TARDIS Eruditorum

“I’m sorry, Ms. Jovanka, but the passengers have been complaining that instead of directing them to the toilets you send them to a chamber occupied by a horrifying snake god. We’re going to have to let you go.”

It’s January 18, 1983. You can’t hurry Phil Collins off the number one spot, but given time Men at Work dispatch him, replacing him with “Down Under.” The lower portions of the charts are somewhat more optimistic, with Madness’s “Our House” and Kajagoogoo’s “Too Shy” both appearing. OK, optimistic might be selling that one a little too strong. But both are, at least, wholly valid guilty pleasures.

In real news, Klaus Barbie, who represents what is possibly the biggest disparity between quality of name and quality of human being in history, is arrested in Bolivia. And hey, I totally just found a Wikipedia page for years in history that’s specific to the UK, so that’s useful. Between the end of Arc of Infinity and this story the police manage to shoot a perfectly innocent man named Stephen Waldorf, seriously injuring him. The police officers involved are eventually cleared of attempted murder despite, having shot Waldorf five times out of the thirteen times they’d fired at him, holding a gun to his head and calling him a cocksucker before finding out that they were out of ammo and just pistol whipping him a bunch. Oops. In cheerier news, Breakfast Time debuts on the BBC, their first attempt at a morning program. The first broadcast passes without anybody being shot or called a cocksucker.

Snakedance, I can vouch first hand, is one of those bits of Doctor Who that properly gets into your head and unnerves you. I’ll admit to a longstanding distaste for mind control plots, simply because I tend to just not like stories in which people are out of character – I tend to have a similar lack of enthusiasm for body swap plots and the like. But as mind control plots go, Tegan’s possession in this story is particularly creepy and memorable. And though the rubber snakes in it are still not great the image of snake tattoos that crawl off of your flesh are downright fabulous.

It is, in that regard, one of what, as an adult, I recognize as perfect pieces of childhood Doctor Who – a story that is remembered vividly without being loved (and, of course, without being hated as well). Though it’s by no means universally the case that these are the stories that then grow into beloved classics in adulthood, they’re certainly prime candidates for it. And Snakedance is certainly an example of this. As a child, it gets in your head. As an adult, you see why it got in your head in ways that make it even more compelling.

Much of Snakedance involves taking conventions of Doctor Who and looking at them from slightly oblique angles. (A suitable hat tip here to Lawrence Miles, whose analysis of the story in About Time underpins much of this) The story essentially takes what The Daemons tried and almost but not quite succeeded at and inverts it.…

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So that’s what Stephen Thorne looks like.

It’s January 3rd, 1983. Renee and Renato are at number one with “Save Your Love,” which is… a song. Phil Collins removes it from number one in the second week of this story with “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Culture Club, Men at Work, Madness, Malcom McLaren and the World’s Famous Supreme Team, and David Bowie and Bing Crosby also chart.

In real news, ooh, we get to do a big wrap-up since last time, don’t we. OK. So there’s the Falklands, obviously. Canada fully patriates its constitution and achieves full political independence from the UK. Ronald Reagan addresses a joint session fo the British Parliament. There’s a World Cup. England does well in its first group stage, then manages a series of two 0-0 draws in a second group stage, knocking it out of the tournament. The Equal Rights Amendment fails, to the delight of Phyllis Schlafly, who is basically the American version of Mary Whitehouse. Like all American adaptations of British source texts, she is bigger, louder, and stupider. The queen’s bodyguard, Michael Trestrail, resigns over excessive use of male prostitutes. The first lethal injection is carried out in Texas, the first emoticons are posted, and Time Magazine’s Man of the Year is the computer.

Also, at this particular moment in time I am exactly one hundred and sixteen days old, and this is the first episode of Doctor Who to air in a world I exist in. So I guess this is all my fault. Really, really sorry.

I talked, last time we did a television story, about the way in which it is at times helpful to watch Doctor Who without remembering actively that there is such a thing as a bad story. And that’s true to an extent. But another aspect of childhood watching of Doctor Who – or of any television series, really – is that rubbish episodes pass you by forgettably. Time-Flight, for all its flaws, was oddly memorable. Arc of Infinity, on the other hand? Here are my childhood memories of Arc of Infinity: it had Time Lords, it brought Omega back, and it had Colin Baker being as horribly unpleasant as I assumed his eventual Doctor would be. I remembered virtually nothing else about it. This, as it happens, is a very bad sign. While not every story that fails to make an impression as a kid is, in fact, wretched it is striking just how often a failure to remember a story at all on my part coincides with it being a truly and epically awful one.

To be fair, of the things I did remember, I was not quite right about any of them. My initial dislike of Colin Baker was motivated purely by my parents badmouthing him on the grounds of his strangling Peri in The Twin Dilemma. In truth the character improved and was not as wretched as Commander Maxil, and it is by now clear that the problem with the character was not, in fact, Baker himself.…

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Welcome to Longleat, Mr. Davison.

It’s March 22nd, 1982. The Goombay Dance Band are at number one with “Seven Tears,” and stay there all story. Derek and the Dominos, ABC, and Bucks Fizz also chart. Lower in the charts are Flock of Seagulls with “I Ran” and U2 with “A Celebration.” While in real news, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has a groundbreaking ceremony. In less American news, the Canada Act passes the British Parliament, giving Canada the power to amend their own constitution instead of having to ask Britain to do it. In similarly partially-UK news, Chariots of Fire wins Best Picture at the Academy Awards, beating Raiders of the Lost Ark. Time Bandits, in hindsight the actual best film of 1981, was not nominated.

But for me it’s about a decade over, and we’re on scratchy VHS tapes from PBS again. Because Time-Flight was my first Peter Davison story, and one of the earliest Doctor Who stories I ever watched. Which sets up an interesting situation. Time-Flight is, after all, absolutely hated. Apparently the worst story of the Davison era by some margin, and the fifth worst of all time if the Mighty 200 poll is to be believed, which, of course, it isn’t.

One of the nice things about watching Doctor Who as a child with only the Peter Haining book to go by is that you simply don’t know things like that, though. I could, as a child, identify broad eras of Doctor Who that I didn’t care for as much as others, but even the Pertwee era, the one I actively liked least as a child, was fun. I was disappointed whenever a tape turned out to be Pertwee stories, but I still eagerly watched the whole thing. The idea that there were crappy Doctor Who stories isn’t one occurred to me until much later in life, specifically when I discovered that this story and the next were widely hated. So when I watched this as a child I didn’t hate it. It didn’t occur to me to hate it. It was Doctor Who. I liked Doctor Who. So I liked it.

To some extent, of course, there is an immature naiveté to this approach. Uncritical viewing is problematic. Of course, I wasn’t wholly uncritical at age ten – I knew I liked Doctor Who and that I didn’t like other things. But assuming that just because something says “Doctor Who” at the beginning it’s good is still fundamentally uncritical. But equally, there’s a difference between growing to dislike something like The Celestial Toymaker (which I had no idea wasn’t the classic I’d been told until I watched it and realized which use of “celestial” was in play) because there’s something fundamental about the story you didn’t realize and growing to dislike something like Time-Flight because you’ve stopped being able to enjoy something in the way that you used to.

(All of which said, there’s a racial issue in Time-Flight that I should quickly deal with, having just compared it favorably to The Celestial Toymaker.…

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“What do you mean our redesign is bad? Look at his!”

It’s March 8, 1982. Tight Fit are still sleeping with a lion, and continue to do so all story. Fun Boy Three and Bananarama, ABC, and Iron Maiden also chart. So that’s all terribly exciting, isn’t it. Let’s try the news – the US starts its embargo against Libya. That will end well, I’m sure. Mary Whitehouse’s attempt to prosecute the play The Romans in Britain for obscenity goes down in flames when it turns out that the witness who claims to have seen a penis on stage could not possibly have actually done so, proving a delightfully high profile defeat for Whitehouse. Also, syzygy!

While on television we have Earthshock. A story I’ve been hemming and hawing over what to do with almost since this blog started, hoping that watching it would in some sense clarify things. It didn’t really. This is, for me, one of the most inscrutable of Doctor Who stories. No, the thing that really clarified what to say about this story was actually doing revisions on the Troughton book (I just did my revisions to The Wheel in Space last night, and I have the first round of copy-edits in on the Season 4 material. I still need to do the extra entries, however – currently looking at The Prison in Space, Heart of TARDIS, and Twilight of the Gods. Anyone have a strong recommendation for a fourth?) and rereading what I’d written about the base under siege era.

The bulk of my writing on that subject focused on the way in which the base under siege became formulaic and boring, and it did. But a second strand that crops up throughout the entries is a process of contextualizing the stories in the changing tastes of Doctor Who fandom. This is, admittedly, an issue through large swaths of the blog, and it’s one that’s obviously growing in importance in this era. But redoing the Troughton entries reminded me vividly of the large faction of fandom who considered the base under siege format to be the absolute pinnacle of the series.

I did not much like that section of fandom when covering the Troughton era. And back in the Kinda entry I remarked, with some venom, that the crux of what was wrong with Doctor Who in the 1980s is that it took a section of fandom seriously. And this story is the flip side of it. Kinda was at the bottom of the Season 19 poll. Earthshock was at the top, and is still, broadly speaking, regarded as the best episode of its season. And this gets straight at what’s a bit tricky with Earthshock, which is that it’s tailor made for the crowd that thinks that bases under siege are the be-all and end-all of Doctor Who.

For the most part, Earthshock is an astonishingly straightforward story. Cybermen attack Earth. Twice. The pleasures it offers are straightforward pleasures. There are Cybermen. There are gun battles.…

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And then they killed Adric. The end.

It’s March 1st, 1982. Tight Fit are at number one with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” while Toni Basil’s unforgivably awful “Mickey” is at number two. Soft Cell and Depeche Mode also feature in the top ten, while Iron Maiden pokes around just outside of it. While in real news… well, we’ve got here a story that only covers two days, so actually, based on the detailed historical research I do for these posts (aka “look the year up on Wikipedia”) nothing whatsoever happens. Queen Elizabeth opens up the Barbican the day after this story finishes. The Barbican is an interesting little thing – a massive performing arts centre full of good intentions and muddy executions. But I did see a phenomenal RSC production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream there in what a quick check of the Internet suggests was just about their final performance at the Barbican. So that was nice.

While on topic, Black Orchid! Black Orchid is an interesting beast. It doesn’t work at all, first of all, but the reasons why it doesn’t work are almost completely separate from the larger problems that Doctor Who is having in this time period and have very little to do with the story as an idea. Because as an idea, this is the story that really demonstrates how Doctor Who’s relationship with its past can and should work.

The first and most important thing to realize about this story is that it comes after The Visitation. This is a stunningly obvious point, but it’s worth stating anyway. The Visitation restored Earth’s past as a place where the series goes, much as Tegan quietly restored Earth as something that was actually important to the series, it having been almost entirely de-emphasized following The Hand of Fear. And it did so by introducing Earth’s past as the sort of place it’s been ever since The Time Warrior – a place that is visited to do muckabouts in history with cool aliens.

So when Black Orchid comes along and reintroduces the straight historical it’s every bit as much a surprise as when The Time Meddler came along and broke the straight historical. In fact, this story can be read as the inversion of The Time Meddler. In that story we’re led repeatedly to think that we’re watching a straight historical only to discover that in reality we’re watching something else. Here the production repeatedly gestures at the possibility that there is something uncanny in the story, alluding to the possibility that the Master might be involved, for instance. But instead we are repeatedly shown that it’s actually just a 1920s mystery story.

By and large, though, this is a very, very smart thing to do at this point in the series. First and foremost, it shows a relationship with the show’s past that goes beyond merely catering to obsessive fans. There was no loud clamoring for the return of the historical, which has always, within fandom, been viewed primarily as a discarded relic of the early days of the show and as something rightly phased out in favor of more monsters.…

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The flat share sitcom Eric Saward proposed as a spinoff tragically never really took off.

It’s February 15th, 1982. The Jam remain at number one for the entirety of this story with Soft Cell, XTC, Depeche Mode, and Hall and Oates also charting, making this the only time that list of four bands has ever happened. Depeche Mode, it should be noted, are here debuting in their Vince Clarke-free version with “See You,” their first single written by Martin Gore. Lower in the charts Journey appear with “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which will peak at 62 before vanishing, getting the reception it deserved until the damn thing reappeared repeatedly from 2007-2012, eventually becoming a top ten single.

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A snake! A snake! Ooooooh! A Snake! (Badger badger…)

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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And apparently one of the things we don’t quite fully understand is basic physics.

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