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Where’s Mother: The Doctor’s Revisited (Colin Baker)

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There are two observations about this special that strike me as getting to the heart of it. The first is that, more than ever, Steven Moffat is the most interesting thing on display here. I’ve been making snarky jokes here and there about it nearing the 20th anniversary of his great “slag off most of Doctor Who” drunken performance piece at a con, but it’s here we have to admit that Steven Moffat has, at the very least, played two different characters in his life when it comes to commenting on the classic series. Which one is the authentic Steven Moffat is of course a matter for debate, and if you think the answer is either of them you’re a fool, but nevertheless, we all know he’s capable of a devastating and scathing review of this era that outdoes any other.

So it’s fundamentally interesting to see him relied upon so heavily to offer a defense of this era. It is, to be sure, not hard to reconcile the positions. His praise is based on the daringness of the ideas in the Baker era, which has always been the thing you can praise about it. It would have been easy to keep Doctor Who around as wallpaper, and by god it didn’t. But it’s easy to imagine a lengthy amount of unused footage in which he points out that absolutely none of these lofty ideas play out. Nevertheless, those with a fondness for literary biography are spoiled for choice in arguing that the inspiration for the Capaldi era came from trying to redemptively read the Colin Baker era.

This brings us neatly to the second observation, which is that it gives a surprisingly thorough sense of the turmoil of this era without ever speaking the names “John Nathan-Turner,” “Eric Saward,” or “Ian Levine.” Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant are both visibly at the edge of saying that there were some major problems with the era. Baker, at times, seems at pains to be much more soft-spoken, and to highlight the degree to which his Doctor was a performance.

But more to the point, there’s no attempt to shy away from The Twin Dilemma. The strangling scene is there and acknowledged. Defended by Bryant, yes, and unfortunately, but there in all its upsetting glory. Nobody quite tries to defend the coat so much as explain it. You can tell this is a problematic era, even though the program is basically positive.

And it has to be said, it makes good points. Its acknowledgment of how Baker was allowed to improve his performance in his second season is a nice touch, but I was genuinely surprised to see them make the case that the nature of his improvement was set up in The Twin Dilemma. And Moffat’s end-of-episode plug of Vengeance on Varos is an enormously emphatic thing that’s based on a tremendous respect for it as a serious piece of television. The fact that he takes the time to highlight the presence of a serious writer on Doctor Who is enormously appealing, simply because it is such a Moffat thing to focus upon.…

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Overwhelming Presence

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Just been reading the lovely Colin Baker’s (less than warm) remarks about his encounter with Jimmy Savile on the… umm… Daily Mail website.  Bleurgch.  I won’t link.

Found this delightful comment below.  As ever, click to enlarge.

It may be trolling, of course… but I doubt it.  It has the ring of genuine idiocy about it.

It restores a little bit of one’s faith in humanity to see that even the Daily Mail readers downvoted this icky little splat of blinkered, slavering, buttmunching cockwitttery.

Just shows.  It’s a jungle out there.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 28 (Time’s Champion)

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Time’s Champion – probably the single least findable thing I’ll cover on this blog – is an unlicensed novel by Craig Hinton and Chris McKeon published as a charity endeavor in 2008. The provenance of it is interesting – Hinton pitched the novel to BBC Books, but it was rejected – instead they published Gary Russell’s Spiral Scratch to fill basically the same purpose of giving Colin Baker a regeneration story. Separately the American writer Chris McKeon pitched a story to Big Finish about the Valeyard which was also rejected. McKeon and Hinton got in touch, and Hinton gave McKeon permission to turn his outline of Time’s Champion into a full novel, which, following Hinton’s death, McKeon did.

Let’s get one thing out of the way- this is not a good book. McKeon, who is by far the more involved writer, is a weak prosesmith at best. On top of that, the plot elevates fanwank to a profound art, relying heavily not only on Hinton’s previous novels Millennial Rites and The Quantum Archangel but with heavy references to scads of other stuff. This is not in and of itself a problem, except that it seems to be the entire point of this book –  to try to fit absolutely as many existing pieces of Doctor Who together as is possible.

I’ll attempt something resembling a summary of the plot. The Doctor visits Sergeant Benton’s 70th birthday party, which is also visited by some characters from The Quantum Archangel including the human component of Kronos from the Time Monster and his pregnant wife. Meanwhile, in 1908 a writer is attempting to write a book called Time’s Champion that turns out to be written in quantum mnemonics, the magical language from Millennial Rites. And in 9908 another man with the same name as the 1908 writer is writing a computer virus called Abbadon. Eventually it turns out that both are being manipulated by Morbius’s children to launch an attack on Gallifrey, which coincides with the birth of Kronos’s child.

So all hell predictably breaks loose, the Doctor runs to Gallifrey where he meets up with President Romana, a character from another Hinton book, and several other named Time Lords, then goes into the Matrix where the Keeper turns out to be the Valeyard, who is later revealed to be the Doctor’s stolen regeneration energy caught in a time loop, created by the gods, Pain, Hope, Time, Life, Death, and Fate, as a substitute Doctor because Time wanted the Doctor as her champion but was denied by the other transcendent beings, thus creating the Valeyard as a compromise. Then there’s a bunch more stuff, but it ends with the Doctor taking complete control of the Matrix by temporarily becoming Lord President of Gallifrey, then letting the TARDIS get eaten by a sentient computer virus and using quantum mnemonics to blow up the computer virus outside of the universe, but only after unregenerating in order to trick the Valeyard and destroy him, and then has to become Death’s Champion to save Mel, but cheats and sacrifice himself using the powers of Time’s Champion to force a regeneration, and what is this I don’t even.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 27 (Millennial Rites)

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More than anyone – even Gary Russell or Lance Parkin – the late Craig Hinton has a reputation for fanwank. But the fact that we’re dealing with that list in the first place is interesting. On one extreme we have Russell, who I confess to having relatively little regard for as a fiction writer. (Although there’s reason to rate him fairly highly as an editor or a writer of non-fiction material) On the other we have Parkin, one of the consensus best novel writers. So once again there’s clearly not a direct correlation between fanwank and quality.

It’s tempting to try to chart out some sort of principle based on the fact that Jubilee works and Business Unusual doesn’t. Jubilee deals with the past of the program in broad strokes, Business Unusual gets bogged down in tedious and pointless details. But I’m hard-pressed to buy that as a logic – there’s something desperately unsatisfying about the idea that the details not only don’t matter but necessarily cannot matter and are fundamentally opposed to good storytelling. (For one thing, it would pose an uncomfortable existential challenge to the logic of this blog.)

We’re at a point of transition in the arc of the blog, moving from the decade-long deflation of the series that stretched from The Horror of Fang Rock to Revelation of the Daleks to the invisible reinvention of the series once it moved out of the public eye. One of the things that’s going to happen over that period is, both within Doctor Who and outside of it, an evolution in how storytelling works in what we can broadly describe as genre fiction. We’ll watch this unfold over the next lengthy chunk of the blog, but one of the basic principles of the new way of doing things is that the high concept genre ideas are parallel structures to character-based storytelling. (When we get to the inevitable Buffy post in January or February we’ll deal with the details of this.)

And that’s the difference between Lance Parkin and Gary Russell – Parkin writes in a form that recognizably behaves like that while Russell writes more in the style of the Saward-era continuity writers. And the thing is, even though Craig Hinton’s level of fanwank exceeds both of them, at the heart of things he is a Parkin-style writer. And so we have Millenial Rites, a story that is on the one hand a massive celebration of minutiae and on the other is actually a reasonably functional piece of storytelling in its own right that has an actual point to it.

On its most basic level, Millennial Rites is a story about the Doctor’s fear of the Valeyard and what that does to him. All of its big dramatic beats come out of that – from the Doctor’s realization that his treatment of Mel is putting him on the road to that future to his temporary transformation into the Valeyard late in the novel. Even the smaller details work towards that, with Ashley Chapel and Anne Travers both serving as figures that in their own way grapple with obsessions, paranoias, and temptations, thus backing up the theme.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 26 (Business Unusual)

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Last time we dealt with Gary Russell we found ourselves reflecting heavily on the notion of fanwank. Broadly speaking, at least, I’m hard-pressed to complain too heavily about fanwank in the novel lines, particularly the Missing Adventures and Past Doctor Adventures, both of which by their nature appeal virtually entirely to dedicated Doctor Who fans. When you’re dealing with an audience of dedicated fans the extent to which you can rely on existing work increases dramatically. There is a fundamental difference between writing novels for a fan audience and writing television for BBC1.

But having navigated the Saward era and its continuity fetishism there become some new issues around this. Or, put another way, the mere fact that there’s nothing wrong with fanwank is not equivalent to fanwank being inherently worthwhile. There are things that you can do when working in the margins of existing work that you can’t do any other way – a fact that is responsible for no small part of my interest in things like Doctor Who and superhero comics. But the margins aren’t interesting in and of themselves – a problem that plagues Gary Russell’s work, and that, in a few paragraphs, is going to prove the undoing of Business Unusual.

But let’s back up and look at the larger situation, since this is our outro to the Colin Baker era. At the heart of the problem is still the Seasonish and the way in which both Season 23s – the transmitted one and the erased one – create a tangible gap in the history of Doctor Who. Colin Baker is the first Doctor to lack a regeneration story, a fact that coincides with Mel being the first companion since Susan to lack an origin story, combined with the deeply unsatisfying nature of the Valeyard, an idea with far more and deeper implications than the series was willing to actually explore, with all of this slotting into the already confused gap introduced by the hiatus.

The result is a period that is the subject of a massive amount of fan theories. And so, having at least determined that the flaw is not inherently Colin Baker, let’s tie off the last issue – was there ever anything interesting to do here? Are the gaps of this era – gaps that we cannot, given the absurd turmoil behind the scenes, chalk up to any deliberate ambiguity – ones that can be interestingly filled? In other words, is the era we’ve just been witness to fatally and irrevocably flawed, or is there actual quality to be had here?

So that’s what this final triptych of entries is going to focus on – three books that fill the holes in and around the gap between Trial of a Time Lord and Time and the Rani. And first up we have Gary Russell with Business Unusual, a novel that proposes to introduce Mel. And give Colin Baker his “missing” Brigadier story. And serve as a sequel to The Scales of Injustice.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 25 (Jubilee)

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The first and most obvious thing to say is that the Sixth Doctor does, in fact, work. More than anything else, we ought to acknowledge the fact that Rob Shearman, with Jubilee, makes it so that Colin Baker has an unambiguous classic of Doctor Who under his belt. Baker has a lot of good audios, actually, but this is one that is blatantly a classic. So before we get into anything else we ought look at what it did with Baker’s Doctor that finally got the character to work.

I would argue that there are two things. The first is a trick the show should have picked up from Jon Pertwee, who was so often at his best when his confident and at times outright arrogant Doctor was put on the back foot or the defensive. Baker’s Doctor is helped enormously by the scenes in this story in which he gets to play the Doctor driven mad by a hundred years being locked in the Tower of London. Seeing his Doctor so weakened and afraid has the same effect it does for Pertwee, on top of letting Baker show off some acting ability that he was rarely given the opportunity to on television. Indeed, the mad Doctor in the tower is in many ways an idea perfectly suited to Baker’s Doctor, whose bluster and confidence can be subverted with a wickedness that the Doctors on either side of him couldn’t hope to match.

The other major trick that Jubilee manages to improve Baker is not Shearman’s invention, but a brilliant idea nevertheless: Evelyn Smythe. Evelyn is an interesting concept for a companion – a middle-aged history teacher. OK, so actually, that’s more accurately described as the original concept of a companion, though Evelyn is a good twenty years older than Barbara was. But it’s a compelling move away from the horribly sexualized peril monkey Peri was stuck playing that doesn’t go straight to comedy as Mel, by dint of her casting, did.

The result is a companion who can actually stand up to the Doctor in such a way as to make him no longer seem nearly so nasty. Again, this is largely lifted from the Pertwee era. Pertwee worked because he had Jo Grant for three years and she, no matter what Pertwee did, could smile winsomely and reassert herself with a moment of sheer pluck and charm. That meant that Pertwee’s character was always kept in check. It’s the same thing that made Tom Baker’s grandstanding in the latter days of his tenure bearable – the fact that Lalla Ward could hold her own. And in Evelyn Smythe Big Finish created a character that could stand up to Baker’s Doctor in that way and thus keep him charming instead of overbearing. She was in many ways the companion he should have always had.

That, at least, explains the infrastructure changes Jubilee enjoys. It starts at a higher baseline of quality and potential, and that makes it easier for it to achieve greatness.…

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The Catharsis of Spurious Morality (The Ultimate Foe)

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Part 3: The Nature of Earth to Gallifrey

In the course of Holmes’s mad recycling of the past, however, Holmes fires off one of the most fascinatingly problematic concepts in the history of Doctor Who, namely the idea that the Time Lords eventually yank Earth and its “constellation” out of place in the galaxy and plop it down elsewhere.

The use of the word constellation is interesting. It’s a chronic foible of Holmes that he seems to use the word as a synonym for “solar system,” but the error is almost the perfect Holmesian error. The nature of a constellation, after all, is that it makes sense only from a set physical vantage point. The constellations of one solar system are not the constellations of another. And yet the Doctor routinely identifies Gallifrey with reference to its constellation.

Tellingly, though, the constellation he names – Kasterborous – cannot be a Gallifreyan one, since constellations are merely happenstance arrangements of stars in the sky of a given planet, and thus one cannot see a constellation that one is a part of. So when Gallifrey is said to be in the constellation of Kasterborous, what can this possibly mean?

Clearly, and this ties in alarmingly well with Gallifrey as we understood it back in The Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords’ understanding of themselves is defined primarily by reference to an external observer. They are, after all, seemingly a race governed not by the recorded facts of history but by the material memory of history. Their entire civilization is based around the Matrix, known to be a collection of memories. So it’s not a surprise that even the location of their planet is defined in terms of an external perspective. The only question is whose.

By far the most sensible answer, within Doctor Who, is Earth’s. Yes, there’s a sort of dreary cliche to the idea that the Time Lords are future versions of humanity, but it’s also difficult to avoid the fact that it makes a lot of sense. Not, as Miles and Woods sneer, because the sorts of people who like this idea are the sorts of people who want the Doctor to be Anakin Skywalker’s father, but because some version of this is already true. The series is hopeless at making up its mind whether the Time Lords consider Earth an obscure backwater or whether they see it as a vitally important planet, but it’s difficult not to observe that Earth has been the obsession of every single renegade Time Lord in the series from the Monk on.

Part of this may simply be geopolitical. Clearly there comes a point where Earth is the dominant force in the galaxy. In that regard, the Time Lords would, in any conception of them, have a lot of investment there. But the Time Lords seem almost wholly unconcerned with, say, Draconia. None of the other vast conquering species besides the Daleks raise much of an eyebrow. The Time Lord fascination with Earth exceeds mere local politics.…

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A Far Greater Crime (Terror of the Vervoids)

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Part 2: Recycling the Future

The Mysterious Planet, of course, embodies the “past” idea in more ways than one. The story is an unrepentant “greatest hits” reel for Robert Holmes. Both stories that he wrote and stories that he script edited are plundered and reworked over the course of it. The underlying premise is The Face of Evil, with bits of The Krotons grafted on around Drathro. Glitz and Dibbler are, of course, just Garron and Unstoffe redone. The underlying notion of a Time Lord conspiracy is straight out of The Deadly Assassin. The notion of restoring a post-apocalyptic Earth is a reworking of The Ark in Space. Hints of The Time Warrior surround the Tribe of the Free, while the people in the tunnels feel, as much by set design as writerly intention, rather like The Sun Makers.

Of course, reckless plundering of the past has been the calling card of the series for some time now. But there’s something very different about The Mysterious Planet compared to recent attempts to “do it like it was before” such as Timelash, The Two Doctors, and Attack of the Cybermen. Those were all concerned with plundering the actual signifiers of the past. But The Mysterious Planet takes a very different tack, instead repeating the techniques of the past.

This is part of a general refocusing that goes on in the midst of the hiatus. Ian Levine’s tenure as the unofficial continuity advisor comes to an end in this period. By his account, at least, it’s the hiring of Bonnie Langford as Mel that was the last straw. Given this, then, it’s interesting to note that the spaceship in Langford’s first story, Terror of the Vervoids, is named the Hyperion. The first piece of concrete influence Levine had on the series was back in State of Decay, where he got the name of the ship changed from Hyperion to Hydrax on the grounds that the Hyperion had already been used back in 1972 for The Mutants. So the act of using the name again in the story that supposedly drove Ian Levine away seems almost a deliberate provocation, or, more charitably, a conscious break with Levine’s particular relationship with the past.

Certainly it’s true that from this point on the past will be engaged with very differently. It’s not that continuity is dead – post-Trial a solid six of the twelve remaining stories of Doctor Who are going to feature returns of past concepts or characters. But there’s a marked change in the nature of it. Even in Trial of a Time Lord the Time Lords aren’t brought back in the increasingly stale portrayal that has been crusting over them since The Invasion of Time. From here on out there’s a change to bringing specific concepts back in order to reevaluate and reconceptualize them.

But in the midst of that transition we get this, a story that is in its own way more fetishistic towards the past than anything Levine ever involved himself in.…

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His Almost Gleeful Pleasure (Mindwarp)

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Part 4: How to Stage an Intervention

But if this explains the real reason for hastily convening a trial to dispose of the Doctor it does little to make sense of the ostensible reason for the trial. The Doctor is, as usual, accused of meddling and interfering – and it’s explicitly stated that the accusation is the same as the one from The War Games. But we have to ask, at this point, what the hell the Time Lords actually mean by this.

Obviously some level of hypocrisy is in play in the course of the trial given the Time Lord’s own actions, especially in this and the next story. Mindwarp is actually a particularly telling example, in that it clearly establishes that the Time Lords are still very much concerned with the natural order of things. Indeed, they seem more horrified by the fact that Crozier’s experiments derail the course of evolution than they are by the prospect of an explosion that might destroy the entire universe. This is telling. The idea that the universe might be destroyed, fine. That had to happen eventually anyway, one figures. But the idea of evolution being disrupted – and Doctor Who has more than once dabbled in the idea that evolutionary and historical processes are related – that’s a huge issue.

(It is of course worth discussing what the Time Lords do or don’t actually do about Crozier, but that’s another entry.)

But more broadly, obviously the Time Lords are broadly in favor of intervention in a number of circumstances. They intervene and interfere with Crozier’s experiments, which seem to have happened with no help from them. (The Doctor’s contributions to them seem minor at best, so we have to assume that Crozier gets there on his own) And, more obviously, they interfere like mad with Earth. There is hypocrisy and corruption at play here, but it’s more complex than “they say they oppose interference while doing it anyway.”

Indeed, even in their condemnation of the Doctor they seem to object more to the cavalierness of his interference than to the basic existence of it. The Valeyard faults him on Ravalox because people died, even though he saved the universe. (Though obviously, due to the nature of Ravalox, he does stress the idea that the Doctor should never have been there more than quite makes superficial sense, and this is meant to be a clue to something or other.) In other words, it’s not that he interfered, but that he did so in a dangerous and careless manner.

There is, in other words, a cruel tautology at the heart of Time Lord law. Interference is defined as intervention outside of the rules – as intervention that is not careful. In other words, it’s only interference when it’s not done from within the existing structures of authority. The morality of this is of course abhorrent – hence the belief that moving Earth is somehow an acceptable interference. But equally, there’s a consistency to it.…

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I Was Beginning To Fear You Had Lost Yourself (The Mysterious Planet)

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Voted “Doctor Who screenshot most likely to become an
image macro.”

Part 1: How To Write Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant

It’s September 6th, 1986. Boris Gardiner is at number one with “I Want to Wake Up With You.” A week later, The Communards replace them with “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” and stay there for the remaining three weeks of this story.  Janet Jackson, The Human League, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Run DMC/Aerosmyth, the Eurythmics, and Cutting Crew also chart, while on the album charts its the True Blue period for Madonna and the release of Paul Simon’s Graceland.

In real news, and moving very quickly through the eighteen month gap (which was really only seventeen months), the New Coke debacle happens and the ozone hole is discovered. The Heysel Disaster takes place, leading to a five year ban from European competition for English clubs. A year later is the Hand of God goal, so really, almost as crappy a time to be an English football fan as it was to be a Doctor Who fan. The Nintendo Entertainment System and Calvin and Hobbes both debut. And finally, the Challenger disaster happens, as does Chernobyl.

Whereas during this story, Desmond Tutu becomes a bishop and the Oprah Winfrey show debuts. Casualty debuts on television. Ann the Colwich rail crash happens, killing two and injuring a hundred more.

While on television we begin Trial of a Time Lord with the segment of the story commonly referred to as The Mysterious Planet. But already we’re in choppy waters as we hit the “how many stories does Trial of a Time Lord count as?” Given that I’ve already argued that An Unearthly Child and 100,000 BC should be thought of as two stories and that The Daleks’ Masterplan should be thought of as at least three, I’m obviously unlikely to suggest that a run of episodes with four writers and three production codes should be treated as one story just because of the part numbering. And while there’s a unity to the season that was missing from the previous season-long arc, as mentioned last time there’s also a massive disunity to this season. So let’s say not only four stories, but four very confused stories.

Within this mess there’s a lot to talk about. But the trial-specific material will mostly benefit from being taken in the context of the end, so we’ll save the bulk of it for the Ultimate Foe entry. Instead I want to start with the most visibly rebooted aspect of the series, namely the relationship between Baker’s Doctor and Peri.

The intended structure of Trial of a Time Lord was based on A Christmas Carol, with the three stories shown as evidence representing the past, present, and future. And so The Mysterious Planet is intended to represent the past. Off the bat this is a little strange – it is, after all, an adventure with the then-current TARDIS crew seemingly set after the most recent televised adventure. The distinction between it and the succeeding story in terms of time is almost completely arbitrary.…

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