Doctor Who As Long Form

 I loved Flux. Chris Chibnall and his team promised the biggest story ever last year and – remarkably – their promotion was absolutely on point because Flux was massive. We journeyed from Halloween 2021 to the creation-spanning flux event, via the Crimean War, the 1960s and even the space between universes. We met Ood, Sontarans, Angels, Daleks and Cybermen, all in the one story which, on the whole, boasted an exhilarating sense of cohesion and confidence, only stumbling at its clunky climax, perhaps failing as a result of having a little too much to do. But the ride is indeed a thrill and it begs the question: is long-form Doctor Who the future? Indeed, is long-form Doctor Who better?

We might look back at the show’s past and sideways into its own varied universes to answer this poser. Because arguably, Doctor Who has spent much of its time operating in long-form. We can see a direct throughline from An Unearthly Child to the end of The Time Meddler, which acts as coda to the Ian and Barbara romance, opening up new possibilities for the show to move ever onward, and ending with its own bespoke closing titles which accentuate the end of one story and the start of another: the Doctor and his new companions looking out to pastures new through a universe of stars. Those early tales didn’t even have their own titles. Instead, each episode ran into the next and with only a few weeks off for the summer holiday, early Doctor Who had the staying power of a soap opera, its ending never really a consideration for the viewers. Tellingly though, the story of Ian and Barbara – the longest run of episodes in the show’s history to boast the story of companions is as blisteringly effective as no doubt it was in the 60s. As Hartnell and O’Brien walk away from the time-space visualiser, their sadness is palpable. After 77 episodes, the viewers must have felt equally destitute.

Ironically, the following year, the series offers up its first explicit epic in The Daleks’ Master Plan, the 12-part masterpiece so big it got its own prequel. Terry Nation and Dennis Spooner present a pulpy, comic strip adventure with a hard edge, not unlike the later Flux. Its scope is similar: several alien planets, spaceship travel, a range of villains and creatures and varied tones and registers. Perhaps Master Plan employs a more innocent, linear story-telling form but boasts several dramatic narrative punches including the violent and felt deaths of key characters. There are many four-parters which feel more sluggish than the Hartnell epic, and the vinyl release makes for perfect comfort-listening over the Christmas period. Flux meanwhile is purposefully disjointed and boundless, even de-constructing its own form by having the Hartnell-era closing titles of Episode 4 interrupted by guest characters from the previous episode updating us on their progress and Next Time trailers which boast surprises that leave the viewer aching for more. Perhaps given the success of Doctor Who’s two largest stories, there’s an argument to suggest we should get these megathons as a matter of routine.

The moody Master Plan and the following doom-laden Massacre is interrupted by a mini-season from Big Finish Productions: the Oliver Harper trilogy which consists of three stories by Simon Guerrier – The Perpetual Bond, The Cold Equations and The First Wave. Despite being what is probably extremely niche, even amongst Big Finish followers, this set of terrific tales ought to be heard by many. Threads of science, philosophy and finance run through a unique trilogy with an atmosphere all of its own. Richard Fox and Lauren Yason provide an unsettling and beautiful soundtrack and Guerrier’s final scene is haunting and ethereal, cementing this run as pivotal to the journey of the First Doctor and prizing itself into the even longer story around it forever. Guerrier’s similarly atmospheric Sara Kingdom trilogy (Home Truths, The Drowned World and The Guardian of the Solar System) tells another long story up there with some of the best Doctor Who ever written.

Other televisual season-long arcs include The Key to Time and The Trial of a Time Lord, both criminally under-rated. The Key to Time is discrete in the fact that it features no returning elements at all from previous stories and even introduces new companions and new (old) friends and acquaintances of the Doctor. The season feels fresh, limitless and full of optimism, each of the stories breezy, larkish and fun. The Trial, despite its concept clearly not quite knowing what it wants to do with itself, boasts stark, memorable scenes such as the death of Peri and the machinations of the Valeyard inside the Matrix, as well as a stellar cast of season-long regulars, not least the great Michael Jayston. Whilst these seasons may not represent Doctor Who at its absolute prime, there’s something to be said about their wide-reaching ambitions and the overpowering feeling that this is stirringly epic stuff.

At around this time, the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip begins to come into its own, the Sixth Doctor adventure Voyager in particular offering majestic imagery certain to print itself indelibly on the minds of younger readers. Arguably, however, it’s in the strips of The Eighth Doctor that the magazine stops seeing itself as lesser than the series from which it was spawned and forges ahead with its own identity building a distinct continuity for itself. Alan Barnes’s Endgame begins the story of Paul McGann’s cartoon incarnation with bravado and romance, a reinspired joi de vivre evident from the off, that first panel of Eight stepping out of his TARDIS into Stockbridge heralding a new era of bonhomie and fun. Boldly, the centrepiece of this ecstatic era is the 10-part The Glorious Dead, a story which reinvents the Master and tells tales in a way only a comic can, panels decorated with shredded newspaper clippings in spiralling vortexes. This to the Eighth Doctor and his Master is what The Sea Devils is for the Third and Delgado or Last of the Time Lords is for the Tenth and Simm – era-defining.

DWM tells huge stories for later Doctors too. The Child of Time thread running through several of the Eleventh Doctor strips is mysterious and gripping. The return visits to the planet of Cornucopia create a lovely narrative thread between the adventures of the Eleventh and Twelfth. Best of all though is the story of the Tenth Doctor and Majenta Price, presented in all its totemic glory in the DWM Graphic Novel, The Crimson Hand. Giving the Doctor a comic-only companion after having stuck so firmly to the world of the TV series since 2005 allows the strip to flourish again as it did under the Eighth Doctor and what the TV show loses in the Specials year of 2009, we gain in DWM. Arguably, the strip has never enjoyed a better uninterrupted run, before or since, than the stories from Hotel Historia to The Crimson Hand.

Elsewhere in the Whoniverse, we’ve got the Twelfth Doctor book trilogy The Glamour Chronicles which mirrored the longer tales of that year’s TV series; the media-spanning labyrinthine headfuck that was Time Lord Victorious; and the 50^th anniversary BBC Audio series Destiny of the Doctor which allowed each Doctor and era their time in the spotlight – every story presenting an authentic representation of the respective era from which it sings. Big Finish’s take on the Hartnell epic in their own equally thrilling Syndicate Master Plan is just one example of their season-long successes, the others including the massively lauded adventures of the Eighth Doctor and Charley which climaxed in the characteristically massive Neverland via the poll-topping The Chimes of Midnight, spring-boarding from the grand and gorgeous Storm Warning (also from Alan Barnes, whose palpable affinity with Paul McGann’s Doctor seems undeniably inherent). The company’s 20^th anniversary 6-hour tale The Legacy of Time was a success on every level, each story offering its own thrills and hoorahs – after 20 years, that’s really something.

Longer TV stories always seem to fare well in the polls: The War Games was voted the best story of the 1960s in DWM’s latest fan survey in 2014 and Season 7’s clutch of 7-parters is widely regarded as a huge success. What all the best of these novel-size stories do is offer a narrative which is as thrilling in its constituent parts as it is marvellous from a holistic perspective. You can pick any episode of The Daleks’ Master Plan and find an enjoyable 25-minutes (yes, even The Feast of Steven) but viewed in all its 12-part glory, it represents a hugely satisfying body of work. Similarly, the gripping edge-of-the-seat horror of Village of the Angels on its own is as admirable as the wild ambitions and twists of Flux in its entirety. But longer series of stories which may not have been as well received at the time seem to meet with greater acclaim over time. Russell T Davies’s epic three-parter - Utopia, The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords (charting at 55 in the DWM poll) – now feels mythic. Similarly, his at-the-time-bloated-seeming The End of Time now feels like its tone meeting moniker: The Best. More recent finales seem also to do well in the polls: World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls is hailed as a modern classic on fan forums and always fares well in online polls. Stand-out episodes of the series such as Heaven Sent, A Christmas Carol and Voyage of the Damned (boo to the miserable nay-sayers) are improved by dint of their increased running time. If there were an episode that could feel like a bona-fide Doctor Who Movie it’s Voyage of the Damned, although Deep Breath and of course, the official number one, The Day of the Doctor, are equally totemic, and of course, enjoyed cinema screenings.

When Doctor Who returned to the screen in 2005, many criticisms were made of the 45-minute format, fans feeling that stories of this brevity simply didn’t work as well as longer ones. I was not in this camp: Father’s Day and Tooth and Claw are two of the most perfectly formed Doctor Who stories in the arsenal, each making a virtue of their runtime. But maybe there is something in Doctor Who as a long-running series? The Top 20 stories in that 2014 poll run as follows:

The Seeds of Doom – 6 parter
The Power of the Daleks – 6 parter
Inferno – 7 parter
The Eleventh Hour – Feature length episode
The Web of Fear – 6 parter
Dalek
Terror of the Zygons
Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways – 2 parter
The War Games – 10 parter
The Robots of Death
Remembrance of the Daleks
Human Nature/The Family of Blood – 2 parter
Pyramids of Mars
The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances – 2 parter
The Talons of Weng-Chiang – 6 parter
City of Death
The Caves of Androzani
Genesis of the Daleks – 6 parter
Blink
The Day of the Doctor – Feature length episode

Only eight of the twenty stories above have running times which could be deemed as standard for the show in their respective contemporary periods. Several of the stories in those eight - Dalek, Terror of the Zygons, The Robots of Death, Remembrance of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, City of Death, The Caves of Androzani and Blink - can’t even be said to be typical of the format. Blink, most obviously, tells a very different “short story” style narrative; Androzani is a theatrical Jacobean tragedy and neither Pyramids nor arguably City of Death boast masterclasses in how to structure a well put-together tale. Tellingly, at the other end of the scale, only five stories run longer than usual: The Space Pirates, The Dominators, The Time Monster and The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe and The Sensorites. The King’s Demons, also in the bottom 20 is actually shorter than usual and Meglos sports unusually slight episodes, perhaps suggesting more obviously that longer is better?

Perhaps as a fandom we do want our stories to feel bigger, more epic, more universal, in keeping with the breadth and imagination of the show itself. The Daleks’ Master Plan, as I have argued before, is perhaps the story that best typifies the programme as a whole: planets, history, space, Daleks, Time Lords, starships, contemporary Earth, fun, danger, comedy and tragedy, all vying for attention across its five hours, the very distillation of Doctor Who. When the show returns in 2023, rumour has it that RTD will produce three feature-length specials. Judging by fandom’s bent towards the epic, we could be in for a treat. Hell, we all know we’re going to be spoilt by the boss. Steven Moffat’s The Day of the Doctor topped the polls in the 50^th anniversary. Will RTD manage to top it come the 60^th? With longer stories, I’d put money on it.

JH