Eruditorum Press

You have always been one of us

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

I Was Beginning To Fear You Had Lost Yourself (The Mysterious Planet)

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Voted “Doctor Who screenshot most likely to become an
image macro.”

Part 1: How To Write Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant

It’s September 6th, 1986. Boris Gardiner is at number one with “I Want to Wake Up With You.” A week later, The Communards replace them with “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” and stay there for the remaining three weeks of this story.  Janet Jackson, The Human League, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Run DMC/Aerosmyth, the Eurythmics, and Cutting Crew also chart, while on the album charts its the True Blue period for Madonna and the release of Paul Simon’s Graceland.

In real news, and moving very quickly through the eighteen month gap (which was really only seventeen months), the New Coke debacle happens and the ozone hole is discovered. The Heysel Disaster takes place, leading to a five year ban from European competition for English clubs. A year later is the Hand of God goal, so really, almost as crappy a time to be an English football fan as it was to be a Doctor Who fan. The Nintendo Entertainment System and Calvin and Hobbes both debut. And finally, the Challenger disaster happens, as does Chernobyl.

Whereas during this story, Desmond Tutu becomes a bishop and the Oprah Winfrey show debuts. Casualty debuts on television. Ann the Colwich rail crash happens, killing two and injuring a hundred more.

While on television we begin Trial of a Time Lord with the segment of the story commonly referred to as The Mysterious Planet. But already we’re in choppy waters as we hit the “how many stories does Trial of a Time Lord count as?” Given that I’ve already argued that An Unearthly Child and 100,000 BC should be thought of as two stories and that The Daleks’ Masterplan should be thought of as at least three, I’m obviously unlikely to suggest that a run of episodes with four writers and three production codes should be treated as one story just because of the part numbering. And while there’s a unity to the season that was missing from the previous season-long arc, as mentioned last time there’s also a massive disunity to this season. So let’s say not only four stories, but four very confused stories.

Within this mess there’s a lot to talk about. But the trial-specific material will mostly benefit from being taken in the context of the end, so we’ll save the bulk of it for the Ultimate Foe entry. Instead I want to start with the most visibly rebooted aspect of the series, namely the relationship between Baker’s Doctor and Peri.

The intended structure of Trial of a Time Lord was based on A Christmas Carol, with the three stories shown as evidence representing the past, present, and future. And so The Mysterious Planet is intended to represent the past. Off the bat this is a little strange – it is, after all, an adventure with the then-current TARDIS crew seemingly set after the most recent televised adventure. The distinction between it and the succeeding story in terms of time is almost completely arbitrary.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten(…ish) 24

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…ish is one of those pieces that is desperate for you to recognize how clever it is, which would be irritating if it weren’t so damned clever. Indeed, it’s sufficiently clever that an irritating number of reviewers seem to think that this is a lot of clever presentation wrapped around an overly simple story. This, however, involves an unfortunate confusion of plot with story. The plot is standard Doctor Who fare – an expedition to an alien planet inadvertently collects something… evil. It escapes back among the humans and threatens to cause untold devastation. After uncovering malfeasance among the people who went on the expedition the Doctor stops the evil thing and saves the day. As basic as they come, really.

The only tricky bit, really, is that the “something evil” is, in fact, a word and that the nature of the threat is the complete collapse of all language and meaning. The word – referred to as the “ish” – destroys meaning itself – as, of course, does the suffix itself. The threat is that the ish will be unleashed into the Omniverbum, which is essentially the Word of “in the beginning was the” fame.

It’s just that this tricky bit causes the story to extend considerably beyond the straightforward plot. It also, however, enables a mass of cleverness, some of which is oft-noted and some of which is less so. The most obvious thing to observe is that this is a story that required Baker’s Doctor. One of the key characteristics of Baker’s Doctor is a degree of pomposity. Unfortunately, as Tat Wood rather cuttingly observed in About Time, this tends to manifest such that Baker comes off as a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person is like. Which is to say that the writers had an irritating tendency to write with the thesaurus open such that Baker’s Doctor displays a certain… ludicrous logorrhea, if you will. (The trait is, of course, compounded when Pip and Jane Baker are writing for him, since their tendency is to write everybody verbosely to begin with.)

So for a story that is about words and language there was really only one Doctor to choose. And the story is littered with bits of wordplay and what is less continuity porn than continuity erotica – a bevy of jokes that are both terribly obscure and utterly artful. (An impossibly large encyclopedia volume beginning with DAL, for instance. Or a Delphon joke.) There’s also a rampant set of jokes referencing post-structuralist literary theory – several bits of dialogue are straight lifts from major postmodernist thinkers. (I caught at the very least a Lacan and a Deleuze reference) This is also a compelling bit of timing. The era this story is set during was the real breakout of postmodernism, both in popular culture and in academia, and a story that is about postmodern literary theory is a natural fit – a story that on the one hand would never have been made in the era itself, but on the other still speaks to the cultural concerns of the era.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 12 (Steve Parkhouse)

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So, I’ll admit, part of why I’ve been dragging my feet on ever doing a comics entry post-Tom Baker is that I knew that I was going to get pilloried in a way I haven’t been pilloried since pointing out that Inferno’s pacing is a complete shambles. Because everybody points to the Sixth Doctor comics, and particularly the Steve Parkhouse-penned/John Ridgway-drawn ones that are the ones I’m really focusing on this entry (The Grant Morrison ones will get a look when we cover The Invisibles, which will be next year), are apparently widely praised as the best Sixth Doctor stories in existence and as highlights and classics.

And, I mean, they’re good, but… they have real and massive problems of their own. Or, actually, not of their own. For the most part their problems go hand in glove with the problems we noted last time in the series in general. What is good about them is largely (though not exclusively) that they are ambitious and epic in a way that the television series was not in the mid-1980s, and that they have a level of consistent aesthetic and atmosphere that the series lacked.

The thing is, both of those are in many ways functions of the medium. One of the advantages that comics have over other visual media is that the budget and what is depicted are utterly unrelated. Whereas if Steve Parkhouse were to try to write “Voyager” (his most acclaimed story) for television, well, one doesn’t imagine he’d have gotten much further than “EXT. VAST FROZEN WASTELAND – NIGHT,” and if he somehow had, “an ice covered tall ship rests among the frozen peaks” would have been the end. Similarly, when you’re only dealing with a writer and an artist as creative personnel it’s not exactly the same challenge to get them all on the same creative page as it is to get a bunch of designers, musicians, costumers and actors on the same page as the writer, script editor, and producer.

So yes, both of these things are accomplished by the Parkhouse comics quite well, but to use them as the basis for a comparison with the television series is a bit pointless. It’s one of the basic differences between the media. The real question is whether these are good comics.

Certainly it’s easy to see the appeal. “”Voyager”” rightly gets the bulk of the credit – it’s an absolutely gorgeous and lush story full of creepy and haunting images. (I’m usually skeptical of colorization of black and white comics, but IDW’s color version of “Voyager” is absolutely gorgeous) There’s a long-standing train of thought within Doctor Who in which the Doctor is cast into hallucinatory or surreal realms, dating back at the very least to The Celestial Toymaker and, I would argue, all the way back to The Edge of Destruction. But there can be no doubt that “Voyager” is one of the most successful applications of this.

Much of its success comes from excellent taste in what images to use.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 31 (The Singing Detective, Edge of Darkness)

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The weakness of Doctor Who in 1985-86 would be one thing if it were a weak period for British television in general. Instead, however, two of the most acclaimed British television productions of all time aired during the Colin Baker era. The first, at the end of 1985, was Edge of Darkness. The second, airing at the tail end of Trial of a Time Lord, about 26 hours after each of the last four episodes and then for another two weeks after, was The Singing Detective.

For those not reflexively versed in the nuances of British television, Edge of Darkness is a conspiracy thriller written by the creator of Z-Cars and directed by Martin Campbell, who went on to be a serious director who did such high profile work as the Daniel Craig Casino Royale and, less satisfyingly, the recent Green Lantern film. If the name sounds vaguely familiar as a Mel Gibson film, I’m very sorry for you, as that’s Martin Campbell remaking the series as a film a few years back and very much not good. The plot concerns a police detective whose daughter is gunned down in front of him and the nuclear conspiracy that unfolds as he investigates her death and discovers that she, not he, was the target.

The Singing Detective, on the other hand, is one of the two things that people point towards when picking the masterpiece of Dennis Potter, himself the consensus best writer in British television history. It stars Michael Gambon as a writer with a debilitating skin condition (one that Potter himself also suffered from) who drifts among his stay in the hospital, the detective novel he’s writing in his head (in which Gambon also plays the  lead, the eponymous singing detective), and memories from his childhood.

It goes without saying that both are very, very good. Less clear is whether they’re meaningfully comparable with Doctor Who. Certainly both have wildly higher production standards. Indeed, in the case of The Singing Detective the production standards were actually too high – Dennis Potter had wanted the hospital scenes shot on video to look like a sitcom, but he was overruled and the whole thing was done on film. As a result, both are much better looking than Doctor Who.

And this is not, to be clear, just a special effects thing. Television is a visual medium. We Doctor Who fans are used to overlooking bad effects, but in doing so we can be prone to blinding ourselves to just how much good directing can matter. (Consider the degree to which Revelation of the Daleks was salvaged by Graeme Harper. Even in the new series directors matter to a great extent – consider how much The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex were elevated by Nick Hurran’s revelatory direction.) It’s not just that Edge of Darkness and The Singing Detective look ritzier, they’re fundamentally better and more complexly shot pieces of television. Doctor Who didn’t have the money to let directors cut loose the way they can in these shows, and as a result struggled to get directors as good as these – one of the few claims in the infamous Eric Saward Starburst interview I have no trouble believing.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 11 (Slipback)

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With Doctor Who off the air for eighteen months everyone involved was, for obvious reasons, interested in finding some way to get some new Doctor Who out. And so they ended up doing a radio series of six ten minute episodes written by Eric Saward. The end home of this series was part of a BBC Radio 4 children’s magazine show entitled Pirate Radio 4. Since he was writing for an overtly children’s audience Saward, to his credit, recognized that his usual space marine action approach was a no go. Accordingly, he channelled Douglas Adams.

Wait, what?

Let’s not forget that one of the foundational myths of the Nathan-Turner era is that the show was irrevocably broken by the Graham Williams era and that it was “silly.” Eric Saward was among the pilers-on, accusing the Williams era of insulting the audience. Now, suddenly, he’s trying to mimic the approach of Williams’s script editor?

The problem is that between the time when that myth was laid down – 1980 or so – and 1985 – there’d been a necessary reevaluation of things. In 1980 Douglas Adams was a comedy writer who’d had a decent success with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with the novel coming out towards the end of his time on the show. Accordingly, he could be dismissed as having made the show silly. But 1985 he’d gotten to book four of the trilogy and was a reliably best-selling author. And suddenly he was a major point of legitimacy for Doctor Who – someone the program wanted to boast about its association with instead of boasting about moving past.

But more than that, there is something odd about the spectacle of Eric Saward writing light comedy. I mean, he attempted dark comedy on a regular basis – there’s a great moment in the infamous Starburst interview when, pressed on the idea that Doctor Who isn’t funny anymore, he pointed out that Vengeance on Varos, The Two Doctors, and Revelation of the Daleks are all comedies. Which, I mean, they technically are, but… this is clearly not what those critics meant. This, though, is the only real instance of him doing an extended piece of straightforward comedy in Doctor Who on his own initiative (as opposed to in the course of a salvage job).

It’s not very good, but it’s not very good in the same ways that The Visitation is not very good – a case of the whole being markedly less than the sum of its recycled parts. Many, if not most, of the ideas are genuinely funny, but the story is in many ways wholly encapsulated by the drunk ditz computer, a funny idea that overstays its welcome by a considerable margin. Still, it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Doctor Who has always faltered when people attempt explicitly “for children” versions of it. This is no worse than The Pescatons before it or The Infinite Quest after it, if we’re being honest. Indeed, it’s probably better than either.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 23 (The Nightmare Fair)

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Right. So, a little over a year ago I had a blog that was just starting to get some attention. And I came upon a story that, well, kinda sucked. And the thing is, it was a story that had a surprisingly good reputation, but the story itself was really, really rubbish. Plus there were some really uncomfortable racial elements to it, and it was the second story in a row to have those, and I wrote an entry that tore the story to shreds. And writing it, I was getting a nice build-up going, so I went for broke in the conclusion and suggested that the story should be exiled from the canon on the grounds that it’s racist and terrible.

So, funny thing, it turns out that if, right when people are just starting to take notice of your blog, you viciously slaughter a mildly sacred cow this rapidly becomes one of the things you’re best known or. It’s not actually one of my most read posts, which I’m fine with, but to this day if I see a link in my referral logs from something I haven’t heard about before and I click through, over half the time it’s someone citing my blog to say that the story is a bit racist. It is unmistakably the case that The Celestial Toymaker (or, really, the combination of that and The Daleks’ Masterplan three entries earlier) is where my blog made itself. Because apparently nobody had really made the observation that The Celestial Toymaker was a piece of racist crap. (And it was. And it’s deliberate. I didn’t quote the novelization in the entry, but I’d like to point out the quote I’ve been pointing to since writing the entry: “The Toymaker was lounging in a black Chinese chair behind a laquered Chinese desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl and scenes of chinese life,” and, its counterpart a few sentences later, “The Toymaker stood up, a tall imposing figure, dressed as a Chinese mandarin with a circular black hat embossed with a heavy gold thread, a large silver red and blue collar and a heavy, stiffly embroidered black robe encrusted with rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls set against a background of coiled Chinese dragons.” Also, the Toymaker is Chinese.)

So you can imagine that it was somewhat comforting to open up Graham Williams’s The Nightmare Fair and discover that someone actually had noticed this problem before me. After a bunch of referring to the Toymaker as a Mandarin, Williams, at about the halfway point of the book, drops all pretense and just becomes a wonderfully snarky jerk about the fact that watching Michael Gough pretend to be Asian is kind of horrifying. My favorite bit, for what it’s worth, is “Stefan carefully tore off the printed sheet and made his way towards the Mandarin, who was standing, listening attentively to a technician in a white coat who looked distinctly as though he had the better right to the eastern style wardrobe the Mandarin favoured.”…

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New Adventures: Draft List For Discussion

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The big document in which I keep the schedule for upcoming stretches of the blog is rapidly getting short (by which I really just mean that it only goes out to the end of July, but by the standards of the document that is, in fact, short). And since we’re in the midst of a big section of not-television anyway, it seemed like a good time to have the talk about what novels I cover in the Virgin era. I’ve got a draft list below. But I want to get input from the rather delightful community that’s sprung up on this blog as well.

The list is already a bit larger than I’m happy about, so while suggestions for what to add are more than welcome please note that some argument as to why I should add it and, better yet, an argument for something I should cut will help the case tremendously. (Of course, so will raw populist appeal – if I get a wave of comments demanding I cover Shadowmind then I will. Weeping.)
I also want to be clear – this is not a list of the best NAs or of the most important ones. They’re the ones I think I can get the most interesting and thorough coverage of the Virgin era through. So there are choices that are there because I think I’m likely to have a fair bit to say about them, and important books like Death and Diplomacy that are left out because I think I’ll struggle to get to 2000 words. 
That said, here’s the tentative list:
Timewyrm: Genesis/Exodus (as one entry)
Timewyrm: Apocalypse/Revelation (ditto)
Cat’s Cradle: Time’s Crucible
Cat’s Cradle: Warhead
Love and War
Transit
The Highest Science
Deceit
Lucifer Rising
White Darkness
Birthright
Blood Heat
The Left-Handed Hummingbird
Conundrum
No Future
All-Consuming Fire
Blood Harvest
First Frontier
Warlock
Set Piece
Sanctuary
Human Nature
Original Sin
Head Games
The Also People
Warchild
SLEEPY
Happy Endings
Christmas on a Rational Planet
Return of the Living Dad
Damaged Goods
So Vile a Sin
The Room With No Doors
Lungbarrow
The Dying Days
I want to also nod at some of what I’m imagining will be the obvious comments and questions. To wit:
Nightshade: Yes, it’s Gatiss’s first published piece of Doctor Who and the first NA to be written by someone who went on to write for the series. Honestly, though, I just don’t like Gatiss enough to want to cover another book of his. I fear running out of things to say about Gatiss on the basis of his four episodes. Adding a book doesn’t thrill me. That said, I remember very little about the book – is it interesting on merits beyond being by Gatiss?
The Pit: I know William Blake is in it. All I would have to say is that this is a terrible portrayal of William Blake that completely misses everything about why a Blakean Doctor Who is interesting. Having already written infamously on why a Blakean Doctor Who is interesting, I don’t see 2000 words here.
…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 22 (The Song of Megaptera)

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Among the many services Big Finish provides for Doctor Who at large is a helpful testing of various pieces of fanlore regarding unmade stories. There are, for instance, people who wonder whether Prison in Space would really have been as unbearably terrible as it sounds. And as it happens (and we’ll cover this in the Troughton book this fall), yes, yes it would have been. But there is perhaps nowhere this service is more valuable than in the Saward era. One of the less resolvable debates surrounding the Saward era, and one that will play into the next two entries heavily as well, is the nature of the writers. Simply put, there’s some solid evidence of some very good writers having scripts rejected during this period while people like Glen McCoy and Anthony Steven had scripts made. It’s one thing when Pip and Jane Baker, two writers who are at least fast and reliable, get repeated commissions. It’s quite another when they’re actively commissioned over Christopher Bidmead and PJ Hammond, as, in Season 23, they were.

Of what I’d consider the big three of baffling rejections – the twin rejection of Christopher Priest’s Sealed Orders and The Enemy Within, PJ Hammond’s Paradise Five, and Pat Mills’s Song of the Space Whale, two – Hammond’s and Mills’s – have subsequently been recorded by Big Finish. Since the fan lore has Hammond’s rejection being down to Nathan-Turner and not Saward, whose influence I am more interested in tracking at the moment, let’s opt for Mills’s script, now renamed Song of Megaptera.

For those who don’t obsessively memorize every detail I cover on this blog, Mills, along with John Wagner (who was a co-author on earlier drafts of this script) co-created Judge Dredd with artist Carlos Ezquerra, and co-wrote the earliest Doctor Who Weekly comic strips. Song of Megaptera was, originally, a story for a Tom Baker comic strip, but Mills was persuaded that it was too good for that and instead sent it to the production office where it was, at various times, considered for Tom Baker, Peter Davison, and, finally, Colin Baker before finally being abandoned. In discussing its scrapping Pat Mills has stated that one of the reasons Saward gave for objecting to it was that Saward didn’t like Mills’s decision to portray the ship’s captain as working class, preferring the idea of a classless future.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first – in a litany of poor creative decisions that can be laid directly at Eric Saward’s feet, making Timelash over this is one of the most inexcusable. It is flat-out inconceivable how any remotely sane or reasonable script editor could look at Timelash next to this script and conclude that Timelash was going to work better. The Twin Dilemma was an aggregate of brain-searingly bad decisions, but I’m not convinced that any given decision, and particularly any given one of Saward’s decisions about The Twin Dilemma was prima facie worse than this.

It is not that Song of Megaptera is a flawless story.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 30 (Doctor In Distress)

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I have for the most part avoided significant discussion of Ian Levine, typically gesturing to the fact that eventually I’d do this post. So let’s take the bull by the horns here and lay this question out in its most damningly blunt form: can Ian Levine be blamed for Doctor Who’s cancellation?

This is, of course, terribly unfair. Although no Gareth Jenkins, there’s something that leaves a bad taste in my mouth about a sustained attack on Ian Levine’s role in the series’ history. At the end of the day, Levine in 1985 was a 30-year-old geek and acted the part. He was a poor spokesman for Doctor Who in the public eye, yes. But more than anything one feels bad for him for being put there in the first place. His biggest problem, in many ways, was that he played the role that the cancellation crisis cast him in – slightly maladapted uberfan – too well.

I’d also be lying if I said that, as a 29-year-old socially maladapted Doctor Who fan, I didn’t have at least some visceral understanding of where Levine was coming from. Being an angry geek in 2012 is easy. There’s a whole Internet for hard-headedly arguing on. And adamant as I am that one argues on the Internet for the entertainment of the lurkers, I’m not nearly daft enough to pretend that I don’t like getting to vent obsessively on forums. Where do you think I learned to write 2000 words a day? I’ve been drawn inexorably into being a hard-nosed tit in Internet arguments too many times not to understand Levine. Time warp me into 1985 with no Internet to argue on and give me an in with the production office of Doctor Who and I’d probably smash a television as a publicity stunt too. At least Levine holds down steady employment, which is, let’s face it, more than we can say for my overeducated ass.

And so to some extent one is left wanting to let sleeping dogs lie. 1985 was a long time ago. Ian Levine is nearly 60 now. At some point one has to stop blaming someone for dumb shit they did in their early 30s. And if nothing else, the 1985 crisis is a footnote in the history of a wildly successful show. Perhaps lingering axes to grind exist among those who were making the show – or at least those who are still with us – but it’s tough to say that we the chattering public still have anything at stake in this fight. We’re not so much beating a dead horse as beating the empty space where once a horse carcass lay. These days Levine is mostly just another bloke with a Twitter who says stupid things about Doctor Who or DC Comics occasionally. So really, I’m one to talk.

And so I’ve avoided going too far into Ian Levine. But he can’t be avoided entirely. For one thing, he presents himself as a central player in this time period to this day.…

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Outside the Government 3 (A Fix With Sontarans)

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All right chums, time’s up. Let’s do this.

This was written both before the Jimmy Saville scandal broke and before anything from Richard Marson’s book about John Nathan-Turner leaked. The former alone would have required a complete rewrite of the post. The latter would have required some discussion somewhere in the blog. In tandem, they render this post almost completely beside the point, and it will receive a full rewrite in the book version eventually. Until then, enjoy the most obsolete post on the blog.

Doctor Who fandom is spectacularly bitchy. Sometimes – even often – this is a virtue. Mind  you, it’s an often misunderstood virtue. For one thing, the bitchiness is often mistaken as actual dislike, sometimes to puzzling effect. (The most obvious example here is people who take Moffat’s somewhat infamous interview comments about the classic series as actual dislike for the classic series) It’s not, and the central joke of almost all of fandom’s bitchy, snarky comments about bits of Doctor Who is that despite the obvious faults of the series we love it to pieces. Even with the really terrible episodes that we claim to actively hate there’s the underlying joke that we’ve watched them a dozen times and have a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of how crap they are. The fact that this involves being vicious to Doctor Who is almost incidental – after all, for most of the active history of fandom everybody thought Doctor Who was kind of crap. Doctor Who fandom, unusually for a fandom, has tended to favor ostentatiously loving the show in spite of it being crap over trying to defend Timelash, and really, who’s going to fault them for it.

But, and it’s a big but, there are times when the bitchiness of fandom tips into a bit of a dark side. And to be frank, this is one of them. A Fix With Sontarans is widely mocked and hated. And this is, if not inaccurate, more than a little unfair. Let’s start with the context. A Fix With Sontarans is a mini-episode shot for the show Jim’ll Fix It, in which the late Jimmy Saville extravagantly grants the wishes of people who write in. And in the case of A Fix With Sontarans, a kid named Gareth Jenkins wanted to be on Doctor Who, so Eric Saward lashed together a little TARDIS-set mini episode featuring the Sontarans, which they had around at the time for The Two Doctors. Nicola Bryant wasn’t available for filming it, so they roped in Janet Fielding. The plot is exactly the sort of thing that people do for something like this – the Sontarans and Gareth both get teleported onto the TARDIS, Gareth helps save the day, there’s a cute bit about how he’ll apparently someday be a great military leader against the Sontarans.

It’s crap, of course, but it’s crap in the exact ways you’d expect it to be. Gareth Jenkins can’t act at all and is utterly timid. Colin Baker got the script late enough that he was forced to scribble lines on the console.…

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