Elizabeth Sandifer

Oh no, Jamie! World War I! This is almost as bad as watching The Dominators!

It’s April 19, 1969. Desmond Dekker and the Aces are at number one with “The Israelites,” the first reggae song to hit number one in the UK. One week later The Beatles take number one with “Get Back,” their second to last number one single in the UK. It stays at number one for six weeks. Also in the charts over this time are The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Herman’s Hermits, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, The Isley Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, Tom Jones, and The Fifth Dimension. Of these luminaries, it is of course Tommy Roe who unseats The Beatles with “Dizzy,” before he himself is unseated by “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” the last time The Beatles ever hit number one. This happens the same week that episode nine of The War Games airs, and remains through the rest of Patrick Troughton’s tenure as the Doctor.

While in news of reality, British troops arrive in Northern Ireland to provide support for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Robin Knox-Johnston completes a solo circumnavigation, and Charles de Gaulle steps down. In the US, the first death from AIDS occurs, although it will be years before what happened is understood. Apollo 10 launches. There’s a bit of trivia most people would get wrong – what happened first, the first American death from AIDS or the moon landing? And, to grab a quick bit of intercontinental spirit, John Lennon and Yoko Ono do their Bed-In in Montreal.

But let’s actually take one historical event in this time period and unpack it, because it was truly something special, and forms a vital metaphor for The War Games. In Berkeley California, People’s Park was opened. Those of you with particular love of grammar fascism will note my use of the passive voice there. It is deliberate. It is difficult to call something like People’s Park something that opened. That implies some degree of planning and design. In practice, People’s Park was a plot of land seized by Berkeley University via eminent domain and then abandoned when proper construction stalled. Community members, irritated at this, proposed developing a portion of the plot as a park. And then, in the classic California guerilla theater style that had been out of date since 1967, they occupied the area and developed it into a park.

Then things got amazing. Governor Ronald Reagan, who had run on a platform that included accusing California’s colleges of breeding “communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants,” overrode the University’s promise not to begin developing the property without warning and consulting with the protesters, constructed an 8-foot fence around the unused lot to keep people from planting flowers there. A small riot erupted over this with protesters attempting to re-enter the park. Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s chief of staff and future attorney general, took charge of the response, authorizing police to use whatever means they wanted. Clad in riot gear with their badges obscured to prevent identification, the police stormed in, beating protesters and, in an egregious case, firing shotguns loaded with buckshot far more dangerous and lethal than normally accepted for crowd control.…

Continue Reading

One odd thing about The Space Pirates is that, with Milo Clancy here, Doctor Who has another one of those odd “it invented X many years too early” as it inadvertently creates Firefly in 1969.

It’s March 8th, 1969. Peter Sarstedt is still at number one with “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely),” which I’m just now listening to, because apparently this is some grave flaw in my cultural upbringing. And… ummm… this is one of those you had to be there things, isn’t it? Not that the rest of the charts are any better – Cilla Black, Dean Martin, Engelbert Humperdinck, Glen Campbell… we’re not exactly dealing with pioneering music that advanced the art. I mean, all lovely stuff, and the Bee Gees and Marvin Gaye are nice touches, especially when “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” unseats Sarstedt. It’s almost enough not to notice the UK’s 1969 Eurovision entry in #2, Lulu’s “Boom Bang-a-Bang.” Almost. (And Lulu co-wins that year, I regret to inform you.)

While in real news, Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth. A small dustup in the colony of Anguilla results in British troops being quasi-peacably deployed there, and the TV mast at Emley Moore collapses due to ice buildup. In other countries’ news, former US President Dwight Eisenhower dies, Golda Meir becomes Prime Minister of Israel, and James Earl Ray pleads guilty to the Martin Luther King assassination, which, to give you an idea just how much was going on in 1968, I really missed covering in any detail because I was too busy doing Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in that entry. Oh, and if you want to be technical about it, The Impossible Astronaut takes place between the transmission of episodes 5 and 6 of this story.

So this story. Another entry into the bottom ten of all time – in fact, this is apparently the worst Troughton story ever. It has a seriously bad reputation – largely due to the “one surviving episode” problem we’ve mentioned as afflicting The Underwater Menace. But this lets us segue into something else that’s really important about this story – it’s a missing story.

We’ve evaded talking about this phenomenon at any great length, and now we’re at the last missing episodes of Doctor Who (although some colorization gaps exist in the Pertwee era, everything from that era exists in some form), so I suppose we’d better. The idea of missing stories is a strange one to people. Inevitably a new fan of Doctor Who, high on the fumes of Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, will declare that they want to watch the whole classic series, and one of us old-timers will have to gently explain to a baffled 21st century television viewer that, actually, you can’t do that. This is very strange to them. And understandably – as Miles and Wood point out, it’s difficult to imagine 15% of Buffy the Vampire Slayer simply not existing in any form.

Historically, what happened basically comes down to “The BBC didn’t make preservation a priority.”…

Continue Reading

The Doctor after an encounter with the Seeds of Death. There is no innuendo about this, right?

It’s January 25, 1969. Marmalade are still at number one with Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, but after one week are overtaken by Fleetwood Mac, who are here seen in their early stage, i.e. not the one anyone recognizes as Fleetwood Mac, in that Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks were not yet in the band. From there it’s The Move with Blackberry Way, a bleak and dour song from a band previously known for cheery psychedelia. Welcome to 1969. From there it’s two weeks of Amen Corner’s (If Paradise Is) Half as Nice, then, for the last week of this story, Peter Sarstedt’s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely),” which is apparently a big deal, but I confess I’ve never heard of the song.

In other news, Ian Paisley is arrested for political demonstrations in Ireland and jailed for three months, one of the more radical moments in his long political career, there’s some vandalism of art at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yasser Arafat is elected leader of the PLO, and, ironically, St. Valentine is stricken from the Roman calendar of saints on Valentine’s Day. But perhaps most importantly, The Beatles give their last public performance, an impromptu rooftop concert broken up by the police.

The elegiac feel of this concert mirrors an elegiac feel to The Seeds of Death that has been remarked upon by more than one commentator. This makes sense – especially through the lens of history. This is the last time Troughton appeared in what was by and large his archetypal mode of story – the base under siege. It was the last time Troughton met one of the big monsters. And Troughton’s departure was announced during this story’s filming. The sense of an era coming to an end is unavoidable.

But there’s more that’s elegiac than that. The most elegiac aspect, in fact, seems audacious for the time: space travel is portrayed as an outdated and abandoned technology. Miles and Wood, quite cleverly, relate this to the common news story of the day of train lines running their last service. This is the central cleverness of The Seeds of Death – it takes the hottest and most advanced form of transportation technology of 1969 and treats it like the one that’s going obsolete.

From our post-space vantage, this seems oddly prescient. Even if space rockets were rendered obsolete not by teleporters but by, essentially, their own lack of relevance, the image of an old man in a museum full of rockets mourning the abandonment of space is a crushingly familiar one in 2011 as the US prepares to abandon the Space Shuttle program with no clear plan for a replacement emerging. (Yes, a replacement program exists, but nobody would be so absurd as to call it a certainty that it will ever happen.)

I suspect in many ways that my generation is the last one to really feel this.…

Continue Reading

At least this time the monster design successfully hit “iconic,” albeit more like a car hitting a pedestrian than like an arrow hitting its target.

It’s December 28, 1968. The Scaffold still have number one with “Lilly the Pink,” with The Foundations in number two with “Build Me Up Buttercup.” Just that kind of week, I suppose. A week later Marmalade, the first Scottish group ever to hit #1, does so with a cover of the Beatles “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da.” They proceed to trade back and forth with The Scaffold for the rest of the story.

Out of the charts, the first photos of the far side of the moon are taken by Apollo 8, Rupert Murdoch makes his entry into the British press by buying News of the World, The Troubles get more troublesome, and the Waverly Line is abandoned for good. So really, not a great month for Britain, with continued echoes of 1968 richoeting through the culture. Though again, as awful as Rupert Murdoch is, it’s tough, in historical terms, to view his entry into the British press as anything other than a pale echo of Richard Nixon’s re-entry into American politics. As I’ve said previously, Britain had a pretty good 1968 as 1968s go.

So The Krotons, then. This story has an odd reputation not helped by the fact that it was the Patrick Troughton story picked for the 1981 Five Faces of Doctor Who string of reruns. The importance of these reruns can’t be overstated – in 1981, a whole generation of Doctor Who fans existed who had either never seen Troughton or only seen him in The Three Doctors. Not that they were unaware of Troughton – the existence of the Target novelizations and a genuine working memory of the show ensured that. But there were simply no opportunities for people to see him. The thing is, The Krotons is not what people expected. A story that would have left most viewers saying “the whats?”, it was picked, if we’re being honest, because in 1981 it was the only four-part Troughton story that existed.

So the initial reaction to this one – and we’ve discussed enough times how initial reactions from the 80s and 90s colored fan reaction for decades to come – was puzzlement, and, predictably, that has endured with the general reaction to the Krotons still being puzzlement in 2011. Miles and Wood suggest that the root problem is that it doesn’t quite fit with anyone’s memory of what the Troughton era should be. If we’re being honest, what this means is that it’s not a base under siege. But having endured the classic “monster” season and found it somewhat wanting, one struggles to, watching it in sequence, get particularly upset about the fact that it’s not the bog-standard monster runaround everyone expects a Troughton story to be.

In truth, nobody would think this a strange season four story, and if it were a missing story its reputation would probably be right around that of The Savages, The Faceless Ones, or The Macra Terror.…

Continue Reading

The Doctor and Tobias Vaughan make their way through imagined streets.

It’s November 2, 1968. Mary Hopkin is at number one with “Those Were The Days,” with Joe Cocker in number two. He overtakes her one week later, and is in turn overtaken by the theme to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. It lasts until the last two weeks of this story, at which point “Lily the Pink” by The Scaffold, a comedy band featuring Paul McCartney’s brother, takes over. Elsewhere in the top ten over these eight weeks one can find Jose Felicano’s cover of “Light My Fire” and Hendrix’s version of “All Along The Watchtower.” Elsewhere in music, Elvis makes his comeback and the Beatles release the White Album.

In other news, Richard Nixon is elected President of the United States, bringing, in effect, all hope the left might have ever had over the 1960s to a crashing end, as we talked about last Friday. In more subtle news, Douglas Engelbert demos the NLS, or oN-Line System, in an event called the “mother of all demos.” Although at the time known only to a small core of technical users, this is one of the most important events in the history of computers, and the technology Engelbert shows off here ends up being the basic underpinning of the modern desktop computer. Among the concepts debuting here are the mouse and the idea of “windows” within a computer system, and the first major debut of word processing on the computer.

While on television we have The Invasion. Essentially a backdoor pilot for the Pertwee era of Doctor Who, this story exists primarily to try out a new format whereby the Doctor is the assistant of a military organization called UNIT who battles alien threats on Earth. Here, to kick things off in a big way, the Doctor reteams with Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart from The Web of Fear – now given his more famous rank of Brigadier-General – to fight the Cybermen in London.

This is not, of course, the first time that the series has been set in London. In fact, it’s the sixth major instance. First of all, An Unearthly Child opens there. From there contemporary London is avoided until the end of the third season, but futuristic London is attacked by Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. Contemporary London finally gets its day in the sun in The War Machines, where it gets attacked by evil computers. From there we nip off to Gatwick Airport for The Faceless Ones and the start of Evil of the Daleks, before returning to the Underground (and brief aboveground shots) in the aforementioned Web of Fear.

But something is different this time. For the first time in a story set in a more or less contemporary London (the “more or less” aspect of it will be dealt with later), we have a focus on the idea that London – the very home of the program – is under real attack, with the sixth episode culminating in one of the great money shot cliffhangers of Doctor Who as the Cybermen burst from the sewers and storm down the steps of St.…

Continue Reading

You mean I could leave Jamie and Zoe behind and just take you two? As I’ll say in about 37 years, fantastic!

It’s September 14, 1968. In our traditional sign of some sort of restoration of order, The Beatles are at number one with Hey Jude. They are unseated two weeks later by a signing to their own record label, Mary Hopkin, a British folk singer, who holds the number one slot with “Those Were the Days” for the remainder of this story.

In news that doesn’t sing, the Apollo missions get closer and closer to the moon with their first manned launch, Apollo 7. The merger between General Electric Company (no relation to the American company General Electric) and English Electric is the biggest merger in UK history. There’s a lovely revolution in Panama. And, most significantly, in the one major bit of 1968 catastrophe to hit the UK, rioting breaks out following a civil rights march in Derry, leading to the twenty years of tension and terrorism between the UK and Ireland known as The Troubles.

While on television we have, thankfully, the exact story we needed after the grotesque train wreck that was The Dominators. The Mind Robber is a thing of absolute beauty. If The Dominators was the complete breakdown of all heart, soul, and ethics in the series, The Mind Robber is, more even than Power of the Daleks, a story that is about establishing Doctor Who as an unending story.

The basic idea is that following a TARDIS malfunction the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe get caught in the Land of Fiction, a realm in which stories are real. The title, which is admittedly intensely marginal, refers to the Master of the Land of Fiction, who has apparently lured the Doctor here in order to get him to run things in the Land of Fiction.

Much has been made of many of the obvious aspects of this story. The intertextuality, the degree to which this represents Doctor Who acknowledging a longstanding debt to a tradition of British children’s literature, the pleasant and inventive surrealism – all of these are well worn topics that you can see covered in almost any book on the series. Even if you go for criticism from third generation fandom – things like Running Through Corridors or About Time (Those links are UK links. American links are available on the pretty spinny wheel on the right of the site) most of what you get are acknowledgments of how brilliant this story is. And it is absolutely brilliant – a story with more creativity, and more of a sense of joy than anything else in the Troughton era.

So let’s move beyond that, as we try to do here, and try to find two new things to say about The Mind Robber. First, I want to talk about a particular approach to Doctor Who that The Mind Robber is a particularly key moment in. Let’s start by looking at how this story is less of a departure from past stories than one might think.…

Continue Reading