Not a Trace of the Original (Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror)
It’s January 19th, 2020. Stormzy, Ed Sheeran, and Burna Boy are at number one with “Own It,” with Lewis Capaldi, Future featuring Drake, Roddy Rich, and the Weeknd also charting. Life is settling into a certain rush—exchanging e-mails about the new place and the fact that our new landlord apparently lost our lease and needs us to sign it again while preparing for the fact that in a week Penn and I are leaving for a trip to the UK, primarily though not entirely to see the Tate’s massive Blake exhibition.
While on television, what passes for quality in this awful day and age. It’s not that Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror is good. It’s manifestly not—it treats its audience like idiots, has nothing to say that isn’t a cliche, and at no point even considers aspirations beyond “do about as well as The Masque of Mandragora or Under the Lake/Before the Flood.” But if you’re high and have a decent game to fuck around with on your phone it’s no less entertaining to have this on than it is to have some Pertwee-era adequacy like The Dæmons, and in an era with The Bok Choi of Rainbow Akkaidians, The Timeless Children, and Legend of the Sea Devils that counts for something. (Ironically, it is apparently the only script of the era that Chibnall did not take a final editing pass on.) Barring a real surprise out of rewatching Can You Hear Me? or something, it’s going to be hard to have this much fun again with Doctor Who until Eve of the Daleks. We may as well at least try. After all, we have a story that’s actually about something. It’d be criminal not to analyze that.
The key thing that makes this story function on the level of aboutness is that the villain and Thomas Edison are paralleled. Tesla attacks Edison for having “a factory full of men to do your thinking for you,” saying, “you’re not a man of vision, you’re a man of parts.” Meanwhile, the Skithra are portrayed as precisely that—an alien invasion made of spare parts of other alien invasions, from aliens who the Doctor furiously asks whether “there’s a single thing on this ship that you’ve built yourselves.” It feels surreal to explain such a basic concept in a blog where I’ve previously spent a fair amount of time on moderately advanced topics in narratology, but this is sort of thing that makes themes work. By overtly paralleling the Skithra and Edison the story ensures that each of them serve as a commentary on the other.
It’s crucial to note that this does not constitute an episode that can be decoded into a singular meaning. Series 9, with its hybrid plot, used the technique consciously to create a cracked mirror funhouse of signification that never did anything so crass as resolve. In contrast, Kerblam!, for all that it collapses into a single, unambiguous, and flatly evil moral, never really bothers to do this sort of mirroring. The point of the technique isn’t to increase clarity of communication, but rather to increase the moment to moment intensity of communication. You make parts of the story mirror and tacitly comment on each other so that there’s simply more going on in every scene. Again, Series 9 is useful here, in that it never really resolves its hall of mirrors into anything. The resolution is emotional, rooted in character work. The hall of mirrors is just there to crank up the volume—to amplify the dysfunctional glory of Clara and the Doctor.
Here, likewise, the Skithra-Edison parallel never actually resolves into anything. In the end the default logic of the Doctor Who story wins out. The Skithra, as monsters, are bad. More to the point, Edison, as a historical celebrity, is good. For all that the Doctor likes Tesla better, and for all that he and (in absentia) Graham get their moral points against Edison, Edison still gets his big hero moment, turning his evil publicity genius into the thing that saves lives. And by the end of the story Edison and Tesla are treated not as a moral parable about the nature of human ingenuity but as chummy rivals. He may be overtly paralleled with the villain, but that doesn’t actually go anywhere.
On one level this is a pity. A celebrity historical in which a celebrity is fully deconstructed would be a pleasant novelty. One thing that the Chibnall era does deserve at least some praise for is that it flirts with this—King James, Edison, and Byron are all held up to varying levels of critique, if never outright rejection. Pushing further in that direction would be good—indeed, it’s bordering on moral necessity in an era where even criticizing fucking slaveholders is politically controversial.
On another level, though, it’s just part of this episode’s basic status within the annihilating void of the Chibnall era. This is the one where things go basically as you’d expect for a generic episode of Doctor Who. That momentary hitch, like a lucid moment in a fast declining loved one, becomes something faintly interesting—an execution of generic Doctor Who in the midst of what is otherwise essentially nothingness. This is unique. In stellar eras, successful execution of generic Doctor Who functions much like a virtuoso performance of a beloved standard. Here I’m not talking about things like Under the Lake/Before the Flood or 42—cliche-ridden low spots in strong eras—but things like Mummy on the Orient Express or The Curse of Fenric, interesting because of the stylistic flourishes, like a brilliant cover. In less functional eras, it becomes an interesting lab for their failed obsessions—a way of seeing what they were going for, like Frontios or Gridlock.
But here there are no failed obsessions. There’s nothing they’re going for. There’s literally no context to read this in light of—no coherent sense of “the Chibnall era” for this to take on in interpreting the standards. They are simply standards, interesting for no other reason than that they are standards of a thing we happen to be invested in. Here is Doctor Who, stripped of anything save for itself and basic competence. What do we make of it?
Perhaps the celebrity historical does itself no favors in this context. It is, as noted, Doctor Who in its most inescapably conservative—a subgenre that fundamentally glorifies both the past and the great man theory of history. Frankly, it’s a subgenre one struggles to come up with great examples of. I’ll give you Vincent and the Doctor for free in spite of the fact that it’s a strong candidate for the most wildly overrated episode of the new series, but let’s be honest—what’s the second best celebrity historical? The Unquiet Dead? The Unicorn and the Wasp? I mean, fundamentally we’re dealing with a subgenre where, what, five out of seven examples over the first ten series are by Gareth Roberts of Mark Gatiss? “Oh yeah, that’s not half bad” is pretty much the ceiling.
Equally, the floor isn’t that bad. Things like The Shakespeare Code and Robot of Sherwood aren’t favorites, but they’re perfectly adequate; nobody’s picking them as the weakest episodes of their seasons, certainly. For the most part the celebrity historical is the perfect place to look at Doctor Who in a pure state because it represents Doctor Who at its most adequate. It is in many ways modern Doctor Who at its most basic.
And yeah, it is in fact pretty entertaining. For all its conservatism, the push and pull of the historical celebrity, who’s typically played slightly stodgily, and the Doctor’s more anarchic energy is a pretty good engine, and spaceships and period costumes always offer decent visuals. And frankly the BBC is better than anyone at shoving moderately respectable actors in period costumes. It’s not a surprise that the Whittaker era’s three swings at it are generally the times it comes closest to working, and not just because Chibnall doesn’t write any of them. This really is Doctor Who at its most blandly functional.
What it’s not, though is… I mean, especially worthwhile. The world doesn’t actually need Teatime Tesla for Tots. If my ringing endorsements of the celebrity historical’s adequacy weren’t giving the game away, the truth of the matter is that this is endearing because it’s a Doctor Who tradition, not because it’s pulsing with some sort of urgency. At the end of the day, you can see the real reason the episode needs to endorse Edison’s cruel but effective showmanship in spite of the fact that he’s a man of parts: it is too.
Because the ugly thing that, perhaps, it’s finally time to admit is that parts don’t matter. Even if this were largely the good parts, and it isn’t… For all the pleasant and much quoted idealism about Doctor Who in the preface to this blog, it’s not valuable because of the beautiful flexibilities of its structure. It’s not valuable because of the amazing things it can do. It’s not valuable because of some magical breath of mercury at its foundation. It’s not, in fact, valuable at all, at least in and of itself. It’s a flexible container that was lucky enough to be written by people like David Whittaker, Robert Holmes, Ben Aaronovitch, Kate Orman, Russell T Davies, and Steven Moffat—to have had actors like Patrick Troughton, Peter Davison, Christopher Eccleston, and Peter Capaldi, to say nothing of Jacqueline Hill, Katy Manning, Lis Sladen, Sophie Aldred, Billie Piper, Catherine Tate, and Jenna Coleman—and to have intersected the careers of people like Delia Derbyshire, Verity Lambert, Douglas Adams, Bonnie Langford, and Ben Wheatley.
But even that’s just a list of names. What really matters is simply that things like The Rescue, The Mind Robber, Carnival of Monsters, City of Death, Enlightenment, Remembrance of the Daleks, Damaged Goods, and Hell Bent were made—that its theme music was a pioneering piece of electronic music, that it’s a who’s who of British television talent across the ages. It never mattered because it was Doctor Who; it mattered because it was often good, and when it wasn’t good it was often at least interesting. When that quality builds up over decades you get a fascinating and vital lens into British culture. But when that quality is absent, frankly, so does the importance. This, at the end of the day, is the crux of my longrunning beef with much of the spinoff material—they’re simply far too indifferent towards quality.
And sure, a perfectly reasonable definition of a fan is someone who likes something even when it’s not good. Certainly I’m a lot more likely to watch a middling Doctor Who episode while high and browsing BlueSky is than I am to watch a middling Star Trek episode. And that’s all well and good. I am blatantly, demonstrably a Doctor Who fan. But at the end of the day, if all a fandom is good for is picking what your televisual wallpaper is while you doomskeet then who cares? There is, as an endless parade of Marvel Cinematic Universe fans will rush to tell you if you accidentally mention color grading in a place they can hear you, nothing wrong with empty fun. But there’s nothing much right with it either. It’s not something you love.
This week, Chibnall actually managed to make a fifty minute block of recognizably Doctor Who-shaped content. But frankly, if I want recognizably Doctor Who-shaped content, I can watch Paradise Towers for the tenth time instead of this pile of borrowed glories.
July 22, 2024 @ 1:12 am
My brother’s grunge fandom obligates me to give a thumbs up to the caption.
July 22, 2024 @ 5:54 am
Not pleased they straightwashed Tesla tbh
July 22, 2024 @ 8:27 am
Speaking of great creatives whose careers intersect with Dr Who, I was surprised that Nida Manzoor’s direction didn’t get any coverage here. I don’t remember it being especially flashy, but what she did after Dr Who was absolutely stunning, and clearly (in the case of Polite Society) in a broadly similar vein.
July 22, 2024 @ 9:15 am
“Things like The Shakespeare Code and Robot of Sherwood aren’t favorites, but they’re perfectly adequate; nobody’s picking them as the weakest episodes of their seasons, certainly.”
Oh aren’t they? I speak not of ‘Robot of Sherwood’, which I’ve always quite liked, but ‘Shakespeare Code’ is simply dreadful — vapid to the point of insulting its audience, as though laughing at the idea that it might have a point. In a season that also has ’42’ and ‘The Lazarus Experiment’ it’s got some hot competition for the bottom drawer, but both of these are at least trying to give Martha material besides the surface-level ‘heh, heh, she thinks the Doctor’s a bit of a dish but he’s mooning about Rose and she keeps being disappointed’ joke; and formally, ’42’ is a failed experiment because Chibnall is not capable of successful experiments, but it is, still, an interesting experiment. ‘The Shakespeare Code’ is just… nothing.
Anyway, I’m not sure what you’re counting as the “three swings” the Chibnall era takes at the celebrity historical. “Rosa”, “Nikola Tesla”, “The Haunting of the Villa Diodati”, I guess? But surely “War of the Sontarans” is also a swing, albeit a swing-and-a-miss, with its hollow hagiography of Mary Seacole. (More arguable are “Legend of the Sea Devils” with Madam Ching, and “Spyfall” as a two-in-one with Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan, but I’d still be inclined to count them as ultimately-fairly-conservative variations-on-a-theme. Certainly the Doctor’s excited expository babbles going OMGGG IT’S [HISTORICAL FIGURE]!!! in both are indistinguishable from the equivalent beat in a conventional celeb historical.)
July 22, 2024 @ 12:46 pm
Re the three swings at the celebrity historical… The Witchfinders, Nikola Tesla, and Haunting of Villa Diodati? Given the stipulation that Chibnall didn’t write any of them, which can hardly apply to “Rosa”.
July 22, 2024 @ 12:49 pm
Agreed with you in general about the other variations on the theme, though: Rosa, Spyfall, War of the Sontarans, Legend of the Sea Devils, and arguably the Joseph Williamson segments of Flux although that’s stretching the case somewhat.
Suddenly the wafer-thin treatment of Queen Nefertiti in “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” looks a bit like a forerunner of how he will tackle e.g. Madame Ching, Mary Seacole, Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan, doesn’t it? Shallow, perfunctory, “gee whiz you were awesome you were, please now hold this plot related lever and do very little else of importance or symbolic value in 45 minutes”.
July 22, 2024 @ 6:07 pm
I… don’t know why I forgot “The Witchfinders” given El mentions King James in the review. But really now, “Rosa” is the celebrity historical of the Chibnall era if anything is!
July 23, 2024 @ 12:55 pm
On the flipside, it’s definitely not going to be in the list of ones our good host can describe as “closest to working”…
July 22, 2024 @ 3:12 pm
I’ve kept thinking about this because you’re very good at inspiring your readers to think about the interesting ideas that flow out of your keyboard when writing about Doctor Who. I don’t know if you’re also thinking of something like this, but the fact that last entry reflected on Doctor Who’s metaphysics of time instead of talking about the content of that tortuously dull episode can reveal what may be the essence of the Chibnall years and why his approach to Doctor Who fails so miserably.
First, I don’t think that the eventual compilation of posts into the Chibnall/Whittaker Era volume of TARDIS Eruditorum can be complete without discussing his first appearance in Doctor Who. I’m not talking about his first episodes in the Davies 1.0 era: I mean the fan panel in 1986 where he told off Pip and Jane Baker.
Pip and Jane were ultimately caught up in a moment of contradicting themselves. They first talked about how they wanted to write a serious-looking sci-fi adventure because that was what Doctor Who offered, but when challenged about some of the parts of Terror of the Vervoids that didn’t make a lot of sense or coherence, they just wrote it off as a silly children’s show that didn’t really matter. Chibnall very angrily called them out on it, as they deserved. It made me think, when he was first announced as Moffat’s successor, that the Chibnall years would be a rather self-serious, but quality-focussed period of the show (his scripts may have been pretty functional over complex, but he could have been a good curator). And we were all very disappointed.
Because when Chibnall was entirely in charge of the whole show, he didn’t seem interested in any of the deeper possibilities of storytelling and character development in the show. As you say, thematic techniques like mirroring Edison’s business of intellectual piracy with the methods of the invading monsters amplifies the intensity of the story by having it play across multiple dimensions of thought at once. But Chibnall’s default approach is to make one-dimensional Doctor Who stories. He thinks that the show is serious, but that the show’s seriousness comes only from its content itself: that we should care about The Battle of Registrars and Comptrollers because it’s on Doctor Who. His problem with Pip and Jane was that they revealed that they didn’t even care this much: they didn’t even really care about Doctor Who.
But Doctor Who is more than the TV show called Doctor Who because of how flexible it can be telling complex, multilayered stories about meaningful themes and characters. That’s what almost every other creator on the show (and in the creative arts generally) actually understands.
July 22, 2024 @ 4:22 pm
For whatever reason (acceptable or not), celebrity historicals are not allowed to tear down someone’s legacy. Probably either fear of a lawsuit from descendants or just plain being too cowardly to ruffle the feathers of some fans. I may not like it, but I understand.
But Doctor Who is certainly allowed to tear down a completely fictional alien character. We see that all the time. This episode would be much better if instead of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla it were about alien analogues. Let’s call them, I dunno, Masedi and Olates just for funs. Now there’s complete freedom to say whatever you want about them. And you can even get some historical facts wrong (or just alter them in service of the story) and it’s not going to light up the message boards in the same way. But this can’t be done under Chibnall, as demonstrated by the toothless take on the Amazon analogue.
I used to be part of the BBC’s audience feedback program. They’d send out a survey after each episode and ask us for a rating and what worked and what didn’t. Under Chibnall, my responses started with “I am cautiously optimistic he’ll be better than before” and eventually became “another Chibnall episode, doing Chibnall things that I am powerless to stop.” It was probably somewhere around this episode that I dropped out of the program altogether. It was just too depressing to report the same issues over and over again.
July 22, 2024 @ 6:12 pm
Honestly, you’ve hit the nail on the head on why I prefer Doctor Who when it engages in outright fantasy/historical fantasy/science fiction than with “real” history (and why withdrawing from Earth-based storytelling was a good move from 1976-1981 at least). Doctor Who can’t overthrow Thatcher directly but it can defeat Helen A, and as I believe the Eruditorum has demonstrated quite thoroughly, the latter is far more satisfying as a narrative and as a comment on real life.
July 22, 2024 @ 4:58 pm
If Vincent and the Doctor is overrated, then it’s for good reason. 😛 But regarding the celebrity historical in general: absolutely.
July 22, 2024 @ 5:21 pm
I feel you’ve really hit the nail on the head here – Chibnall’s Who as a collection of spare parts aiming to be nothing more than what the general idea of what Doctor Who is without any real direction or spark. His whole run is basically aiming to be Doctor Who as it works when described by surface-level fandom tweets: as a silly goofy sci-fi show that shows you a lot of cool different sights and has a twee lead performance. When you don’t have a direction to take the series in once you actually start writing, you end up spitting out derivative stories about how “everything you know is going to change” before saying “uh The Doctor was adopted I guess. That’s all.”
The only explanation that actually makes sense to me as to why Chibnall’s Who is so bad in so many different ways is that he didn’t believe the show needed to be anything more than his idea of it to succeed. Which is a shame. Obviously, the series doesn’t provide a social good just for existing (like you describe) (and even if us fans would really like it to), but when it does try, as you describe, it’s capable of giving us Remembrance of the Daleks, City of Deaths, and Dot and Bubbles. The fact that Chibnall, in his apparently lifelong fandom, never, ever saw it that way is a real shame.
July 22, 2024 @ 6:13 pm
If only “the Doctor was adopted I guess” had been all. If only.
July 22, 2024 @ 7:41 pm
I was really disappointed at how little it got into just how fucking weird Tesla was. This is my problem with the celebrity historical, there’s rarely much effort put into characterisation. Honestly, Pertwee’s name-dropping was probably the best way to do ‘the Doctor meets historical celebrities.’
July 23, 2024 @ 6:24 am
I’m not sure if it is accidentally a lens into British culture at the time precisely because it is so naff. We were governed by idiots, if you said anything less than positive about Brexit on social media you got shouted down, the BBC had a target on it’s back from both the right and the left. It must have been far too easy to rest on casting Jodie with a multiracial crew and not actually get the scripts to be any good. It felt like Chibnall was too concerned with the locations, lenses and practical stuff. That there was this whole attempt to be comparable to prestige serious tv. By then I was watching like I’d almost become like a supporter of a sports franchise with a losing record. Because it’s force of habit/ brand loyalty. El gets respect for continuing to write about the show during the period. If I were less broke I’d break my rule of avoiding Patreon & make it the first thing I gave money. Sorry about that & thanks for still publishing this blog.
July 25, 2024 @ 9:16 pm
Surely the best celebrity historical is the one with Richard Nixon.
July 28, 2024 @ 1:46 pm
Yes, but it’s more of a deconstruction/parody of that subgenre than a true example.
July 29, 2024 @ 10:13 am
I’ve literally never thought about The Impossible Astronaut/ Day of the Moon being a celebrity historical but thinking about it it’s kind of obvious. I suppose it highlights the problem with the celebrity historical – TIA/DotM are episodes with big ideas and an interesting plot, and they just so happen to feature Nixon, while The Unquiet Dead or Shakespeare Code leads with “what if the Doctor met X!” and works backwards from there. It can work when that celebrity comes with a genre baked in (“Doctor Who does an Agatha Christie murder mystery” is a worthwhile idea on its own, and it’s fun to add Agatha Christie into the mix, so why not), but otherwise it’s just “I guess Queen Victoria met a werewolf”.
I’m betting that El has already pointed all this out in a much more interesting way in an Eruditorum post that I’m forgetting.
July 28, 2024 @ 1:43 pm
The concept of parallels/mirroring is quite simple, yes, but I personally never thought about it increasing “the moment to moment intensity of communication”. Thanks for that interesting observation and for the whole essay which was, as usual, fascinating to read.