Eruditorum Press

Siding with bugs is praxis

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.

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One Tiny Little Gap in the Universe Left, Just About To Close (Kinda)

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A snake! A snake! Ooooooh! A Snake! (Badger badger…)
It’s February 1st, 1982. Kraftwerk! They’re at number one! With “The Model/Computer Love!” It only lasts a week, but they’re overtaken by The Jam, also a fabulous band, with “A Town Called Malice/Precious.” The rest of the top ten isn’t hugely interesting, although some mention needs to go to the rather fabulously named Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who chart with the equally fabulously named “Maid of Orleans (The Waltz of Joan of Arc.” Meat Loaf and Christopher Cross also chart, taking the positions on either side of OMD. Oh well.

In real news, Hafez al-Assad, father of current Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, conducts a scorched earth campaign in Hamathat kills between seventeen and forty thousand people, mostly civilians. Like father like son, clearly. And British airline Laker Airlines abruptly goes out of business, stranding six thousand passengers when their flights are cancelled due to lack of airline. Putting the creativity into creative destruction, then.

And then on television, Kinda. As such things go, Kinda is one of the most overdetermined Doctor Who stories in existence. So we’ll start with a book that I’m kind of largely going to avoid, namely Doctor Who: The Unfolding Text. There is, to be clear, nothing particularly wrong with this book. It’s a fabulous example of early 1980s media studies. Unfortunately, the 1980s were basically the earliest days of media studies. And so reading The Unfolding Text in 2012 one gets the sense of a clever book where the only bits that would be at all new to someone who is reading this blog are basically the bits where some mildly arcane bit of literary theory is being evoked. I mean, I don’t think most of my readers are necessarily going to be solid on Greimasian oppositions and their relationship to The Krotons, but even there I think they’d do fine on the actual analysis.

But The Unfolding Text has a particularly detailed reading of Kinda due to the fact that the authors were allowed to hang around the set during filming, and so among we academic types Kinda has a bit of a reputation simply because its been analyzed in particular depth. All of which said, the reading is a bit flat – various codes of meaning overlap and partially cancel each other out and the end result reinforces established social codes based around a BBC image of “professionalism.” It’s a fair enough approach and hard to argue with, but it falls a bit too neatly into the general tendency of early cultural studies work to find oppressive cultural hegemony everywhere.

I, somewhat obviously, prefer a different approach. Not to break out the theory excessively, but I tend to favor an approach where it’s assumed that nothing is ever fully erased and that overlapping codes of meaning – which obviously happen in any collaboratively authored text, and, frankly, in most single-author ones – do just that – overlap, leaving each meaning intact as one of a number of routes through the text.…

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Because We Don’t Quite Fully Understand (Four to Doomsday)

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And apparently one of the things we don’t quite fully
understand is basic physics. 
It’s January 18, 1982. Bucks Fizz are at number one with “The Land of Make Believe,” with Kraftwerk threatening to take the number one spot. Unfortunately it is instead Shakin’ Stevens with “Oh Julie” that inherits the number one from Bucks Fizz. Elsewhere, The Human League have two separate songs in the top ten and are joined by Kool and the Gang, Foreigner, and Meat Loaf.
The trouble with these twice-weekly airings is that I get very little window to cover any non-musical history in. To wit, all I’m finding is that the post-war peak in unemployment happens in the UK, with over three million people out of work. Ah, the triumphs of Thatcherism. (Yes, she cut the unemployment rate later. But in the process she presided over a complete realignment of the economy that was… less than ideal.)
While on television, it’s Four to Doomsday. With the exception of The Highlanders, which is, of course, missing, I am reasonably certain that this is the second appearance of a Doctor that the fewest people care about one way or another. The next two Doctors get two of the most reviled stories in series’ history for their second outings (one of them even correctly reviled), while Hartnell, Pertwee, and Baker get all-time classics for their second go-rounds. Davison, on the other hand, gets this – a story nobody much likes, nobody much hates, and, frankly, nobody much thinks about beyond “that one between Castrovalva and Kinda” with a side of “that was the first story Davison filmed.”
While I would not go so far as to call this story an overlooked gem (or as an overrated disaster), it is a fair bit more interesting than its reputation. The first thing to realize about it is that it very much sets the tone for Season Nineteen. Of the seven stories in Season Nineteen three are unabashedly attempts to redo things the series has done in the past in a new format. The first of these is, of course, Castrovalva, which we already noted was an effort to go back and build a transition out of the Bidmead era. And we’ll deal with the other two in a few days. Three more are conscious attempts to try new things that the series couldn’t previously do. And then there is Four to Doomsday, a story that it is difficult to firmly describe as forward-looking or backward-looking. In a season that is equally committed to finding ways to rework the standards into the new approach for Doctor Who and to finding new things to do, Four to Doomsday is actually the one story that’s splitting the difference between the two approaches. 
On the one hand, as Miles and Wood point out, Four to Doomsday is essentially built like a Hartnell story. From the start, this is clear: the story opens with the Doctor failing to get his companion back to Earth and the TARDIS crew trying to figure out what sort of world they’re in.
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Time Can Be Rewritten 17 (Cold Fusion, Virgin Books, 1996)

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As novels that I couldn’t possibly avoid go, this one ranks pretty highly. I’ve noted several times that, within the classic series, McCoy is “my Doctor,” so to speak. As the only Doctor (after my first three episodes) I didn’t originally know existed he was the one I got to discover without episode guides. But even still, when I got into Doctor Who it had been off the air for three years. The McCoy years may have been the televised Doctor Who that I came to freshest, but until the dark days of 1996 the only Doctor Who that I got to follow as it came out were the Virgin books.

I’m going to cover much of the Virgin and BBC books lines as if they were new episodes when the time comes. (I haven’t gotten a firm list together, but on a quick scan of titles I think I’m going to do about 30 Virgin books and about 15 each of the BBC Books and Big Finish Eighth Doctor stuff.) But my relationship with them was… interesting. I was reading them roughly from the ages of 11-13, which is just a bit too young for them. But this is in some ways the perfect way to relate to the Virgin books. Their darkness, complexity, and occasional jaunts into overt sexuality are as perfect for that age. The mixture of scandalous and salacious content with the fundamental safety of Doctor Who is as gentle a gradient to tackle emerging sexuality as they come – like having a copy of Timeframe with its Katy Manning/Dalek photo as your sole piece of pornography (which, for years, I did).

This book, in other words, merges two of my favorite eras. As Doctor crossovers go, this one is, for me, as good as it gets. Not just because it’s two of my favorite Doctors, but because there’s such an intrinsic contrast between them. The relative gentleness of Davison’s Doctor combined with the dangerous and manipulative nature of the Virgin Books version of McCoy’s are an inspired pairing that offers no shortage of drama.

All of which said, any multi-Doctor story is less about the particulars of a man meeting himself at a different point in his life and more about the comparison of two eras of the show. Doubly so in a book, where we do not get Davison’s Doctor or McCoy’s Doctor but rather their textual ghosts. The Doctors themselves are televisual performances – things created by actors, directors, and writers in a collaborative environment. These are purely literary characters, responding almost entirely to the whims of a singular creator. They are echoes. That does not diminish the validity of their stories, but this book belongs to neither the Davison nor the McCoy eras.

This gets at another issue with the Virgin books (and for that matter the BBC ones) that I’ve largely danced around. I poke at it a little bit in both the Man in the Velvet Mask entry and the Empire of Glass essay in the Hartnell book, and deal with it more extensively in the Scales of Injustice entry, but it’s been a while and it’s high time we tackled the issue of fanwank again.…

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We’ve Materialised With Considerable Finesse (Castrovalva)

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It wasn’t until Matthew Waterhouse watched the fourth
episode of Castrovalva that he realized that he hadn’t been
hungover at all.
It’s January 4th, 1982. The Human League are at number one with “Don’t You Want Me,” but are unseated by Bucks Fizz’s “The Land of Make Believe,” a song whose lyrics, by former King Crimson member Peter Sinfield, were supposedly a subtle attack on the Thatcher government. Very subtle, in fact. Also in the charts are ABBA, Adam and the Ants, Kool and the Gang, and, now in the top ten, Kraftwerk!

In real news, AT&T agrees to being broken up, the coldest temperature ever recorded in the UK is managed in Braemar, and, at least from my perspective most importantly, the Commodore 64 is introduced. Although I’m still nine months out from my debut (I’m strictly gestational for Season 19), my parents got me a Commodore 64 in the name of getting themselves one when I was about two, and my earliest memories are of playing it.

This serves, in part, as another transition point then. The fact that my entrance to Doctor Who came at the end of the Pertwee era meant that I remained absent for that in the blog. I was present for the Hinchcliffe era, but those were the stories I watched in 6th grade, largely. The Williams era I missed, but as I noted in passing on The Keeper of Traken, with Warrior’s Gate 4 watched I have now hit the point where I have, in fact, seen every single existent episode of Doctor Who, save, of course, the two as of yet unreleased missing episodes. But I’ve watched reconstructions. (I am rather glad to have had Warrior’s Gate be my last unwatched story. It was a very lovely way to go out.)

The remaining three classic series Doctors divide fairly neatly for me. Davison and Pertwee, as I’ve said elsewhere, made up the overwhelming majority of my parents’ VHS tapes. Since I was not fond of Pertwee, and in the absence of the Baker stories I desired, Davison was the first Doctor I watched with any avidness. I treated him at the time as my second favorite Doctor, behind Baker, but as I loved a theoretical ideal of Baker, this was a lie. Until I discovered the existence of Sylvester McCoy (my parents’ guidebooks all left off in the vicinity of Davison’s regeneration. I knew Colin Baker existed and that my parents hated him, but I’d been a Doctor Who fan for a solid year before I learned that there was a Seventh Doctor) Davison was my favorite Doctor. It’s a little tricky to reconstruct because I found a couple of Davison stories on mislabeled tapes after I’d started getting commercial VHS releases, but the “core” of Davison stories I remember watching young are Castrovalva, Four to Doomsday, Kinda, Time Flight, Arc of Infinity, Snakedance, Mawdryn Undead, The Five Doctors, Resurrection of the Daleks, Planet of Fire, and The Caves of Androzani, though I remember getting The Visitation, Black Orchid, and Earthshock all relatively early as well.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 26 (Coronation Street)

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The Davison era is described, usually by its detractors, as a soap opera. “Soap opera,” it should be noted, is one of the great denigrating terms in science fiction fandom. There is nothing, including the Star Wars Christmas Special, quite as bad in the world as being a soap opera.

To anyone outside of science fiction or soap opera fandom this is completely insane since the two are self-evidently the exact same thing. To someone uninvolved in either there is no difference whatsoever in what die-hard sci-fi fans do and what die-hard soap fans do. Both are equally objects of mockery. One dresses up more, the other sends panicked letters in that don’t quite seem to grasp that the characters are fictional. But other than that they’re exactly the same thing.

Consider a recent example. In 2011 Coronation Street brought back the character of Dennis Tanner, who had not appeared in the show since 1968. The only thing that can possibly be reached for as an analogy would be something like bringing Sarah Jane Smith back to Doctor Who in 2006 when she hadn’t appeared in it since 1983. Or bringing Leonard Nimoy as Spock back in the latest Star Trek movie. More simply, consider this – virtually every long-form serialized text (as opposed to something like, say, Garfield that is serialized but consists of one-off strips instead of continuing storylines) that exists in either the US or UK is either a sci-fi/fantasy story or a soap opera.

And yet it’s difficult to imagine two genres that are more diametrically disdainful of one another. Under the hood much of this comes down to the fact that although their basic narrative structures match almost exactly their subject matter is wildly different. Soap operas are emotionally-based character dramas, science fiction is action-adventure. But understanding the fact that they’re basically the same in terms of structure and audience interaction is key to understanding why, starting in about the 1990s, sci-fi/fantasy shows began working hard to try to cater to a soap audience as well. It’s just good business – if the two work similarly, you may as well try to appeal to both.

The other thing to note is that the perception that soap operas and science fictiona re diametrically opposed is not quite fair. It’s true that the average soap fan and the average science fiction fan are very different audiences. This is the logic behind the other event that would justify a Coronation Street entry, the scheduling of Doctor Who opposite Coronation Street in the Sylvester McCoy years on the grounds, as Michael Grade put it, that nobody in Britain watched both shows. But the logic behind this line was delightfully skewered years later in Russell T. Davies’s Queer as Folk when Vince Tyler reminisces about how irritating it was to have both shows on at once. Of course now that Phil Collinson has moved from Executive Producer of Doctor Who to showrunning Coronation Street the idea of any opposition between the shows becomes almost farcical.…

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Outside the Government 2 (K-9 and Company)

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The 1980s called. They said you can keep their bloody
title card.

It’s December 28th, 1981. The Human League are now at number one with “Don’t You Want Me,” with ABBA, Adam and the Ants, and Eurovision winners Bucks Fizz also charting. Kraftwerk are lower in the charts, if you’re into that kind of thing. (I so am.)

Since the Five Faces series wrapped, an inconclusive attempt at an arms reduction treaty between the US and USSR takes place in Geneva, Arthur Scargill becomes president elect of the National Union for Mineworkers, which is likely to end well. Muhammad Ali fights his last fight, the US-supported El Salvadorian army kills 900 civilians, martial law is declared in Poland, the Penlee lifeboat disaster takes place off the coast of Cornwall, and the first test tube baby is born.

While on television we have one the only attempt in the course of the classic series to produce a spin-off: K-9 and Company. This is, perhaps, one of the stories that has most substantially shifted in how we must take it following the new series. Given that Russell T. Davies showed rather conclusively that, in fact, a series following the solo adventures of Sarah Jane Smith can work just fine. The existence of a K-9 centered spinoff is perhaps less of a glowing endorsement (though actually, I’ve never actually met anyone who’s even seen the K-9 series), but the fact of the matter is that K-9 appeared in fully a third of The Sarah Jane Adventures stories.

So like it or not, the fact of the matter is that this concept works. And if we’re going to continue being honest about this story, let’s note that at 8.4 million viewers it beat all of Season 18 of Doctor Who, and furthermore did it during the festive season and with a transmitter out in the northwest that meant it wasn’t seen there. The reason it wasn’t picked up had more to do with changes in leadership at the BBC than with the failure of this production. And so the default take on this story – that it’s a dead end that didn’t work – doesn’t wash. It did work. Just not for until over thirty years after this aired.

All of which said, it’s not hard to reason why the BBC might have been unimpressed with this pilot. While it’s clear today that the basic ideas behind this show work, this specific execution is deeply, deeply flawed – badly enough that it’s in many ways harder to see what convinced Russell T. Davies that there was actually meat on them bones than it is to see why people wrote the idea off for thirty-five years. The problem is that this pilot can’t decide if it’s a straight children’s show or an all-ages Avengers-like show with Sarah Jane and a robot dog.

The bulk of it is written like a quasi-serious adult drama. It’s certainly kid friendly, but it’s not for kids as such. In this regard it’s much like Doctor Who itself is.…

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Outside the Government 1 (The Five Faces of Doctor Who)

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Outside the Government is an occasional series focusing on televised Doctor Who material that is not a part of the series proper – spin-offs, documentaries, and, in this case, reruns.

It’s November 2nd, 1981. Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin are at number one with “It’s My Party.” I’m finding records on this point just a little dodgy, but I think we’re looking at a five week run, in which case what we should say is that in one week The Police overtake them with “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.” Two weeks later Queen and David Bowie take over number one with “Ice Ice Baby,” which holds number one for the remainder of this experience. Elvis Costello, The Jam, The Human League, Rod Stewart, Soft Cell, The Pretenders, and Oliva Newton-John also chart.

Since the prepared-for end, Ronald Reagan was shot by John Hinckley Jr. Jodi Foster was unimpressed. Pope John Paul II is also shot and nearly killed. And Marcus Sargeant took six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II. The first Space Shuttle takes off, serving in most regards as a tombstone for all dreams of spaceflight that had animated the 1960s, reducing wonder to a banal and pointless repetition of spaceflight essentially for its own sake. Peter Sutcliffe is found guilty of being the Yorkshire Ripper, and I’ve learned my lesson about commenting on that particular issue. The first recognized cases of AIDS are identified by the CDC. And, of course, the whole race riots thing we talked about last time. And Hosni Mubarak is elected President of Egypt following Sadat’s assassination.

While during the five weeks that Doctor Who’s five faces apparate, Antigua and Barbuda gain independence from the UK and the General Synod of the Church of England votes to allow the ordination of women. Luke and Laura marry on General Hospital, and Reagan signs the order that will lead to the Iran Contra scandal.

While on television we have the first real attempt to historicize Doctor Who. The Five Faces of Doctor Who repeats, in which episodes were screened daily Monday through Thursday to provide, over five weeks, reruns of five four-part stories from the history of the program personally selected by John Nathan-Turner. The stories, for the record, were An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC, The Krotons, Carnival of Monsters, The Three Doctors, and Logopolis.

It is first and foremost telling what stories were selected. The constraint of the timeslot restricted the program to four-parters. Combined with the problems of missing episodes this left, for a Hartnell repeat, the following options (assuming I haven’t forgotten about something that was completed post-1981, which I may well have): An Unearthly Child, The Aztecs, The Romans, The Space Museum, The Ark, The Gunfighters, and The War Machines. Of these, given the nostalgia factor of a first repeat series, An Unearthly Child was the only choice.

But this had the effect of badly obscuring Hartnell’s Doctor, who, after all, is at best prototypically formed in An Unearthly Child.…

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Guest Post: David Bowie and Doctor Who

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Among the ways in which the end was prepared for is that I, suspecting that the Logopolis post would maybe take a bit longer to write than most, decided to secure a guest post for today. Not wanting to leave you in the hands of anyone other than the best, of course, I asked Chris O’Leary of the fabulous Pushing Ahead of the Dame, which was quite rightly one of Time Magazine’s 25 best blogs of 2011. 

I’ll be back Wednesday with the first of three posts I’ve got before we get to Castrovalva, two of which will belong to a brand new sub-series to go with Time Can Be Rewritten, Pop Between Realities, and You Were Expecting Someone Else. Then a week from Wednesday we’ll kick off the Peter Davison era proper. (Speaking of which… were there any good BBC Books novels set in the Davison era? I’ve got a golden turkey penciled in for that slot now, but if there’s something of actual quality I’d prefer that.) 
But before all of those terrible things happen, you get the pleasure of a blog post written by someone who’s actually good. Enjoy it while it lasts.
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David Bowie, for much of his life, has been considered an ideal candidate for various iconic TV/film parts that he will never play. He’s the great James Bond villain who never was, for instance. And from the ‘70s on, Bowie was regularly rumored to appear on Doctor Who in some manner, from playing a supporting role (allegedly considered as a replacement for Alexei Sayle in “Revelation of the Daleks”) to a villain (an eternal candidate for the Master) to playing the Doctor himself.
Who and Bowie, two modern British institutions whose trademark has been a commitment to continual transformation, are also one long parallel, with each reflecting the other from their timelines to their aesthetics. They were born in the same ward: Bowie’s first-ever recording (an unreleased track for Decca called “I Never Dreamed”) was cut in London in August 1963, within a month of the shooting of the first “An Unearthly Child.” Bowie’s Mod and R&B singles coincide with William Hartnell’s term; Bowie’s sudden turn to Anthony Newley-infused psychedelia begins directly upon the arrival of Patrick Troughton, and “Space Oddity,” the culmination of this era, debuts mere weeks after the end of “The War Games.” Phil has already gone to great lengths to find connections between Ziggy Stardust Bowie and Jon Pertwee’s tenure. And the Tom Baker years are Bowie at his most visionary and influential, from Diamond Dogs through Station to Station, the Berlin trilogy and Scary Monsters.
You can keep it going for as long as you’d like. Bowie’s floundering in the mid-‘80s coincides with Who’s hiatus (during which Bowie recorded “Dancing in the Street”) and the ugly desperation of the Colin Baker years; the 1996 “modernized” TV movie appears just as Bowie’s dyed his hair copper and is attempting drum ‘n’ bass. And Bowie’s public career ends precisely at the start of Who’s successful revival: “Rose” was being filmed in Cardiff in early summer 2004 just as Bowie was playing what would be his final concerts.
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Recursive Occlusion (Logopolis)

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Note: For gematrial reasons, section #10 is the beginning of the entry and you should skip to there. Alternatively, John G. Wood has made a proper interactive fiction version of it and posted it here because he is awesome.

1.
It is stark white and so very bright here at the summit. There is simply light, and oneness, and completion. This is the void, and it is everything. 
Nothing follows this. But out of nothing can come anything. In one story Doctor Who is built up to the heavens itself and then leveled back down. These heights are miles from Toxteth and Thatcher, from the Kingdom that the Crown rules above. No matter. Sometimes the only escape we have from the world is dreams, whether it be the world of schoolyard bullies or of Tories. Sometimes all we can do in the face of a growing darkness is retreat into a realm of silly and daft ideas and watch as they inexorably spin their way into more.
Doctor Who can’t fight Thatcher. It can’t stop her. She will run rampant and horrible over Britain for a decade, a terrible woman who does terrible things. She will win election after election, and her legacy will be nearly impossible to chisel out of the heart of the country even long after the sheer breadth of devastation she brought is clear. We are in history here, and there is no height to which one can ascend in order to find a solution to it. You can’t rewrite history. Not one line. Much as one wants to, much as one is desperate to.
But one can always rewrite fantasy. One can always rewrite Doctor Who. One must. It demands it, demands endless action, endless mercurial play. It is enough to say this of Logopolis: it could have been the end, but the moment was prepared for.
2.
This near to the pinnacle of all things it is difficult to pin down specifics. A musky greyness is all there is. Neither thing nor absence, there is no purity here. At nearly the most refined point in the cosmos, scraping against eternity itself, we have passed knowledge, passed understanding. Now there is only Wisdom, the capacity to take a step, to act, to do something. In the beginning, and thus in the end, is the word.
The Doctor, in the entire story, takes three actions that matter at all – he lands his TARDIS atop another Police Box that turns out to have been a trap, he lands it within a city of words, and he sends a CVE out into Cassiopeia. All three are the same action – the positioning of an emboitment at a crucial moment. This, in the end, defines the Doctor’s actions. If the TARDIS chooses the moment, which as we later learn, she does, it is still the Doctor who injects her into them, who actually puts the box into place. 
We are returning to first principles here, but this is inevitable.
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You Were Expecting Someone Else 8 (Alan Moore’s Doctor Who Work)

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Let us first stipulate that there is relatively little reason to care about these particular comics on their merits in either Alan Moore’s ouvre or the Doctor Who canon. Bits of them – particularly “Black Death,” may have credible cases for placing in any given top ten list of Doctor Who comics, but they’re not self-evidently the best Doctor Who comics ever or anything, as one might hope from the combination of Alan Moore and Doctor Who.

On the other hand, there’s something fundamentally irresistible here. I mean, obviously there is – I wouldn’t do a post like this if there weren’t. But I’m also hardly the only one. Russell T. Davies himself namechecks Alan Moore’s Deathsmiths of Goth in a text piece published about the Time War. Miles and Wood argue that it was Moore’s take on Time Lord history in “Star Death” that shifted the consensus view of the relationship between Rassilon and Omega. And more generally speaking, starting from 1987 and continuing to the present day, Alan Moore has been a massive influence on the show whether directly or indirectly. (For the purposes of this statement remember that Neil Gaiman is in many ways the quasi-authorized successor to Alan Moore) Much like Douglas Adams before him and Neil Gaiman after him, Alan Moore carries a massive fanbase that is separate from Doctor Who, and thus the intersections between the two of them carry odd and peculiar resonances.
This doesn’t change the fact, however, that we are talking about a mere 28 pages of comics here, all drawn with David Lloyd, later to be Moore’s artist on V For Vendetta. His first two stories consist of four two-page installments, and then he did a set of three interconnected one-parters at four pages each. That is it. We are necessarily not talking about a huge contribution to Doctor Who here. Furthermore, all of these were published in 1980 and 1981. These predate anything that it would be fair to call a major work of Moore’s. This is Alan Moore, in other words, before he was even one of the very goods, little yet before he was one of the greats. 
It shows, most particularly in his second offering, “Business as Usual.” He’s reliant on clunky and awkward thought bubbles to convey exposition, for instance, having a character explore an industrial plant and think “This must be the warehouse section. It seems to be full of kids’ toys. I suppose it figures… after all, our reports say that toys are Galaxy Plastic’s main product…” It’s a case of poor mechanics – simply put, Moore isn’t using the medium well enough to get the exposition out organically. The pacing, similarly, is badly flawed. This is one of Moore’s first multi-part stories, and he hasn’t yet figured out how to make each two-page installment a distinct experience. It’s really an eight page story with four cliffhangers as opposed to a story comprised of four two-part installments. 
But although Moore’s mechanics are still clunky at this phase, even in this – by far the weakest of his Doctor Who efforts – there’s quite a bit that’s sharp.
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