Eruditorum Press

We’re not cancelled; these are just our Wilderness Years

colin baker

A Well-Prepared Meal (The Two Doctors)

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Before we start, I just wanted to give everyone an update on the Troughton book – and this seems the appropriate post to do it in. I’ve switched to paying someone to copyedit in the hopes that it will reduce the number of infelicities that creep into the text. Unfortunately, that person is booked through to July, which means that the book is probably looking at a fall release.

That said, once I finish the first draft on the Wonder Woman book this summer I am taking a few months to do revisions on a couple of projects – both getting some proper academic work, and doing my revisions and additions to the Pertwee, Baker, and Davison/Baker volumes one after another and with the ability to focus on them as a main project instead of as something I’m fitting around the blog and another book. So while the wait for Volume 2 of TARDIS Eruditorum is going to be longer than I’d hoped, the wait for volumes 3-5 should be considerably shorter.

On to the post.

That’s right, it’s the same picture again.
It’s one way of learning visual literacy!

It’s February 16th, 1985. Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson remain at number one, remaining there for all three weeks of this story. Kirsty MacColl, The Commodores, and Howard Jones also chart. More inspiring are the album charts, where The Smiths’ landmark Meat is Murder debuts at number one in what is one of the most perfect thematic convergence of music charts and Doctor Who in some time.

In real news, William J Schroeder is the first person to receive an artificial heart and leave the hospital. It doesn’t go terribly well, admittedly, but it happens. EastEnders starts, and the day after the story ends the miner’s strike ends. Oh, and Doctor Who gets cancelled. Damn.

When last we looked at this story the question was whether or not it functioned meaningfully as a Patrick Troughton story, and it was found wanting. Lucky for it, then, that its primary job was not to function as a Troughton story but as a Colin Baker story, a job that it performs markedly better at. Especially so under the model I’ve been approaching the series under – indeed, the “Baker era as exorcism” theory has, perhaps, no evidence better than this.

It can hardly be called a surprise. I said we’d have to drop the “no talking about the production team” rule for this story, so let’s go ahead and point out that this is a Robert Holmes script. Holmes is always a nice writer to deal with as a critic simply because the authorial intent objection falls away. Holmes is a smart and clever enough writer to have intended much of what we’ll find here, and it’s only the alchemical embellishments that strike me as at all improbable.

The key detail is the part of the story everyone seems most ready to ignore – the Sontarans. Apparently Holmes was not terribly thrilled at the instruction to include the Sontarans, but was eventually mollified by Eric Saward pointing out that nobody had done them right since he created them.…

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Think I Don’t Know My Own (Mark of the Rani)

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Let’s play “what part of the Doctor’s disguise is ill-advised.”

It’s February 2nd, 1985. Foreigner is still at number one, as they are on the albums chart as well. After one week, however, Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson unseat them on the singles chart. Bruce Springsteen, The Art of Noise, and, just out of the top ten, Phil Collins and Bryan Adams also chart. In real news, the first British mobile phone call is made and nine miners are jailed for arson in the miners’ strike.

Let us start with the Rani herself. The name is an odd choice, to say the least. On the one hand, she is clearly situated in the naming conventions that brought us the Doctor and the Master – as opposed to the other style of Time Lord who actually has names. BThis is a meaningful distinction within the series – even among the renegade Time Lords the Doctor, the Master, and the War Chief have had special status distinct from those Time Lords who have retained their names. Those with names are either still on Gallifrey or appear merely to be expats – Time Lords who are on the outs with Gallifrey, but who are still living, if not within its laws, within its worldview. Whether it be that they take relatively menial positions in the grand order of things – i.e. Drax and Azmael – or that they retain outright distance from the world like K’anpo, even the named exiles seem to remain part of Time Lord society.

Then there are the outright renegades – those who have lost their names, and who live fundamentally at odds with the Time Lords. This category, of course, includes the Doctor, and by extension his inversion in the Master. Its precise nature is thus complex and inscrutable. But it’s clear that there is a power to this group – one based on the old logic that the lowest and most debased part of something – that part of Time Lord society that has lost even their names – is inseparable from the highest point of it. (A point reiterated time and time again – when Borusa or Hedin attempt to engage with Rassilon or Omega it kills them. Only the Doctor and the Master can walk out of Rassilon’s tomb alive because, as lowly renegades, they alone are his equals.)

But the Rani makes a strange addition to this group. Described externally, at least, she’s a joke. Where the Doctor and the Master have their deep and hidden reasons for joining the nameless her reasons sound like parodic fanfic – her lab mice mutated, ate the President’s cat, and took a chunk out of him too, leading to her exile. This is not the origin of a legendary character. Even her name is odd. The name means the Queen, but  is, of course, from Indian culture instead of British culture. Diegetically this is more difficult to explain than people give it credit for. We can allow that Time Lord names are translated into British English as a basic conceit of the series, but here we have one whose given name is presented in a different cultural context than all the others.…

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Do You Think Anybody Votes For Sweet? (Vengeance on Varos)

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Stuff it, Governor. I want to get back to Mass Effect. I’m
about to kill off the Quarians.

It’s January 19th, 1985. Foreigner has decided that they are less interested in knowing whether it’s Christmas and that they’d rather know what love is, asking the question for both weeks of this story. Both Prince and King also chart, along with Tears for Fears and the gorgeously named Strawberry Switchblade. In real news, Ronald Reagan is sworn in for his second term. British Telecom announces that it will be phasing out red phoneboxes, relegating them to the same scrapheap as the Police Box (or at least trying to). A House of Lords debate is televised for the first time, and, three days after the end of this story, Thatcher is denied an honorary degree by Oxford University.

Vengeance on Varos is for the most part the easiest to like story of Season 22. This is not to say it is the best – the redemptive reading of The Two Doctors presents a story that is probably superior to this one. But where The Two Doctors is prickly and difficult, liking Vengeance on Varos requires only a basic ability to deal with satire and black comedy of the sort that ought be trivial for anyone reading this blog.

There is, of course, a negative reading to be had of the story in which it is simply an extended bit of nasty sadism and torture porn. But unlike something like Warriors of the Deep or Resurrection of the Daleks, the embedded critique of the story’s own violence is given some serious teeth. From the start this story is solid on the fact that the Varosian’s love of extravagant and sadistic executions is wrong.

But what makes Vengeance on Varos interesting, especially within the context of our chosen theme of the Colin Baker era as an exorcism. Here the story is overtly built around television as a medium, with active effort taken to make the broadcasts look and feel like the BBC. Tat Wood observes that the fanfare for the governor is a dead-ringer for BBC home video, and the interactive “home voting” aspect would have been recognizable as a close cousin to the interactive television offered by Ceefax at the time.

More broadly, we’re at a point in the history of television where the link between television and pornography is growing. A thread that’s been absent for a few posts is the  rise of the VCR, which means that television is no longer simply a broadcast medium but a medium of storage and replaying. Which means, of course, that it’s possible to have pornography on it. In practice, of course, most of the pornography that could actually be obtained barely deserved the name – a motley of soft-core titillations. More common were cheap, dirty, and violent movies. But because the video market was mostly unregulated at first and major studios feared piracy, there was a flood of lurid schlock as all manner of grindhouse cinema wound its way onto the market.…

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Things Which Act Against Everything We Believe In (Attack of the Cybermen)

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I can’t decide if the weary and kind of bored expression on
Lytton’s face is funnier than the way that the Cyberman
helmet makes the one on the right look like a perplexed
Muppet.

It is January 5th, 1985. Band Aid are at number one with “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” a song that will have spectacularly unfortunate results for Doctor Who in a few months’ time. They remain at number one through the story, with Wham! at number two with another Christmas song. Foreigner, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Tears for Fears, and Ray Parker Jr. are also in the charts, the last, of course, with the theme from Ghostbusters.

So in the news, since last we looked at a story, The Soviet Union decides to boycott the 1984 Olympics essentially in protest of the US boycotting the 1980 ones four years earlier. So that’s another thrilling series of events. The Indian government storms the holiest site in the Sikh religion to remove Sikh separatists, killing 2000. Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, is assassinated by her Sikh security guards a few months later, which, you know, there’s something to learn there. The other JN-T, John Napier Turner, becomes Prime Minster of Canada. And is ousted three months later. The UK agrees to return Hong Kong to China.

While on television… The obvious putdown of Attack of the Cybermen is that it finally and demonstrably shows just how bad both Ian Levine and Eric Saward are, in that both of them take credit for this story instead of frantically trying to shift the blame onto the other. But denouncing Attack of the Cybermen is almost too easy. And anyway, I want to take a different line on Season 22.

In writing this blog I have found that eras of the show tend to work in one of two ways. The first category are eras whose aesthetics are relatively straightforward, in which case readings of stories tend to be based on exploring the particulars of those aesthetics and pushing readings a bit further. Much of the the 1960s, along with the Hinchcliffe and Bidmead eras, worked like this. The second are what one might call the problem eras – chunks of the show where how the show works is contested and I have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to read the show in the first place instead of getting on with it. The Pertwee, Williams, and Davison eras were all like this, with entries having to go back and forth on questions like “what is the show actually trying to do here” for large swaths of it.

The Colin Baker era is something else – an era that doesn’t work, but that doesn’t work in such a consistent and straightforward manner as to not require a lot of explanation. The era’s flaws have almost completely been sorted out with The Twin Dilemma. This story adds continuity porn to the list, but that’s a flaw we largely sorted out during the Davison era.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 10 (FASA)

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The 1984 Doctor Who roleplaying game published by FASA is, as roleplaying games go, not hugely exciting or interesting. As Doctor Who merchandise it’s slightly more exciting – and inadvertently hilarious at times, such as when it provides a character sheet for Peri that reveals her to be wildly less competent than a newly created player character would be. (So far as I can tell from a perusal of the rules she’s spent exactly eight attribute points and three skill points. A new character should have 74-84 skill points and 38-48 attribute points. I assure you that if you knew what any of this meant it would be hilarious.)

But what’s interesting about it, and why it gets more than a footnote in the blog is that it allows for an interesting look at the rather nebulous process of “identification” and its slightly saner cousin “empathy.” It should come as no surprise, given the rather hardline anti-realist and anti-escapist position of this blog, that I am no fan of “identification” as a concept. In almost all cases I strongly favor models of reading/viewing/whatevering that openly and consistently acknowledge the fact that fiction is fiction, feeling that even if the resulting theories are a bit more complex at first glance they avoid the sorts of absurd contortions that are needed the moment you start digging into a model based around the idea of immersion, escapism, realism, or, yes, identification. Readings based on some flavor of “suspension of disbelief” require the reader to continually moderate between a knowingly false premise (“this is real”) and a true one (“this is not real”). In practice this is always going to be more complex than a system that sticks to one set of true premises.

Many years ago a professor expressed the problems of identification with the following example, which I don’t know if was his originally or not. Imagine a horror movie with a female protagonist walking up a hill towards what the audience knows to be a haunted house, but that she does not. The girl is not afraid in this circumstance, but the audience is. Then, at the end of the movie, imagine her battered, injured, but having finally killed whatever monster lives in the house. At this moment the audience feels triumphant, but the girl feels traumatized, hurt, and terrified. Not only is the audience clearly not identifying with the protagonist here, were the audience to identify with the protagonist the story wouldn’t work at all. In order to function that plot has to have the audience and the protagonist feeling almost the exact opposite.

To my mind, at least, everything one wants to get out of the concept of identification can be accomplished with far more sensible concepts like “investment” and “empathy.” What’s at issue in the hypothetical horror movie is not that we feel the same things as the protagonist but that we both understand what she feels and have an emotional investment in it that is rooted in similarities between her and her situation and things we recognize in our own lives.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 29 (Max Headroom, Tripods)

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So what went wrong? I mean, the flaws are obvious enough in The Twin Dilemma. And it’s easy enough to pin the blame. But what’s the alternative? Throughout the Davison era, even when it was having its biggest disasters, it was at least relatively clear what the good parts of the show were. They may have frequently struggled to break through, but we could usually tell what good Doctor Who was supposed to look like. But the highlights of the Colin Baker eras, though existent, are so few and far between that it’s difficult to say what they should have done. For a long time the conventional wisdom was “not cast Colin Baker” or “have a different concept of the Doctor,” but as we’ll see Big Finish proves that Baker’s Doctor could have worked. Still, the advance in storytelling techniques over the nearly 30 years since this era aired mean that we can’t just say “they should have done what Big Finish did.” The question is what Doctor Who in 1985-86 should have looked like. 

The usual technique would be to look at what else was going on in TV sci-fi in Britain. But we have slim pickings for this era, so in this case that becomes where we start. Or, rather, in the difference between them.

See, Doctor Who has always existed in a liminal space between children’s television and science fiction. This may seem a bit of a strange claim given the rather obvious fact that there’s a good deal of children’s television is science fiction, but it’s important to realize that these are two distinct traditions with a subtle but significant philosophical difference at their heart, and that Doctor Who has always had to do at least some active work to bridge them.

If one were to make a horrific overgeneralization about children’s fiction then one of the least inaccurate ones available would be to observe that children’s literature tends to focus thematically on the existence of a threshold between two worlds, whether they be mundane and fantastic or otherwise. The logic of this is not difficult to figure out – it’s as sensible a metaphor for coming of age as exists. But at the heart of this approach is the fact that a children’s story tends to be about obtaining some degree of mastery and sense over the strange second world. Put another way, the basic arc of children’s fiction is that it makes the strange familiar.

Science fiction, on the other hand, when considered as a genre instead of as an iconography, does almost the exact opposite. Science fiction’s main trick is to use the expanded possibilities of its iconography to reflect our own world back at us from an odd angle. So science fiction goes not for making the strange familiar, but for making the familiar strange.

These ideas are not impossible to reconcile, not least because science fiction can serve equally as a vague iconography that is easily made familiar, and because children’s literature often involves making the world that its protagonist starts in strange along wiht making the new world familiar.…

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Does It Offend You? (The Twin Dilemma)

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What do you tell a companion with two black eyes?

It’s March 22nd, 1984. Lionel Richie is at number one with “Hello,” and remains so for the whole of this story. Sade, Culture Club, Bananarama, and Depeche Mode also chart, along with, at number two for the second week of this story, the Weather Girls with “It’s Raining Men.” Hallelujah. In real news, the heyday of the Satanic ritual abuse panic begins in sync with the Colin Baker era as teachers at the McMartin Preschool are falsely accused of it. Speaking of Satanic ritual abuse, Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Starlight Express opens in London.

While on television, we go from the supposed best Doctor Who story ever to the supposed worst. Unlike The Caves of Androzani, The Twin Dilemma made it as the worst story for two polls running. On basic quality, this might not be quite fair. It’s very bad, but as a matter of competent production and provision of a modicum of entertainment it’s not demonstrably worse than many others. If you were to show someone a selection of this, Warriors of the Deep, The Horns of Nimon, Mark of the Rani, and The Monster of Peladon and ask them to pick the worst of them I don’t think you’d see this one picked in particular excess to the others. There are actually moments of it that border on the compelling. I mean, this is praising with faint damnation, but it’s still worth noting that, taken on its own and out of context, and judged purely on its storytelling merits, this is merely among the worst stories ever made, but it’s not clear that it’s the worst story ever by any means.

But, of course, when have we ever taken things out of context here? Yes, the biggest problem with this story is its context in Doctor Who, but the thing aired on television in a context everyone involved knew about, so really, that criticism sticks pretty well. Because what this story does is doom Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor and, in doing so, ensure the show’s cancellation. In this regard it is the single story most destructive to Doctor Who. Never mind Michael Foot. At 100 minutes, this is the longest suicide note in history.

There are, of course, self-inflicted wounds prior to this. If the past two seasons hadn’t started with pieces of utter crap like Warriors of the Deep and The Arc of Infinity, if the Peter Davison era hadn’t been a monument to wasted potential, et cetera, et cetera. The Twin Dilemma’s spectacular faceplant and sabotaging of the series didn’t happen in isolation. On the other hand, it’s also not the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s the entire bale of hay flung at high velocity towards the camel’s back. Doctor Who was vulnerable coming into this story, yes, but even if the Davison era had been a consistent triumph it would have been, at the very least, in serious trouble coming out of this story.…

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Slaughterhouse-22

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My plan to post Doctor-by-Doctor compilations of my better stuff from Timelash II has gone a bit squinky, mostly because what I tapped in about Seasons 18-20 needs expansion before I’m happy to post it.  So, I’m going to skip them for now and proceed to post stuff from later.  Here is… well, the clue’s in the title.  Season 22.  The Nasty Season.  Not much new stuff here… but some great quotes from excellent Gallibase contributors, who said what (I think) needed to be said.  Enjoy, Constant Reader, enjoy…

‘Attack of the Cybermen’

Objectively, this is bad. Padded, garish, unstructured, naff, continuity-porn.  Subjectively, there’s something interesting starting to happen. The perverse, off-colour, queasy, brutal, resolutely uncool vibe that runs through Season 22 is already in evidence… and it’s kind of fascinating.

The hand-crushing scene, for instance, has real balls.  Unsuitable for kids?  Well, I remember watching it as a kid and loving it.  Not because I was bloodthirsty (if anything, I was – and still am – rather wussy about gore and violence) but because it suddenly seemed to raise the dramatic stakes (not that I could’ve articulated that at the time).

The story also scores big points for remembering something that most other Cyberman stories forget: the Cybermen are technologically reanimated zombies.  Amidst all the stuff they get wrong, they remember that the defrosting cybertombs would smell.

‘Vengeance on Varos’

 A bit like an episode of Fame Academy directed by General Pinochet.

More topical than prophetic.  More interested in the at-the-time current “video nasties” thing than in investigating the territory of The Year of the Sex Olympics, upon which it draws and which turned out to be more prophetic.

Still, it’s hard not watch this and see foreshadowings of the way we live now.  Reality TV of increasing nastiness keeps the impoverished and sweated workers of an austere ‘Big Society’ preoccupied with schadenfreude.  Meanwhile, democracy is a media sideshow that entails a succession of men being briefly trusted and then spurned by disillusioned masses… and no matter how well intentioned such men may be, they’re all drawn from one class and all find themselves trapped in an insane system that allows them no room for manoeuvre.

Moreover, Varos is a client state of a huge corporation. Sil could be one of those oil company execs who ends up as a politico in Washington and visits the dictatorships that are important to American imperial interests, shaking hands with the Justice Minister and praising the enterprise and initiative of the local exporters.

Sadly, there’s little sense of public resistance. We hear a reference to unionisation, but the public are personified in the useless, reactionary and passive Arak and Etta.

And can the Varosians really expect things to be okay now, simply because they’ve got a better deal and a good, reformist leader?

Actually, there’s a hint of reactionary sneering at the square-eyed, apathetic drudges lurking beneath the apparently angry satire.

‘Mark of the Rani’

Oh dear. I hate this one.…

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Order in Court

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Here’s my Timelash II stuff for ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’.  Some extra bits and some rejigging here and there.

‘The Mysterious Planet’

Bob Holmes redoes ‘The Krotons’… which looks more acceptable now that we have a showrunner and head writer who, essentially, just does the same story again and again and again.

The production design comes to a high standard but belongs in a different story. It’s clear that Marb Station is supposed to be dark but it gleams with light. Holmes has the underground dwellers talk about “the train”, which is clearly supposed to be something that runs on the old underground rails, etc.  Everything looks good but nothing looks right. The Tribe of the Free look like peasants in an authentic peasant village… but they should look like something out of Mad Max, with loads of decaying, retro-fitted, malfunctioning technology that they don’t understand and use for things like propping open doors. We need salvagepunk but we get re-enactment kitsch.  As Richard Pilbeam put it: “It’s like doing ‘Talons’ in the style of a Quality St. ad”.  Glitz and Dibber look… um, interesting… but they look as much like mercenary wideboys as Colonel Gaddafi looks like the lead singer of a boy band. The space station at the start is spectacular… but it hardly goes with the idea that the Doctor has been “taken out of time”. He should end up in a surreal nowhereplace, and the court room should look like Gallifreyan gothic or a grotty 19th century courtroom of the type that Mr Jaggers would’ve appeared in.  The whole trial should take place in the Matrix, or something like it.

The story itself is a perfectly functional and occasionally witty riff on order vs chaos, with Drathro vs Katryca as the personifications… but, interestingly, they’re not polar opposites in a dichotomy because neither are quite what they seem. Drathro’s underground survival camp is absurd, perpetuated because he blindly follows orders.  The society of the underground dwellers is built on the worship of texts whose original context and message is lost, on unnecessary rationing of water and on the ‘culling’, i.e. the ruthless and needless control of population numbers. Katryca, meanwhile, is a tyrant who rules idiotically over people she fatuously calls “the tribe of the free”. She’s a matriarch that rules a society which treats women as a social resource. So, it isn’t that Drathro is nasty old Order and Katryca is nice free Chaos… it’s that all rulers are useless and all social pyramids are nonsensical and backward. As I’ve said elsewhere, whether he knew it or not, Bob was an instinctive radical.

There are some great lines, some mythic resonances, an awareness of text and literature, and the script has plenty to say about the false opposition between ‘advanced’ and ‘primitive’, about social control through the control of resources and surplus, about hierarchy which becomes a false ideology of order hiding a reality of arbitrary, hidebound or chaotic rule.  This order vs chaos theme will be picked up again and again in this season…

One thing: somebody really needed to question why the Valeyard would enter into evidence the scene where Glitz and Dibber discuss the details of the Time Lords’ plot, even with some words bleeped out.…

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