Elizabeth Sandifer

Only Doctor Who would finally give aliens masks where they can have facial expressions, then have them just look tired and busy all the time.

It’s February 24, 1973. The Sweet continue to be at number one with “Blockbuster,” but are unseated after one week by Slade’s “Cum On Feel The Noize,” a more emphatic anthem. It lasts four weeks before Donny Osmond unleashes “The Twelfth of Never.” Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” T. Rex’s “Twentieth Century Boy,” Alice Cooper’s “Hello Hurray,” and the Jackson 5’s, consisting at this point of Jackie, Tito, Michael, Jermaine, and Marlon, cover of Browne’s “Doctor My Eyes” all also chart. Also during the course of this story, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is released.

The day before Pink Floyd’s release, on the other hand, came Thomas Pynchon’s release of Gravity’s Rainbow. Other non-musical events of the six weeks included voters in Northern Ireland voting to remain part of the UK (Irish nationalists supported a boycott of the referendum), while IRA bombs go off in London. The Governor of Bermuda is assassinated by a small Bermudan black nationalist group. The Watergate scandal begins to blossom in the news, while in the UK is the Lofthouse Colliery disaster, a mining accident in which seven coal workers died in West Yorkshire.

On television we have Frontier in Space, the annual Malcolm Hulke Lizard People Extravaganza. As with all of Season Ten, there’s more going on here than in similar stories from past seasons. Which is good. One could be forgiven for thinking that we’ve been here before, after all. The Master manipulating two parties into a conflict for his own benefit. Misunderstandings between humans and lizard people. Pig-headed military figures. I’d link those phrases to the appropriate Hulke stories, but one is spoiled for choice – literally every Hulke story to date has qualified for at least two of that list.

The thing about the Pertwee era is that in a real sense, it builds logically and inexorably towards a peak in Season Ten. To give a sort of map of the era, at least for our purposes here, it spends its first three years working out a bundle of anxieties and contradictions. Then its last two seasons each end up embodying one half of that split, with Season Ten as the brilliant glam monument and Season Eleven basically flopping around like a dead fish. This is a strange split. It’s not that Season Ten is doing something massively different from the seasons on either side of it. Season Nine has its Hulke lizard story. Season Eleven has its Hulke lizard story.

But for some odd, ineffable reason, perhaps down to nothing more than the lingering energy of the madcap singularity that was The Three Doctors, perhaps down to Doctor Who just being in the exact right place to catch a social wave, the show is on fire in 1973. Everything they try comes off, even when (as in the next story), it has no right to.…

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Ah, realism.

It’s January 27th, 1973. The Sweet’s “Blockbuster” has mercifully brought an end to this unfortunate Jimmy Osmond business, and hold number one for four weeks, marking a pleasant restoration of glam rock order. Gary Glitter, Elton John, David Bowie, and ELO all also chart. In non-musical news, Roe v. Wade is decided in the US, the US ends its involvement in Vietnam by signing the Paris Peace Accords, while in the UK the Sunday Times wins a court case allowing it to publish articles on thalidomide, as it was increasingly turning out that people should probably have figured out that in addition to reducing nausea in pregnant women it also caused them to give birth to deformed flipper babies. Oops.

While on television we have Carnival of Monsters. It ought go without saying that Carnival of Monsters is the best Pertwee story to date, probably the best period, and flat-out one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. And yet somehow it does not go without saying. In fact, on the big Doctor Who Magazine poll, Carnival of Monsters inexplicably finishes behind Inferno, The Daemons, The Silurians and The Sea Devils – and those are just the stories it’s completely bewildering why anyone would prefer to this, as opposed to the ones where I can at least squint and pretend that there’s some logic to.

The thing is, if you ask non-fans, it’s clear this story’s reputation is right where it should be. It’s not a coincidence that this is the one used for the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat, was among the earlier DVD releases, and has generally acquired a reputation as the goto Pertwee story for the general public. Which makes this a case of that classic problem where Doctor Who fans occasionally know far less about Doctor Who than anyone else.

It’s worth taking a step backwards here and looking at season ten as a whole. Like all the Pertwee seasons, it consists of five stories. Unlike any of the other Pertwee seasons, fully four of these are “event” stories – that is, stories in which a character recycled from an earlier story appears or stories in which a major character debuts or departs. The only other Pertwee season to have anything like this sort of pure focus on event stories is Season 8, and that’s only true if you want to overlook the fact that the Master wasn’t an “event” yet.

More broadly, the Pertwee era is actually strangely short on primarily self-contained stories. If we take a broad view and count stories that are “events” for historical reasons – things like The Silurians or The Time Warrior – Pertwee ends up with only four stories in his entire tenure that are definitively not event stories: The Ambassadors of Death, Inferno, The Mutants, and this. And save Inferno, that list consists of stories I’ve claimed are underrated.

The non-event status of Carnival of Monsters, however, is more than just a reason why it’s oddly overlooked by fans.…

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Omega

It’s 1807. Major hit songs of the year include Ludwig van Beethoven’s Mass in C, the ballet Hélène and Paris, the operas Joseph and La Vestale, and Thomas Moore’s publication of Irish Melodies. While in non-musical news, Napoleon makes an attack on Russia, Aaron Burr is acquitted of conspiracy, the England/Argentina soccer rivalry has pre-season friendly as Britain mounts a disastrous attack on Buenos Aires, and Robert Fulton launches his first American steamboat.

While in London, William Blake abandons his masterpiece, The Four Zoas. Intended as the culmination to a lengthy series of what are now described as his “mythological works,” the piece was never finished to Blake’s satisfaction, although parts of it were recycled into Jerusalem, one of his two last great mythological pieces (the other being Milton, A Poem, whose introduction gave the words to “And did those feet in ancient times, arguably now England’s most popular hymn and unofficial national anthem).

Fingers stained with ink and the caustic acids of his relief etchings, Blake stares with an unfathomable eye at angels, gods, and demons. A visionary in every sense of the word, he sees within the festering wounds of industry the promise of salvation, sees the fall of man in a pastoral landscape. From within one meager corner of this unbound and incommensurable vision we see Nebuchadnezzar, bestial king of Babylon cast down into insanity for his hubris. The mad king speaks:

Without me, there would be no time travel. You and our fellow Time Lords would still be locked in your own time, as puny as those creatures you now so graciously protect. Many thousands of years ago, when I left our planet, all this was then a star until I arranged its detonation. It was an honour, or so I thought then. I was to be the one to find and create the power source that would give us mastery over time itself. I was sacrificed to that supernova. I generated those forces, and for what? To be blown out of existence into this black hole of antimatter? My brothers became Time Lords, but I was abandoned and forgotten!

And in his universe of antimatter, dark Urizen prepares. A lost shard of holy Albion, fallen and abject, Urizen spins law, gives shape and form to the universe. A solar engineer, Urizen collapses a sun into a cosmological abscess, a crack in the skin of the world. He does not create law so much as extrude it from his being, forming his net of continuity and myth purely by being. His gravity is inescapable. Here begins the long history of Rassilon and the Other, of secret centuries-old plots to destroy Skaro and looms. Here is the line between question and answer, between mystery and revelation.

He is called a fallen Time Lord, but this is wrong, implying a unity of Time Lords prior to his fall. Rather it is his fall, the schism of some primordial entity, that creates these categories in the first place. Time Lords and Urizen are both fragmentations of some greater being – each the emanation of the other.…

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Honestly, I was browsing Google Image results for “Time Monster,” and this was the best thing I found. And hey, who wouldn’t rather look at Cookie Monster than Kronos? I mean, seriously.

It’s May 20, 1972. T. Rex is back on top with “Metal Guru,” which, continuing our rule that glam songs should be seen as well as heard, is linked. It holds number one for four weeks before finally yielding to Don McLean’s “Vincent,” Elton John, Johnny Cash, David Cassidy, The Rolling Stones, and Wings also chart. But perhaps the most remarkable moment, chart-wise, is the final week of this story, where T. Rex, Slade, The Move, Sweet, and Gary Glitter are all in the top ten. This period, with David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars entering the charts (with its lead single, “Starman,” entering the singles chart at 49 the same week that five glam acts are in the top ten). In fact, if you want an experience that is aesthetically indistinguishable from The Time Monster, has far better acting, and is completable in less than 1/6 the time, I recommend just marathoning all five of those videos linked above.

While in the news, Nixon becomes the first US President since World War II to visit Russia in a meeting in which the Apollo/Soyuz mission is agreed upon. While he’s out, the first Watergate break-ins happen, and the first Ford Pinto explosion happens, beginning one of the most horrifying episodes in the history of corporate capitalism as it eventually becomes clear that Ford knew full well that the car was dangerous, but determined that the cost of settling lawsuits from exploded drivers and their families was lower than the cost of performing a recall. Then, in the tail end of the story, comes the big Watergate break-in, as Nixon campaign operatives are arrested following a botched attempt to bug the offices of the DNC. Nixon quickly moves to squash the FBI investigation of the break-in, a move that will bring down his Presidency when it’s uncovered.  In Europe, Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction is arrested (and I was just talking about them with a friend before I sat down to write this), with Ulrike Meinhoff following two weeks later. British European Airways Flight 548 crashes into Staines shortly after takeoff in the worst airplane crash in british history until Lockerbie.

While on television, we have something we haven’t seen in a while. I mean, we’ve had bad stories before, but the last few times we’ve had an unmitigated disaster of a story it’s been because the entire thing was misconceived – it was a story that should never have been attempted done badly. That’s harder to say of The Time Monster, where the basic ideas seem remarkably solid but the actual execution is an absurd train wreck. The last time we’ve really seen something like this, where a solid idea on paper just goes terribly wrong, is probably actually The Chase.…

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“But I stiiiillll haven’t fooouuund what I’m looking for…”

It’s April 8, 1972. Nilsson is still at number one. After one week, however, they are stunningly unseated by, and this is one of those moments where I love following the British charts, Pipes and Drums and the Military Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard, with “Amazing Grace,” which further impresses by staying there for five weeks. Also in the charts are Lindisfarne, Ringo Starr, Tom Jones, Neil Young, and T. Rex.

The IRA sets off a wave of fourteen bombs in Belfast in response to the Bloody Sunday Massacre. In a show of all being friends now, China gifts two giant pandas to the National Zoo. (Some time later, in my sister’s favorite story about her traumatic childhood, my mother has her walk across a frozen expanse of Washington DC in February, promising her pandas as the incentive for her not to have a nervous breakdown, only for everyone to discover, upon reaching the zoo, that the pandas have been dead for some time and instead there’s a memorial full of children’s drawings and poems about how much they miss the pandas. This was over a decade ago, and she still complains bitterly.) More of Pruitt-Igoe gets blown up, the Paris Peace Talks to try to end the Vietnam War derail spectacularly, and Nixon announces that the US will be mining North Vietnam’s harbors. And J. Edgar Hoover finally displays an ounce of taste and dies.

And oh, hey, we finally got through those bits in two paragraphs again. That hasn’t happened in a while. So in any case, on television it’s The Mutants, the second outing by the madmen behind The Claws of Axos and, for my money, the best Pertwee story since The Ambassadors of Death. Which, puzzlingly, does not seem to be what you’d call the consensus view of this one. So I guess we know what we’re doing with this entry.

The thing about Baker and Martin is that, more than any other Pertwee-era writers, they are a pile of strange tics. Going into one of their stories it is necessary to simply accept that the characters are going to be intensely programmatic, the narrative aimed primarily at spectacle, and that the whole thing is going to be completely gonzo. But it’s not as though any of these things on their own are unique to Baker and Martin. The programmatic character was invented by Robert Holmes, nobody out-gonzos a Robert Sloman script (Or The Curse of Peladon for that matter), and those inclined to complain about a spectacle-based script should probably take a long, hard look at exactly what all those shots of impressive ships cutting through the ocean are doing in The Sea Devils. Rather, it’s that Baker and Martin have shown more willingness than almost anyone save perhaps the Sloman/Letts team to push all of these to their max. But unlike the Sloman/Letts team, who contributed four of the great Curate’s Eggs of Doctor Who history, Baker and Martin offer a sort of ruthless consistency to their stories.…

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You have to understand, Doctor, we need your fashion sense to survive. As bad as velvet jackets are, my people think chopped up fishing nets are acceptable evening wear.

It’s February 26, 1972. Chicory Tip are still at number one. Two weeks later, it’s Nilsson with “Without You,” which holds the title for the remainder of the story. Michael Jackson, T. Rex, Paul Simon, Slade, and, I am sorry to say given that I loathe and despise them with every fiber of my being, Chelsea FC also chart.

In other news, Nixon concludes his visit to China. He follows this by attempting to get John Lennon to conclude his visit to the United States, using the somewhat novel method of deporting him as a “strategic counter-measure” to his anti-war beliefs. (The phrase is not Nixon’s but Strom Thurmond’s. Not that that’s an improvement.) Two days thereafter, he passes an executive order setting standards for classified information, allowing the US to engage in a thirty-year campaign to cover up the FBI surveillance of John Lennon. Also in the US, demolition begins on the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex, a disastrous public housing project that was a marvel of architecture, and a travesty of virtually everything else including “remembering to think about the tenants when doing architecture.” (We will on several occasions find ourselves dealing the UK equivalents of this particular farce.)

While in the country I’m actually supposed to be writing about, Edward Heath renounces the use of the “five techniques,” a set of approaches used widely by the UK in Northern Ireland for what I believe the current euphemism declares “enhanced interrogation,” but those of us not seeking to excuse our own monstrosity just call torture. He follows this by proclaiming direct rule over Northern Ireland, dissolving the Northern Ireland Parliament and administering the country from London.

While on television we have The Sea Devils. On the surface, this is as straightforward a piece as we could have. Vintage action-style Pertwee (which to be fair we haven’t really seen since The Mind of Evil) and a flat-out attempt to remake The Silurians with the Master and some impressive naval footage. Malcolm Hulke stuck on a script that in no way flatters his strengths. A blog post in which I find some bright spots to emphasize in amidst the general sense that there’s just something crushingly lackluster about this approach to Doctor Who when compared to the manic inventiveness of the glam style. Wrap it all up in under 2000 words, call it a short one, and clear some time tonight for watching Misfits or something instead of finishing up the post. God bless the easy ones.

Except that the convergences of circumstance and the fact that the show is moving successfully away from the season seven mould (which, while fascinating, was at its best when Whitaker and Hulke tried to break it) and toward a new mould mean that, under the patois of earthbound-by-numbers storytelling there’s some scattered points that are worth remarking on.…

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It’s really the fact that the cape vaguely resembles a condom that makes it.

It’s January 29th, 1972. The New Seekers, with no trace of irony whatsoever, would like to teach the world to sing, and are going to have to insist that the harmonies be perfect. T. Rex mercifully puts this out of its misery quickly with “Telegram Sam,” which, as with most glam acts, really needs to be seen as well as heard. This spares us for two weeks before Chicory Tip have their one hit with “Son of My Father,” a song that comes far closer to capturing some of the basic themes of this entry than it has any right to. America (with “Horse with No Name,” of course), Cat Stevens, Melanie (with “Brand New Key”), Sonny and Cher, and Don McLean (with “American Pie”) all also exist in the top ten.

While in news without power chords, the famed Bloody Sunday massacre of U2 (and absolutely brilliant Saul Williams cover) fame takes place as the British army opens fire on unarmed civil rights protesters in Northern Ireland. So OK, still power chords, but given that since I wrote the Day of the Daleks entry nearly a week ago, I should perhaps briefly talk about something I didn’t talk about there. See, I’m writing entries in six-entry chunks over the course of a week, then taking a week off for other projects these days – so this was written on 8/9/11, and I’ll be writing up through the entry for Monday the 22nd over the next five days. But had I written the Day of the Daleks entry yesterday, I’d have mentioned the dystopian urban jungles of Day of the Daleks and their eerie parallels to the photos of a burnt out and looted London. (Although what I would have said would largely involve the fact that the wasteland was all overgrown parking garages and things – a return to nature, not a nightmarish terror of rubble, and how there’s been a shift since 1972 in what we imagine society’s collapse will look like.)

But one of the things that really is worth stressing is that Northern Ireland is part of the UK. So when I say that the British army shot and killed fourteen unarmed protesters, what needs to be stressed is that this is a military deployment inside the UK shooting its own citizens. Reports exist of soldiers prior to the massacre actively declaring that “we want some kills” going into the day, and the overwhelming reports from anyone other than the military itself is that those shot were unarmed and fleeing for their lives. It is, in short, a dark and genuinely horrific atrocity. So when, in a few paragraphs, we get to talking about a sci-fi show with an accidental giant green penis alien, remember the context is that this story is going out in times of egregious, serious unrest in the country. Perhaps flip back and forth between this blog and The Guardian’s coverage of the riots every few paragraphs to get the proper impact.…

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