Elizabeth Sandifer

See, Peri? Kamelion, lying there in the sun. He can change shapes, you know, and be all things and everyone. Now run, Peri. Run, run away.

It’s February 23rd, 1984. Frankie Goes to Hollywood is still at number one, but they’re finally unseated by Nena’s “99 Red Balloons.” Lower in the charts is equally satisfying – Rockwell’s beautiful bit of paranoia “Somebody’s Watching Me” and Slade’s “Run Runaway” chart, though to be fair, the latter is far better when Great Big Sea does it as an overly fast paced fiddle orgy. Also, The Smiths have their first full-length album out, and it debuts at #2. In real news, the US pulls out of Beirut, Pierre Trudeau retires as Prime Minister of Canada, and, four days after this story wraps, the miner’s strike to end all miner’s strikes begins.

While on television, Planet of Fire. Peter Grimwade is nobody’s favorite writer of the Davison era, and Planet of Fire is nobody’s favorite story of the era. Neither of these judgments is necessarily unfair – I think you’d have a hard time arguing Grimwade as superior to any of Holmes, Bidmead,  or Bailey, and arguing Planet of Fire as a classic of the era crosses the line from redemptive readings to outright psychosis. But in an era with Eric Saward, Terrence Dudley, and Johnny Byrne submitting multiple scripts treating Grimwade as one of the era’s lowlights seems equally strained.

But there’s always a complexity to flying in the face of critical consensus. This gets at one of the fundamental tricky bits of understanding audience responses, which is that audiences are very good at identifying whether they like or dislike something, and very bad at explaining why. When it comes to making art, giving people what they say they want is almost always a disaster, particularly when those people are a self-selecting group of hardcore fans who are volunteering their opinions. (This is not to say that populism is a bad thing, but there’s a difference between giving people what they like and giving them what they say they want. In one you attempt to reproduce what has been successful. In another you base your aesthetic and goals off of what people say they like. The issue is letting the audience’s self-description and interpretations play in as opposed to using data like what they actually do.) For example, I would argue fairly readily that the complaint that Davison’s Doctor was “bland” at Longleat and the resultant attempt to correct it via Colin Baker’s portrayal was a case of misunderstanding that the writers weren’t giving the Doctor good stuff to do and not a reflection on Davison as such.

So we’re faced with a bit of a puzzle. Grimwade’s scripts are clearly jarring in some sense, but the degree of judgment against him seems in excess of the observable flaws in his scripts. What’s the actual flaw here?

I dealt with this a bit in the Mawdryn Undead entry, where I observed that Grimwade is the one writer who’s actually capable of working in the soap opera style that the Davison era half-heartedly aspired to.…

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Of all of the silly set design elements of the Nathan-Turner years, the tendency to make surfaces more “spacey” by covering them in bubble wrap is, in fact, my favorite.

It’s February 8th, 1984. Frankie continues to relax in Hollywood, with Queen lurking just below. Duran Duran and The Eurythmics also chart, and The Smiths have one of their biggest hits during their actual career with “What Difference Does it Make” just barely missing the top ten and peaking at #12. But perhaps most significant is Madonna making her chart debut with “Holiday,” which peaks at #6.

The Winter Olympics run through this story, necessitating the merging of episodes into two 45-minute episodes, an experiment that becomes the norm in the next season. Konstantin Chernenko becomes the head of the Soviet Union.

While on television, Davison gets his obligatory Dalek story. There is no such thing as a great era of Doctor Who that has ended without a great Dalek story. The Pertwee era’s inability to quite stick the landing on any of its Dalek stories is emblematic of the nagging doubts plaguing that era. The fact that the Williams era went to pieces on its Dalek story is almost a perfect metaphor for its failings. And on the other extreme, however good – and indeed better – stories like The Brain of Morbius are, it will always be Genesis of the Daleks that is the defining moment of the Hinchcliffe era, and all the various weak spots of the Troughton era can be forgiven in a heartbeat in the face of his two Dalek stories. But perhaps no stories exemplify the way in which Dalek stories serve as the defining metaphors of their eras as the two Saward-penned Dalek stories.

For all the stick I’ve given him, John Nathan-Turner was not untalented. The quality of work at the beginning and end of his tenure makes it very clear that he was capable of producing some phenomenally good television. But it is equally telling that he is by miles the least writerly Doctor Who producer. He is the only post-Innes Lloyd producer of the series to have no significant writing credits to his name. Bryant and Sherwin both served as script editor, Letts wrote several scripts, Hinchcliffe started as a writer, wrote three novelizations, and submitted scripts after his departure, and Williams stepped in on scripts in his era and was set to write one for Season 23. Nathan-Turner, however, was not a writer.

This is not an insult, I should stress. The producer’s job is not first and foremost a writing job, and writing is only one path to the chair. Nathan-Turner has a strong sense of publicity, is savvy about stretching the budget, and is attentive to the visuals even if his aesthetic is at times exceedingly dodgy. But it does explain a fairly basic truth about Nathan-Turner’s tenure, which is that he is more dependent on the quality of his script editor than almost anyone else. (Of course, with a nine season tenure and three script editors, there’s considerably more data available for Nathan-Turner) When he’s paired with a writer who has a strong creative vision for the show he’s able to get that vision to execute successfully and compellingly week in and week out.…

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The skies of November turn gloomy.

The news, on the other hand, is wholly mediocre. The big one is that the Winter Olympics kick off the day after this story airs its final installment, but that has relevance for the next story, not really this one. Nissan announces plans to open a plant in Great Britain, which will be the first time that non-British cars will be built in the UK. The first embryo transfer resulting in a live birth is announced? An untethered space walk? It’s not thrilling news.

It is, however, thrilling television, as we’ve got Frontios on tap, and as it happens, Frontios is quite good. Perhaps the easiest thing to say about Frontios is that it is not at all the script you would expect from Christopher H. Bidmead. Not merely based on Logopolis or Castrovalva, although it’s very much unlike either of those, but based on the entirety of Season 18, one does not expect to see Bidmead going for body horror and grimy militarism. Nevertheless, this is unmistakably a Bidmead script. His stocks in trade – lost knowledge of the ancients, eccentric spaces – are all here. It’s just that they’re serving a story about slugs using human corpses for labor instead of some fugue on Escher or computers.

There is an almost ritual element to the progression of Season 21. After so long mining every part of Doctor Who’s history save for its alchemical spark the series unexpectedly brings back two of its last three alchemists in Bidmead and, later, Holmes. On top of that, there is an odd focus on the buried. Story after story in this season focuses on imagery of caves, tunnels, or the deep. With the miners’ strike looming, there is in hindsight something slightly uncanny about this. It is not quite a thematic link – the issues of the strike are not well reflected across Season 21, although there are moments that come close. But it remains striking, as Doctor Who finally stirs, even if temporarily, from its season-long torpor of museum pieces, and has a resurgence of alchemy to see it obliquely reflect the looming politics of the day.

But there is something troubling and unsettling about the alchemy in these stories, and Frontios is a prime example. Bidmead has always had a love of eccentric spaces, but here the unfathomable depths of Frontios and the outer reaches of time do not hide a sense of wonder but a sense of raw horror. And not just any horror, but good old-fashioned body horror.…

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Don’t make me crumble menacingly at you.

It’s January 19th, 1984. Paul McCartney is still at number one with “Pipes of Peace,” with Frankie Goes to Hollywood now up to number two. The lower reaches of the charts are basically as described last time, so let’s go even lower and see if there’s anything interesting. The Police have “King of Pain” near its peak, which isn’t nearly as high as you’d expect for that song. The Smiths are in with “This Charming Man.” There. That’s worth noting. Ooh, and on the album charts the first volume of Now That’s What I Call Music! is at number one. So there’s a symbol of the death of culture and hope. In real news, though it’s between this story and the next, we may as well give this one credit for the Apple Macintosh being introduced, just because otherwise I’d have absolutely nothing to talk about before I moved on to Doctor Who.

So here is something that I didn’t realize how much I’d missed writing about until I sat down for this entry: a thoroughly underrated gem. Not one I have to provide some rescue operation on like Terminus, but a story that’s just quite marvelous and largely overlooked. I think the last one of these was, what, Stones of Blood? Regardless, The Awakening is absolutely marvelous.

Perhaps the most striking thing about The Awakening, at least to a modern eye, is that it figures out how to do the two-part story. Or, at least, rediscovers it – David Whitaker had the gist of this figured out in the mid-60s. (Then again, to some extent the entire history of Doctor Who after 1968 is just people figuring out what David Whitaker understood all along.) But as The Awakening is the only 45-minute Doctor Who story to work between The Rescue and Rose, it bears some analysis on those grounds alone.

To some extent, of course, its central innovation is just blindingly obvious: it gets the cliffhanger to work right. Let’s look at the cliffhangers of the two-parters quickly, starting with the post-Rescue ones. The Sontaran Experiment ends with revealing the villain of the piece. Black Orchid ends with the incident that kicks off the murder mystery. The King’s Demons ends with the revelation of the Master. All three of these are cliffhangers in what we might call the game-change mould – they’re revelations that promise a shift in the nature of the story.

Compare those to Whitaker’s two cliffhangers on his two-parters. The Rescue has the Doctor stumbling upon a spike trap, and The Edge of Destruction has a particularly vivid  moment of the crew betraying each other. These are not cliffhangers that change the shape of the story, they’re sudden intrusions of danger that we know will be squared away within a minute or two of the start of the next episode so we can get back to the plot.

In most circumstances it is the game-change cliffhangers that are most interesting.…

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Gronda Gronda?

It’s January 5th, 1984. The Flying Pickets are at number one with “Only You,” with Paul McCartney’s “Pipes of Peace” knocking them off a week later as they manage one of the most impressive drops I’ve ever seen from a number one single, plunging down to ten. Billy Joel, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, Culture Club, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood all also chart, the latter with “Relax.” (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, it should be noted for Americans, were not a one hit wonder in the UK at all.)

In the month and change since The Five Doctors, Lynda Mann is murdered, though the newsy part of that came many years later when the murderer, Colin Pitchfork, became the first person in Britain to be convicted based on DNA evidence. An IRA car bomb exploded outside Harrods in the Christmas shopping center. And Pope John Paul II visited the man who attempted to assassinate him to forgive him. While during this story a hurricane-force storm kills six in Britain.

While on television. A commenter made the quite valid point that my entries on the Davison era have been markedly closer to the critical consensus than in any other era. This is true, and I’ve kind of internally conceptualized much of this stretch as being about providing a more thorough account of the logic behind the consensus than about changing it. Largely because I think the overall consensus on this part of the Nathan-Turner era is solid, which, in turn, is because it’s just about the most analyzed portion of Doctor Who around save, perhaps, for the new series, which is so deliciously oversignified that the existing critical consensus can’t be grasped at all.

All of which said, I think the era as a whole gets an unfairly rough ride. There are systemic problems, which I’ve pointed out at length and will continue to do so, but there are also moments of real quality, including in oft-overlooked stories. And then there is Warriors of the Deep, about which I sadly, if unexpectedly, find myself with virtually nothing good to say.

That said, much of the criticism of the story is, if not inaccurate, at the very least faintly unfair. Yes, the effects on it are lamentable, but I’ve kept a decent policy of not criticizing Doctor Who for poor effects and I’m not going to break it here. The Myrka is deeply, deeply unfortunate, but to suggest that it, or any of the shoddiness of this story, is the actual problem with the story is ridiculous. They’re symptoms of the problem. The story wouldn’t be significantly improved by better effects. It just wouldn’t have quite as obvious a punching bag.

Michael Grade, responsible for pulling the trigger on the 1985 hiatus, has apparently cited this story as the one that persuaded him that Doctor Who was crap, a claim that Eric Saward took issue with, pointing out that Grade was in a position to give the program more money. But the flip side of this is what possible reason Michael Grade would have for giving more money to a program that’s blowing what it has on a pantomime horse.…

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In many ways, every single thing I could possibly say about this story is encoded thematically within this image. All of which said, whose hand is on waxwork Tom Baker’s shoulder, exactly?

It’s November 23rd, 1983. Lionel Richie is at number one with “All Night Long (All Night),” as for one of only two times in Doctor Who we are forced to use the American charts, as this story actually aired two days earlier in the US than it did in the UK. This fact reflects the way in which Doctor Who, in the 1980s, was increasingly turning into a global export – a massive brand that raked in money for the BBC. This, of course, is not what you expect. In any other context global success would matter tremendously and would justify the show’s continued existence. But the BBC is beholden to different rules, as is appropriate given the nature of its funding. The license payers deserve not to be ignored in favor of Americans. And so far from being a reason to keep the show on the air, Nathan-Turner’s mad quest to chase American cult television fans at the expense of the license payers is, increasingly, a major problem.

Not, however, here – a story that is rightfully and properly delightful when it airs on November 25th, 1983. Billy Joel is at number one with “Uptown Girl,” with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson below him with “Say Say Say.” The Cure are also in the top ten with “The Love Cats.”

In real news, since March sci-fi and the real world have merged uncomfortably with Ronald Reagan announcing the space-based and comically unfeasible Strategic Defense Initiative, derisively nicknamed “Star Wars.” Samantha Smith manages the impressive feat of being used as a cheap propaganda tool by both the USSR and the US. Her resulting celebrity is the only reason she is on the plane whose crash kills her at the age of thirteen two years later.

Margaret Thatcher wins reelection in June in a landslide whereby an outright majority of voters opted for more liberal parties, resulting in Thatcher having a 61% majority in the House of Commons. This massive vote of confidence emboldens Thatcher’s government, and the Thatcherism we all know and loathe really begins here. Pioneer 10 flees the solar system four days later.

The Famicom, known in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System, launches in Japan. The Global Positioning System is announced to be opened for civilian use. The GNU project is publicly announced. 38 IRA prisoners escape from Maze prison. And US cruise missiles arrive at Greenham Common.

While, of course, on television we have a big one. The Five Doctors.

The problem with occasionally doing what I think of as the gonzo entries is that there is occasionally the sense that I’m expected, for a given “big” story, to provide one. In practice it’s a bit more idiosyncratic than that. What makes a classic story and what makes a story that lends itself to an over the top gonzo entry do not, in fact, completely coincide.…

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