TARDIS Eruditorum

April 6, 2011

The Right To Experiment (The Savages)

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The device the Doctor is holding is called the Reacting
Vibrator. I am not making this up. I swear.

It’s May 28th, 1966. The Rolling Stones have the number one single with “Paint It Black.” Also in the top ten are “Wild Thing” and “Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 and 35,” alongside conventional fare. Although Frank Sinatra takes over #1 after one week, holding it for the remaining three weeks of The Savages with “Strangers in the Night,” the remainder of the charts retains the increasingly hardening edge of music with The Animals and The Yardbirds both notching top ten hits.

In other news, two days ago the South American colony of Guyana was granted independence from the UK. The rest of the news is fairly typical 60s stuff. The Space Race continues with the US doing its second spacewalk, American cop shows evolve suddenly when the Supreme Court rules in Miranda v. Arizona, and the Vatican finally gets rid of the Index Liborum Prohibitorum.

On television, we get one of the least heralded episodes of William Hartnell’s tenure on the show. Certainly it was one of the least watched, with this entire period of the show being the lowest sustained drop in ratings the series would experience until 1980, and the second least watched story of Hartnell’s era. And on top of that, it’s another missing story, this one with no episodes in existence and a post-1983 novelization (see The Gunfighters if you don’t know why 1983 matters here).

One of the harder things in writing these is marking the ends of things. Since in the classic series, a new creative team for the show always inherits some spare scripts from the previous team, the end of an era tends not to be an emphatic “out with a bang” in the style of The End of Time, but rather some faint whimper down the line that you don’t even realize was the end until you look at the next seven stories and notice that nothing like how it used to be is being done.

So it’s easy to miss that this is basically the last William Hartnell story. I mean, he sticks around for three more, but in terms of the tone and type of adventures that make up a normal Hartnell story, the historical checked out back with The Massacre (but more about that when the historical itself checks out) and science fiction checks out here.

Once upon a time, you see, Doctor Who didn’t always have monsters in it. Eventually that came to an end, and somewhere in season four or five we reach a point where the norm is for stories to have monsters. But up to now, the only properly monstery monsters we’ve had are the Daleks. The other attempts to create “the new Daleks” have been interesting visual designs, but not the sort of lurking Otherness of a proper monster. Look at something like the Chumblies or the Mechanoids and you get an alien, but the point is their strangeness.…

April 4, 2011

Stetsons are Cool (The Gunfighters)

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I have no need for a gun, my dear boy. One look
at my plaid pants will slay even the most vile
of outlaws.

It’s April 30, 1966. Dusty Springfield is politely disclaiming the necessity of us telling her we love her, and next week Manfred Mann is going to sing about a Pretty Flamingo, which certainly sounds exciting. Lower on the charts are your usual mix of mid-60s artists – forgettable pop groups and American imports aplenty, with occasional outbreaks of Cher, The Who, or The Beach Boys. The most interesting thing you get is the chart run of Wild Thing, which never hits number one, but at least does help illustrate the way in which a dirtier, rougher sound was entering mainstream pop music. (Did some blogger just find better UK chart data than he’d been using? Yes. Yes he did.)

In other news, the first episode of today’s Doctor Who story aired on the same day that Anton LaVey formed the Church of Satan, which, as we’ll talk about, must be hilarious for a certain segment of fandom that considers this story to basically be the Devil itself. Other news over the next few weeks will include the launch of some pirate radio stations off the coast of Britain, the resolution of the Moors Murders we talked about way back when Donald Cotton was last writing for Doctor Who, more Rhodesia problems, and more Vietnam War protests. Oh, and Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde both come out on the same day, which is actually kind of awesome.

So there’s not exactly any thrills going on in the culture of Britain here. Things are boiling along. The stylized optimism of mod culture and Vicki are not gone, as such – if anything, they’re entering their most important era. But they’re counterbalanced by the fact that the world is as scary a place as it’s been since Hitler was busy taking it over. This is one of those periods that history seems ill-suited to. We know the ending, both the Summer of Love in America, the Underground in the UK, and the final collapse of it all in ’68. At the time, though, everything is up in the air, smoldering tensely.

But that’s OK, because The Gunfighters is one of the few Doctor Who stories it is nearly impossible to take primarily as a product of its times. Because The Gunfighters is, more than any other Doctor Who story, and I include the fanwankiest depths of the John Nathan-Turner era in that, the story that symbolizes Doctor Who fandom.

Let’s have a bit of history, shall we? Up until the 1980s, Doctor Who fandom in the sense we know it today wasn’t really possible. With no Internet and no home video, Doctor Who fans were left mostly with the novelizations (more about which on… ooh, blimey, let me think through all the stuff I’m packing in the next few weeks… how’s April 20th looking for you?) and some hazy memories for the bulk of the show’s run.

…

April 1, 2011

The Most Totally Closed Mind (The Celestial Toymaker)

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Me Chinese. Me play joke. Me trap you in a nightmarish
shadow dimension and force you to play sadistic games
for all eternity.

Update 12/9/23: lol Davies explicitly agrees with me about the Toymaker being racist suck it haters

It’s April 2nd, 1966. The sun continues not to shine. In two weeks, The Spencer David Group will require someone to save them. So the singles chart isn’t that interesting. Flipping to current events, then, we have… not a heck of a lot. Artificial heart installed in Texas. That’s a bit funny, actually, given that the story we’re talking about today was almost Harnell’s regeneration story, whereas his actual regeneration story features a villain based on paranoia about things like artificial heart.

So this story and the next one are a bit interesting. I mean, Doctor Who is always interesting. Even when it gives a complete turkey of a story, it’s still usually interesting. But these stories are interesting because they are a consecutive pair of stories that have both had dramatic and significant re-evaluations within fandom. We’ll talk about the actual process of re-evaluation on Monday with The Gunfighters, but for now, let’s note that this was, for a long time, considered one of the great lost classics of Doctor Who.

It’s understandable on paper. You’ve got an unusual setting, a first rate actor in Michael Gough, and a bizarre and terrifying villain. Everything looks like we’re set for a story that works well. So in the absence of anyone actually taking a look at the thing, of course everyone thought it was good. Episode 4 wasn’t found until 1984, which is after the cut-off for initial impressions, and didn’t get a mass release until 1991. Loose Cannon didn’t get to it until 1999. So there was plenty of time for everyone to make assumptions about the story before anyone saw it.

Sometimes this process masks a hidden gem. Nobody quite knew how good The Massacre was for a very long time, because on paper it didn’t look like much. Here, however, that process led us to assume that this story was brilliant. After all – a nightmarish realm of toys ruled over by an insane demigod that forces the Doctor and his companions to play a bunch of nefarious games with odd titles like the Trilogic Game. That sounds great. Clearly a departure for Doctor Who into something new and exciting, and an ambitious idea that introduced new kinds of threats for the Doctor.

Then people actually saw the thing. And that’s the problem. Because in practice, this story is a complete trainwreck. The pacing is excruciating. Even if you make the standard accommodations of remembering that it’s not supposed to be watched in one shot, it’s tough to get over the fact that there is no emotional content to this story. It’s just the Doctor playing the Trilogic Game for four episodes while Steven and Dodo meander through a series of arbitrary deadly challenges. The reason it’s four episodes long is… that’s how long it is.…

March 30, 2011

Ready to Outsit Eternity (The Ark)

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Oh, and to top it off, the Monoids are dark skinned. So we
have the dark-skinned savage of a monster kidnapping
the cute white girl. Nothing amiss here. No sir.

It’s March 5, 1966. Boots continue to be made for walking. The Walker Brothers will, come March 17th, discuss how the sun ain’t gonna shine no more. This seems flatly contradicted by the episode of Doctor Who that airs five days earlier, in which the sun expands and burns the Earth to cinders. Thankfully, that takes place in the far future. In 1966 itself, these weeks are fairly tame, presenting a nice tableau of what we might call stories about the British character. The Jules Rimet trophy for the World Cup is stolen, and dug up a week later by a dog named Pickles. The Archbishop of Canterbury courts controversy for having the gall to sit down and talk to the Pope. And Ronnie Kray, one of the two Kray Twins who basically run organized crime in London, commits the murder he’ll finally be sent away for when he walks into the Blind Beggar pub and shoots George Cornell in the head, causing a record of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine No More” to skip endlessly on the word “anymore.” Kray would manage to get away with this for three years by virtue of the fact that nobody was actually stupid enough to testify against a man who walked into pubs and shot people dead, this being a sort of tautological behavior. If you have the insane confidence needed to shoot someone in the head in front of numerous witnesses because you believe yourself to be untouchable, you also have the insane confidence needed to actually be untouchable. At least for a while.

It’s not that these are dark days. They’re not. It’s that they’re deeply schizoid days, in which the sort of rampant corruption needed to have the Kray twins exists side by side with the charming nationalistic glee of Pickles the trophy-finding dog.

“Deeply schizoid” is an apt phrase, really, for talking about the end of John Wiles’s tenure producing Doctor Who, which happens with this episode. He was only on board for four stories, though of course, one of them was rather long, and yet it seems difficult to overstate his importance to the show. Even if, under him, the ludicrous failure to resolve The Massacre well (a problem that really is constrained entirely to the last ten minutes of the story, as the rest of it is phenomenal) and thus failed to quite resolve the ongoing plot arc of the Doctor’s inadequacy, the fact of the matter is that, on quality, The Myth Makers, The Daleks Master Plan, and The Massacre have been among the best Doctor Who stories we’ve seen. And now we have his finale, and the lone story of his tenure to be complete in the archives.

Oddly, though, The Ark is the first and only time under John Wiles that we’ll get something that feels more or less like a normal Doctor Who story.

…

March 28, 2011

Not Always. I’m Sorry. (The Massacre)

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Don’t worry, my dear boy. I leave women I sleep with
behind to die all the time. Some day, I’ll learn to dump
them in parallel universes, but for now bloody historical
tragedies will have to do for us both, hmmm?

It’s February 5, 1966. The number one single is The Overlanders with “Michelle,” which will be unseated by Nancy Sinatra with “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” which, actually, I’ll be able to make something out of later on in this blog post, so that’s nice. The Spencer Davis Group, Cilla Black, The Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Rolling Stones all also chart.

News-wise, the most interesting things going on are that the Russians landed a thingy on the moon and a bunch of governments go up in flames and military coups. Oh, and the Naval Minister of the UK resigns. Which I suppose is worth mentioning, if only because Christopher Mayhew holds the wonderful distinction of being (I think) the only major politician overseeing a military force to be filmed tripping balls on mescaline. Which, and this is the really good bit, has nothing whatsoever to do with why he resigned. He was just cranky about a change in military policy towards land-based aircraft launches instead of aircraft carriers.

Doctor Who is not going to get around to becoming a full-out drug trip for another 8 weeks, though, and it’s not even going to be a very good trip. Instead, well, let’s recap. Twelve week Dalek epic, massive death toll, Doctor at the lowest point we’ve ever seen him and completely frail and mortal, so things must be looking up this week, eh?

Well, OK, perhaps not if you read the title of the story. But as has been pointed out by others, this, more than any other story, is one that visibly loses something when you turn it into a movie with its own title. The official title – The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve – is rubbish. For one thing, the massacre in question is on St. Bartholomew’s Day. The usual defense of this teensy problem – that the story ends the day before the massacre, and that the story is thus about the eve of the massacre – opens the far larger problem that the title of the story now turns the slaughter of thousands of people into a holiday. For comparison, this would be like setting a story in Nazi Germany on November 8, 1938, and calling it “Kristallnacht Eve.” (Oh boy, I hope Father Gestapo comes!)

The alternative title – The Massacre – does considerably better, but is still a deeply flawed title in that it gives away the end. It would be like renaming The Rescue “The Guy Who’s Disguised As A Monster.”

Because the thing is, this story hinges on the fact that it’s a historical that isn’t about a well-known historical event. As has been frequently pointed out, the audience, watching this, would not have a clear idea of how this is all going to play out.…

March 25, 2011

Doesn’t It Just Burn When You Face Me (The Daleks’ Master Plan)

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The Daleks stare incredulously at each other as the big blue
dude keeps talking.

It’s November 13, 1965. The Rolling Stones are still on top. They’ll be replaced by The Seekers. The Beatles will take the Christmas number one, hold it for five weeks, then turn it over to The Spencer Davis Group, followed by, finally, on January 27, The Overlanders.

Those of you who like arithmetic may have noticed how we’ve covered twelve weeks there. That’s not a mistake. This is The Daleks’ Master Plan. In twelve parts, plus its prequel a month ago, it is by far the longest Doctor Who story ever, running nearly five and a half hours. And for not the first time, but thus far the most important time, we’re going to have to pause here and look at what this story means to Doctor Who as a whole. It’s the capstone experience for John Wiles’ tenure as Doctor Who producer, which admittedly only began last story and ends two stories hence. It is, in other words, absolutely epic, and everybody knew it. It said so in our handy 1980s books on the series that listed all the episodes. Really. I quote Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration, which says that this story is “quite simply the longest-ever Doctor Who story and also one of the best.”

It’s also 75% missing. So for a long time, that description was what we got. The Daleks’ Master Plan was the big Hartnell epic that was really good and missing. And 75% gone is an improvement. Episode 2 was only found in 2004. Prior to its discovery, major characters from the story simply didn’t exist. It wasn’t novelized for years, because it was just too long. In other words, it was one of the great lost epics of Doctor Who. There are a couple of these scattered through Doctor Who history – stories that were allegedly among the greats of their era that are missing and can never be seen. In the 80s, Doctor Who got into the habit of remaking some of its old classics for new viewers. Mostly these were disasters. But the first instance of doing this was actually in 1973, when two six-parters were quietly welded together to form a twelve part epic that, after some misdirection in the first story, turned out to be a Dalek epic. That’s how good this story’s reputation was. It was so good that there was a desire to redo it eight years later.

Life’s been hard since the 1983 guide, though. In 1992, the two surviving episodes at the time, episodes 5 and 10, finally made it out for home viewing on a documentary called Daleks – The Early Years, sparking a bit of a rethink. The problem is that what we knew about the story before seeing those episodes was that it was a massive epic of Daleks in which tons of people died. The novelization had come out super-late in 1989, so hardly anyone had read it.

…

March 23, 2011

There Should Have Been Another Way (The Myth Makers)

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From futuristic Scouse space girl to Shakespearean
title character. You go, girl.

It’s October 16, 1965. Ken Dodd’s Tears continue to rule the chart. It will continue for the next three weeks. For once, let’s start with the opening shot of Doctor Who again, because last week left us in such a strange place. And we open with… Achilles and Hector fighting in the fields of Troy, with Achilles killing Hector when the materialization of the TARDIS distracts him. So immediately, we know that we are not in Dalek country.

We also know, by sight, that we’re in a comic historical. We’ve seen them enough before. Perhaps somewhere in the back of our minds we remember that the last comedy historical, The Saxons, was unexpectedly interrupted, but one genre-breaking story does not erase the existence of the genre. So whatever shock we might have in the unexpected failure of the Daleks to show up again, we can at least settle down quickly.

And indeed, the first episode of this story is pretty straightforward. By the end of it, we know what we’re watching. It’s a typical historical. This is something that really can’t be stressed enough. I’ve said that Doctor Who is building to something in these stories over and over again now, and we’re almost there, but that’s an easier claim to make in 2011 when I know what the next 16 episodes of Doctor Who are and have seen them. In 1965, this tonal shift was jarring and confusing, and it was in no way clear where all of this was going. And so the fact that the episode appears to offer some foothold – that it looks like something resembling normal service – is probably nice. After something as weird as Mission to the Unknown, the historical version of the Galaxy 4 phoning-in is pretty welcome looking.

But as the episodes play on, a couple of things are clear. For one thing, this is funnier, at least to modern tastes, than any past historical. There’s a scene in the second episode in which Paris slips out to the battlefield to make a token effort at challenging Achilles to single combat, and happens upon Steven, who wants to fight him. Paris’s visible dislike of the idea of combat, and wants nothing more than to get out without dying. Similarly, in the first episode, there’s a wonderful scene of Menaleus complaining that, honestly, after ten years of Trojan War, he doesn’t even care that Paris stole Helen, and he’d rather just go home.

Much of this is down to a new writer, Donald Cotton, who, on the early evidence, appears to be quite a sharp, clever writer who one hopes will make a return to the series down the road. But the result is a really sharp, funny story. The acting is also good – Max Adrian as Priam is fantastic (even if his homosexuality allegedly caused serious tensions with an increasingly temperamental William Hartnell), as is Frances White as Cassandra, retooled as a villainess who demands Vicki and Steven’s execution as Greek spies.

…

March 21, 2011

My Mother Verity (Mission to the Unknown)

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It’s a fun Doctor Who fan parlor game to try to match names
to the alien delegates in this story. Here’s a clue – the gal in
the super stylish dress? She’s Verity Lambert. She’s the
one who actually runs the universe.

It’s October 9, 1965. Ken Dodd’s “Tears” is still at the top of the charts. Post Office Tower, the tallest building built in London in the 1960s, opened yesterday, the biggest visible monument to the cultural capitol that is London. And Doctor Who is doing something unusual – the only single-episode and Doctor-free story of the classic run, Mission to the Unknown.

I’ve talked about the way in which the stories are, right now, building towards something. More than any story under the script editorship of Donald Tosh or John Wiles (who was producer in all but official name of the whole of this season), this episode exists first and foremost in service to that something. One of the things that was settled on quickly after The Chase was that instead of doing two Dalek six-parters on either end of the season, they’d do a massive twelve-part Dalek epic in the third season. However, due to a quirk of accounting stretching back to having to refilm the first episodes of both An Unearthly Child and The Daleks, as well as condensing the last two epsiodes of Planet of Giants into one, it became necessary to produce an extra episode at the end of the recording block that started with The Rescue, and, ideally, to give the entire cast a break at the same time. So a one episode TARDIS-free prelude to the Dalek epic got put on the schedule.

That’s the lens through which this story is normally approached. And it is, factually speaking, true – tat is why this episode exists. But it has the unfortunate side-effect of turning a very interesting episode of television into a lesson on the intricacies of BBC budgeting in the 1960s. And, I mean, I say this as a ridiculous pedant who actually finds BBC budgeting in the 1960s interesting, but that does a real disservice to the episode.

For one thing, it’s a flagrant retcon. Nobody watching this story in 1965 was thinking about it in anything like these terms. And nobody making the story was primarily making a historical document to illustrate BBC funding. This is purely an invention of hyper-knowledgeable Doctor Who fans trying to develop a history of the show. While this is usually a wonderful thing – the fact that Doctor Who’s production is so well-documented is part of the show’s importance, frankly – here it’s a bit of an irritation. Part of it is no doubt that, being yet another missing episode, for most fans the received wisdom and history of the story is all we’ve got – especially because Mission to the Unknown, along with The Daleks Master Plan, were not novelized until 1989, among the absolute last stories to get an adaptation. So prior to 1989, detailed information on this story just wasn’t there.…

March 18, 2011

Eat Crisps and Talk About Girls (Galaxy 4)

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Quick. Guess which of the two species in this photo is
the monster name-checked in The Pandorica Opens.

It’s September 11th, 1965. The Rolling Stones are at number one with a more Rolling Stonesy recording than they’ve charted with previously, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” They’ll give way to some less interesting stuff, namely The Walker Brothers for one week and Ken Dodd for a staggering five weeks with a song I have never heard of. A quick listen suggests I was not missing anything. In fact, hearing it, I think I might be missing the blissful unawareness I had before. (But we’ll give Ken Dodd a slight break for appearing in Delta and the Bannermen in 1987.)

Meanwhile, Doctor Who is starting up its third season with Galaxy 4. It also is, from a more historical perspective, starting the third longest stretch of missing episodes in the series, with all episodes of this, the next two stories, and the first episode of the one after that missing from the archives.

Let’s start there, actually. Because much as I favor treating Doctor Who as an evolving narrative, it’s still an evolving narrative I’m telling in 2011. Just as there’s no reason to pretend that these stories are anything other than 1960s science fiction (a problem that many attempts to work out a Doctor Who canon fail miserably afoul of, creating readings of the episodes that are obviously incompatible with the episodes as transmitted), there is no reason to pretend this blog is anything other than a Doctor Who blog written in 2011.

The nature of the lost episodes, then, is complex – and it’s not going to be until the Season 4 premiere that we finally finish most of their implications. First of all, they are among the least seen episodes of Doctor Who. Not just for the obvious reasons. The soundtrack of every episode of Doctor Who exists, and a group called Loose Cannon have done superlative reconstructions based on the soundtracks and photographic evidence of the stories. For most of the missing stories, this is made easier by the existence of Telesnaps – a service provided by a man named John Cura where he would point a camera at the television screen and take photos throughout an episode in case the production team wanted a handy visual record. Unfortunately, Galaxy 4 is not among the stories Cura did this for, meaning the visual evidence is particularly thin. Thus Loose Cannon have had to make up the slack via photoshopping existing photos together to make decent guesses at what the scenes looked like, and, in the case of Galaxy 4, building their own version of the monsters to recreate scenes of the monsters from scratch.

The problem is, Loose Cannon’s policy is that they will only ever put their reconstructions out on VHS. In practice this has been circumvented via the usual means, but it does mean that these excellent reconstructions are going the same way as the episodes themselves, stuck on a dead medium (Yes, VHS is officially dead now.

…

March 16, 2011

You Were Expecting Someone Else II (1966 Annual, The Dalek Book, Dalek World)

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The thing in front is not David the
Gnome. It’s the Doctor. Or did you mean
the Sensorite?

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 Doctor Who Annual (published in late 1965), The Dalek Book, and The Dalek World, the three earliest examples of Doctor Who spin-off fiction.

So, I’m getting a late start to the blog entry today, kind of have a sinus/allergy headache, and am in a strangely bad mood. Let’s dive right in and tackle the question of canonicity and Doctor Who, shall we? (What? I mean, what do you do when you have a headache?)

I mean, it’s not actually that tough a topic. The sadly defunct blog Teatime Brutality sorted out all the possible issues in Doctor Who canon over here. The piece is as good a take on the matter as I could possibly do, and reveals the rather surprising truth that the single most important episode of Doctor Who in explaining its canon is Gareth Roberts’s The Unicorn and the Wasp. From this data, he works up the extremely handy map of Doctor Who continuity you see somewhere on the right side of your screen.

I’d love to give proper credit for this image, but Teatime
Brutality guy has long since left the Internet and wrote
anonymously before that. So it’s his, whoever he is. Hey
Teatime Brutality guy. If you happen to read this, drop a
line. I’d love to talk about your views on The Big
Bang.

But a broader question is what that means. I mean, it’s all well and good to do some hand waving and proclaim that Doctor Who has no canon and all works of fiction are equally valid in the Doctor Who mythos, but it comes awfully close to the literary criticism equivalent of technobabble. I mean, yes, it’s trivial to show that Doctor Who does not have a canon in the traditional Star Wars tiered sense of things. (Though it’s worth doing so, as Teatime Brutality demonstrates. If only so you can quote that hilarious line from the Transformers Wiki, “Indeed so little attention is paid to it that the franchise is riddled with countless irreconcilable continuity clashes despite being presented as a single continuous story, even in the TV movie and continuing television series that were made many years after the original series was cancelled.” If only for the hilarious implication that we poor Doctor Who fans are somehow living with a terrible affliction in this regard. Hey Transformers fans. We just have a lack of canon. You have two Michael Bay movies. We win.)

So let’s look at it with some historical perspective. Such as via these three books, the earliest instances of something that may or may not be Doctor Who canon. First off, what are they? Well, they’re three books, each about 100 pages.…

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