Eruditorum Press

None of you understand. We’re not locked in here with you. We just lost our keys.

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:

The Original Viking Settlers (Terminus)

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A frame from the recording of the commentary track
this time.

It’s February 15th, 1983. Kajagoogoo are finally at the top of the charts, prancing about for both weeks of this story with one of the great pieces of 80s trash. Michael Jackson and Tears for Fears also chart, making this perhaps the single most 80s chart we’ve dealt with yet. Fitting, that.

News is relatively quiet. Some particularly bad fires in Victoria and South Australia, a multiple homicide in the robbery of the Wah Mee gambling club in Seattle, and the Environmental Protection Agency announces plans to completely and permanently evacuate Times Beach in Missouri due to an excessive amount of deadly poison in the soil.

While on television, Terminus. There was, in the drawer of VHS tapes that constituted the initial guiding principles of my Doctor Who fandom, a tape on which the words “Terminus” and Enlightenment” were written and crossed out. The tape now contained a track meet. This is one of several standing grievances between my parents and me, along with my not being allowed to trick or treat when I was a child and their failure to buy a life-size Dalek when they had the opportunity. Some day I will put them in homes and laugh at them.

The result of this is that when I finally got my hands on a copy of Terminus I was positively chomping at the bit to watch it. The fact that I remembered virtually nothing about it going into rewatching it for the blog, then, was a bit unnerving. As I’ve noted, there are few worse omens when talking about a Doctor Who story than to say that it was forgettable as a child.

And this is doubly true of the Nathan-Turner era. Every era of Doctor Who has its poor stories. The realities of BBC production mean that sometimes Doctor Who has no choice but to go to air with a story that self-evidently sucks. And there’s an inverted history of Doctor Who from the one we’ve usually followed, in which eras are described and understood by the best of what they strove for. We could instead ask what various eras do when it’s clear they have a turkey on their hands. And it is, in many ways, just as revealing as the optimistic history of the show. Verity Lambert, for instance, tries with a sort of manic desperation to do something interesting. The Lloyd/Bryant/Sherwin era just grimly grinds out the story figuring that the audience doesn’t actually care what’s on screen, leaving Patrick Troughton to shout “oh my word” a lot. The Pertwee era tries desperately to avoid ever making a turkey, slowly sacrificing quality at the altar of not fucking up until they make a horrific string of turkeys as a result. The Hinchcliffe era maintains reasonable production standards throughout, and its turkeys are defined almost entirely by whether or not Robert Holmes could be bothered to even try to fix the script. And the Williams era just dials up the charm in a frantic effort to salvage script after script that goes wrong.…

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And He’s Just Wiped Them Out (Mawdryn Undead)

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Red velvet lines the black box…

It’s February 1st, 1983. Men at Work are at number one with “Down Under,” remaining there all story. Kajagoogoo, U2, and Echo and the Bunnymen also chart, which starts to look like one of the best charts we’ve seen until you look a the second week when it’s Joe Cocker, Wham, and Fleetwood Mac charting. Bauhaus, however, are in the lower reaches of the chart, and a post-breakup rerelease series means that The Jam occupy fifteen spots of the top hundred. So that’s nice.

In real news, unemployment in the UK reaches its record peak. The Australian parliament is dissolved in preparation for elections. Klaus Barbie is actually charged with war crimes. And that’s about it, I’m afraid.

On to television, then. Mawdryn Undead is another one of those stories that I was unaware was controversial and not widely liked until well after I’d seen it, and where I am thus unable to quite dislodge the way in which I was initially taken by it. I quite liked this story on the VHS tape, and was gutted that the back two parts of the Black Guardian arc had been taped over with a track and field meet by my parents, leaving me unable to watch them for a good two years or so after becoming a Doctor Who fan. Rewatching it, as with most classic Doctor Who, its flaws are evident, but as with much of the Davison era its virtues are evident as well, with the embryonic forms of what Doctor Who could and would become on plain display throughout the story.

Let me first say that I am mostly going to set Turlough aside until Enlightenment. I have a lot to say about the character, but I don’t think it’s going to be well-served by being split among three entries or by treating the early scenes of his character without reference to the later ones.

Second, let me deal very efficiently with the Brigadier. He’s obviously not the right character for this story, but in this story’s defense, he’s also the third choice character. The correct character is, obviously, Ian. They wanted to do the story for Ian. But William Russell wasn’t available and they had to do fallbacks, and ended up with the Brigadier. Nicholas Courtney is, of course, wonderful, but the fact of the matter is that this is to the story’s detriment and that very little about the story is meaningfully about the Brigadier. He is serving here as a stand-in for “generic past companion” and I’m mostly going to treat him that way, especially since there actually is a story in the future that deals with the Brigadier as the Brigadier and that, furthermore, is just as much a work of flawed genius as this one, so I’ll just hold all of that for Battlefield. (As for UNIT dating, I don’t really have anything to add to what I said on the subject in The Invasion.)

Those set aside, then, let’s start with Peter Grimwade, a strong contender for the most underrated writer in Doctor Who’s history.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 19 (Goth Opera)

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The July 1994 launch of the Virgin Missing Adventures line was a strange moment in Doctor Who history. It’s not as though it was the beginning of adding in extra adventures for past Doctors – that was in 1973. But there was an odd dissonance to the basic idea of it. The Virgin books were certainly not exclusively experimental works that tried to push the limits of what Doctor Who could do, but they were certainly well enough known for it. And so the turn towards the Missing Adventures was, for the most part, a bit strange and uncertain. This level of actively rewriting the past had never really been tried before, and to have it done by a company with as much of a reputation for the avant-garde as Virgin seemed pregnant with possibilities, both good and bad.

In practice it rapidly became clear that the Missing Adventures, at least to start, were Virgin’s attempt to better appeal to the so-called “trad” audience who were left cold by their more adventurous New Adventures line. (Or, as Paul Cornell put it in an interview from his “hilariously bitchy” days, to write for the line “you had to abandon any thoughts of originality.”) But the launch of the line was interesting in this regard. July of 1994 had two releases – the debut Missing Adventure Goth Opera by Paul Cornell and a New Adventure called Blood Harvest by Terrence Dicks, with Goth Opera serving as an ostensible sequel to Blood Harvest.

What’s interesting about this is that Terrence Dicks is, for obvious reasons, the very definition of the “traditional” Doctor Who writer, whereas Paul Cornell was one of the leading lights of the New Adventures range. And, of course, they were flipped. Terrence Dicks – who had actually written the Fifth Doctor on television – wrote for the ostensibly weirder line while Cornell wrote for the ostensibly traditional line.

Superficially, at least, the result of this was that both books were fairly traditional, with the Terrence Dicks aesthetic winning out over the weirder one. Certainly Goth Opera has its share of traditional moments, including a chapter that serves mostly to do some of the connective work between the two books. The chapter a beautifully fast-moving bit involving Romana that manages to, in rapid succession, heavily reference The Five Doctors, Carnival of Monsters, and then insert a cameo from Sabalom. It so perfectly nails Dicks’s style that I actually momentarily found myself composing a bit of this post in my head before having to abandon the line of argument I was imagining due to my remembering that it was actually Cornell who’d written this book.

But this is unfair to what Cornell does here. Cornell’s reputation in 1994 may have been for formal experimentation and “difficult” books, but this reputation was, if not misleading, at least only part of the picture. Cornell was, we can safely say at this point, one of the best writers to make their debut in the Virgin line.…

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The Void Beyond The Mind (Snakedance)

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“I’m sorry, Ms. Jovanka, but the passengers have been
complaining that instead of directing them to the toilets
you send them to a chamber occupied by a horrifying snake
god. We’re going to have to let you go.”

It’s January 18, 1983. You can’t hurry Phil Collins off the number one spot, but given time Men at Work dispatch him, replacing him with “Down Under.” The lower portions of the charts are somewhat more optimistic, with Madness’s “Our House” and Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy” both appearing. OK, optimistic might be selling that one a little too strong. But both are, at least, wholly valid guilty pleasures.

In real news, Klaus Barbie, who represents what is possibly the biggest disparity between quality of name and quality of human being in history, is arrested in Bolivia. And hey, I totally just found a Wikipedia page for years in history that’s specific to the UK, so that’s useful. Between the end of Arc of Infinity and this story the police manage to shoot a perfectly innocent man named Stephen Waldorf, seriously injuring him. The police officers involved are eventually cleared of attempted murder despite, having shot Waldorf five times out of the thirteen times they’d fired at him, holding a gun to his head and calling him a cocksucker before finding out that they were out of ammo and just pistol whipping him a bunch. Oops. In cheerier news, Breakfast Time debuts on the BBC, their first attempt at a morning program. The first broadcast passes without anybody being shot or called a cocksucker.

Snakedance, I can vouch first hand, is one of those bits of Doctor Who that properly gets into your head and unnerves you. I’ll admit to a longstanding distaste for mind control plots, simply because I tend to just not like stories in which people are out of character – I tend to have a similar lack of enthusiasm for body swap plots and the like. But as mind control plots go, Tegan’s possession in this story is particularly creepy and memorable. And though the rubber snakes in it are still not great the image of snake tattoos that crawl off of your flesh are downright fabulous.

It is, in that regard, one of what, as an adult, I recognize as perfect pieces of childhood Doctor Who – a story that is remembered vividly without being loved (and, of course, without being hated as well). Though it’s by no means universally the case that these are the stories that then grow into beloved classics in adulthood, they’re certainly prime candidates for it. And Snakedance is certainly an example of this. As a child, it gets in your head. As an adult, you see why it got in your head in ways that make it even more compelling.

Much of Snakedance involves taking conventions of Doctor Who and looking at them from slightly oblique angles. (A suitable hat tip here to Lawrence Miles, whose analysis of the story in About Time underpins much of this) The story essentially takes what The Daemons tried and almost but not quite succeeded at and inverts it.…

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You Ask Me To Appreciate It? (Arc of Infinity)

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So that’s what Stephen Thorne looks like.

It’s January 3rd, 1983. Renee and Renato are at number one with “Save Your Love,” which is… a song. Phil Collins removes it from number one in the second week of this story with “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Culture Club, Men at Work, Madness, Malcom McLaren and the World’s Famous Supreme Team, and David Bowie and Bing Crosby also chart.

In real news, ooh, we get to do a big wrap-up since last time, don’t we. OK. So there’s the Falklands, obviously. Canada fully patriates its constitution and achieves full political independence from the UK. Ronald Reagan addresses a joint session fo the British Parliament. There’s a World Cup. England does well in its first group stage, then manages a series of two 0-0 draws in a second group stage, knocking it out of the tournament. The Equal Rights Amendment fails, to the delight of Phyllis Schlafly, who is basically the American version of Mary Whitehouse. Like all American adaptations of British source texts, she is bigger, louder, and stupider. The queen’s bodyguard, Michael Trestrail, resigns over excessive use of male prostitutes. The first lethal injection is carried out in Texas, the first emoticons are posted, and Time Magazine’s Man of the Year is the computer.

Also, at this particular moment in time I am exactly one hundred and sixteen days old, and this is the first episode of Doctor Who to air in a world I exist in. So I guess this is all my fault. Really, really sorry.

I talked, last time we did a television story, about the way in which it is at times helpful to watch Doctor Who without remembering actively that there is such a thing as a bad story. And that’s true to an extent. But another aspect of childhood watching of Doctor Who – or of any television series, really – is that rubbish episodes pass you by forgettably. Time-Flight, for all its flaws, was oddly memorable. Arc of Infinity, on the other hand? Here are my childhood memories of Arc of Infinity: it had Time Lords, it brought Omega back, and it had Colin Baker being as horribly unpleasant as I assumed his eventual Doctor would be. I remembered virtually nothing else about it. This, as it happens, is a very bad sign. While not every story that fails to make an impression as a kid is, in fact, wretched it is striking just how often a failure to remember a story at all on my part coincides with it being a truly and epically awful one.

To be fair, of the things I did remember, I was not quite right about any of them. My initial dislike of Colin Baker was motivated purely by my parents badmouthing him on the grounds of his strangling Peri in The Twin Dilemma. In truth the character improved and was not as wretched as Commander Maxil, and it is by now clear that the problem with the character was not, in fact, Baker himself.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 27 (The Cleopatras)

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Defense of Time-Flight aside, and complete lack of defense of The Arc of Infinity aside as well, watching Doctor Who in the John Nathan-Turner era often involves a fair amount of staring incredulously at the screen and bewilderedly asking “what the fuck were you people thinking.” This is somewhat odd. Time-Flight is not, in point of fact, worse-made than The Power of Kroll, to pick one of five or six examples from the Graham Williams era that people are far more willing to defend. Nothing The Arc of Infinity does to Gallifrey is prima facie stupider than The Invasion of Time. The Black Guardian is no more of a ham sandwich in Mawdryn Undead than would be expected given his servant in The Armageddon Factor. And yet what is defensible, if not necessary forgivable, under Graham Williams is a source of incredulity under Nathan-Turner.

There are reasons for this. We’ve just wrapped 1982 in the series. Defending it because it compares reasonably well to Doctor Who five years before increasingly doesn’t wash. On top of that there is a question of overall aesthetic. The Graham Williams era was cheap and silly, yes, but it was cheap and silly within an aesthetic that could at least tolerate cheap and silly. John Nathan-Turner eviscerated the Williams era, denounced cheap silliness, and touted his ability to bring a serious-mindedness and increased production values. You can’t do that and Time-Flight. Even if Time-Flight does work – and I think it largely does – there’s surely no way to argue that it works according to the principles and aesthetics that John Nathan-Turner espoused, is there?

And then one watches The Cleopatras. Airing on the same nights as the Tuesday episodes of Snakedance, Mawdryn Undead, Terminus, and Enlightenment, The Cleopatras manages the previously almost unimaginable task of making the John Nathan-Turner era look, if not immediately sensible, at least wholly consistent with the overall approach television was taking. But to get at The Cleopatras one has to start with The Borgias. The Borgias was a 1981 attempt at historical costume drama in the vein of I Claudius. It was also an unmitigated disaster that essentially killed the genre. Fast forward two years and you have The Cleopatras, the BBC’s effort to revamp the genre as… well, it’s not entirely clear they got that far.

It’s key to remember, when watching The Cleopatras, that it is not a joke. Indeed, all the elements of seriousness are here. The writer, Philip Mackie, was an acclaimed writer with a history of successful costume dramas, most obviously ITV’s 1968 The Caesars. The cast is impeccable – though somewhat oddly most of the highlights seem to come either from Doctor Who or Harry Potter. On the Doctor Who side of the ledger you’ve got John Bennett (Chang in Talons), Christopher Neame (Skagra in Shada), Graham Crowden (Soldeed in The Horns of Nimon), and Ian McNiece (Winston Churchill) in fairly substantial rolls, plus Patrick Troughton in a maddeningly small cameo. Whereas on the Harry Potter side you’ve got Richard Griffiths and Robert Hardy, or Vernon Dursley and Cornelius Fudge if you prefer.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 18 (Spare Parts)

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I somewhat adamantly refused to cover the Big Finish line on this blog before this post, simply because I felt like I should start with a “proper” Big Finish audio from their most distinguished line. The Hartnell book has a Companion Chronicles entry in it, and the Troughton, Pertwee, and Baker books will also have Big Finish bonus entries (The Prison in Space, Find and Replace, and Destination: Nerva, most likely). But in terms of the blog, this is where Big Finish enters. So I suppose we should do the ticky box business of explaining what I’m on about before we get to the fun stuff.

Big Finish are the crowning achievement of the professional fan industry – a bunch of people so good at fan-made Doctor Who audios and audio adaptations of some of the Virgin books that they managed to secure a license in 1999 to do original Doctor Who audios. This is important in several regards. First, it led to a considerably muddier sense of what current Doctor Who was in the half-decade before the return of the series. During the Virgin era there was one official continuation of Doctor Who – the New Adventures. You could love them or hate them, but they were the quasi-official Doctor Who. Their replacement with the BBC Books line was controversial enough in its own right, but the fact that the BBC Books line took a turn into the massively controversial a year after Big Finish started and that six months later Big Finish began its own line of 8th Doctor stories meant that for the bulk of the McGann years there were two barely compatible versions of “new Doctor Who” being made.

Second, like the Virgin books Big Finish has had visible impact on the new series. Two stories – Rob Shearman’s Jubilee and this one – were consciously adapted into television stories. Big Finish staff have worked on the program (more about this in a moment), and, perhaps most impressively, Big Finish have managed to retain the rights to produce audios to this day. (Part of this latter point is a genuinely touching bit of public service. Big Finish in effect provides a retirement home for former Doctor Who actors. Its creative merits aside – and there are, in fact, many creative merits – the fact that it gives a modest paycheck to a large number of people who have contributed substantially to Doctor Who, and that it does this by giving them creative work instead of putting them on exhibit in convention halls, is a genuinely good thing.) The Big Finish line is genuinely important to the story of Doctor Who – you simply can’t cover the beginnings of the new series without also stopping off and talking about things like Jubilee and, well, Spare Parts.

Right. Intro material sorted, into the good stuff. The first and most striking thing, when listening to Spare Parts, is how maddeningly possible it is. Marc Platt wrote for Doctor Who just seven years after the period we’re talking about.…

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Our Mode of Conveyance is Irrelevant (Time-Flight)

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Welcome to Longleat, Mr. Davison.

It’s March 22nd, 1982. The Goombay Dance Band are at number one with “Seven Tears,” and stay there all story. Derek and the Dominos, ABC, and Bucks Fizz also chart. Lower in the charts are Flock of Seagulls with “I Ran” and U2 with “A Celebration.” While in real news, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has a groundbreaking ceremony. In less American news, the Canada Act passes the British Parliament, giving Canada the power to amend their own constitution instead of having to ask Britain to do it. In similarly partially-UK news, Chariots of Fire wins Best Picture at the Academy Awards, beating Raiders of the Lost Ark. Time Bandits, in hindsight the actual best film of 1981, was not nominated.

But for me it’s about a decade over, and we’re on scratchy VHS tapes from PBS again. Because Time-Flight was my first Peter Davison story, and one of the earliest Doctor Who stories I ever watched. Which sets up an interesting situation. Time-Flight is, after all, absolutely hated. Apparently the worst story of the Davison era by some margin, and the fifth worst of all time if the Mighty 200 poll is to be believed, which, of course, it isn’t.

One of the nice things about watching Doctor Who as a child with only the Peter Haining book to go by is that you simply don’t know things like that, though. I could, as a child, identify broad eras of Doctor Who that I didn’t care for as much as others, but even the Pertwee era, the one I actively liked least as a child, was fun. I was disappointed whenever a tape turned out to be Pertwee stories, but I still eagerly watched the whole thing. The idea that there were crappy Doctor Who stories isn’t one occurred to me until much later in life, specifically when I discovered that this story and the next were widely hated. So when I watched this as a child I didn’t hate it. It didn’t occur to me to hate it. It was Doctor Who. I liked Doctor Who. So I liked it.

To some extent, of course, there is an immature naiveté to this approach. Uncritical viewing is problematic. Of course, I wasn’t wholly uncritical at age ten – I knew I liked Doctor Who and that I didn’t like other things. But assuming that just because something says “Doctor Who” at the beginning it’s good is still fundamentally uncritical. But equally, there’s a difference between growing to dislike something like The Celestial Toymaker (which I had no idea wasn’t the classic I’d been told until I watched it and realized which use of “celestial” was in play) because there’s something fundamental about the story you didn’t realize and growing to dislike something like Time-Flight because you’ve stopped being able to enjoy something in the way that you used to.

(All of which said, there’s a racial issue in Time-Flight that I should quickly deal with, having just compared it favorably to The Celestial Toymaker.…

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A Pathetic Bunch of Tin Soldiers (Earthshock)

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“What do you mean our redesign is bad? Look at his!”

It’s March 8, 1982. Tight Fit are still sleeping with a lion, and continue to do so all story. Fun Boy Three and Bananarama, ABC, and Iron Maiden also chart. So that’s all terribly exciting, isn’t it. Let’s try the news – the US starts its embargo against Libya. That will end well, I’m sure. Mary Whitehouse’s attempt to prosecute the play The Romans in Britain for obscenity goes down in flames when it turns out that the witness who claims to have seen a penis on stage could not possibly have actually done so, proving a delightfully high profile defeat for Whitehouse. Also, syzygy!

While on television we have Earthshock. A story I’ve been hemming and hawing over what to do with almost since this blog started, hoping that watching it would in some sense clarify things. It didn’t really. This is, for me, one of the most inscrutable of Doctor Who stories. No, the thing that really clarified what to say about this story was actually doing revisions on the Troughton book (I just did my revisions to The Wheel in Space last night, and I have the first round of copy-edits in on the Season 4 material. I still need to do the extra entries, however – currently looking at The Prison in Space, Heart of TARDIS, and Twilight of the Gods. Anyone have a strong recommendation for a fourth?) and rereading what I’d written about the base under siege era.

The bulk of my writing on that subject focused on the way in which the base under siege became formulaic and boring, and it did. But a second strand that crops up throughout the entries is a process of contextualizing the stories in the changing tastes of Doctor Who fandom. This is, admittedly, an issue through large swaths of the blog, and it’s one that’s obviously growing in importance in this era. But redoing the Troughton entries reminded me vividly of the large faction of fandom who considered the base under siege format to be the absolute pinnacle of the series.

I did not much like that section of fandom when covering the Troughton era. And back in the Kinda entry I remarked, with some venom, that the crux of what was wrong with Doctor Who in the 1980s is that it took a section of fandom seriously. And this story is the flip side of it. Kinda was at the bottom of the Season 19 poll. Earthshock was at the top, and is still, broadly speaking, regarded as the best episode of its season. And this gets straight at what’s a bit tricky with Earthshock, which is that it’s tailor made for the crowd that thinks that bases under siege are the be-all and end-all of Doctor Who.

For the most part, Earthshock is an astonishingly straightforward story. Cybermen attack Earth. Twice. The pleasures it offers are straightforward pleasures. There are Cybermen. There are gun battles.…

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Just a Hint of Mint (Black Orchid)

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And then they killed Adric. The end.

It’s March 1st, 1982. Tight Fit are at number one with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” while Toni Basil’s unforgivably awful “Mickey” is at number two. Soft Cell and Depeche Mode also feature in the top ten, while Iron Maiden pokes around just outside of it. While in real news… well, we’ve got here a story that only covers two days, so actually, based on the detailed historical research I do for these posts (aka “look the year up on Wikipedia”) nothing whatsoever happens. Queen Elizabeth opens up the Barbican the day after this story finishes. The Barbican is an interesting little thing – a massive performing arts centre full of good intentions and muddy executions. But I did see a phenomenal RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream there in what a quick check of the Internet suggests was just about their final performance at the Barbican. So that was nice.

While on topic, Black Orchid! Black Orchid is an interesting beast. It doesn’t work at all, first of all, but the reasons why it doesn’t work are almost completely separate from the larger problems that Doctor Who is having in this time period and have very little to do with the story as an idea. Because as an idea, this is the story that really demonstrates how Doctor Who’s relationship with its past can and should work.

The first and most important thing to realize about this story is that it comes after The Visitation. This is a stunningly obvious point, but it’s worth stating anyway. The Visitation restored Earth’s past as a place where the series goes, much as Tegan quietly restored Earth as something that was actually important to the series, it having been almost entirely de-emphasized following The Hand of Fear. And it did so by introducing Earth’s past as the sort of place it’s been ever since The Time Warrior – a place that is visited to do muckabouts in history with cool aliens.

So when Black Orchid comes along and reintroduces the straight historical it’s every bit as much a surprise as when The Time Meddler came along and broke the straight historical. In fact, this story can be read as the inversion of The Time Meddler. In that story we’re led repeatedly to think that we’re watching a straight historical only to discover that in reality we’re watching something else. Here the production repeatedly gestures at the possibility that there is something uncanny in the story, alluding to the possibility that the Master might be involved, for instance. But instead we are repeatedly shown that it’s actually just a 1920s mystery story.

By and large, though, this is a very, very smart thing to do at this point in the series. First and foremost, it shows a relationship with the show’s past that goes beyond merely catering to obsessive fans. There was no loud clamoring for the return of the historical, which has always, within fandom, been viewed primarily as a discarded relic of the early days of the show and as something rightly phased out in favor of more monsters.…

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