Eruditorum Press

Post-Geek

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:

An Unknown Power (The Power of the Daleks)

10

Of the many things to love about Daleks, the
way their eyestalks wilt when they lose
power is perhaps the smuttiest.

It’s November 5, 1966. The Four Tops are at number one with “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” In two weeks, The Beach Boys will take it with “Good Vibrations,” and two weeks later it’ll be Tom Jones with “Green Green Grass of Home.” Meanwhile, in the news, the Rhodesia situation goes worse and worse, John Lennon meets Yoko Ono, and Barbados declares independence from the UK.

While on television…

Sometimes Doctor Who is magical. I mean this on several levels, but one of them – and a significant one – is that the show is a clear formative influence on the sci-fi/fantasy culture that will eventually produce writers like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. As with many things about the future, we’ll get there in time. For now, the only thing you really need to know is that it’s hardly unusual for the show to have something of a spiritual dimension.

I mention this because, as The Power of the Daleks spins up, it’s essential to understanding the only thing that’s on anybody’s mind – what the heck just happened to the Doctor. Again, this is something it’s easy to forget in hindsight. We’ve had eight further post-regeneration stories now. We know how these work. But The Power of the Daleks isn’t written for us. It’s written for an audience with no idea what is going on. And it’s establishing all of this for the first time, which means there are no precedents for this. This isn’t “a regeneration story.” It’s the regeneration story – the story about what happens when the Doctor changes who he is.

It’s tough to say what does happen, though. Minimalist exposition and the fact that we’re on the joint longest stretch of missing episodes in the series conspire to make this a maddening thing to piece together. So let’s go to the behind the scenes and look at what the people making this thought was going on. For me, the choice quote from Gerry Davis and Innes Lloyd’s notes on what they call a “metaphysical change” is this: “It is as if he has had the LSD drug and instead of experiencing the kicks, he has the hell and dank horror which can be its effect.”

What does this mean? I probably should have tossed Timothy Leary in back when we did our roundup of 1966 counterculture. But suffice it to say that talking about LSD and metaphysical changes ties right in with the existing discussions of spiritual journeys that we’ve already had. But what, specifically, does LSD evoke? Well, let’s crack open our Timothy Leary – specifically The Psychedelic Experience – and look at his incantations to be used in case of massive acid trip:

That which is called ego-death is coming to you. Remember: this is now the hour of death and rebirth; take advantage of this temporary death to obtain the perfect state – Enlightenment. 

…

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Pop Between Realities, Home In Time For Tea 4 (Adam Adamant Lives!, Batman, The Avengers)

, 16

Fun Fact #1 – Burt Ward, while playing Robin, frequently
had to be given emasculating injections to keep
his tights from being overly revealing.
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. This time we look at the British series Adam Adamant Lives! and The Avengers, as well as the American series Batman.



Occasionally cultural history throws up a juxtaposition that is so brain-breakingly weird that it perfectly encapsulates an entire moment of history. For instance, nothing has ever clarified the nature and tone of Japanese narrative structures for me quite like knowing that My Neighbor Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies were originally released as a double feature. (Though I have yet to find a definitive statement on which film came first, which seems to me to be just about the most crucial fact in human history.)

I mention this because if you want to understand 1966 in Great Britain, it is possible that no fact is more immediately relevant than the fact that on Saturdays in 1966, at around 5:15 PM, the latter episodes of Season 3 of Doctor Who were airing opposite imports of Batman, the 1966 television series starring Adam West. If this fact does not sufficiently unsettle you, I highly recommend firing up, say, The Celestial Toymaker Part 4 or a random bit of The Ark and watching it back to back with a Season 1 episode of Batman.

What is most unsettling about this is the fact that with only three channels in existence at the time, that meant that ITV viewed Batman as the natural competitor to Doctor Who in that media environment. Because other than being adventure stories (and thus, it is worth remarking, “for boys” in a way that it never was before the dual roles of Barbara and the young female companion were collapsed into one female companion role, thus changing the show from being about a bunch of people in terrifying circumstances to being about a bunch of boys and their girl sidekick in terrifying adventures) there’s not a lot of obvious similarities.

Up to this point, one of the major characteristics of Doctor Who has been the essential joke of the TARDIS crew being completely the wrong people for this sort of story. In its original form, this is clearest – two schoolteachers, a teenager, and an old Victorian inventor walk into an alien planet. Even when the companions were Vicki and Steven – two capable future types who have something resembling a valid reason to be traipsing about Galaxy Four – there was still the Doctor, who was by and large the antithesis of a correct action hero. The whole concept still hinged on the incongruity of the old Victorian inventor and these harshly modern (and increasingly postmodern) settings.

So where we’ve left the TARDIS crew off, that’s still basically where we are. There’s nothing too unusual about Ben and Polly as action heroes – unlike Ian (essentially a middle aged ex-soldier) and Barbara (the charmingly mumsy type), attractive young people are never out of place having exciting adventures.…

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A Chrysalis Case After Its Spread Its Wings (The Tenth Planet)

16

A horrible, otherworldly monster that’s nothing more than
a grotesque parody of humanity confronts a Cyberman.

It’s October 8, 1966. Jim Reeves is posthumously at number one with Distant Drums. The Rolling Stones, The Supremes, The Who, Dusty Springfield, and The Troggs are all charting. Distant Drums will hold #1 for three weeks, before The Four Tops take it. In the news, we have our standard smattering of 60s misfortune with a side of a massive coal disaster that kills 144 people, mostly children, in the Welsh village of Aberfan, and the infamous escape of George Blake, a British spy and double agent for Russia, from prison in London.

But let’s be honest, it’s hard to approach this one from that direction. Which is a pity. There are stories fandom has done some mean things to over the years, but few we’ve been as brutal to as this one. Ask a reasonably dedicated fan, and there are two things to know about this story – it’s the first regeneration story, and the first Cybermen story. And that basically defines it. The trouble is, it’s neither.

It’s certainly not the first regeneration story. Wood and Miles make a compelling case for this, including their observation, much ignored by the rest of fandom, that for years Doctor Who Magazine didn’t even count this story as a regeneration, instead saying it was a “rejuvenation,” and thus a completely different thing from what happens in, say, Planet of the Spiders. Even if you do take the modern viewpoint that what happens at the end of this story is the same thing that happens at the end of Parting of the Ways, though, the fact of the matter is, treating this as the first regeneration story reads it the wrong way. Calling it a regeneration story treats the ending as a defined, known thing. We get to read the story in the context of the other seven regeneration stories (Yes, there’s one I’m not counting, and we’ll deal with it when we get there), and get to define it via a raft of stuff that came later.

The same problem exists with calling it the first Cybermen story. Never mind that the Cybermen never look or act like this again. The real problem is that this means that when they show up, the audience reaction is “Oh, it’s the Cybermen.” Which is a fine reaction, but it’s manifestly not the reaction the story is going for. The Cybermen in this story are not the classic monsters who are returning for another round. They’re the bizarre new villains who are making their first appearance.

It is admittedly a challenge to scrape off the forty-five years of reputation that have been built on this story. The problem is, at this point the reputation is spoiling our view. Read from the future, we see all sorts of cracks. The Cybermen look like men in lycra. The regeneration is unexplained and doesn’t seem a natural extension of what went before, meaning Hartnell gets a kind of feeble sendoff.…

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These Books Are From Your Future (The Smugglers)

8

It’s September 10, 1966. The Beatles are at number one again with the double-single of Yellow Submarine and Eleanor Rigby. Also in the top ten are the Troggs, the Beach Boys, and Napoleon XIV.  Over the course of the next four weeks we’ll also see The Small Faces take #1 with “All or Nothing,” Jim Reeves will take it with “Distant Drums,” and Roy Orbison, The Seekers, Sonny and Cher, The Supremes, The Who, and Manfred Mann will also pop around the top 10. Not on the Top 10 but still enormously important, since we last saw Doctor Who, The Doors released their debut album. Also, the first episode of some American sci-fi show called Star Trek aired, which is surely just some cheap Doctor Who knockoff or something that we can safely ignore. And over in reality, while we were sleeping the Cultural Revolution began in China.

Meanwhile, Doctor Who has returned for its fourth season with The Smugglers, filmed, as with Galaxy 4 and Planet of Giants before it, at the end of the previous production block, and thus in many ways the last story of Season 3 more than it is the first story of Season 4 – especially given the degree to which the next story represents, shall we say, a decisive break from what has come before.

As a result, it is possible that The Smugglers is actually the most undisputed story in Doctor Who history. Not undisputedly anything in particular – simply undisputed in a broad sense. Neither loved nor hated by much of anyone, this may simply be the Doctor Who story about which people care the least. It’s not terribly hard to see why – it’s a completely missing story (Season 4, in fact, is the only season of the show with no complete stories at all), a historical (never a recipe for widespread acclaim), and was novelized all the way out in 1988. And on top of that, it’s a story that just misses the milestones over and over again. It’s the second to last Hartnell story, the second to last historical, the second story featuring Ben and Polly… Just about the only thing it has going for it in terms of major milestones, actually, are that it is the first historical since The Aztecs to feature no major historical figures, and that it is the first completely missing story to be novelized by Terrance Dicks.

Which, actually, is enough to make it absolutely crucial, at least in terms of how we’re experiencing the story. Yes, it was a painfully late novelization, long after Terrance Dicks had passed his peak in terms of the novelizations. (In fact, it’s his third-from-last novelization) But that’s beside the point. Yes, there are other good novelizations from earlier in the series, including Ian Marter’s novelizations. But somehow it seems unthinkable to introduce the Target novelizations properly with anyone but Terrance Dicks.

A younger fan, or one more used to other science fiction shows, might reasonably ask why the novelizations are so important.…

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Goodbye. My Sarah Jane. (Lis Sladen)

6

I shouldn’t be writing this. Today’s supposed to be a day I update Nintendo Project. It’s that blog Tuesday and Thursday, this one Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That’s how it works. But I’m staring at a half-written entry there – about monsters, no less – and all I can think about is this. And this is my blog, and I’ll cry if I want to. I shouldn’t be writing this. I shouldn’t have to be writing this. I mean, really? 

As if Sarah Jane Smith could ever die.

I have the thing pretty plotted out, you know. I mean, there’s a lot of episodes I haven’t seen in a long time and things I know I’ll discover. But on the other hand, I know my Doctor Who well enough to know some of the major beats and points. I know what’s going to be in some of the entries. There are parts I could write right now, today, without rewatching the episodes. One thing that will eventually happen with the blog, as you can probably imagine, is that as the show develops, multiple senses of what it is are going to come into play. And eventually, one of those senses…

Well, let me show you. Let me just quickly write one of the bits I know how goes. This is going to be the start of the entry on Planet of Spiders:

It’s mid-September, 1992. The Shamen are at number one with “Ebeneezer Goode.” At least, in the UK. In the US, somewhat less fortunately, “End of the Road” by Boyz II Men is at number one. As it was for three months that year. Perhaps more importantly, at least for our purposes, in a small town in Western Connecticut, a newly minted ten year old flips through a book he just got from a family friend a week or so after his birthday. By a man he’s never heard of called John Nathan-Turner, about a television show he’s vaguely heard of called Doctor Who, the book is called The Companions. After the friend leaves, and it is no longer rude to do so, he asks his mother what this Doctor Who thing is. She looks around in a drawer, and hands him a VHS tape, which he goes to the basement to watch. The Delia Derbyshire theme, familiar to so many people, plays, and something called Planet of Spiders comes on. And so, in the wrong country, in the wrong decade, but every inch at the right time, I became a Doctor Who fan.

And I figured that, a few months after that, in one of those standard wrap-up entries where we say goodbye to a regular, I’d get to talk about all of this. That at that point, when one of the things the blog is about is my experiences of Doctor Who, and how one of the things it is – not the most important at all, but one of them, is how it is the story of one little boy growing up and realizing who it was he wanted to be.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else III (Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD)

, 9

Note how the Doctor is mentioned prominently in the
advertising this time.

You Were Expecting Someone Else is a recurring feature covering non-televised Doctor Who from classic eras, generally more or less in the period where they came out. Today we look at the 1966 film Daleks – Invasion Earth: 2150 AD, starring Peter Cushing as Doctor Who, Roberta Tovey as Susan Who, and Bernard Cribbins as Not-Ian-Chesterton.
It’s August 5, 1966. The Troggs are at #1 with “With A Girl Like You,” a nice, proper, crunchy record. The rest of the top ten, however, is mostly pretty unambitious pop, with The Kinks chillaxing at #9. Since we last saw Doctor Who, the news has been a standard mixture of war, mass murder, military coup, and the like. Beyond that, as mentioned last entry, England won the World Cup. Also, The House of Lords issued the Practice Statement a somewhat important milestone in political liberalism in the UK in that it freed the House of Lords up to be more progressive, and August 3rd, 1966 happened, which is interesting only if you’re a Simon and Garfunkel fan. Also, Revolver came out. And, as it’s the summer break in Doctor Who, it’s time for another Dalek film!
It’s strange how different a position this film is in compared to the last one. I mean, first of all, this film flopped and killed plans for a third one (which would have been an adaptation of The Chase, a prospect that is mind-bogglingly weird). Second of all, the show is in a very different place. At the end of season 2, the show was as strong as it had ever been, coming off an inventive season of hits. At the end of season 3, the ratings were in the toilet, the star was being fired, and there was an increasing consensus that the TARDIS had landed everywhere worth landing. As a result, the last movie was in a position to remind us how wonderful Doctor Who could be, and show us things bigger and grander than before. And it basically did that.
But what, exactly, is this film for? Most obviously, it seems to be an occasion for Doctor Who to make a case for its continued relevance – to say “This is what the show can do.” It’s taking a season 2 episode – i.e. from the program’s heyday – and doing it bigger and better. And ironically, given that it failed at the box office, the film is frankly a rousing success in that department. 
I suppose we should deal with the film’s flop status. Why did it flop? The argument that Doctor Who was also flopping at that time is certainly compelling, but it’s worth noting that the film was not advertised as a Doctor Who film, it was advertised as a Dalek film. Admittedly the two were not entirely distinct in people’s minds, and the Dalek craze was past its immediate prime, but Doctor Who’s decline has been compellingly argued to mostly be down to the fact that ITV was aggressively counter-programming it with the Adam West Batman series, not due to actual problems with the snow. No,
…

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Pop Between Realities, Home In Time For Tea 3 (International Times, Oz, Kenneth Grant, FIFA World Cup)

, 3

 Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. This time, we engage in the frankly insane task of looking at 1960s counterculture, extremist occultism, and the FIFA World Cup.

There is a 60s that we all know originated in San Francisco, and through the haze of marijuana we can still just about make out that there was some sort of revolution lurking underneath that tie-dye. Some aspects – sexual freedom, the de facto legalization of marijuana (which is, let’s face it, not so much illegal to smoke as it is illegal to be caught smoking, with virtually no police forces in European or European-descended cultures actually bothering to seek out individual users), and certain hazy new age concepts have stuck around. But the hippie movement is, by and large, a dessicated corpse of a rebellion now seen as defined primarily through its failure – i.e. as a symbol of a failed revolution whose proponents are too naive to realize that they have long since failed.

But in 1966, as mod culture is about to suffer a fatal capitalism hemorrhage and psychedelia is about to take the center stage, we have the opposite problem. Just as in The War Machines we were caught between the context that led us there and our knowledge of what was to come, 1966 is an impossible year to grasp. We cannot understand it without peeking at the future. Which is the point of this entry – a loose assortment of tendencies in British culture, revolutionary and mainstream, in the 1960s so that we know what to keep track of as Doctor Who begins to change everything about itself.

The point here is not so much to identify styles as ideologies. If the hippies were a flamed out failure of a revolution, they were also practically on the other side of the world from London. What did the fringes of British culture in the 1960s think, want, and do? As a result, this entry isn’t going to talk about Doctor Who all that much. On the other hand, the next eight years of Doctor Who are going to talk about this entry a lot.

The best place to start is probably the International Times and Oz Magazine – two of the leading counterculture zines of the 1960s. IT debuted in 1966, Oz in 1967, so we’re looking here more at what is emerging out of the culture right now than what was strictly mainstream. IT’s debut in October of 1966 is distinct most immediately because of its sheer practicality. Its opening editorial, entitled YOU (except that the word is printed upside-down) gives a good sense of its attitude. Speaking of a boondoggle of a project to create a London poetry centre, the magazine writes:

No-one seems to have realized that a basement and a few notebooks, plus the necessary poets, could be a suitable starting base for a poetry centre.

…

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Very Sophisticated Idiots (The War Machines)

5

We’re functioning automatic, and we are dancing mechanic.

It’s June 25, 1966. The Beatles are at number one with “Paperback Writer,” and will trade it to The Kinks in two week’s time. The remainder of the charts display a fairly standard blend of irritating traditionalism and pleasant edginess as it proceeds towards a more contemporary style. In the news, not a lot happens – some shuffles of foreign leaders, France leaving NATO, and the Vietnam war gets worse and worse. Oh, and the 1966 World Cup started five days before the finale of this story. But it’s not like that had any influence on British culture of the time.

Meanwhile, on television, the Doctor fights a renegade computer that’s controlling people’s minds out of Post Office Tower. So I guess the odds were fairly high after all, and we’re going to have to talk more about Quatermass.

Much of the point of taking The Quatermass Excursion on Monday was to make sure it was clear just how bizarre this story is in the context. As much as Doctor Who has felt a bit all over the map since Verity Lambert left (but never with the supreme confidence with which Lambert’s Doctor Who simply assumed it could get away with whatever it tried – since then it’s been desperately trying to find what it’s good at, lacking as it does now Lambert’s capacity to make it good at anything), the amount which it has changed in a year is staggering. More or less exactly a year ago today, the show was wrapping up The Chase and saying goodbye to Ian and Barbara. To get from there to The Daleks’ Master Plan is staggering enough. To get from there through that, through The Massacre, through The Celestial Toymaker, and out to this… I mean, however bizarre the jump from The Sensorites to The Chase is, it’s nothing compared to the gap from The Chase to this.

But what, exactly, is different? Hartnell has changed, certainly, with his acting painfully deteriorating over the course of the season. The bigger change can be seen in the companions. A year ago, we had Ian and Barbara – the two ordinary humans – and Vicki, who, while not an ordinary human, fulfilled the promise of the first episode better than Susan ever did – she was very much An Unearthly Child, visibly from our world, but clearly an avatar of its future. The rapid shedding of this entire companion team in favor of Steven, the featureless chameleon and Dodo, the one where they forgot to have a concept for the character, marks a major change. With Ian and Barbara we could see mundane life in extraordinary people. With Vicki we could see a clear vision of the future. With Steven we have an effective character for plot resolution, and with Dodo we have… well… something very good at being kidnapped. We’ve gone from companions that set the tone of the show to companions that advance the plot well.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home In Time for Tea 2 (Quatermass)

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. This time, we look at Nigel Kneale’s classic science fiction serials, the Quatermass series.

If you kidnapped somebody from November 24th, 1963, and asked them about British televised science fiction, it would be self-evident that the most important thing to talk about is Nigel Kneale’s set of three serials in the 1950s, The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II, and Quatermass and the Pit. Still influential well into the 1960s due to the adaptations by Hammer Films into The Quatermass Xperiment (1955, The X refers to the film rating they were going for), Quatermass 2 (1957), and, in 1967, their version of Quatermass and the Pit, everybody knows that the Quatermass serials were major influences on Doctor Who, which is why Kneale refused to write for the program, viewing it as just a ripoff of his ideas.

And really, with even a cursory glance at the first three seasons of Doctor Who, you can see just how much the show relied on Quatermass. Just look at all the stories featuring intense paranoia about space, a government that is evil and untrustworthy out of misguided virtue, and broad global terrors of alien invasions that threaten to consume the Earth. It’s a wonder Kneale didn’t sue over the rip-offs, really.

Hopefully you see what I did there. If not, suffice it to say that up to this point, it’s far easier to discuss the ways in which Doctor Who is a decisive break with the Quatermass tradition than it is to discuss the similarities. That won’t always be true, of course – in particular when we hit the Pertwee era and Season 7, the show actually will start to (arguably) act like a Quatermass clone. Even then, Lance Parkin, in an essay reprinted in the first volume of Mad Norwegian Press’s fantastic Time Unincorporated series, makes a fairly compelling argument that the influence of Quatermass on Doctor Who is egregiously overstated.

Let’s look at the actual series. The three 50s Quatermass serials belonged to the classic live transmission school of television – with only a few exceptions of inserted scenes in the later two, all of Quatermass was shot live. The original Quatermass Experiment, in fact, only has its first two episodes in existence not because the BBC wiped the tapes a la Doctor Who, but because there were no tapes in the firstplace – nobody actually tried to record it for posterity. (The first two only exist because of an aborted plan to sell the show to Canada) Watching them now is… an interesting experience. As with most serials, they transplant somewhat poorly to the modern era, or at least, to the modern practice of watching them as a movie that occasionally runs the credits in the middle of the feature.

But one thing that does come across is an amazing sense of tone.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 4: The Man in the Velvet Mask (Daniel O’Mahoney, Virgin Books, 1996)

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Dodo stares dubiously at the plot
of this novel. Or maybe that’s
just her “come hither” look.

So this one ought to be fun. Daniel O’Mahony’s The Man in the Velvet Mask is pure Marmite. Ostensibly one of the most hated Doctor Who books, it apparently came in dead last in Doctor Who Magazine’s poll about the novels. But that claim carries a metric ton of assumptions with it. I don’t want to do a whole post like The Gunfighters about the various factions of fandom during the interregnum, mostly because I intend to do a whole series of posts when we actually get to that time period. So suffice it to say that this book also has passionate defenders. (I suppose I should, as part of my continued commitment to helping Americans work through their stages of grief at discovering that there are actually entire facets of foreign cultures that have nothing to do with them, mention that Marmite is a savory, salty, yeast-based spread used in the UK on sandwiches, toast, crackers, and other such things. Its use is somewhere between that of peanut butter and mayonnaise, neither of which it tastes remotely like. Among those for whom it is part of their culture there are exactly two opinions available – passionate love or utter hatred. Thus “Marmite” is, in the vernacular, an adjective describing something that produces extremely polarized views with minimal middle ground.)

Most of the dispute centers on whether or not the book simply goes too far to be a Doctor Who story, and, secondarily, whether it goes too far to be a Hartnell story. Which is to say, the objection is over the fact that Dodo spends an awful lot of this book naked, then also has sex and gets infected with an alien virus that slowly corrupts you. (There is some dispute over this, with some people claiming Dodo gets a fatal venereal disease or syphilis. She doesn’t. The description of the virus is that “Once infected, you cannot be sure whether your actions are of your own free will or directed by him.” By the end of the book the him in question is dead, But given that in the next story televised Dodo succumbs to mind control, the implication is that it leaves one susceptible to mental domination in general, and the virus is later described as “eating through her nervous system and her brain.”)

Back in The Celestial Toymaker, I called into question the idea that every story was a Doctor Who story. And as a friend of mine pointed out after that entry, there are more obvious problems with the claim – as she put it, “What about that story where the Doctor is a serial rapist.” Which captures at least one crux of the issue – that the notion of “Doctor Who story” is bounded on one side by the fact that the Doctor needs to act Doctor-like. But is there more than that? The problem with The Ark is not even that the Doctor does the wrong thing – the Monoids are, after all, portrayed as moustache-twirlers.…

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