Flux, ed. Paul Driscoll

Posted on 3 May 2024 by fromtheheartofeurope

The six-part 2021 season of Doctor Who was produced under pandemic conditions, and by the time it ended, I was myself recovering from my bout with COVID and didn’t feel inspired to write about it. A year later, after the broadcast of The Power of the Doctor, I returned to Flux and wrote:

So. The 2021 six-part story, Flux, was a mess. There’s no kind way of putting it. I actually like John Bishop as new companion Dan Lewis; I love Barbara Flynn, whatever she is in; I was really thrilled by Thaddea Graham as Bel, the first semi-regular Irish character in almost sixty years [of the show’s history]; and there were some good spine-chilling moments, such as the destruction of Dan’s house and the Doctor being transformed into a Weeping Angel.

But unfortunately the plot made very little sense, and the climax took place largely offscreen. Of course it was filmed under serious constraints due to the pandemic, but that doesn’t excuse the writers from sitting back and thinking about what they were really trying to convey. For all their faults, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffatt generally remembered that they needed to please their audience as well as indulging their own inner impulses. I felt that Chibnall had lost the run of himself.

I rewatched it again for this blog post, and felt very much the same. This time around I had various plot summaries to hand, which helped me make a little more sense of it; but TV science fiction at its best, unlike say opera, is not normally one of those art forms which requires the consumer to follow along with notes. I love Whittaker as the Doctor, but there are far too many moments where she is attempting to carry the full burden of audience interest through facial expressions and body language, and not helped by the dim studio lighting, the lack of other actors to interact with, or (crucially) the script.

Once again, I did like the fourth instalment, Village of the Angels, much more than the rest – a coherent plot which is more than adequately explained, higher production values, and interestingly the only episode of the six for which a co-writer (Maxine Alderton) is credited alongside Chibnall; and it ends with one of the best visual cliff-hangers ever, as the Doctor herself becomes a Weeping Angel. Interestingly, when I surveyed the Internet Movie Database for the top-rated episode of each era and spinoff of Who, Village of the Angels was a clear winner for the Thirteenth Doctor.

In his editorial foreword, Paul Driscoll explains that the fact that there are six very tightly linked episodes provided a challenge for the Black Archive series. What they have done is to commission six essays from six different authors, topped and tailed with shorter pieces by Alasdair Stuart.

Stuart’s introduction reflects on the terror of the time, when Doctor Who became to an extent a pandemic coping mechanism.

James Cooray Smith’s essay on The Halloween Apocalypse, ‘Apocalypse? Now!’, starts by reflecting on Chris Chibnall’s previous career and how different his Doctor Who turned out to be from his previous work, looks also at the importance of Liverpool as a setting and 31 October as the date for the episode, and recognises the weaknesses in the characters of Karvanista, Swarm and Azure; as I like to say, their means and motivation are never made entirely clear.

Emma Reed’s ‘A History in Flux’, looking at War of the Sontarans, examines the role of history (and fictionalised history) in Doctor Who, especially the Chibnall era’s emphasis on women in history. It also explained to me what the Temple of Atropos stuff was meant to be about, a point which had escaped me on both viewings of the story.

In ‘The Primordial Division’, Once, Upon Time is examined by Philip Purser-Hallard. I found it a thoroughly confusing episode on both viewings, and rather hoped that everything would come out right with the rest of the show. Purser-Hallard explains to me much better what is going on than the actual script did. He makes a number of interesting observations also about the role of double identities in the story and the Jungian resonances, but basically he enjoyed and was interested in this episode and I didn’t, and he doesn’t sell me on it. The second paragraph of his piece is:

She’s perfectly correct, as ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’ has already shown: in the Ravagers’ introductions, Swarm was confined to a cylindrical energy shield, supposedly ‘since the dawn of the universe’, while Azure was reduced to ‘Anna’, a human woman living with her partner Jón in the far north of Iceland, without recollection of her extraterrestrial past.

Village of the Angels was broadcast on the worst day of my bout with COVID in 2021, and I did wonder when re-watching if it would hold up to re-watching. I’m glad to say that it did, and as noted above it’s my favourite episode of the series. I therefore had high hopes of Oliver Tomkins’ analysis, ‘The Angels Have the Goggle Box’, and they were fulfilled – it’s an in-depth look at the Weeping Angels, where the come from in terms of story and what they mean, why they are frightening and what they do, and how they break the fourth wall. Tomkins also looks at how the Bel plotline integrates into the Flux story.

‘Doctor Who’s Mother’, by James Mortimore, looks at Survivors of the Flux, considering the colonial framing of the Time Lords (vis-à-vis the Shobogans, and the rest of the universe), and looking at Tecteun and representations of motherhood in the show.

Finally, we get to The Vanquishers. In ‘The Three Doctors… and a Sontaran Stratagem’, Matt Hills is disarmingly frank about its failure to provide satisfactory narrative resolution, and puts this down to Chibnall’s emphasis on surprise. He then looks at the triple-Jodie Whittaker Doctor in the episode as a tribute to The Three Doctors, and reflects on how a fannish show-runner reacts against fannish expectations. It’s a good explanation of what the episode was trying to do, though again I do not feel that it succeeded.

Alasdair Stuart’s conclusion, ‘You are the Universe, Doctor’, defends the whole sequence of episodes, though as will have become apparent, I am not convinced.

Incidentally there are six ways of arranging three different things, and I have arranged the episode title, essay title and essay author’s name differently in each of the previous six paragraphs.

In sum, I did learn quite a lot from this Black Archive, largely because it explained to me what several of the episodes were supposed to be about. I’m afraid that underlines to me that the entire thing was a failure of art. I prefer to understand my TV at the time that I watch it, rather than waiting until I read serious analysis two and a half years later. But you can get it here.

From here on in, I’m switching to doing just one Black Archive write-up per month, as I am catching up with current releases all too quickly.

The Night of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith, Alasdair Stuart and Steven Moffat

Posted on 23 October 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

So, back in November 2013, I was having a dull Thursday afternoon in the office when my social media started pinging with news of a new short Doctor Who story on Youtube. I fired up the link and watched it; and watched it again. I don’t think that you can ever recreate the impact of Paul McGann, 18 seconds in, saying “I’m a Doctor – but probably not the one you were expecting.”

The continuity issues raised by precisely which companions were mentioned led me into completely inaccurate speculation about the plot of The Day of the Doctor.

That evening, still excited, I was reading through Big Finish’s online magazine and unthinkingly tweeted the final paragraph of their interview with Tom Baker, which turned into my most retweeted tweet ever (to the point that Buzzfeed ranked it ninth in their list of 16 pictures we can probably stop tweeting in 2014).

https://twitter.com/nwbrux/status/401103755825147905

Nine days later, we drove to Germany for the showing of The Day of the Doctor in a cinema near Cologne. I wrote:

The cinema is part of the massive Hürth Park shopping complex, and we found food without difficulty at their in-house restaurant. They were showing [The] Day of the Doctor in three different screens, and ours, which was the emptiest when I booked it, was full on the night, so I guess that all three sold out. Sitting beside me were three young women speaking Russian to each other, who gasped with appropriate appreciation in all the right fannish places(such as “Bad Wolf” and “I don’t want to go”). I wondered how far they had come to watch it. Probably not as far as us on the night, anyway.

We cinemagoers also got a lecture from Dan Starkey as Strax about cinema etiquette, showing unfortunates who had been arrested by the Sontarans for using their mobile phones or for trying to record the event, but also rejoicing in the eating of popcorn; followed by Matt Smith and David Tennant demonstrating the 3D while bantering with each other. (It’s perhaps a little regrettable that the 3D glasses were not returnable, at least not where we are; I can’t imagine that we’ll ever use them again.)

And then on with the main feature. Well, I liked it a lot. As everyone has been saying, John Hurt slipped into the part of the missing incarnation utterly smoothly, and in just the right way, portraying a veteran in his own incarnation aware that there would be others to come, and mocking the future Doctors very effectively. I was also relieved that Tennant dialled it down a bit; I felt he sometimes pushed too far in his own stories. And Smith seemed totally energised by the experience, though he must have already decided to go when it was being made.

I was actually glad that Billie Piper didn’t play Rose again (and delighted with the way the script covered that); she actually does well when she gets decent material to work with. Jenna Coleman is a delight. I liked the UNIT subplot (Yay, Jemma Redgrave and Ingrid Oliver!) more than the Elizabethan subplot, but enjoyed both (Joanna Page excellent, if improbable, and softening one of the stupider lines from The End of Time). I remembered the Zygons fondly, and indeed rewatched Terror of the Zygons last weekend to refresh myself; the negotiating the deal moment was perhaps a bit contrived in plot terms, but theoretically sound from the diplomatic perspective. And the shedding of the Time War baggage, both in terms of plot and in terms of liberating the Doctor from what we now know was more than just survivor’s guilt, and possible reintroduction of the Time Lords and Gallifrey is excellent for the future of the show’s storylines.

Not to mention the fan service:

A terrific way of including the former Doctors
(who did Harnell’s voice, by the way?)

Just one look from his eyes, but
already we know it will be different.

I was spoilered for this, which is probably
just as well as I don’t think I could
have remained dignified otherwise.

In the global scheme of things, this was one of Moffat’s better Event episodes and probably the best anniversary special. (I know that Moffat has declared that there is only one previous anniversary special, The Five Doctors; he is entitled to his opinion, but I definitely count The Three Doctors, Silver Nemesis, Dimensions in Time and Zagreus, plus perhaps one or two others.) He has always been good at witty banter, and at identity confusion; he hasn’t always been as good at fitting these things to the frame of a wider show, but he did it this time, and I’m a happy fan.

I rewatched both Night and Day of the Doctor in preparation for writing this post, and they both held up really well. The Night of the Doctor packs so much into six and a half minutes. The plot threads of The Day of the Doctor just about tie up properly (this is one of Moffat’s skills). It’s all great fun and rekindled my enthusiasm.

It’s a little sad that there isn’t quite the atmosphere around the 60th anniversary as there was for the 50th, but it’s understandable why; in 2013 we had the first significant milepost since the 2005 reboot, and the show was on a high; but the Chibnall years did not reach the same level of public interest. It should also be said that I’ve heard from sources involved with the production that some at the BBC felt that 2013 went too far, with An Adventure in Space and Time, The Five-ish Doctors Rebooted, and the awful After-party alongside the actual specials. I’m sure that there will be extras around the anniversary this year, but not as many as ten years ago. (Dismayed by the rumours that the next episode will be shown on 11 November, as I will be out of town that day.)

Stephen Moffat’s novelisation, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, actually covers both Night and Day. The second paragraph of the third chapter (numbered Chapter 1) is:

‘He’s here,’ I said, keeping tight rein on the panic levels in my voice. ‘I can hear him, moving about. He’s in Time Vault Zero. The Doctor is in Time Vault Zero.’

The second paragraph of the seventh chapter (numbered Chapter 3) is:

I am writing this account so that perhaps, finally, I can leave it behind.

When it came out in 2018, simultaneously with three other New Who novelisations, I wrote:

Steven Moffat is, oddly enough, the one writer of the four new novelisations who had not previously written a Doctor Who novel. Yep, his previous written Who prose, despite his being the show-runner for the whole of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor eras, and having generated screenplay for more Doctors than any other writer (even if you don’t count the extra five in The Curse of Fatal Death), amounts to only a few short stories, starting with “Continuity Errors” in the 1996 collection Decalog 3: Consequences, and going on to “What I Did In My Christmas Holidays – By Sally Sparrow“, the short story from the 2006 Annual that became the TV episode Blink.

Of course, I really enjoyed the 2013 50th anniversary special, which in retrospect we now see as a last salute to the Tennant era from almost the end of the Smith era. And I am glad to report that this is by far the best of the four new Doctor Who novels published last month. Moffat has veered further from the script than any of the other writers; the chapters are told by alternating narrators, in non-sequential numbers, interspersed with reports from other characters (Chapter Nine, significantly, is missing); the basics of the storyline (starting with the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration, and ending with the Curator) remain the same, but the transmission to the printed page has been done in a very different way. And there are some lovely shout-outs to odd bits of continuity – Peter Cushing’s Doctor is canonicalised; there is a desperate attempt to explain the black and white era. In general, it’s just good fun, and it feels like the process of writing the book was much more enjoyable for the author than was notoriously the case with the original script. If you are a Who fan, you should get it here.

I stand by that. Several more novelisations down the line, Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor remains the best of them – so far.

The 49th and 50th Black Archive monographs on Doctor Who are on The Night of the Doctor, which is James Cooray Smith’s fourth in the series, and Day of the Doctor, by the appropriately named Alasdair Stuart, who I also know as a Hugo finalist and commentator on sf and fandom. To jump to the end, they are both very good and enhanced my appreciation still further for two stories that I already liked a lot.

James Cooray Smith’s monograph on Night is only 73 pages long, but that’s roughly 11 pages per minute of script; compare the volumes on the seven-part stories that are barely a page per minute! There’s a lot to say about these short few scenes, of course, and Smith says most of it.

The first chapter, ‘I’m a Doctor, but probably not the one you were expecting’, reminds us (as if we needed to be reminded) of the excitement around the 50th anniversary and the surprise launch of the mini-episode; and looks at the returns of past Doctors (which turns out to be an even more timely topic in 2023).

The second and longest chapter, ‘What if I get bored? I need a television’, debates whether or not Night counts as TV Doctor Who, looking at other edge cases, of which there are a lot more than you might have thought.

The third chapter, ‘The universe stands on the brink’, looks briefly at the origins of the War Doctor. Its second paragraph is

This assumption, however, fits rather less well with other aspects of ‘The Night of the Doctor’, and the possible discontinuities that result are worth consideration for what they imply about the story and its relationship with The Day of the Doctor, particularly with regards to how much time passes between them. In ‘The Night of the Doctor’, Ohila describes the perilous situation in which the universe finds itself at this point in the Last Great Time War in very stark terms, saying that ‘The war between the Daleks and the Time Lords threatens all reality. You are the only hope left,’ and later insisting that, ‘The universe stands on the brink. Will you let it fall?’

The fourth chapter, ‘What do you need now?’, looks further at the concept of the War Doctor.

The fifth chapter, ‘I don’t suppose there’s any need for a Doctor any more’, looks at the Time War and the character of Cass.

The sixth chapter, ‘Physician, heal thyself’, looks at the last words of various Doctors and at the Doctor as Jesus.

The seventh chapter, ‘Doctor no more’, looks at how the episode fits into the wider Steven Moffat’s wider concept of who and what the Doctor is.

It’s a little cheeky of the publishers to offer this slim volume at the same price as others in the series which are almost three times as long, but the completist will want it, need it and enjoy it anyway. You can get it here.

Alasdair Stuart’s The Day of the Doctor is twice as long. It starts with an introduction, setting out the author’s stall: this is a story involving metafiction and death, and combining Old and New Who. Usually I write my own chapter summaries, but in this case the author has done it for me so I will lazily cut and paste, inserting the chapter titles:

The first chapter [“The Doctor Can See You Now”] looks in more detail at the concept of postmodernism and Who’s own unique flavour of it. Fans of a certain stripe will probably be thinking the word ‘discontinuity’ and they are not wrong.

The second chapter [“The Barn at the End and the Barn at the Start”] talks about the barn, what it represents to the show and also, crucially, the fictional spaces it allows the show to step into. It’s also going to look at the concept of postmodern and metafiction and what that, and 1970s BBC Shakespeare adaptations, have to do with Doctor Who.

The third chapter [“A Man Goes to War”] looks at the War Doctor. He’s arguably the most important incarnation of the Doctor and also one of the least well known. Here we’re also going to explore the idea that each one of these incarnations represents an era of the character.

Just interrupting to say that the second paragraph of the third chapter is:

But before all that, we need to talk about Christopher Eccleston.

Going back to the chapter summaries:

The fourth chapter [“The Man Who Regrets”] turns the attention to the 10th Doctor. Poster boy for the series’ triumphant return! Big-haired righter of wrongs! Lonely god and occasional near mass murderer. He’s also the representation of the show’s past, which is an odd, interesting thing for him to be.

The fifth chapter [“The Man Who Forgets”] focuses on the 11th Doctor and how this is a story which is a prelude to his final bow in The Time of the Doctor (2013) and how it sets up the future of the show. A future which is far more introspective, for both Doctor and Daleks, than it first seems.

The sixth chapter [“Impossibilities, Moments, Revolutionaries and Evolutions”] examines Clara, the Moment, Kate Stewart and Osgood and why the future of the show is carefully, subtly encoded into those four women.

Finally, [in te seventh chapter, “Midlife Crisis of the Daleks”] we take a look at the Daleks and how The Day of the Doctor is a fictional structure through which the past, present and future of both the Doctor and his nemeses are examined and defined.

There’s also an appendix looking at how the 2020 story The Timeless Children affects our understanding of Day of the Doctor now, including also the “Morbius Doctors”.

This is all good, meaty stuff, well worth adding to the thinking fan’s shelves, and you can get it here.

The Underwater Menace, by James Cooray Smith (and Geoffrey Orme, and Nigel Robinson)

Posted on 8 May 2023 by fromtheheartofeurope

When I first listened to the audio of The Underwater Menace in 2007, and watched what was then the only remaining episode, I had fully absorbed the fan consensus that it is terrible, and I wrote:

The Underwater Menace, from Patrick Troughton’s first season in early 1967, is notorious – even the normally upbeat Howe and Walker describe it as “undoubtedly the weakest of the second Doctor’s era, if not of the sixties as a whole”. Fortunately, in a way, only episode three (out of four) survives, and today’s fan can buy the soundtrack with narration by Anneke Wills who played Polly (the story featuring her, Ben and new companion Jamie). This means that we are not subjected to the awful production values and can let our imaginations fill in for the cheap-looking sets. As a sound only production it comes close to succeeding, with the main problems being the baffling ballet of the fish people in episode three (which in fact becomes more rather than less confusing when you actually see it) and the utterly clichéd villain, Professor Zaroff, who actually ends the third episode by declaring that nothing in the world can stop him now. The director, Julia Smith, went on to create EastEnders; this cannot have been a high point of her early career.

It does feature the most extensively featured Irish character in any Doctor Who story [arguably until Thaddea Graham as Bel in 2021], P.G. Stephens’ trapped sailor Sean (who is teamed up with Jacko, a trapped Asian sailor played by Paul Anil). As I have previously noted, there is not a lot of competition. It is not fair to say that he has “the least convincing Irish accent in television history”, as he has a long acting career both in Ireland [dead link] and England (playing mainly Irish parts, including a comedy IRA bomber [another dead link]), but he is certainly as wobbly in his acting as any of the rest of the guest cast, especially in the deeply embarrassing scene where he urges the fish people to revolt.

When I came back to it in 2010 for my Great Rewatch, I was no less forgiving.

Ow. The Underwater Menace is the first really bad story for some time, in fact almost as bad as The Sensorites which is my least favourite story so far. The plot is dreadfully padded – the Tardis crew faffing around getting captured in the first episode, wandering around in caves in the second episode, the hideously embarrassing fish-people dance in the surviving third episode, more cave wanderings in the last episode. The plot is fundamentally stupid, and Joseph Furst intensely annoying as Professor Zaroff. (Likewise Peter Stephens, doing a reprise of Cyril the schoolboy as Lolem the high priest; and the risible parts written for Token Irish Guy and Token Black Guy.)

As minor compensation, it looks decent enough, and the early Dudley Simpson score generally works; and some of the supporting cast are good – Ara (played by 16-year-old Catherine Howe who went on to a successful career in music) is clearly deeply in love with Polly, in the most overt gay crush in Who since Ian and Marco Polo. And Troughton carries it well, conveying at least his own confidence in the story (however feigned that may have been). Episode Three is the thirteenth Second Doctor episode, but the earliest to survive. I can’t help feeling that any one of the previous twelve would have been better.

A year later, of course, the missing second episode was recovered, and I watched it for the first time last month in preparation for this post; and you know what? I have revised my opinion of the story substantially upwards. Perhaps it’s that the second episode generally looks good enough; perhaps it’s that the intervening decade since 2011 has seen Moffat and Chibnall stories which were easily as silly in their premises as The Underwater Menace; perhaps my own tastes have matured enough that I am confident in my own judgement without relying on fan wisdom. The fish people are still a bit strange, but we’ve seen similar in New Who. I think my tolerance for what Doctor Who should be like has been broadened by the last two show-runners. You can judge for yourself by getting the DVD with reconstructions here and the audio only narration by Anneke Wills here.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the novelisation by Nigel Robinson, introducing Dr Zaroff, is:

Lolem stalked angrily up to the figure who had just entered the temple and had evidently given the black uniformed guards their orders. The newcomer was tall and dressed in a high-collared white coat; a short black cloak hung over his shoulders. A shock of prematurely white hair covered his head, and a pencil-thin moustache topped his cruel mouth. The skin of his long aristocratic face was sallow but his large eyes gleamed with an icy-blue brilliance.

When I read it for the first time in 2008, I was also unforgiving:

This is very poor. It’s not quite as bad as Robinson’s novelisation of The Sensorites, and in the earlier chapters I thought it seemed quite promising. But the prose soon descends into his trademark clunkiness, and the story’s most famous line actually manages to come over even worse on the printed page than it does in the original.

Again, I don’t think I was being fair. It’s a perfectly adequate novelisation; a bit of back-story is given to Ara, Sean and Jacko, and even to Zaroff. You can get it here (if you are lucky).

This is the first time in this run of rewatches that I have found myself substantially revising my opinion of a story. Of course, it’s partly that there was a whole new episode here that I had not seen before. I was therefore in an open frame of mind when I started on James Cooray Smith’s Black Archive monograph; he had already done yeoman’s work on The Massacre and The Ultimate Foe, so my expectations were high.

And I was not disappointed. This is a more personal account than some of the Black Archives have been, as Cooray Smith was actually present at the BFI event in 2011 when, without any prior warning, the missing episode was shown to a crowd who had mainly come to the event for other reasons. Several of the Black Archives have made the point that our reception of past Doctor Who episodes is often dynamic rather than static; this is a very good case in point.

The first chapter, “Prehistoric monsters” looks at the reception of The Underwater Menace before 2011, pointing out that it was one of the most obscure of Old Who stories.

It neither introduces or writes out any memorable characters, nor features any popular monsters or villains. There are no references to it in subsequent television Doctor Who. It is one of a vanishingly small number of 20th-century Doctor Who stories to have no substantial sequel or prequel in any medium. With very few photographs taken during production, there was little visual material for use in the various glossy Doctor Who history books produced in the 1980s, whose printing of often striking colour photographs from black-and-white serials did much to shape fandom’s perceptions of the series’ earliest years.

The second chapter, “Hope it’s the Daleks”, describes the event on 11 December 2011 when Mark Gatiss presented both the third episode of Galaxy 4 and the second episode of The Underwater Menace. I remember this vividly too, though I was not there; the news hit Twitter as I was dining in a bistro near the main station in Luxembourg, on my way to a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, possibly the first time I learned something important from Twitter as a news source. Cooray Smith also points out that the episode’s subsequent DVD release was a bit underwhelming.

The third chapter, “Please let it be… 1966”, briskly recounts the fraught writing and production of the story. Its second paragraph is:

The Tenth Planet (1966) had been rewritten as a swansong for William Hartnell’s Doctor and then its third episode had been hurriedly redrafted¹ when Hartnell became unavailable. The Power of the Daleks required the temporary return of former Story Editor Dennis Spooner to the role (in addition to work performed by Davis in that capacity and rewrites by credited writer David Whitaker). The Highlanders (1966-67), made before The Underwater Menace but commissioned and initially intended to be made after it, was written by Davis after the contracted writer, BBC executive Elwyn Jones, failed to deliver any material at all, and was scripted with such urgency that all the necessary paperwork surrounding Davis’ commission was delayed until after most of the story had been made.
¹ The original version, the Doctor playing a larger role in events, is retained in Gerry Davis’s novelisation.

The fourth chapter, “What have I come upon?”, looks in depth at Episode 2 and how watching it changes one’s perceptions of the story as a whole, exactly the experience I had had myself a few days before reading the chapter.

What the recovery of episode 2 has gifted us, however, in addition to a whole extra episode of 20th-century Doctor Who to enjoy, is a tremendous real-time demonstration of how any even only partially missing Doctor Who serial cannot ever really be understood as a piece of television, no matter how much secondary and supplementary material exists.

One utterly glorious bit of trivia. For many years, the only surviving segments of Episode 2 were those that had been cut from it by Australian censors for being too scary. The recovered copy of the episode turned out to have been the very one from which the Australian censors had cut the scenes, so they were reinserted into the master copy, half a century later on a different continent.

The fifth chapter, “Science is in opposition to ancient temple ritual”, looks at the tension between science and religion in the story, in the course of which the Doctor allies himself with the High Priest against Professor Zaroff, not the usual way around for these situations in Doctor Who.

The sixth chapter, “Nothing in the world can stop me now!”, offers a redemptive reading of the character of Professor Zaroff. Again, now that we have episode 2 as well, I can see that Joseph Furst’s performance, and the character as written, are much less over the top than fan lore would have had you believe.

The seventh chapter, “I should like a hat like that!”, looks at the question of the Second Doctor’s tall hat, which is seen for the last time in The Underwater Menace. Cooray Smith reckons that it was badly damaged in the filming of the previous story, The Highlanders, and thus quietly abandoned.

The eighth chapter, “Look at him! He’s not normal, is he?”, makes a good case that Troughton’s performance as the Doctor only really settles down after The Underwater Menace.

The ninth chapter, “A New Atlantis”, looks at the very little that is known of the writer, Geoffrey Orme, and examines the socialist elements of the plot – notably the strike of the Fish People as one of the few cases of industrial action in Doctor Who, and speculates that their infamous dance is rooted in the work of Ernst and Lotte Berk, with whom Orme had professional connections. I was convinced.

An appendix, “Vital secret will die with me! Dr. W”, looks in amusing and extensive detail at the question of whether the name of the lead character of the show is “Doctor Who” or not.

A second and final appendix reviews the production schedule of the story, whose studio sessions were recorded only a week before they were broadcast.

It’s all very satisfactory, and after a run of Black Archives which I was less happy with, this is reassuringly back to the usual excellent form.

Having said that, there is one very annoying production glitch. As has sometimes been the case before, it involves the footnotes; in this case, most of them are duplicated. It rather breaks up the reading experience.

Other than that, I really recommend this – after you have seen the recovered second episode. You can get it here.

The Ultimate Foe, by James Cooray Smith (and Robert Holmes, Eric Saward and Pip and Jane Baker)

Posted on 15 April 2022 by fromtheheartofeurope

The fourteenth in the Black Archive sequence of analyses of Doctor Who, this takes the sensitive topic of the two-part story that ended Colin Baker’s time as the Sixth Doctor – billed on TV at the time as “Trial of a Time Lord” episodes 13 and 14, but generally known now as The Ultimate Foe. When I first watched it in 2006, I was not forgiving.

Sadly, there is nothing to be said in favour of the last segment of the Trial of a Time Lord, two episodes credited to three writers [Robert Holmes for the first – though it turns out that Eric Saward, then the script editor, rewrote a large chunk of it – and Pip and Jane Baker for the second], a botched farrago of half-baked Time Lord lore, where we find out that the Valeyard is a projection of the Doctor’s future self, and he and the Master take it in turns to do the evil cackle. The Time Lords have forgotten who the Master is, despite what happened in The Deadly Assassin and their summoning of his aid in The Five Doctors. The means available to the Master and the Valeyard are conveniently immense and yet just not quite immense enough to destroy the Doctor. I am even a bit dubious about Peri’s survival, which rather critically undermines the drama of her death (and the chemistry between her and King Yrcanos was as absent as that between Leela and Andred – at least Susan, Vicki and Jo got decent parting romances.) It’s a shame that after delivering so many classics Robert Holmes’ final contribution is such a dud, and the Sixth Doctor, having won his trial, then gets regenerated anyway. The miracle is that the show was allowed another three years after this awful closure to an over-ambitious season.

Rewatching it in 2011, I had not mellowed:

And then The Ultimate Foe is a poor farewell to a misused Doctor. There is little good to be said of it – Eric Saward’s original script for the second episode makes more sense than Pip and Jane Baker’s version as broadcast, but that is not saying much. The Valeyard’s role does become clear, and actually interesting, but the back-story of Time Lord politics simply becomes confusing and the means and motivation of the Master, crucial to what passes for a plot, are even less comprehensible than usual. (And we have the cop-out of Peri’s faked death, which kills the drama of the only interesting development of the entire season.)

Rewatching it again, I felt exactly the same. The first episode is not bad, but it is let down by the second episode. As my brother put it, “this story is not just boring and not just stupid: it is boring AND stupid.”

There are of course good reasons why the whole thing ended up in such a mess, and James Cooray Smith takes us through them; but before we get there, let’s briefly look at the novelisation by Pip and Jane Baker. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

His [the Master’s] brooding eyes surveyed the scene below him. ‘By me, Madam,’ he repeated, enjoying the consternation his intrusion had caused.

When I read it in 2008, I wrote:

Alas, it doesn’t matter how many exclamation marks you add, this remains an incoherent story; and while the Bakers valiantly attempt to fill it out with extra detail, it is basically beyond salvation from the start.

What I did not know was that the “extra detail” was all in the original script that the Bakers had submitted to the BBC, and excised because at 38 minutes it was far too long for a 25-minute slot.

Rereading, I actually felt that the writing was OK at first, but by the end I still got annoyed by the incoherent plot. Completists will want it anyway, and you can get it here.

From this pig’s ear of source material, James Cooray Smith has produced a surprisingly silky purse. The history of how the TV story was made (or not made) is much more interesting than the TV story itself, and that is what Cooray Smith has chosen to tell.

The account begins with the early 1986 attempt by Michael Grade to cancel Old Who (for which he has been called to account on the floor of the House of Lords) and the consequent disruption to production schedules and procedures. Cooray Smith is not charitable to either Grade or his Director of Programmes, Jonathan Powell.
He then looks at the writing of the original Robert Holmes script of the first episode, about half of which ended up on screen. The half that did not survive is very dark indeed. The fact is that Holmes was dying at the time, and indeed died before starting on the second episode, and Cooray Smith convincingly argues that this is subconsciously present in the script.
The third chapter looks at the uncredited revisions to Robert Holmes’ script carried out by Eric Saward, again including about half of what appeared on screen. Per my usual procedure, here is the second paragraph of the third chapter, along with the quote which it introduces:

Saward revised Part 13 in his capacity as Doctor Who’s Script Editor, and therefore there are no records of exactly when he began or completed his work on it, or when he moved onto writing his version of Part 14. His work on Part 13, though, must have been completed before he resigned from the BBC on 13 April 1986. Saward had been under pressure for at least a year, the production team had literally written off as many scripts as they’d accepted for the 1986 series of Doctor Who, and Holmes’ illness had taken a huge emotional toll on the younger writer:
‘I said ultimately to John [Nathan-Turner]… “I feel I can’t serve this any more, I’ve given so much to it already.” John was sort of understanding, I think he was also terrified that he might be left to finish the series on his own, which he ultimately was.”

A brief “intermission” asks who the Valeyard actually is.
The fourth full chapter looks at the unproduced script for the second episode by Eric Saward, whose rejection by John Nathan-Turner provoked his resignation from the show, taking the script with him. The killer point of dispute with Nathan-Turner was the question of how it should end. Saward insisted on a literal cliff-hanger; Nathan-Turner vetoed the idea; Saward could not take any more, and left. (This was only a few days after Holmes’ death, which had deeply upset both of them.)
The fifth and last full chapter tells the story of how Pip and Jane Baker were commissioned to write the new second episode with a three-day deadline, forbidden to use any of the ideas from Saward’s script which he had taken with him.
The sixth and last chapter pulls all the threads together and finds some degree of sympathy for all involved (except Grade and Powell). Certainly I have to admit that I still don’t like what Pip and Jane Baker wrote, but I am much more sympathetic to their travails now that I have read about them in detail.
A really intriguing footnote here tells a story that I did not know. Michael Grade asked Sydney Newman, the original creator of Doctor Who, what he would do with the show; and Newman responded that he would bring back Patrick Troughton for two years, and then regenerate the Doctor into a woman. He also had some rather odd thoughts about child companions, and wanted his own name in the credits as creator of the series. Troughton of course died only a few months later; but it’s fascinating to think what might have been. The source given is Newman’s 2017 memoirs, though I find it in the Daily Telegraph in 2010 and have been told that it was first published in 1996.
An appendix looks briefly at the question of what the title of the story actually is. Cooray Smith hints that he would actually have preferred to call the book “Trial of a Time Lord, episodes 13 and 14” but that he “bows to convention” “in deference to [the] DVD release”.
A second appendix asks how you can resolve the question of Melanie Bush’s first meeting with the Doctor. Cooray Smith doesn’t seem to be aware of the 2013 Big Finish play The Wrong Doctors, which addresses this issue rather amusingly.
A third and final appendix gives the scene breakdowns for the Holmes and Saward scripts of the first episode.

Cooray Smith’s previous Black Archive contribution was on the lost First Doctor story The Massacre, where he similarly converted a complex production history into a compelling narrative. But this is really superb, and it’s the first Black Archive volume that I have liked much more than the story it is covering. You can get it here.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

Tag Archives: writer: james cooray smith

Flux, ed. Paul Driscoll

The Night of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor, by James Cooray Smith, Alasdair Stuart and Steven Moffat

The Underwater Menace, by James Cooray Smith (and Geoffrey Orme, and Nigel Robinson)

The Ultimate Foe, by James Cooray Smith (and Robert Holmes, Eric Saward and Pip and Jane Baker)