"Roly-Poly Fish Heads": The Underwater Menace

The Troughton Era is getting well under way with The Underwater Menace, and it's clearly going to be a pretty mixed bag. On the positive side, there's a lovely opening scene when, as the TARDIS is landing, we hear each of the traveler's hopes:

BEN: We're just beginning to land.
DOCTOR: Hold tight, everyone.
JAMIE: Land?
POLLY: Don't be scared, Jamie, it's all right really.
BEN: I get a sort of queer feeling. See we never know what we're going to find, do we?
DOCTOR: Ah, that's the fun. Stand by, here we go.
POLLY: Please let it be Chelsea 1966.
BEN: Hope it's the Daleks, I don't think.
DOCTOR: Prehistoric monsters.

That's our Doctor,and he'll be this way all the way through Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and Deep Breath.

Some of the character beats are spot on--Ben is sarcastic, assured, and resigned; Jamie confused, and Polly--well, here's the thing. Polly, who was so brash, resourceful, and funny in The Highlanders, is afraid, hoping anxiously for home. And that's pretty much how Polly is used in this episode. Our stroppy, smart "Duchess" (as Ben often calls her) is reduced to screaming, panicked, damsel-in-distress for far too much of this story. Annette Wills tries, and finds a few moments when Polly is her more feisty self, but she's fighting the script and the director here.

(Although, fair dos, Polly gets to demonstrate her powers of deduction at the start of the adventure with what is, basically, a sherlockomito, based on her having found a bracelet in the sand:

DOCTOR: Yes, it's difficult to put a precise date on these people.
POLLY: I don't think it is.
DOCTOR: All right then, when?
POLLY: Oh, I'd say about 1970.
DOCTOR: Can you prove it?
BEN: Yeah, go on, prove it.
JAMIE: How d'you know, Polly?
BEN: Ah, she's been studying her crystal ball.
POLLY: Abracadabra.
(Polly produces the bracelet she found.)
DOCTOR: Oh, how interesting, yes. Hmm. It's Aztec. Fake of course.
BEN: Mexico Olympiad.
POLLY: When we first left Earth it hadn't happened yet.
BEN: No, that's right, it wasn't due till 1968.
POLLY: Right, so now is any time later than that.

So it isn't all bad for Polly.)

The basic plot is unpromising: The travelers land in Atlantis, are about be sacrificed to the Atlantean deity, the Goddess Amdo. The Doctor bluffs his way to a meeting with the scientist who has promised to raise Atlantis out of the sea, Professor Zaroff (a strong, mad performance by Joseph Fürst). Zaroff quickly discovers that the Doctor's claim that "vital secret will die with me" (signed "Dr. W", so further supporting the argument that the character is in fact named Doctor Who.) is a bluff, but is amused at the Doctor's effrontery. But then the Doctor discovers Zaroff's intentions are to raise Atlantis, but also to destroy the world, as scientists so often wont to do:

DOCTOR: Even supposing you succeeded, you know what will happen, don't you?
ZAROFF: You tell me, Doctor.
DOCTOR: Well, the water will be converted into superheated steam, the pressure will grow, and crack the crust of the Earth. Destroy all life, maybe even blow the planet apart.
ZAROFF: Yes. And I shall have redeemed my promise to lift Atlantis from the sea. Lift it to the sky! It will be magnificent.
DOCTOR: Yes.
ZAROFF: Bang! Bang! Bang, bang! That's all.
DOCTOR: Yes. Just one small question. Why do you want to blow up the world?

Meanwhile, the Atlanteans are planning to make Polly one of their "fish people"--former human beings converted into fish/human hybrids, and treated as food gathering slaves.

The three succeeding episodes are a bit of a run-around: The Doctor recruits a priestly ally, then the political leader, but Zaroff outwits him. Ben and Jamie effectively recruit some miners to help take down Zaroff, Polly screams a lot, but also plays a constructive part, the Doctor and Ben thwart Zaroff at the very end,and the TARDIS team takes off--who knows where?--while their Atlantean friends, who have seen their temple and lower levels flooded--grieve for them, and plan a new, more fair, Atlantis as their memorial.

Troughton is mercurial and charming, and Jamie is beginning to adjust. The design range from the silly--fish head masks for the temple ceremonies--to the sublime. There's an extended sequence among the fish people that doesn't advance the plot, but brings us back to the sheer demented weird spectacle of Auntie Verity's Pandemonium Shadow Show, best exemplified by The Web Planet. The show's not quite sure what it is yet, with Troughton but it's coalescing, and still determined to be Doctor Who.

Herr Doktor von Wer: The Highlanders

Well, we're back. Since I have managed to find a watchable version of Patrick Troughton's sophomore story, The Highlanders, we can carry on traveling, after all.

The thing that stands out about The Highlanders is just how competent everybody is in this story. Polly shows steely courage and initiative, getting herself and the laird's daughter Kirsty out of danger, and becomes a proactive force in her own right. In fact, in the end, Polly saves the day--her quick obtaining of a blackmailing hold over Lieutenant Algernon Ffinch (the least bad of the English portrayed in the story) repays her throughout the story, and gives the TARDIS crew a guide back to the ship after the Doctor's hostage, the creepy solicitor-slave trader Grey, escapes.

Throughout, Anneke Wills is the standout of this story--once she has some of Ffinch's hair and his identity disc, and can thus prove he was outwitted by, as she puts it, "two girls" (Kirsty helps!), her blackmailing mixes charm and menace--the stiff Englishman finds himself called "Algy" almost affectionately by Polly, even as she is coercing him into handing over all his money, violating orders, and risking court martial. Polly's teasing familiarity is both an assertion of power over him (his title and grandiloquent name--that is, his very identity-- are taken from him by her as much as is his money), and yet she is not entirely cruel to him; the stakes are kept bearable for him. (Like Arnold Zeck before her, Polly knows that a blackmail victim must be allowed hope, and not be "pushed to extremities".) She's gutsy, funny and flirty.

Michael Craze's Ben is also very good--escaping torture because he's familiar with the techniques of Harry Houdini, reassuring the rattled young piper Jamie (a solid, but not yet outstanding Frazer Hines), that the Doctor is trustworthy, and figuring out the Doctor's plan pretty quickly.

And Troughton? He's a protean force here, masquerading as a German Doctor von Wer" (yes, that's "Doctor Who" auf Deutsch), complete with Teutonic accent, and an old beggar woman as the plot requires. He naps at one critical juncture, as Kirsty and Polly are champing at the bit to have a plan of action. The Doctor here is less a cosmic hobo than a man--well, I hate to outsource my own commentary, but Elizabeth Sandifer pretty much nails it:

From there, almost immediately, the story just becomes a compilation of "stuff we couldn't get Hartnell to do." Prance about in a comedy German accent and do intense and oddly violent comedy scenes of humorously torturing people? Check. Cross-dress? Check. Be oddly obsessed with stealing people's hats? Check. Basically, liberated by his metaphysical change from the tedious requirement that he be remotely sane, the Doctor goes completely nuts here, hamming for the camera, firing off one-liners to nobody in particular, and generally having a good time, while, distantly in the background, some kidnappings and rescues go on.

This is where the spotters guide approach falls short, then. Because this isn't the last historical, due largely to the fact that other than having no overt science fiction elements, nothing about it even faintly resembles historicals we've seen before. In terms of televised Doctor Who, The Smugglers was the last historical, and this is just a parody of the genre to reiterate after last time that the entire rulebook has been chucked out the window.

We don't yet know what Doctor Who, as Sandifer writes. We're not yet sure who the Doctor is anymore. But he's fast, and funny, and watchable. Even in a recon.

"I Am Your Ser-Vant": Power of the Daleks, Parts 4-6

For my money, the creepiest moment of The Power of the Daleks is when Lesterson, the scientist who revived the Daleks, believed their protestations "I am your servant," until it was far too late to stop them, comes to admire them.

He steps out of the shadow in which he is hiding, and grating in his best impression of a Dalek voice, "I am your ser-vant." Robert James is great throughout, but his final moments are superb.

It's especially chilling because he is, at this point, completely sincere.

There are other deliciously creepy bits--the assembly line of the newly fashioned Daleks is beautifully animated, and flows much more naturally the human movements (my main complaint about the animation is that walking looks all too often like sideways hopping), the massacre of both the rebels and the guards by the Daleks--while the usurping Lieutenant Governor Bragan thinks his plans are working, humanity within the colony's capital is being efficiently wiped out.

There are moments that are touching--Valmar's sincere grieving for his colleague and fellow rebel Janley. In the wasteland her errors have indirectly caused, he can't leave her body, and murmurs, "She wasn't as bad as you think" to the Doctor. (Richard Kane infuses a touch of unexpressed passion in his dealings with Pamela Ann Davey's all-business Janley, and it adds to the poignancy of the moment.)

This is the first Dalek story to raise the threat level the pepper pots pose to the level they now do; the Doctor notes that all is not well with the colony, and then adds darkly, "Add to that one Dalek." Ben replies, "Oh, blimey, you don't half make mountains, don't you? One Dalek?"
The Doctor's answer will be echoed throughout the history of the program, most notably by Christopher Eccleston in 2005: "Yes! All that is needed to wipe out this entire colony."

So too will the "I am your servant" ploy reappear:



All this, and the first circle chanting "Exterminate!" "Exterminate" over and over again. We're setting some show standards here in this episodes, codifying tropes that will go on for half a century. And such is the cleverness of David Whitaker's script that the characters who are caught up in it all--the double-dealing Bragen, the honorable Hensell, the cold-blooded Janley, the enigmatic, flippant Quinn, and the tragically self-confident Lesterson--are each distinct, important characters. They're interesting in their own right. Even Janley's death, telegraphed as it was, counted for me, and Hensell--Doctor Who's early version of Ned Stark--dies rather than dishonor himself. And you believe it.

***

In a way, these last three episodes of political intrigue, the Daleks being cunning instead of only blazing away, and the Doctor's brilliant (or lucky; the episode seems genuinely ambiguous) is Doctor Who on good form, but not spectacular. But think about it, for a second, what has been accomplished.

A new Doctor has been inaugurated, in a painful process that acknowledges the pain of the loss of Hartnell, and the need to regain the audience's trust;

The Daleks are back, an existential threat in essentially the manner they will hold for the rest off the classic series, and, frankly, through the revival The Daleks remain the parable of nuclear war they always were, but now have a motive beyond their old enmity with the Thals:

POLLY: You've all underestimated these Daleks.
KEBBLE: Better brains than us, I suppose.
POLLY: I only know what the Doctor has told me. He says they're capable of exterminating whole nations.
VALMAR: Perhaps, but what would they want to kill us for, after we've taken over. We're friendly with the Daleks.
POLLY: But don't you see? Human beings can't be friends with Daleks. They don't have friends.
VALMAR: I don't see why not.
POLLY: It's a kind of hatred for anything unlike themselves. They think they're superior.
VALMAR: The girl's got something.

It's been intimated before, but Polly's articulation of it rings down the decades;

And a story of human vulnerability has been told--how we are capable of unleashing forces that seem benign but escape our control.

Just the story we need at this time, really.

"Who am I Anyway": Power of the Daleks Episodes 1-3

Who am I anyway?
Am I my resume?
That is a picture of a person I don't know
What does he want from me?
What should I try to be?
So many faces all around, and here we go
I need this job
Oh God, I need this show.

--Marvin Hamlisch, A Chorus Line.

The old order changeth, yielding place to new--that's where we left the Doctor, remember, gasping out his life on the floor of the TARDIS. His face glowed, his features shifted, and, an old man faded out, replaced by a younger, smaller man.

He awakes to great pain, and sound searing him. "Focus on one thing," he says, half audibly, and repeats it. And then--silence.

"It's over," the little man says, and then laughs harshly--almost a bark of a laugh. He hauls himself up to his feet, using the TARDIS console. The Doctor's clothes are much too big for him--he sheds the cloak, the coat. Left in the checked pants, braces, he staggers to a chest. When he looks in a mirror, his image fades, replaced by the of the Doctor, and then fades to that of the little man himself again.

Polly knows the the little man is the Doctor, Ben keeps trying to trip him up--or at least get a reaction:

BEN: Now look, the Doctor always wore this. So if you're him, it should fit now, shouldn't it?
(And slips it on the man's finger. It's far too big.)
BEN: There. That settles it.
DOCTOR: I'd like to see a butterfly fit into a chrysalis case after it's spread its wings.
POLLY: Then you did change!
DOCTOR: Life depends on change and renewal.
BEN: Oh, so that's it. You've been renewed, have you?
DOCTOR: I've been renewed, have I? That's it. I've been renewed. It's part of the Tardis. Without it, I couldn't survive. Come here.

It's not really an answer, necessarily--it's Ben's own words, fed back to him. Or it is an answer. Troughton plays it so perfectly that you can defend either reading.

After looking over some old possessions ("The Doctor was a great collector, wasn't he?" he asks appraisingly brandishing Saladin's dagger). He supplements his wardrobe--a more contemporary coat, a bow tie--looks for "the Doctor's diary" (it's a 500 year Diary, by the way).

Then, calling to his companions, he goes out for a stroll. He tests his legs, gets used to his new body. And starts exploring the planet.

****

Right, we'll get to the story, but stay with me on this magical, ominous, mystery tour. David Whitaker has done it again--created a capsule form of the original hero's journey that was the plot line of Auntie Verity's Pandemonium Carnival. The Doctor isn't for the first two episodes, trustworthy, in just the same way he wasn't in the first few Hartnell episodes--he is a mystery again, not the giggly, stern, pompous, righteous, brave old man we have lost.

We are back at the beginning.

***

This renewal is unexplained in its scope, and tied to the TARDIS somehow, but all we really know is that our hero is dead and what is left behind is--very different--his consistent references to the Doctor in the third person suggests that even he doesn't feel that he is the same character. The recorder, the indifference to his companions, the way he takes the Examiner's badge and assumes his identity--all of this leaves us with someone new. When he finds himself in a colony, in the muddle of a power struggle against authority and rebels, he shows no interest, he wants to know what's in the capsule scientist Lesterson is trying to open. He (and Ben and Polly) steal in after hours, opens the castle, and we see two cobwebbed and seemingly immobile Daleks--and one Dalek mutant scuttling across the floor into the dark.

Lesterson, flooding the third Dalek with power wakens it; it's first act is to kill Lesterson's assistant. Lesterson is too enthralled to look after him, Janley lies, saying that the assistant will live. "I am your servant!" it grates, again, and again, but then:

Lesterson's Dalek glides into the room. It's movement is strangely fascinating, holding everyone transfixed. Everyone except the Doctor who edges backwards, shaking his head in horror. The Dalek stops and looks around at each person in turn. At last it re-focuses on the Doctor. The Doctor backs into a chair.)
BEN: It recognised the Doctor. It recognised him.
POLLY: What's the matter, Doctor? Are you all right?
DOCTOR: The fools. The stupid fools.
BEN: You're scared. What can it do?
DOCTOR: Nothing yet.
LESTERSON: This creation is called, I understand, a Dalek.
BEN: It knew who you were. It sounds ridiculous, but it did.
DOCTOR: It knew who I was.

And suddenly, before the political machinations that take us to the end of episode 3, before the Dalek manages to make Lesterson its assistant, while hanging on--barely--to the "servant" persona, we realize that the Dalek's recognition of the Doctor has cemented our own.

The Doctor is different, but he is still the Doctor.

And just in time, too, because a small circle of Daleks chanting "We will have our power!" again and again suggests that we need him badly.

***

BritBox has the new restored animated version, which is what I watched. The animation is good, not perfect,, as the trailer above shows, but good. The cleaned up audio sparkles, and the story moves smoothly. And, for old Who fans, the animation team has subtly righted two old wrongs.

The traditional credit of the theme to Ron Grainer is followed by a credit noting the theme was "realized by Delia Derbyshire."

Likewise, the original credit for Terry Nation is immediately followed by a credit "Daleks designed by Raymond Cusick.

So much of the impact of the theme music was the strange, otherworldly sound dynamic crafted by Derbyshire; so much of the power of the Daleks (sorry!) is in their design. Yet for decades Derbsyshire and Cusick were not given their just due. The BBC has done a little justice in this revision to the credits, as well as creating a lost episode with style and narrative force.