A crowded TARDIS, a new, less
commanding Doctor and a return to the more philosophical, ponderous tales of
the 1960s. Sound familiar? Season 19 got there first. Big historical event such
as say, Rosa Parkes making her stand or the Great Fire of London? Check.
Stories as close to purely historical as one can get, based on buried family
secrets? Check. A second outing for a Doctor which takes in an impressive
spaceship in its first few minutes and includes a bit of magical space walking?
Check. An old enemy reinvigorated for a new era? Check. A disappointing finale?
Check. There are huge similarities between both series, not just those of
superficiality, and it’s been nice to revisit Peter Davison’s first episodes in
the wake of Jodie’s, making for neat references and comparisons.
Compared to Jodie Whittaker’s
fledgling series, Season 19 is perhaps rather better, despite three script
editors playing musical chairs, out of order filming and far less money thrown
at it. It is certainly more innovative, charming and at times, poetic. Like
Whittaker’s season though, its chief strength is in its variety of scope, from
locations (jungle planets, fairy tale cities, spaceships, 1920s country
mansions, London 1666, modern-day Heathrow and even finally prehistoric Earth)
to narrative forms (high-concept philosophy, action-adventure, religious
metaphor, historical yarn and murder mystery). Perhaps Season 19 feels so fresh
and invigorating precisely because it never stands still. Whereas Chris
Chibnall tends towards traditional story structures, Season 19 is never quite
sure what it wants to be or how precisely it rolls, making for a more unpredictable
and surprising set of adventures.
Castrovalva is an admittedly rather unfriendly way to open a season
but in its own way is quite brilliant. Whereas The Woman Who Fell to Earth is perhaps the most user-friendly
jumping on point for any newcomer to the TARDIS, even eschewing a title
sequence in fear it might put off the lay public, Castrovalva essentially starts mid-adventure, the Doctor continuing
to lock horns with a similarly newly regenerated Master from previous tale Logopolis. We aren’t introduced to the
companions at all, simply asked to go along with their plight and accept their very
strange dialogue. Because quite remarkably, everybody in the story – and I mean
everybody, companions too – talks as if exploring endless examples of
recursion. “If we had an index file, we could look it up in the index file,”
says Tegan, forgetting her auntie died a few hours ago, large portions of the
universe have been destroyed and a stranger she flew off with in his spaceship
has just changed his face. “I had installed a trap behind that trap that would
have been a joy to spring,” says the Master, seemingly accepting that most of
his schemes end up thoroughly quashed. “Was there ever a man with such capacity
to lose both his quarry and himself?” asks Mergrave, the first person we meet
in Castrovalva. Even the first exchange between the Portreeve and the Doctor is
served with lashings of recursion:
DOCTOR: Will I find the Doctor here?
PORTREEVE: Oh, yes, Doctor, very soon.
Even the Doctor notes Mergrave’s
later statement that, “Because, sir, I maintain I am and I am a man of my word”
as a “perfect example of recursion.” Finally, the solution to Castrovalva
itself relies upon a recursive paradox: “The books are old but they chronicle
the rise of Castrovalva up to the present day.” It is some bravery, nay gall,
on the part of the crazed mind of Christopher Hamilton Bidmead that he decides
to open Peter Davison’s first series by exploring a philosophical theory for a
couple of hours, attendant jeopardy located largely at cliff-hangers. The two
settings, the corridors of the TARDIS and the beautifully designed city itself,
lend themselves to architectural recursion too and weaving Tom Baker’s scarf
through the TARDIS to find one’s way home lends a pleasingly mythic touch to
the Fifth Doctor’s first outing. Castrovalva
is a bold decision and I can’t imagine this sort of tale happening at any other
point in the entire history of the show. We could have been given a fresh new
take on Doctor Who here – the golden opportunity was there - but instead we
were gifted one of the most intelligent, gentle and thematically sublime
scripts the show would ever have. In his insanity and possibly losing millions
of viewers into the bargain (for Davison, Castrovalva
had better average ratings than any of his later stories) Bidmead created
something which might distance those tuning in to watch sci-fi high-jinks, but
in its own way something remarkably beautiful and blissfully poetic.
Four to Doomsday follows and continues the minor peril: high
concept ratio established by Castrovalva.
The first two episodes sail by, new ideas and mysteries making for a curious
piece, as the viewers attempt to jigsaw together precisely what is going on,
excitingly at the same pace as the Doctor. Part One’s cliff-hanger in which the
attractive new guest stars reveal themselves as the frogs we met mere moments
ago is perhaps the high point of Four to
Doomsday, a cliff-hanger reliant on turning the narrative on its head, as
opposed to putting the regulars in obligatory danger. The second one pulls a
similar stunt and it’s amazing how Part Three’s execution-style ending seems so
drab by comparison. In fact, the whole of Part Three sags hugely before Part
Four picks itself back up for a climactic spacewalk sequence. It’s a shame the
script couldn’t have been tightened to include Stratford Johns’s delightful
Monarch in this sequence. As it stands, his defeat (let’s throw some poison at
him) feels like an afterthought and deflates the ending somewhat. A rough
diamond then is Four to Doomsday in
the end but sports more beautiful set design, terrific lighting and effects,
some hard-hitting juxtapositions and an imaginative, for the most part lively
script.
Kinda is one of 80s Doctor Who’s crown jewels and much has been
written by better Who scholars than me about its uniqueness. To get the tragic
out of the way with first: the jungle set is terrible: plastic trees, studio
floors and artificial turf make for an unconvincing alien environment
particularly after two such lavish stories. The lighting is wretched. No gobos
at all seem to have been used to give even a hint that light is passing through
high leaves, let alone the passing of the sun during the day. Finally, that
snake… It’s bloody awful, isn’t it. (The fabulous CG version MUST be a default
for any first-time viewer!) But it’s a testament to the incredible talent of
writer Christopher Bailey and the tour de force performances of Peter Davison,
Simon Rouse, Nerys Hughes, Jeffrey Stewart, Janet Fielding and Mary Morris that
the show remains an out and out triumph.
The script is so strange, so very
odd. Composer Peter Howell adds to the weirdness, synthy howls and melodies
combining to give Deva Loka an aural landscape all of its own. The scenes
inside Tegan’s dark place are frightening and sinister. The decline into
madness on the parts of Hindle and Sanders is truly unsettling to watch. And
those cliff-hangers! It must be said Season 19 has some of the very best
cliff-hangers in all Doctor Who, matched only by perhaps Philip Hinchliffe’s
second and third years. There are moments in Kinda when scripting, performance, music and atmosphere come
together to make the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand on end: Hindle
taking a seat as the two Kinda prisoners kneel either side of him, their soles
now trapped in mirrors; the moment Sanders first opens the Box of Janna and his
face lights up with orange radiance; the dream sequence with the clocks at the
end of the world; the old couple playing chess; Todd’s gut-curdling scream as
the Doctor suddenly opens the lid. Kinda
is its own beast, rare and powerful and to be found absolutely nowhere in any
Doctor Who before or since.
The Visitation was at the time of transmission lauded as a return
to the Doctor Who of old. After three avant-garde excursions into
philosophical/pseudo-religious realms told in unusual forms, it’s easy to see
why. The Visitation has all the
hallmarks of a traditional classic Who story: atmosphere, a rich historical
setting, the plague, the Great Fire, a Great Monster in the Terileptils and
their lovely-looking android, a terrific opening sequence and some old-school
theatrical dialogue. This should work. The only problem is, nowadays The Visitation seems a little feeble.
The pace is, even compared to other episodes of Season 19 and certainly to the
same writer’s Earthshock, pedestrian.
The plot is simplistic, the cliff-hangers dreary and the big moments lost. How
much better and more memorable would the opening sequence have been if it were
Death complete with scythe that burst through those doors and not a bejewelled
robot? How much stronger would the threat of those rats have been if we’d met
victims of the plague as opposed to dull, masked villagers? All the elements
are there for the story to be a rich, atmospheric period piece and we get a
sense of that in those last scenes in London, the use of glass shots and filmed
sets suddenly lending the period a vivid tangibility. Unfortunately, Eric Saward
is a few drafts away from the sort of old-fashioned classic we really want The Visitation to be. When we should be
watching the plague tear through the villagers, we’re watching Nyssa happily
build a small machine in the TARDIS. When we should be watching the Terileptils
stalking the streets of London in their hooded cowls, we’re busy enjoying Adric
attempting to pilot the TARDIS or the Doctor looking at some maps on the
scanner. There’s no urgency to The
Visitation. It’s limp and flagging, especially after such an astonishingly
unusual start to a season. Perhaps in another series, Season 20 for instance,
it would be a highlight, but here, it fails to shine amongst a string of
extremely good, hugely ambitious opposition. I must make special mention of Michael Robbins's Richard Mace: the fruitiest guest star of the season and a joy to be around.
A friend challenged me to watch Black Orchid with him once. I thought it
was dreadful. He thought it was 10/10 magnificent. Of course, the truth is
somewhere in between. It feels extremely lazy and something of a modern trend
to say that a story “Isn’t Doctor Who” but I see it more and more online, especially
in the wake of the loathsome #Not My
Doctor brigade. The DWM Time Team condemned The Two Doctors as “Not Doctor Who.” I just don’t understand that
attitude. It’s best to review what is there than to pretend it doesn’t exist;
rebut rather than remove. Of course, Black
Orchid is a very, very odd example of Doctor Who, but isn’t all Season 19?
It seems to want to be a murder mystery but the killer is revealed early on:
it’s the chap in the shit clothes. It reaches for the tropes of Agatha
Christie: the Amazon and Latoni representing the mysterious “other” and the
Cranleighs having an historical family secret. But there’s not enough time in
this two-parter to give the viewer clues or invite them to play detective. As
it goes, Black Orchid is not very
good at being a period sleuth drama. Nor is it very good at being Doctor Who,
absent are the exciting tropes of yore replaced by a pleasant cricket game, a
fancy-dress party and a cold outdoor collation. It has a title sequence, the
TARDIS lands and an adventure of sorts ensues, so it is quite provably Doctor
Who, but it certainly feels like it perhaps doesn’t want to be at times.
The harlequin killer does however
pose a frightening image of villainy and its arrival at the party is the
story’s most chilling moment. The Nyssa-Ann plot feels like an effort to give
Sarah Sutton something to do after confining her to the TARDIS occasionally
(and she does come into her own here, Sutton’s performance as Ann subtly
different) but only really becomes important at the story’s climax which
admittedly it navigates rather well. The fire spreading through the house feels
urgent and unusually domestic in its terror. What makes Black Orchid feel unfocussed and almost “tossed off” is the unforgivable
trip to the TARDIS with the peelers in tow. Honestly, what was Terence Dudley
thinking when he decided, “I know. I’ll just get the Doctor to show everyone
the TARDIS and they’ll all believe him?” The solutions to the mysteries are not
to be found in the setting or the characters. It’s, simply put, lazy writing
and makes for the feeling that despite the strong period detail, the gorgeous
costume and set design and the very strong performances, Black Orchid is as disposable as its writer thinks it is.
Earthshock’s impact on Doctor Who was aptly seismic. After its
incredible success, much of what came after was informed by it and so it’s
perhaps more difficult from a 21st Century viewpoint to appreciate
how different the story was at the time. No other tale before it had attempted
such a brazenly action-packed, movie-on-a-TV-budget endeavour before. The
scenes are markedly shorter, the narrative more thrilling and breathless, and for
once its director knows it. Everything about Earthshock combines to make for something very special indeed.
What’s most notable of all though
is not the rightly-lauded reveal of the Cybermen, nor the shock death of Adric.
No, it’s the way in which Eric Saward allows us some time with Adric in the
first half hour, and in a stroke of genius, paints him as a bit of a dick. He’s
annoyingly smug, argumentative and patronising. The thrill of his death later
is that we feel instantly guilty about hating him earlier. It’s a tremendously
clever move on the part of Eric Saward and one never to be repeated. Enough has
been said about Earthshock’s multiple
successes: the surprises, the pace of its direction and performances, the
lighting, the sets complete with running water, the running silhouettes and Malcolm Clarke’s moody music. What is notable
now, with over thirty years’ hindsight, is Eric Saward’s script: it looks
fairly straightforward but is actually robust and complex, the opening episode
in the caves foreshadowing the climax in its dinosaur bones and offering an ultimate
solution in plain sight as early as the fifteen-minute mark. Classy.
Poor, much-maligned Time-Flight. What a shame it follows a
series of such excellence. But is it really as bad as its detractors would have
us believe? It does all the things we now expect of a season finale. It
completes Tegan’s story, taking her back home to Heathrow, a destination to
which we’ve been headed all season (this year’s arc if you will). It includes
the Big Bad Master from the season opener in a surprise reveal at the mid-way point.
It also includes some call-backs to earlier adventures: the Terileptils make a
re-appearance, the recent Melkur says hello and finally Adric’s ghost
materialises. Time-Flight’s problem
though is that it doesn’t make any of these elements its focus.
The real story here should be the
“will she/won’t she” decision of Tegan’s possible departure. Adric should
appear as very final ghost, rather than the first in a series of convenient obstacles,
to give his death some meaning and be pivotal to the characters’ emotional
climax. When we should be experiencing the fall-out of Earthshock’s devastating ending, seeing its effects on a fellow
time traveller who’s been granted a tantalising glimpse of home, we’re watching
the Doctor and the Master swap TARDIS parts on a set which definitely isn’t outdoors.
The script spends so much time wittering on about mechanics, psycho-tronics and
electronics whilst Roger Limb jabs at his synthesiser incessantly over the top
of all the bafflegab, that this final adventure of Season 19 becomes very quickly
wearying. It’s a shame because all the ingredients for a dramatic, hard-hitting
finale are present and correct.
Like Jodie Whittaker’s series, it’s
easy to see how the crowded TARDIS doesn’t always work, companions confined to
lesser duties for stories at a time and with little room to show them truly develop.
Just as nobody in the Whittaker season asks the obvious questions of the Doctor,
so to here nobody seems to want to deal with the obvious consequence of their
adventures. Nyssa’s status as an orphan does nothing to propel her decision
making. Tegan is a one-trick “Take me home” mouthpiece who confusingly decides she
no longer wants to go home off-screen. Adric is probably the best served companion
and he isn’t exactly somebody we enjoy being with. (Seriously, who else would
deliver the sentence “Why is he never around when you want him?” like Matthew Waterhouse?)
Chris Chibnall’s Yaz is JNT’s Nyssa and hopefully like Nyssa, Yaz will enjoy
more development the following season. Both TARDIS teams are pleasant enough
but on occasion don’t really feel like they are part of an ongoing story.
Across the season, leading man Peter
Davison undergoes some transitional acting decisions but always impressed. In
the interview with Matthew Sweet on the Special Features disc, he bemoans the
fact that he didn’t put his stamp on the part early on, preferring to find his
way in the playing of it. Watched in the order the stories were produced rather
than broadcast, there’s a clearer through-line of development in Davison’s performance.
In Four to Doomsday and parts of The Visitation, he’s more measured and definitely
posher. “And I’ll keep it,” he tells Tegan outside the TARDIS of his promise to
get her home, with all the plummy rah-rah of an Eton school boy. In Four to Doomsday, he is given some
unfortunate gags which make his Doctor seem like a bit of a patronising, witless
bore: he makes a crap joke about the names of the people he meets at almost
every turn, which now seems the very antithesis of the behaviour of a modern Doctor.
LIN FUTU: Greetings. I am Lin Futu.
THE DOCTOR: Well, I’d never have guessed it. You look in the best of health to me.
THE DOCTOR: Well, I’d never have guessed it. You look in the best of health to me.
It’s a joke that doesn’t even
make sense and paints a picture of a Doctor who sits condescendingly above
those he meets. Fortunately, this habit dies a quick death and is peculiar only
to this story.
Davison throughout the whole
season though, like Jodie Whittaker, never delivers a line without true commitment,
although some decisions on the parts of both actors are questionable. It is,
perhaps ironically, only by Time-Flight
that he really has a handle on that breathless, frantic delivery we now
associate with his Doctor. He flies around the TARDIS for the first time like a
New Series Doctor, breaking new ground for a show contented to use older actors
in the role for its opening 18 years. Here is the first Doctor with the dynamism
of youth as his ace card. There is only one moment in the entire season when I
feel I can see Davison himself. He’s lying, eyes closed, on the TARDIS floor in
Part Four of Time-Flight clearly
feeling rightfully aggrieved by the whole dreary escapade. Nyssa asks, “How are
you going to deal with the Master?” and he replies with a withering sigh and an
irritated, “I’m thinking about it.” It’s a terrific moment and one can really
feel the season spluttering to a stop along with him.
All told though, Davison is such
a good actor that he pulls off the part of the Doctor with utter aplomb and his
regrets that he should have made his mark more strongly can be confined to the
history books because his Doctor is present and boundless and wonderful. If
Jodie Whittaker needs any advice – indeed, if Chris Chibnall needs any advice –
they’d do worse than to sit through these episodes of imaginative passion, ambitious,
far-reaching story-telling, intellectually stimulating and (for the most part) completely
gorgeous-looking Doctor Who.
9/10
Addenda: This Special Edition Blu
Ray box set continues the almighty success of July’s Season 12. It’s presented
in a beautiful box, with staggeringly strong, original artwork. The remastering
job on the episodes is magnificent, the film sequences in true HD for the first
time. Castrovalva’s new effects are
subtle and the icing on the cake for an already incredible story (I disproportionately
love that the unsightly reversed question mark on Davison’s collar has been
righted!). The new Making Of documentaries are fabulous too: the Mark Strickson-led
visits to old locations make for beautiful looking retrospectives and the more
standard affairs for Four to Doomsday
and Earthshock are informative and
fun. I can dream of a time when all 26 classic seasons sit alongside one
another: the ultimate chronicling of the best programme in the universe.
JH
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