn't published until 1972, it's de trop for our purposes.) There, as here, the millennia that have passed (though not, in The Ark, due to the voyage (not too long under way, expected to take 700 years), but rather to the TARDIS's usually long time jump from the end of The Massacre) have created problems of comprehension and of lost knowledge posing a risk to the voyage's safety. And of course the notion that the common cold could be deadly to the higher evolved beings dates back to Wells's War of the Worlds (1897), though, of course, in that novel it defeats the otherwise unstoppable Martians. (The Martian's last signal, "uless") has stayed in my mind since I first read Wells as a boy.)
But what this story really reminds me of, as if the clip up top didn't give it away, is Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes, not filmed until 1968 (also de trop, accordingly), but published in English under the title Monkey Planet in 1963, so it could have influenced the script. Possibly. The Ark is a bit of a mashup--the colony ship carrying micro-reduced humans and their servants, the Monoids, at first welcome the travelers, showing them a partially built (up to the knees) statue of a human being that they work on to keep the importance of their mission to preserve all life on Earth (about to be consumed as the Sun becomes a gas giant). The welcome turns sour though, when the mission is endangered by Dodo's cold, to which the Ark's pilots (Guardians) and Monoids alike have no immunity. The humans are divided in their response--some, like the Commander and his daughter, believe that the rapidly spreading plague was accidentally transmitted by Dodo, and that the Doctor, Steven and she are well-intentioned, as well as being the best hope for curing the plague, and the mob, goaded on by the second in command, Zentos:
Zentos: I invoke the special galactic law against them. Hold them, take them into custody and later they will be made to answer for the crimes that they have committed.
Steven: Oh, listen to us!
Zentos: Take them away!
Mellium: What about my father?
Zentos: He may well die. But then again, so might all of us. In which case it was pointless leaving.
Steven: That unfortunately tells me only one thing.
Zentos: What's that?
Steven: That the nature of Man, even in this day and age, hasn't altered at all.You still fear... the unknown like everyone else before you.
. The silent Monoids merely seem grieved for those of their number who succumb. The Commander, aided by his daughter Mellium, countermands the credit and sentence of execution of the Doctor and his party. The Doctor experiments on Steven, finds a cure, and all is seemingly well. The travelers leave, and....
...the TARDIS reappears in the colony ship, 700 years later, shortly before the landing on the new planet. The bridge of the ship is largely abandoned, weeds and vines allowed to infiltrate, and the completed statute--
Has a Monoid's head.
Well, you can see the similarity--once the docile, silent animal-like servants, the Monoids are now the masters, keeping a few Guardians around simply to enjoy being served. Not entirely dissimilar to Boulle's novel, if rather different from the film. (Though one wonders if the use of the statute to indicate visually the radical shift that has taken place in The Ark had any influence on the similar use of the Statue of Liberty at the end of the 1968 film Planet of the Apes. Probably not, but interestingly prophetic, no?)
The Doctor, Steve and Dodo (now wearing Ian's tabard from The Crusade, for no adequately explored reason, though it does suit her), try to inspire a revolt, but fail:
The Monoids intend to bring their own kind only down to the planet, and leave the humans, both awake and preserved, onboard the Ark, which is set to explode 12 hours after the Monoids leave.
It is only with the help of the natives of the planet, invisible, incorporeal beings with extremely strong telekinetic powers, and the fact that the Monoids begin falling out among themselves, that peace is, uneasily restored. The Refusians, or perhaps we should call them the Deus Ex Machina, or even Trelane's parents (no, they're still a year off), have readied the planet for the colonists--it needs life, they think--but will only allow the humans and Monoids to stay if they make peace. With the humans in the ascendancy again, they agree to live as equals with the Monoids.
It's interesting that the Monoids come off rather well in the first half--they are dignified, and do not join in the mob against the Doctor and his companions, but are genocidal in the later half. Of course, their more cruel leaders are all dead by the end, and the Monoids remaining to be revived are from the era of the first half, so there is hope for peace. Maybe.
Not for the Doctor, though. As the TARDIS lands, with both Steven and Dodo modeling new, psychedelic clothes (Jackie Lane as Dodo pulls her off; Peter Purves somewhat less so), the Doctor disappears, his disembodied voice warning them that they are under attack....
King Charles IX of France, under the sway of his mother, Catherine de Medici, orders the assassination of Huguenot Protestant leaders in Paris, setting off an orgy of killing that results in the massacre of tens of thousands of Huguenots all across France.
Two days earlier, Catherine had ordered the murder of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a Huguenot leader whom she felt was leading her son into war with Spain. However, Coligny was only wounded, and Charles promised to investigate the assassination in order to placate the angry Huguenots. Catherine then convinced the young king that the Huguenots were on the brink of rebellion, and he authorized the murder of their leaders by the Catholic authorities. Most of these Huguenots were in Paris at the time, celebrating the marriage of their leader, Henry of Navarre, to the king’s sister, Margaret.
A list of those to be killed was drawn up, headed by Coligny, who was brutally beaten and thrown out of his bedroom window just before dawn on August 24. Once the killing started, mobs of Catholic Parisians, apparently overcome with bloodlust, began a general massacre of Huguenots. Charles issued a royal order on August 25 to halt the killing, but his pleas went unheeded as the massacres spread. Mass slaughters continued into October, reaching the provinces of Rouen, Lyon, Bourges, Bourdeaux, and Orleans. An estimated 3,000 French Protestants were killed in Paris, and as many as 70,000 in all of France. The massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day marked the resumption of religious civil war in France.
In classic Doctor Who historical fashion, the TARDIS lands the Doctor and Steven in the middle of all of this. The Doctor goes to meet a scientist, instructing Steven to lie low. Of course he doesn't. He gets involved in trying to prevent the massacre, even trying to intercede with the plotting Abbot of Amboise, thinking he is the Doctor (as he's played William Hartnell, we can have some sympathy for Steven--they are dead ringers. Steven's efforts fail, and he is hiding in the apothecary's shop with Anne Chaplet, a servant of the Abbot's caught up in all the plotting who has been with Steven for the last half of the serial. The Doctor insists that Anne run home, or to her aunt's. He refuses to take her with them, despite Steven's anxiety on her behalf and Anne's own fear.
2.
The Doctor and Steven watch the massacre from the TARDIS scanner, deploring their inability to change history. Steven seethes over the Doctor's abandonment of Anne, and tells the Doctor that wherever they land, he's getting off:
STEVEN: Surely there was something we could have done?
DOCTOR: No, nothing. Nothing. In any case, I cannot change the course of history, you know that. The massacre continued for several days in Paris and then spread itself to other parts of France. Oh, what a senseless waste. What a terrible page of the past.
STEVEN: Did they all die?
DOCTOR: Yes, most of them. About ten thousand in Paris alone.
STEVEN: The Admiral?
DOCTOR: Yes.
STEVEN: Nicholas? You had to leave Anne Chaplet there to die.
DOCTOR: Anne Chaplet?
STEVEN: The girl! The girl who was with me! If you'd brought her with us she needn't have died. But no, you had to leave her there to be slaughtered.
DOCTOR: Well, it is possible of course she didn't die, and I was right to leave her.
STEVEN: Possible? Look, how possible? That girl was already hunted by the Catholic guards. If they killed ten thousand how did they spare her? You don't know, do you? You can't say for certain that you weren't responsible for that girl's death.
DOCTOR: I was not responsible.
STEVEN: Oh, no. You just sent her back to her aunt's house where the guards were waiting to catch her. I tell you this much, Doctor, wherever this machine of yours lands next I'm getting off. If your researches have so little regard for human life then I want no part of it.
True to his word, Steven storms out. A young woman, Dorothea Chaplet, enters the open TARDIS door, thinking it really is a police box, and eager to report an accident. Steven charges back in, warning the Doctor the police are coming. They take off, with Steven uneasy about the young woman, until he and the Doctor each find a source of comfort in her presence:
STEVEN: Doctor, how could you?
DOCTOR: What else could I do, dear boy? You don't want a couple of policemen aboard the Tardis do you? You know, you're the most inconsistent young man? Just now you were telling me off for not having that Chaplet girl aboard!
STEVEN: Ah, that was different! This is no joyride you know. You may never get home again.
DODO: I don't care.
STEVEN: What about your parents?
DODO: I haven't got any. I live with me great aunt, and she won't care if she never sees me again.
DOCTOR: There now, you see? All this fuss about nothing. But don't you think she looks rather like my grandchild Susan?
STEVEN: You forget, I've never met your granddaughter.
DOCTOR: Oh, no, no, no, no, of course not, no. Yes, but she does you know. What is your name, child?
DODO: Dodo.
DOCTOR: What?
DODO: It's Dorothea, really. Dorothea Chaplet.
STEVEN: Chaplet? Yes, but you're not French, are you?
DODO: Don't be daft. Me granddad was, though.
STEVEN: Doctor, it's not possible is it? Chaplet? Anne's great, great
DOCTOR: Yes, yes, it is possible, my boy. Very possible. Welcome aboard the Tardis, Miss Dorothea Chaplet.
3.
It's funny how well historicals come across in recons. Maybe it's because they're so less dependent on spectacle than the more future-based or sic-fi storylines, but the most watchable reconstructions of lost stories that I've seen throughout the Hartnell era have been the historicals.
The Daleks' Master Plan is clearly undermined by the loss of the physical performances of its cast, as the few surviving episodes show. The Doctor's cool effrontery in stealing the Terrarium Core, Kingdom's icy ruthlessness in hunting her brother and his comrades down--seeing these moments makes you confront the vitiated nature of what's left. As I said last time, Marsh's voice alone makes her death scene horrible to watch, yet impossible to turn away from. Imagine if we had more than mere telesnaps.
Well, The Massacre, or The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve doesn't have anything in it that suggests such a loss. It's an interesting experiment: the first "Doctor-lite" story, but unlike previous stories where the Doctor would be off for an episode to give Hartnell a rest, here the Doctor disappears partway through the first episode, only to reappear well into the fourth an final episode. The Doctor is is missing for the bulk of the story--but William Hartnell is not; he plays the Abbot of Amboise, a ruthless persecutor of the Huguenots, albeit not as bright as he thinks he is. The Abbot is very different from the Doctor, showing that Hartnell was capable of more than one kind of performance. He's stern and gruff, but rather like a sergeant who has made errors that compromise the mission, refuses to accept that they will have any consequence. Steven, seeing the Abbot, thinks he has found the Doctor, only to watch the Abbot's murder. After his efforts to help avert bloodshed, Steven returns to the apothecary shop where the Doctor had intended to go.
This story arc comes with a sting in its tail; the Doctor, his friendship with Steven strained by the events of The Daleks' Masterplan, sees it shattered by his readopting of his old dictum that "you can't change history--not one line!" (intriguingly suspended recently), finds himself alone in the sterile white confines of the TARDIS. The old man broods:
Even after all this time he cannot understand. I dare not change the course of history. Well, at least I taught him to take some precautions. He did remember to look at the scanner before he opened the doors.
Now they're all gone.
All gone.
None of them could understand.
Not even my little Susan, or Vicki.
And as for Barbara and Chatterton. Chesterton. They were all too impatient to get back to their own time. And now, Steven.
Perhaps I should go home, back to my own planet. But I can't. I can't.
The Doctor doesn't respond with anger, here, but with sorrow, and a bit of guilt that he seems to be tamping down. This moment was never intended, of course, to be what it became, but it's part of a triptych: it leads naturally to The Fires of Pompei and to The Girl Who Died. Absent this moment, you don't have the Tenth Doctor's yielding to Donna's entreaties, and the Twelfth Doctor rejecting the old dictum, without becoming The Time Lord Victorious.
Because the end is a cheat--Steven's return make no sense; Dodo's running away with them just happens out of the blue (what happened to that little boy hurt in the accident she was so grieved about when she bounced into the TARDIS). As so often happens in early Doctor Who, the candy-coating is put on for the sake of the children, but we adults watching know where the story really ends.
An old man, alone, abandoned by all the friends he finally learned how to make.
These two episodes are a mess, redeemed by some fine (if hammy) acting by Kevin Stoney, and the tragic death of Sara Kingdom.
That the Daleks' "allies" hadn't realized this late into the game that they were pawns, and pawns with very limited purpose, is a logical flaw in the script. But it does give Stoney a few last moments of increasing megalomania, and a perfectly earned death. One almost expects the Dalek Supreme to add "Shut up, already" as it orders Chen to be exterminated. To the last, he believes himself irreplaceable, immortal. There is even a great moment when Chen tells his fellow prisoners that Kingdom is coming out of loyalty to him, and when Sara confronts him, he promises her an appropriate reward.
Sara Kingdom's death--no; wait. She dies twice, really. First as Kingdom, then as Sara.
Kingdom was, as Ian Fleming described James Bond, "is a blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department. [she] is quiet, hard, ruthless, sardonic, fatalistic."
Kingdom dies when she realizes that her loyalty, which made her the blunt instrument in the hands of Mavic Chen, in whom she utterly believed, led her to gun down her own brother without a pause, without giving him a chance to explain, without a qualm. The instrument had been wielded, Bret Vyon was dead, the mission went on.
Until she found that the mission had been corrupted from the source, and her surrender of her humanity was not for humanity's benefit, but Chen's personal ambition. In Fleming's The Man With the Golden Gun (1965), Bond, who is captured by the Russians after his disappearance at the end of You Only Live Twice (1964), tries to kill M, having been convicted (brainwashed, in his case), that his own surrender of his humanity has been in a false cause.
So perhaps my earlier comparisons of Kingdom with Cathy Gale have been off base; she might better be seen as an inversion of Bond, whose seeming journey from M's "blunt instrument" into "humanity" is a false journey, further into darkness. By contrast, Kingdom's exact parallel journey is one from darkness into light. From the clipped, short tones of Kingdom, to a woman able to laugh, to smile, to see beauty, Kingdom dies and is reborn as Sara. Sara can be stern and tough, but can have friends, and pause to savor those friendships--hence my Cathy Gale analogy.
But then Sara dies. Ironically, she dies the same way Kingdom died--as a direct consequence of disobeying orders, this time the Doctor's orders to go back to the TARDIS with Steven:
DOCTOR: Now, both of you, back to the Tardis.
STEVEN: What about you, Doctor?
DOCTOR: Do as I say, quickly!
STEVEN: Go on!
(Steven grabs Sara's arm and drags her away. After a short distance, Sara stops and pulls herself free.)
SARA: Wait, Steven. We can't just leave him.
STEVEN: The Doctor knows what he's doing. At least, I think he does.
SARA: All we're doing is running to save our own lives. If anything goes wrong and the Daleks recapture the time destructor, we'll have failed for ever.
STEVEN: I know what you're saying. I'd go back too if I thought it would help. Whatever he's doing, he's doing because he thinks it's the best way. Now come on!
***
[As he hurries away from the control room, the Doctor meets Sara.)
DOCTOR: What are you doing here?
SARA: I came to help you.
DOCTOR: You must remember, my child, this machine is working. It's working slowly because its range is rather small at the moment, but it is working. Now, if you start to feel strange, you must let me know at once.
SARA: Yes, all right, but what about them?
DOCTOR: First, back to the Tardis. Is Steven not with you?
SARA: No. I came back that way.
DOCTOR: Hurry, my child, hurry!
As the episode casts its viewpoint back and forth between the Daleks, Steven watching from the TARDIS, and the Doctor and Sara's desperate effort to escape, Sara's fate unfolds:
[Kembel - Jungle]
(Steven reaches the safety of the Tardis and stumbles inside. Still clutching the time destructor, the Doctor leads the way back through the jungle but realises that Sara has fallen behind.)
DOCTOR: It's not far now. Sara!
(Sara is aging before his eyes.)
SARA: Keep going! The Daleks must be after us by now!
DOCTOR: The time destructor is
(His words are lost in the gale force winds)
SARA: You think I don't know?
(The Dalek patrol leaves the underground base and sets off in pursuit of the Doctor. Ahead, the Doctor does his best to help the increasingly infirm Sara struggle onwards, despite the ever-worsening environment.
[Tardis]
(Meanwhile, Steven is pacing impatiently up and down. Not sure what else to do, he turns on the scanner.)
STEVEN: Nothing.
(Feeling helpless, Steven takes out his frustration on the Tardis console.)
[Outside the Tardis]
(The Daleks maintain their dogged pursuit. All around them the jungle is changing, plants withering and dying, lush foliage shrivelling up and turning to dust. Apparently unmoved and unaffected by the vast power of the time destructor, the Daleks continue to close in on their quarry. Yet the effects are taking a heavy toll on both Sara and the Doctor. Frail and weak, the old man stumbles onwards, all too aware that time is quite literally running out for his companion. At last they see the Tardis ahead but the Doctor can barely stagger a few more steps before he falls to his knees unable to go on. With a final desperate effort, Sara helps the Doctor up and they stumble a few short paces further before the Doctor falls again. The time destructor slips from his fingers, rolling away to lie just inches from his hand. Beside him, Sara pitches forward in the dust, unable to remain upright. She barely has the strength to open her eyes but somehow finds the will. She attempts to claw her way over to the time destructor.)
SARA: Doctor.
(The last of her strength gone, Sara falls and lies still.)
Even with only audio and telesnaps to convey it, Sara's extended aging and death is brutal. We don't know what it that the Doctor says that leads her to shout "You think I don't know?" with a touch of Kingdom's old brusqueness, but the emotion in Marsh's voice is searing. As I read it, it's her response to her own impending death. It hurts to listen to; I can't imagine what it was to watch, with actors like Hartnell, Purves and, especially, Marsh giving it their all.
She dies, because she couldn't let the old man face the danger alone. She dies, because she can't risk failure, and leaving the universe vulnerable. Sara gets her killed as much as Kingdom does. More so, really, because she could have watched from the safety of the TARDIS-the Time Destructor is wreaking havoc on the Daleks too. So she dies because she can't let a friend take all the risk without sharing it.
It's a dark ending, to a dark, and long, story. The Doctor tries hard to draw some meaning from it all, to even attempt a weak Merlyn's laugh. But Steven is having none of it, and, ultimately, the Doctor agrees:
STEVEN: I wish Sara could have seen the end.
DOCTOR: Yes, my boy, so do I. You know, Steven, the one thing that Sara lived for was to see the total destruction of the Daleks. Well, now it's all over. Without her help, this could never have been achieved.
(The Doctor notices something in the sand and reaches down to scoop it up in his hand.)
STEVEN: What is it?
DOCTOR: Millions of years of progress reversed back.
(The Doctor opens his hand to show Steven a tiny dead embryo.)
DOCTOR: That's all that remains of a Dalek.
STEVEN: Let's go, Doctor. I've seen enough of this place.
DOCTOR: Well, my boy, we finally rid this planet of Daleks.
STEVEN: Bret, Katarina, Sara.
DOCTOR: What a waste. What a terrible waste.
The series has never left us in so grim a place before. Where do we go from here?
Well, we've left Terry Nation's episodes of this juggernaut behind, and Dennis Spooner is penning the story. Spooner's wit is a drier form of humor than is Nation's, but they each confront the same fundamental quandary: How do you wring drama out of the Doctor, Sara and Steven evading the Daleks and keeping the McGuffin away from them for yet three more episodes?
Spooner, as with his historical episodes, throws in some plot complications. The TARDIS i being chased by another time-traveling vehicle--the Daleks, in hot pursuit, they deduce. They land on Earth, to do repairs, but find themselves in the middle of the Ashes, where the cricket commenters take the appearance of the police box on the pitch as bad news for England, as its presence prevents play, and the announcers put me very much in mind of Chaters and Caldicott. The TARDIS dematerializes, having only cost England 2 1/2 minutes. . .
To land on a volcanic planet, where their pursuer is revealed as the Monk, seeking revenge. He messes with the TARDIS and gloats. The Doctor fixes the TARDIS, and we're away...
To ancient Egypt, where the Doctor expects only the Monk, but in fact, some Daleks with Mavic Chen are en route. (By the bye the TARDIS links pretty beat up again, and seems to have graffiti on it. Sara and Steven stalk the Monk (un, it's the Daleks, guys), while the Doctor fixes the lock.
The Daleks start exterminating ancient Egyptians (the Butterfly Effect isn't so much of a thing for the Daleks.) With Sara and Steven missing, the Doctor has finished his repairs, and goes in search of them.
Meanwhile, the Monk in fact arrives. Sporting some cool shades. The Doctor, wearing a really nice straw hat, stalks him.
Sara and Steven are thought by the Egyptians to be thieves, and possibly allied to the Daleks. They are held captive, but Sara begins to cut herself loose. She and Steven overpower the guards and escape. Meanwhile the Daleks and Chen capture the Monk. Chen begins to interrogate the Monk. He admits that the odd time machine out belongs to the Doctor, and that he wants to settle a score. Well, the Monk ends up getting forced into trying to trap the Doctor (he fails; the Doctor follows him, and changes his TARDIS's appearance from a stone pillar to...a police box. He walks off with a piece of the Monk's TARDIS, and follows him into the tomb. The Monk gets tied up by the Doctor as we can tell when Steven and Sara, entering the tomb find a heavy set figure trapped in a sarcophagus.
And then, blessedly, we move on to a live episode, not a recon.
The Daleks' Master Plan is a struggle in places, in part because the retcons lose so much of the action. The best work very well--The Myth Makers is the most recent example, but this story is so dense that the recons are not as useful as ideal. (Though the tele snaps of of Peter Purves struggling with guards and Jean Marsh in full-on Cathy Gale mode do work with the audio quite well).
But then we get Escape Switch, and realize how much even the best recons necessarily lose.
Kevin Stoney is eating the scenery as Mavic Chen, and remains a delight, slapping a Dalek's eyestalk when it doubts his ability to pull off his plan, but with moments of hesitation when he realizes they will turn on him if he doesn't pull off his mission.
Peter Butterworth as the Monk (now billed as "the Meddling Monk") is quite amusing as he desperately, and weakly, tries to play Dalek off against Sara and Steven, and then Steven (who has met him before) against Sara. When his schemes fail, and he finds himself wandering time and space in a TARDIS he can't steer--well--it works, that's all.
Steven's become fiery, yet not lost his sense of humor. Purves makes him likable, but tough. Not so tough as Sara, he admits, at one point (after they overpower their guards), remarking "remind me never to get into a fight with you."
Sara--oh, she's interesting. She's softening from the tough-as-nails Space Security Agent we first met, but she can pull that persona right back on, and it fits her like a glove. She's a lethal fighter, but she's befriending her companions, learning how to laugh. Jean Marsh really is awfully good in the part.
But the recons, by losing expression and movement, really undermine what Hartnell is doing as the Doctor.
Hartnell's performance here has become steadily more mannered, more "hmming" and laughing to himself. From the audio alone, it sounds off, with the movement and expression, you can see where Hartnell is going--he's Merlyn, as I've suggested. And that constant laughing reminds me of the story Robertson Davies tells in World of Wonders:
“The magician Merlin had a strange laugh, and it was heard when nobody else was laughing. He laughed at the beggar who was bewailing his fate as he lay stretched on a dunghill; he laughed at the foppish young man who was making a great fuss about choosing a pair of shoes. He laughed because he knew that deep in the dunghill was a golden cup that would have made the beggar a rich man; he laughed because he knew that the persnickety young man would be stabbed in a quarrel before the soles of his new shoes were soiled. He laughed because he knew what was coming next.”
The Doctor here is all reassurance, he's in control, amused, he knows what's coming, and, even though he has to give up the McGuffin to the Daleks to save Sara and Steven (yes, and he insists on saving the Monk, if a little unwillingly), and so the danger is greater than ever, he is undaunted.
Where that confidence will lead remains to be seen.
This brief hiatus in the larger storyline is very hard to get a handle on. It's the first time that the reconstructions have failed to give me a distinct feel for the episode, and that's largely because the second half is knockabout farce.
The first half was, apparently, going to be a crossover with the police show "Z-Cars", but that program's producers backed out at the last moment. So it's a send up of Z-Cars, and I Suspect I am missing half the jokes.
Still, it's amusing see the TARDIS land in a place where a police box is nothing special, and be treated as such. The Doctor goes out to distract the police (leading his detention, though nobody is quite sure what to charge the annoying old man with, so Steven steals a police uniform, and tries haplessly to rescue him.
Meanwhile, the only useful member of the group is Sara, who fixes the TARDIS scanner, avoids arrest, gets everybody back into the TARDIS, and --
--we land in a silent era Hollywood film studio. I think, though I'm not sure, that it's Hollywood as viewed through the prism of P.G. Wodehouse's depictions of on-set antics--the clumsy would-be sheik, the too into her part vamp, the anxious ingenue--all these are reminiscent of the handful of stories where Wodehouse has either a new character or an established one (say, Bertie and Jeeves, or a stray Mulliner), visit Hollywood. Even the exaggerated producer's egos and the overall farcical tone seems to be striving for that effect. The show even uses title cards of the era to set the mood. (Alas, like some of the names Wodehouse assigned his moguls, "Steinberger P. Green" seems a tad stereotypical, and not in a funny way.)
And then it all falls apart--Green tries to get Steven to act for him, baying that he'll be "bigger than Fairbanks"; Sara hides in a trunk, and complains that everybody wants her to undress, and the Doctor has a chat with a dispirited clown who may give it up--alll the good gags have been done by Chaplin--but who'd ever hire a singer named Bing Crosby.
Happily, it all ends, and then the Doctor brings out champagne and nibbles, and breaks the fourth wall.
Happy holidays, mayhem to come next episode.
To be fair, if we could actually see it, and if the audio wasn't unusually muddy, "The Feast of Steven" might work. Parts of it are amusing--Sara's hauteur is especially amusing in such trivial circumstances, and when the fearsome agent hides in a trunk to avoid being cast in a harem, Jean Marsh is quite good. The Doctor's volley with "Bing" is pretty amusing too. Peter Purves's scenes are the hardest to follow, alas, so they're hard to characterize.
This once, the retcons can't help very much, I'm afraid.
Yes, I know. I'm not even listing the episode titles for this one. Sorry. I can't even, as the kids say.
But the 12 part storyline The Dalek's Master Plan Is a strange one--it's long (obvioulsy) and, written as it is by Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner, filled with lots of plot complications and twists and turns. The thing is, summarizing those twists and turns isn't all that much fun, and we'd get lost in a lot of the more intricate, less interesting, bits of plotting.
The story begins right after the TARDIS's hurried departure from Troy. The TARDIS lands in some forsaken wasteland, the Doctor starts exploring to find some medical help for Steven, poisoned in the last episode of The Mythmakers. Katarina, the handmaiden who brought him into the TARDIS, is trying to help, but, as she thinks the Doctor is Zeus and that she and Steven are dead, she's of limited utility.
Enter Bret Vyon, Space Security Service, man of action, who'd return in a few years in an iconic role. Bret is trapped by the Doctor (he wants to capture the TARDIS and use it to warn Earth of impending Dalek invasion, so he's a goodie at heart). Indeed, bound to a chair by the Doctor, he persuades Katarina to retrieve some pills from his belt and administer them to Steven, saving his life.
OK, see? I'm doing plot exposition. Maybe I should do a more Missy-style Catch up.
The Daleks have formed a league with some other aliens to conquer the Solar System. Vyon wants to stop them, the Doctor et al try to help. The Guardian of the Solar System, Mavic Chen (a scenery-chewing, great hambone performance by Kevin Stoney is betraying the Solar System by having a rare metal core (50 years in the making) for a Time Destructor (whatever that is) made. It's a McGuffin you could buy at Radio Shack. The
Doctor swipes the thing from the Conference of Evildoers, Vyon hijacks Chen's ship (they can't take the TARDIS--and this is the first good joke in the story--because they need to get where and when reliably.). On the way they're forced to land on a prison planet; they escape but one of psycho band of prisoners grabs Katarina as a hostage to make them take him anywhere but Earth. He picks Kemble--ie, where the Daleks are--and Katarina proves once and for all that she's not the naïf everyone thought she is, because she opens the airlock pulling her captor and herself into space, to save the others. It's brutal, even in a recon.
When they reach Earth, Chen--who followed in hot pursuit--makes sure That Kingdom, the Space Security Service's most ruthless agent, is assigned to kill the infiltrators and retrieve the McGuffin. We discover (and thank heaven we have this part in film and not just recon) is Sara Kingdom--and she guns down Bret Vyon, her own brother, and then coolly sends her agents out to kill the Doctor and Steven. "Shoot them in the head," she instructs them, to ensure the McGuffin is not endangered.
Meanwhile the Doctor and Steven--and Sara, who jumps into the room with them at the last second--get transported, along with some lab mice, to a planet far away, and (1) the Daleks trap them; (2) The Daleks exterminate the mice; (3) Sara is convinced of Chen's treachery, and grieves for Bret; (4) the Doctor, Sara and Steven steal the Dalek ship, and fly to Kemble. During the trip back, the Doctor makes a fake McGuffin and Steven finishes it, temporarily acquiring immunity to energy weapons. The Doctor turns over the fake outside the TARDIS and they all run inside--the Daleks fire at them, hitting Steven, but see earlier statement re energy weapons, temporary immunity to. The TARDIS dematerializes...
***
See what I mean? What a run-around. But so much to praise/condemn along the way.
The Daleks' Allies What a useless bunch of refugees from Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show (Or is it Dark & Nightshade these days? Hard to remember...)
The Daleks: Really, guys? You send the Laurel and Hardy of Skaro to track down the Doctor and the last piece of your superweapon? Ogrons would have done a better job. As for exterminating the mice because they were potentially hostile? Lame. Just lame.
Mavic Chen: Ridiculing the Daleks when they try to blame him for their failures, over-the-top megalomaniacal, he's the best old fashioned villain to date. I suspect I'll still rate the inimitable Roger Delgado well over Stoney--but he's good. Quite good.
Bret Vyon: Cool, unflappable, but with a sense of honor--sounds like Nicholas Courtney's iconic Brig, right? But he isn't; there's a tension, a near-desperate quality to him that differentiates him from Courteny's later performances. Subtle differences in body language and tone of voice. Vyon is tough, but he's at the limit.
Katarina: Basically she got stuck on the TARDIS by accident, helping Steven inside. She's just a place keeper, you might think, Until Adrienne Hill nails that horrifying, but noble death scene. Katarina is under no illusions; she's sacrificing herself, and it's raw and it hurts. And she's right.
Sara Kingdom: An amazing turn from Jean Marsh. Totally different from Joanna in The Crusade--all clipped commands and subtlety, even grieving. If I'm reading the dates right, Sara appears before Emma Peel in The Avengers. Whether or not that's so, Sara reminds me more of Cathy Gale, who proceeded Diana Rigg's Emma Peel, particularly in her earlier appearances where she's sterner, less playful.
Marsh makes Kingdom a true professional whose professionalism is used against her, and she's now desperate to stop Chen and wrest some meaning out of her brother's death, at her hands.
Doctor Who doing Space Opera rarely works; this part of the story could have been superb trimmed down to a four-parter. But what's good is really good.
"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion,
A great-sized monster of ingratitudes:
Those scraps are good deeds past; which are devour'd
As fast as they are made, forgot as soon
As done: perseverance, dear my lord,
Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang
Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail
In monumental mockery. Take the instant way;
For honour travels in a strait so narrow,
Where one but goes abreast: keep then the path;
For emulation hath a thousand sons
That one by one pursue: if you give way,
Or hedge aside from the direct forthright,
Like to an enter'd tide, they all rush by
And leave you hindmost;
Or like a gallant horse fall'n in first rank,
Lie there for pavement to the abject rear,
O'er-run and trampled on: then what they do in present,
Though less than yours in past, must o'ertop yours;
For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.”
After the rather flat farewell to Verity Lambert that was Mission to the Unknown, I had low expectations for The Mythmakers. It's a serial that is entirely missing, though the reconstruction by Loose Cannon feels much less static than many others. Possibly that's because so much of the story is powered by the dialogue, and the actors--especially the guest stars--are having a whale of a time.
That's in part because we are not in Homer's Troy, nor yet even Shakespeare's poetic, if scandalous and tainted. Troy. No, only Shakespeare's scabrous Thersites captures the Trojan war as seen by scriptwriter Donald Cotton; Cotton takes his cue from Thersites's description of the War:
Here is such patchery, such juggling and such
knavery! all the argument is a cuckold and a
whore; a good quarrel to draw emulous factions
and bleed to death upon. Now, the dry serpigo on
the subject! and war and lechery confound all!
The characters are neither Homer's nor Shakespeare's; Achilles is rash, but hardly the killing machine of myth or drama; Odysseus seems to be a barbarian, at first, but turns out to be clever as advertised, and cynical as Shakespeare's, but without the philosophy to back it. Agamemnon cries out to be played by Brian Blessed, but Jack Melford carries it off quite well.Menelaus doesn't even want Helen back, and knew what he was getting when he married her. (Talk about getting under the radar).
Hector is unimpressive (his brief duel with Achilles is more silly than thrilling), Paris a weak-willed coward who wants to be important (Steven has to goad him into a fight which Steven deliberately loses to get into Troy and rescue Vicki; Paris's newfound courage is, er, transitory), Priam is so innocent he needs a guardian--though he is quite nice-natured. As is Troilus, who falls hard for Vicki. Just as well, really.
The Greeks are bastards, the Trojans are dilettantes, they both really want to command the trade routes, and Helen is a pretext we never even see. (It would have been a perfect in-joke if they'd cast Jacqueline Hill).
It's a jet-black comedy with the Doctor trying to avoid suggesting the Trojan Horse (he can't believe Homer had it right and anyone would be that stupid--pro tip: they are), Vicki being renamed by Priam as Cressida and falling in love with Troilus (at least the script tries to earn this), and Steven just getting in the way. Oh, and episode 3, "Death of a Spy"--the title refers to Odysseus's mute friend who is killed by Paris's patrol for for not answering a soldier's question.
And yet it all works. These characters are funny, infuriating, silly, and steal the show out from under the regulars. Even Frances White's Cassandra is interesting, het petulance and frustration mounting throughout the storyline.
War isn't glorious in Doctor Who. Not in 1965. It's Shakespeare's wasteland, for wretched causes and stupidity run riot, minus the poetry.
Even without a single surviving episode, this one's a stone classic.
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