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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 15 (Moonbase 3)

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Sometimes the most valuable thing one can do to understand something is to take a step back from it. It should be no secret to anyone reading the blog that I am less fond of the Pertwee era than I am of many of the other eras of Doctor Who. (And it is firmly “less fond,” as opposed to “not fond”) I’ve expressed at least part of that frustration, but honestly, it wasn’t until I tried watching Moonbase 3 that I realized exactly what it is that seems to me so fundamentally flawed about much of the Pertwee era.

Moonbase 3 is interesting. It’s not the first time Doctor Who people went on to try something else – that’s basically Adam Adamant Lives! – nor is it the first spinoff of Doctor Who – that’s K-9 and Company. But it is the first time major production staff of Doctor Who used Doctor Who as a springboard for a new show. Basically, Moonbase 3 is six episodes of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks trying desperately to quit Doctor Who for something else. 
In practical terms, it was a failure – low rated, and with a mixed critical consensus. Accounting for why is a tricky project. Terrance Dicks has largely suggested the show was too dark and lacked a sense of wonder. It certainly is serious-minded in the extreme, but no moreso than Doomwatch (from which its first 20 minutes are stolen wholesale) or than Terry Nation’s soon to be successful Survivors. And anyway, dark and cynical is a pretty good fit for when the show aired, at least plus or minus a couple of months.

Nor is it quite fair to say that the show failed because it was bad. It had serious flaws, certainly, but no more so than the first season of any number of successful shows. Occasionally the show manages to feel like Babylon 5 done twenty years early, which, given that Babylon 5 is, for all its flaws, one of the absolute landmark pieces of science fiction television, is a hell of impressive feat. No, the best case for why it failed, to my mind, is that doing a show about realistic space exploration in late 1973 is about two years later than the last day you could really do that. Interest in moon bases after the Apollo missions were over is a bit… well… low.

But ultimately, why it failed commercially isn’t even the most interesting question. One can just as easily ask why Doctor Who succeeded, and in real terms the answer is going to be a diffuse set of arbitrary and often seemingly small decisions that happened to successfully navigate a given crisis where others seem unlikely to have. The question of industry success is not an uninteresting one, but the answer turns out to be arbitrary and beyond the reach of what can be controlled.

No. Far more interesting is the question of why the show failed aesthetically. And that it did. Again, plenty of cancelled-after-one-season shows have had real impact.

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Books! The Best Weapons in the World! (Invasion of the Dinosaurs)

18

Sod captions! I’m just going to
say K-KLAK! from now on!
K-KLAK!

It’s January 12, 1974. Improbably, despite the fact that it has been two weeks since Christmas, Slade continues to hold the number one single, though after only one more week of this they give way to The New Seekers’ “You Won’t Find Another Fool Like Me,” which in turn gives way to Mud’s “Tiger Feet,” which has a four week run and is the number one single of the year. Andy Williams, The Sweet, Lulu, Diana Ross, David Bowie, and The Wombles all also chart.

While in real news, Patty Hearst is kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn is exiled from the USSR. Really, that’s about what I can scrape together here. Oh. On US television, both The Six Million Dollar Man and Happy Days debut. There. That’s truly major world events there.

While on good television… oh, wait, never mind, it’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs. A story that is not so much in the territory of “good” as it is “infamous,” with (likely spurious) rumors even existing that Barry Letts requested its destruction because he was embarrassed by the effects. I’ve usually foregone criticizing the effects of Doctor Who, generally stressing when they are adequate instead of when they’re not. But here we finally have to actually talk about special effects.

Let’s start with a brief typology of special effects. There are essentially two types, which we can call visible and invisible effects. An invisible effect is one that is meant to work in the background. When we see it, we are not meant to gawk at the effect, we’re meant to sail right over it, accepting it within the narrative. Invisible effects merely have to be good enough to not announce themselves. The sets are usually an example of invisible effects in Doctor Who. Very rarely is the point of a story or scene in Doctor Who up to 1974 to gawk at the studio scenery. So as long as nothing crashes into the scenery and makes the wall wobble, the scenery is usually more or less acceptable in Doctor Who. The horrible scene in The Green Death in which the Doctor sits in an unmoving Bessie while a CSO landscape scrolls by is jarring because it’s supposed to be a scene where we’re not thinking about the effects, but because they’re so obvious, we think about them anyway. (We’ll talk more about invisible effects when we get to The Ark in Space, which provides a fabulous limit case.)

Visible effects, on the other hand, are showpieces. The greatest visible effect in the history of cinema is, for my money, the scene in The Muppet Movie in which Kermit rides a bicycle. Nothing about this scene is meant to be realistic or believable. The audience is not meant to believe that Kermit is a real frog who happens to also be a cyclist. The only reason that effect is interesting is because the audience is consciously aware that Kermit is a piece of felt that cannot possibly ride a bicycle, and thus stare at the scene trying to figure out how the effect was done.…

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Why Not Make Some Coffee (The Time Warrior)

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roofle pwned feminist

It’s December 15, 1973. Slade is at number one with “Merry Xmas Everybody,” with Gary Glitter, Roxy Music, Wizzard and Mott the Hoople also lurking in the charts. Slade holds #1 through Christmas, and into the new year, in the last real flourishing of glam.

I’d do the usual new season politics roundup, but I feel like the last entry did most of it. You’ve got the Yom Kippur War, tons more bad stuff in Northern Ireland, Pinochet’s coup d’etat in Chile, Spiro Agnew’s resignation, and the mounting hilarity of Watergate. While during this story, OPEC doubles the price of oil, and the Three-Day Week itself comes into force.

So let’s get down to watching Doctor Who, since the nature of the blog as it gets to the end of an era is that I end up packing it with entries about things other than TV episodes. (There are, after this, four more Pertwee stories, but Robot is eight entries away.) And The Time Warrior, made at the end of the Season Ten block (i.e. a block where the show was, as I’ve said, on fire creatively), is, in a practical sense, the last Pertwee story that has a large number of people who unabashedly and unambiguously love it. Not that at least some of the four after this don’t have their fans (though some of them basically have nobody whatsoever who likes them), but that this is in one sense the Pertwee era’s last stab at outright greatness.

It’s also very much a passing of the torch. It’s Robert Holmes’s last story before he becomes script editor, a position he unofficially adopts for part of Season Eleven, and adopts in full for Season Twelve. And it’s the debut of Sarah Jane Smith, the iconic companion of the Holmes/Hinchcliffe era renaissance. So there’s  a lot to love here.

As with the last Holmes story we saw, the major highlight here is that Holmes is a wizard at creating epic stories out of low rent characters. This is perfectly in keeping with the “fallen power” feel of Britain that has been brewing for a while and really reaches a head with the wiping out of the Heath Prime Ministership. Here we get Irongron, whose name makes him sound like a strange reject from The Krotons. At the start of the story, Irongron is a pathetic loser of a warlord complaining about his bad food and bad wine, and talking of how he’s going to have to go do some conquest to get new stuff, but with the clear sense that he is pathetically all talk.

This is the essential Robert Holmes move – to make a villain out of a pathetic schlub instead of out of some terrifying and powerful figure. So Irongron is scary not because he’s inherently powerful, but for the far more interesting reason that he’s an easily manipulable loser who’s come under the influence of a powerful alien warrior. What Holmes does with this character – and with many of his other characters – is make him scarier by making him more low rent.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time For Tea 14 (Dad’s Army, Three-Day Week)

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The stereotype, of course, is “stiff upper lip.” Or as I put it last Christmas when my sister was stranded until December 23rd in Heathrow and she was baffled how a couple of inches of snow were something that took four days to clear, “why would the British fix something that they could just stoically endure?” It’s one of the classic national myths of self-identity in the world. Every nation has them. The US are ambitious cowboys, the French have better taste than everyone else, and the British have the ability to keep a level head through anything. “Keep Calm and Carry On,” as the idiom goes these days.

The origin of that idiom, of course, is World War II. The famous image was an unused propaganda poster in case of a German invasion of Britain, putting it squarely in the Battle of Britain mythology. And I should note, I use myth here not to suggest that the claims are untrue, but rather to suggest that they have an almost religious character to them. They’re important not because they are true – i.e. because you can make useful decisions based on them – but because they are so widely believed to be true that they have a real influence. In fact, the perception of their truth is probably one of the major reasons why they’re true. Case in point, the at least partially manufactured photo of people hoisting brooms in response to last month’s riots – a photo that depicted an event that never quite “happened” as such, but that is in its own sense true because it is seen to capture some essential truth about the event.

Which brings us around to Dad’s Army, which is one of those shows I’ve been meaning to get to in one of these entries and never quite had room for, and so now goes into the hopper with the rest of the glut of end-of-era entries. Partially because I don’t think I’ve done a sitcom yet, partially because it was extraordinarily popular, but mostly, and I admit that I kind of missed the best timing on this (I should have done it with Monty Python, though this entry works too), because it’s the other major show in the early 70s featuring a comedic version of the military.

On its most basic level, Dad’s Army bears a considerable similarity to the UNIT era. We’ve talked already about how the Brigadier was always conceived of as a character who worked more like a Monty Python sketch character than like a dramatic character in the traditional sense, and how understanding this and the implications it has on the narrative structure is essential to being able to see how something like The Claws of Axos, to pick a particularly vivid example, works. But saying this presents UNIT as if they were figures of pure postmodernism. And while they obviously work very well as postmodern figures, that’s not the only thing going on there. And Dad’s Army is what illustrates the other angle.

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Tamper With The Forces of Creation (The Green Death)

11

Oh Cliff, you take me to the most romantic places.

It’s May 19, 1973. Wizzard is at number one with “See My Baby Jive,” which stays at number one for four weeks until Suzi Quatro’s “Can The Can” unseats it for a week, followed by 10cc’s “Rubber Bullets.” Also in the charts are The Sweet, Gary Glitter, David Bowie, T. Rex, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper, and, um… Perry Como. I’m exaggerating a little bit, as Stevie Wonder and Fleetwood Mac also chart. Since we haven’t talked about them in a while and it’s worth checking in occasionally, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane is at the top, with Alice Cooper’s Billion Dollar Babies and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon all charting. Along with two Beatles compilations and 40 Fantastic Hits From The 50’s And 60’s. So a bit of a nostalgia trip creeping in there.

In real news, Skylab launches, followed immediately by Skylab 2, which whizzes off to the stars to fix the first one. Lord Lambton resigns from Parliament after The News of the World busts him on his fondness for prostitutes. The Greek military junta puts an end to the whole monarchy business, Secretariat wins the Triple Crown, and the Ezeiza massacre takes place in Argentina, with snipers shooting supporters of Peron. And finally, Peter Dinsdale commits his first fatal act of arson, killing a six year old boy in Kingston upon Hull.

While on television, it’s the end of Season Ten of Doctor Who, which means it’s time for Robert Sloman and Barry Letts to lay another Curate’s egg. But unlike certain other Curate’s eggs, this one hatches giant maggots that kill you by turning you bright green. Readers may be noticing a certain pattern of disdain for the writing of Mr. Sloman, and to a lesser extent Mr. Letts. (Though I’ve not seen a clear account of what their process is, my assumption, especially given that Letts demonstrates skill in other aspects of the program, is that Letts comes up with some story ideas and leaves them for Sloman to turn into a script, with most of the resulting defects entering at that stage. But there’s a whiff of dangerous revisionism here – much of the appeal of that apportioning of blame comes down to the fact that Barry Letts is a decades-long friend of the series with numerous positive contributions, whereas Robert Sloman goes away after Planet of the Spiders. Leaving the blame with the guy who doesn’t keep showing up is convenient.) And while The Green Death is without a doubt his best script yet, and rightly deserves much of the praise heaped upon it, what all of this misses is that it is also by miles his worst script yet.

This may seem a contradiction in terms, but it’s one that gets at the heart of the issues with the Sloman/Letts scripts. They are full of some of the best scenes and ideas in the Pertwee era, and also full of some of the most atrocious plotting, torturous dialogue, and, in the case of The Green Death, appalling politics of the Pertwee era.…

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A Thousand Years From A Disintegrated Home (Planet of the Daleks)

15

The Doctor is totally Banksy.

It’s April 7, 1973. Gilbert O’Sullivan is at number one with “Get Down,” with David Cassidy, Donny Osmond, and Little Jimmy Osmond all also in the top ten. A situation along these lines persists for three weeks before Dawn reach number one with “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” which ends up being the number one song for the year. David Bowie, Sweet, and Gary Glitter also chart in other three weeks of this story.

In real news, the Labour Party takes over the Greater London Council, prefiguring their general election win ten months later. Also, the House of Commons declines to reinstitute the death penalty, and a one day strike in opposition to government policy on inflation takes place amount 1,600,000 workers. Elsewhere in Europe, the GSG 9, Germany’s counter-terrorism force, is formed in response to the Munich killings. In the US, a large swath of Nixon aides resign in an attempt to draw a line under the Watergate scandal, which I’m sure is going to work. A 71-day standoff with the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee ends with the surrender of the Native Americans. Also the Sears Tower is built, and screw you if you call it Willis Tower.

While on television, it’s pretty much 1965/66. No. Wait. That’s The Daleks’ Masterplan, which, while the stretch of twelve episodes we’re tying up here was an explicit attempt to redo, isn’t at all what this story is like. On television, it’s pretty much 1963/64, as Terry Nation suddenly reappears and writes a story that is basically just The Daleks only an episode shorter. Note that I say he writes a story that is just a remake of his old work, though. That doesn’t mean that’s what we get on screen.

But before we go there, it’s worth taking a step back, looking at these twelve episodes, and asking how we got here. There are a lot of reasons. First and foremost, Letts, having gotten the Daleks back in his toolbox, was understandably eager to use them. A feature of the deal to bring them back, however, was that Terry Nation got first refusal on the right to write a Dalek story. He’d been too busy to exercise it in 1972, but was now keen to. So that meant that they had to use a Nation script if they were to do Daleks.

But also attached with all of this was a more curious motivation. It was the tenth anniversary, and before The Three Doctors had even been planned out there was a desire to do something nostalgic for it. Accordingly, the production team leafed through past events and said “Ooh, twelve week Dalek epic, that sounds fun.” So they called Douglas Camfield, who had directed The Daleks’ Master Plan, and asked him for advice. His advice was “don’t do that.” So they dropped to plan B – let Nation write six weeks of Dalek thrills, then have a different six-parter that dovetails into it.…

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The Sound of Empires Toppling (Frontier in Space)

18

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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The Outside Universe is Breaking Through (Carnival of Monsters)

14

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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This Point of Singularity (The Three Doctors)

20

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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Time Can Be Rewritten 11 (Verdigris, BBC Books, 2000)

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The year 2000, for a generation of Britain, marked the end of the future. A fluke of naming committed in 1977 inadvertently left the most important comics magazine in the UK with a name demarcating a clear and unavoidable sell-by date. It’s tough to blame anyone – nobody starting a grubby comics rag ostensibly edited by a fictional galactic conquerer and featuring a barely coherent revamp of 50s icon Dan Dare would have taken seriously the question “but what are we going to do in 23 years.” The answer was clear – be working on something else, this magazine having gone under 20 years earlier. But come 2000, there we were, staring awkwardly at one of the most iconic mastheads in science fiction and going “well, that’s underwhelming, isn’t it?”

2000, then, is the perfect date to revisit early 70s science fiction. In 1972, nobody believed there would be a year 2000. And come the year 2000, it turned out they’d been right all along. There really was no future. Enter Verdigris and Paul Magrs. I’ve already, in previous posts, hinted that the rise of the BBC Books line to replace the Virgin books line in Doctor Who was a mixed blessing at best, and that the seven years since the series came back have by and large validated that by favoring writers and innovations from the Virgin line while ignoring most of the new blood brought in at BBC Books. Part of that, though, is that there are actually only two real pieces of new blood brought in at BBC Books. The first is Lawrence Miles, who, while he wrote a Virgin book, is most associated with the BBC line having written four key books for them and spun off his own Faction Paradox series from them. The second is Paul Magrs.

Magrs – who I actually, in one of my handful of brushes with Z-List status in he world of Doctor Who, saw give a talk in early 2001 when I was studying abroad at the University of East Anglia where he taught – is an interesting writer. More than almost any other Doctor Who writer, Magrs visibly has a preferred approach to writing Doctor Who and little desire to deviate from it. Admittedly he has branched out considerably over the years, having now written numerous stories without his signature character Iris Wildthyme, but Verdigris isn’t one of them, so she’s probably as good a place to start as any.

Central to any assessment of Magrs’s work, after all, is the initial decision of whether or not an utterly barmy and frequently inebriated middle aged woman who travels around space and time in a double decker bus that is slightly smaller on the inside than it is on the outside is a brilliant idea or the worst thing ever. Many perfectly intelligent and sensible commentators have committed themselves firmly to the latter answer, which, unsurprisingly, presents a somewhat insurmountable barrier to enjoying Magrs’s work.

The real problem, though, is that Iris is just the tip of the iceberg.…

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