Elizabeth Sandifer

No matter how much she points at the naked lady with the Dalek, Steven’s attention will not be swayed from the burly Vikings.

It’s July 3, 1965. The number one single is going to trade back and forth between Elvis and the Hollies before The Byrds storm in and take #1 with their cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Although the Byrds are American, this still seems like the completion of a deal that started back in The Reign of Terror, when Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to drugs. In turn, the Beatles, indirectly through The Byrds, introduce Bob Dylan’s sort of music to rock, creating folk rock. The day after the last episode of The Time Meddler, Bob Dylan plays his infamous electric concert at the Newport Folk Festival.

The comparisons to The Reign of Terror are apt, as this is the second time Dennis Spooner has been tapped to write a season finale. I was none too fond of his first story, and his second did not particularly endear itself to me either. The flip side of that, however, is that he’s been the script editor since The Rescue, which means he’s presided over an era that has, on the whole, been of more consistent quality than David Whitaker’s run of the first season. (Here we get the first script edited by Donald Tosh, who has no solo scripts on Doctor Who and is thus hard to judge in comparison with Whitaker and Spooner. But more on Tosh’s reign when we get to the end of it.)

With very few exceptions, it’s hard to draw clear lines of “eras” in Doctor Who. Doctor changes provide some sense of it, but, ignoring the 8th and 9th Doctors for obvious reasons, with only two exceptions these changes do not correspond with companion changes (The 3rd and 11th Doctors both started off with brand new companions), and only twice has the creative team shifted at the same time (The 4th and 11th, although the 4th was technically completed over two stories. To be fair, the 3rd and 7th Doctors had partial creative shifts as well, but only the 4th and 11th did full overhauls of the creative team). In many ways producers work better, but that’s not a perfect measure either. Seasons might work, except in the early days of the program stories were routinely produced at the end of one season to carry over into the next, requiring a distinction between production seasons and transmission seasons.

I say all of this because, muddy as it is, there’s a clear era shift going on here that is worth remarking on. The first season of Doctor Who was largely defined by its inconsistency. Significant chunks of it were not very good – The Keys of Marinus being the most uncontroversial example, though as I’ve said, I was no fan of The Reign of Terror (though I’m in the minority on that) or Marco Polo (I seem to be the only person to think that was a horrifically overlong mess of a story).…

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The Daleks realize the difficulty of fighting a monster who does not so much roll natural 20s as is a natural 20.

Hello. There’s a lot of you reading this post right now, and I can’t figure out where you’re all coming from. Would anyone mind letting me know? I’m just curious. Thanks. Hope you enjoy.

It’s May 22, 1965. Number one is going to pass among four artists for the next six weeks – Jackie Trent, Sandie Shaw, The Hollies, and Elvis. So, basically, a melange of pop acts. Which is once again fitting for Doctor Who, which airs The Chase, a story that is, basically, a melange of set pieces punctuated by occasional Dalek attacks.

Let’s start by being honest here. There are, two my mind, two ways to read this story. Either it’s a flawed but mostly edgily brilliant piece of early post-modernism, or it’s a complete crap-fest.

I won’t lie and pretend the latter case is not, on paper, stronger. Terry Nation is, in many ways, a tough writer to love. He parlayed his brief description of some robotic monsters into copyright on one of Doctor Who’s two most iconic images, managing to run roughshod over Ray Cusick, who was the one who changed Nation’s description into an iconic design. Nation is credited whenever the Daleks appear on screen. Cusick… isn’t. On top of that, of Nation’s many Doctor Who scripts, it’s a braver man than I who can argue that several do not feel phoned in. Not the least of them this story’s most obvious antecedent, The Keys of Marinus.

On the other hand, Nation was able to put together Genesis of the Daleks, rightly considered one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. And it’s basically impossible to argue that he is anything less than one of the most influential creative figures in Doctor Who history. Looking even at his three stories prior to this, we can see that it was Nation who introduced the capture/escape sci-fi model, the Doctor’s love of pioneers, genre juxtaposition, and, of course, monsters. And that’s the root problem with Terry Nation. He’s a genius who is perfectly willing to be a hack instead.

So with this story, it’s genuinely tough. Because I do think there’s a reading to be had that mostly makes this story work and work quite well. I’m also very much uncertain that this reading has anything to do with anything that Nation or anyone else involved with this story had in mind at the time.

Still, this blog is not about reviewing stories in the context of their time (there’s been enough quality writing on Doctor Who that does that, most notably Miles and Wood’s sublime About Time sextet). It’s about understanding a story of Doctor Who that continues to this day. And the version of The Chase that I can bring myself to quite enjoy is a version that seems to me to have been tremendously influential on, say, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. And even if, on paper, it seems more probable that this is a warmed over piece of hackery from Nation that got maimed by Richard Martin when it was directed… maybe they were just ahead of their time.…

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The first appearance of the hideous mutant creatures inside the Daleks.

It’s April 24, 1965. The Beatles have number one again, with Ticket to Ride. Those of you who are obsessive Doctor Who fans will glean the particular significance of tat. The more normal folks will want to remember this fact on Wednesday. (The really really obsessive fans now know exactly what book I’m talking about on Monday. If you are one of those fans, congratulations.) In the fourth week of the Space Museum it will be unseated by Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” in what is very possibly the single most jarring transition on the charts until “Do The Bartman” unseats The KLF in 1991. I will not say much about Roger Miller, because, well, he’s Roger Miller. I will, however, point out his future #1 hit in his native US, “England Swings.”

It is easy, at this point, to think that the world is coming unstuck. Protests in Yereven, Armenia begin to bring the horror of the Armenian Genocide to light. Protests in Berkeley, California involve torching draft cards. The ball that started rolling with the Kennedy assassination has gathered something like critical mass.   While the most powerful man in the world was a dashing young technocrat, there was something resembling stability. When the most powerful man in the world is a drawling Texan career politician, even though he’s probably a better champion of liberal causes than Kennedy, things come unstuck. The youth get uppity. They evolve. They rebel.

At the center of all of this, however, quite bizarrely, is London. Never mind that the UK has missed a rather epic series of beats and gone from world-spanning empire to fallen power in a generation. None of that matters. The UK has the Beatles. The UK has Carnaby Street. The UK has the miniskirt. The UK, in short, is mod. And the world is starting to recognize that. As the youth rebels and starts to change the world, the coolest place in the world is London.

This story is where Doctor Who picks a side. It should be no surprise, given the last four stories, what side it’s going to pick. Its newest character is a futuristic star-child with a scouse accent. Its old man lead has turned into a giggling anarchist. The show has adopted a wild theatrical style that lets it look and feel like nothing else on TV. Is it going to side with the mod youth or the entrenched establishment? Take a guess.

No. Whats surprising about The Space Museum is not it’s successful execution of a host of mod cliches. It’s that it’s doing it in what are still the early days of the mod fad. And, more to the point, it’s that its doing it well and more complexly than it has any right to, going beyond mod culture before mod culture even has a chance to arrive on the scene.

The usual brief on The Space Museum is this: The first episode is almost universally recognized as being completely brilliant.…

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Richard the Lionheart really wishes the Doctor wouldn’t bother him while he’s in the loo.

It’s March 27, 1965. The Rolling Stones still hold number one, although that weird tendency for totally rubbish pop trash to take over whenever the show goes into historical mode promptly rears its head with Unit 4+2 and Cliff Richards ready to pounce. If The Web Planet felt like it was going out into a world of bracing and sudden change, The Crusade feels like it’s going out into a world that’s a bit dull.

The most interesting thing to happen during the four weeks it’s airing, in fact, is Mary Poppins winning a bunch of Oscars. Mary Poppins is interesting for presenting a ridiculously nostalgic look at British culture that, effectively, was a love letter to Victorian children’s literature that was so effusive that its major effect was to make everybody think that Victorian children’s literature was actually anything like that.

I mention this because The Crusade is Doctor Who’s pseudo-Shakespearean story – quite distinctly, with bits of the script written in iambic pentameter. There’s something odd on the face of it here – the possibility of saying “the X story” for Doctor Who suggests an oddly definitive power for the show. Miles and Wood (who, if it’s not obvious, I have the sort of tremendous respect for that it is only possible to have for people with whom you disagree almost completely) point this out explicitly – the odd thing about the historical stories, in specific contrast to the monster stories, is their unrepeatability. If the Doctor faces the Daleks or the Zarbi, it’s an attempt at creating a popular and marketable monster. These monsters are supposed to happen multiple times. But the Doctor is not supposed to return to a historical location – especially not those like the French Revolution or the court of Kublai Khan where he meets historical figures.

And so for Doctor Who to do the pseudo-Shakespearean story is definitive. This is meant to be the one story of this type. Which poses something of a problem when, as is the case with this story, half of it is missing. Indeed, the bulk of it was missing for years until a series of unlikely events caused the first episode to surface in New Zealand. (Short form of the story – the TV station that had been airing Doctor Who in New Zealand was destroying film it no longer had the rights to. A collector bribed a huge lot of it out of the dumpster blind, and then this print bounced around collectors in New Zealand for years without anybody realizing it was the last surviving copy of the episode)

This means that its release came in 1999 – which, you may remember, were some dark days for the program. The sort of floundering that was going on is actually visible on the quickly released VHS copy of the two surviving episodes, for which William Russell provided in-character linking narration that makes an oblique reference to one of the BBC Books novels in a sort of bizarre attempt at cross-promotion.…

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Astonishingly, some people look at this photo and think that they’re looking at something that has something to do with realism.

It’s February 13, 1965. The Kinks, The Righteous Brothers, The Seekers, and The Rolling Stones are going to be our #1 singles for the next six weeks. The album charts are mostly The Rolling Stones, with The Beatles taking the top spot for fun one week.

What you have to realize about these times is that, looking at what was popular, it is very clear that the world was changing. That things that had previously bubbled under the mainstream have, at this point, broken through in a big way. The Rolling Stones and The Beatles are visible part of what it is increasingly clear is a 90% obscured iceberg. In America, the Civil Rights movement is at its boiling point. White supremacists are beating demonstrators to death. Malcolm X is assassinated. 1965 is not the present day by any stretch of the imagination. But it is also impossible to argue that 1965 is in any way more normal or understandable than the present day. The world of 1965 is staggeringly complex and weird.

I bring this up because for these six weeks, Doctor Who is showing The Web Planet. Which is easily the weirdest Doctor Who to date, and a strong contender for weirdest ever. It is also among the most popular, in terms of viewers, ever. And it is among the most misunderstood episodes of Doctor Who ever.

The word used in almost every review of The Web Planet is “ambitious.” It’s easy to see why. Every character save for the TARDIS crew in this story is non-human. You’ve got the Zarbi – bipedal ants who make a constant beeping sound. You’ve got the Menoptra – butterfly people, and the Optera – sort of grub creatures. And you’ve got the Animus – a giant tentacle monster. The episode is a special effects bonanza as a result.

And here’s where people misunderstand it. Much is made of Doctor Who’s wobbly sets and poor effects. And it’s true – the effects on Doctor Who are often cheap. Where this becomes inexplicable is when people criticize the effects for being unbelievable, unrealistic, or unconvincing. And so when The Web Planet is discussed, it’s usually exhibit A for those who want to talk about how the old series had lousy effects and was unconvincing and silly.

Here’s the thing. Everybody who complains about the unrealistic effects in this episode is being a complete idiot.

There’s a moment on the DVD commentary for a Russell T. Davies-penned Doctor Who episode where the show briefly appears to have killed off Rose. And Davies and one of the other producers are talking about whether children would believe that they really did kill of Rose. The other producer suggests that he hopes children would not be so cynical as to say “Oh, they wouldn’t really do that.” And Russell T. Davies, in what is, to my mind, the most revealing thing he has ever said on a DVD commentary, says “That’s not cynical.…

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Ian realizes that the only thing more alarming than plaid pants is where they might have gone.

It’s January 16, 1965. It’s Georgie Fame, The Moody Blues, and The Righteous Brothers on the charts for the next four weeks, while at the tail end of the four weeks the Rolling Stones take over the album sales with their imaginatively titled The Rolling Stones No. 2.

The most significant thing to happen in these four weeks, however, occurred on January 24th, when Sir Winston Churchill, twice former Prime Minister, dies. His state funeral on January 30th coincides with the third episode of The Romans, the Doctor Who story du jour for the month.

Production wise, The Romans sees the return of Dennis Spooner, which, if you recall my views of his previous story, should give you a sense of where this is going. In addition to writing the story, Spooner has also just assumed the position of script editor for the series. Script editor, for the original run of Doctor Who, was the closest position to the current role of head writer/executive producer. The biggest difference is that rules prohibited script editors from commissioning themselves to write scripts in most circumstances. Instead, generally speaking, they did revisions and rewrites to other scripts. But with some frequency the situation got complicated and various pen names and other schemes arose to cover the fact that the script editor had written a script themselves.

In this case, David Whitaker, the outgoing script editor, hired Dennis Spooner to write The Romans, then quit, and his replacement, Dennis Spooner, hired him to write The Rescue. Oh, and for accounting purposes, The Romans is actually The Rescue Parts 3-6.

It’s fitting, given all of this, that The Romans is the first Doctor Who story to be explicitly devised as a comedic farce. (Indeed, it’s also basically the last one until Partners in Crime in 2008.) So, a comedic historical tale. Exactly what one imagines the nation wanted as their great wartime hero of a former prime minister is buried.

Of course, Churchill’s legacy in the UK is somewhat more complex than one might assume. In the election immediately following the war, the Tories were hammered and he was replaced by Clement Atlee, who, in historical hindsight, is actually about as much of a lion as Churchill. Then, in 1951, an aging Churchill was returned to power for a frankly lackluster second spell that did no favors for his reputation. Churchill, in his second term, fought hard to keep the British Empire together. By 1965, the empire was all but gone.

In other words, Churchill, though unmistakably a national hero and national treasure, was also part of the fading old Britain. Watched through that lens, The Romans does not necessarily seem like less of a mismatch for the national mood, but it at least becomes somewhat more interesting.

On the one hand, The Romans, despite being a comedy, is fundamentally a conservative story, miles from the oddly post-anarchistic youth revolution of the last two stories.…

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