A Dark Secret After The Candle is Out (Hide)
You mean the episode isn’t about taxidermy? |
You mean the episode isn’t about taxidermy? |
“Sorry, sorry, I’ll sing ‘Rio’ instead.” |
I am a leaf on the wind. |
The totally gibberish computer code that is occasionally superimposed over things is by far my favorite part of this episode. |
The Pertwee era, and I can vouch for this having written for it, presents a major challenge in providing a history of Doctor Who, simply because it doesn’t fit with any of it. For 60% of it, the premise of the series is out of place. The Doctor is portrayed, inevitably, as a reaction against the previous Doctor, but the previous Doctor is the template for every single Doctor after Pertwee. It’s got an awful lot of military action-hero stuff that’s kind of weird for the program. It’s an odd experiment that has really survived as a sort of limit case for what Doctor Who can be.
This is, ultimately, what The Doctors Revisited does. Pertwee is admitted up front as an oddity, and then studied and explained in half an hour. Moffat is on hand to explain why Jo Grant, Liz Shaw, the Brigadier, and the Master worked, and in three out of four cases it’s “the actor playing the part.” And an expanded field of celebrity guests are on hand to talk about the impact of it, reaffirming that this wasn’t just an odd era of Doctor Who, it was a major part of the popular consciousness.
It’s not particularly flashy – of the first three episodes, it’s the one making the simplest case. Both Hartnell and Troughton were defined in terms of how they anticipated the present. Pertwee is simply explained as it was. But it’s a persuasive case. Manning, Courtney, and Delgado really were fantastic actors. As was Pertwee, although he gets somewhat short shrift in his own special. The clips and sequences they pick are compelling early 70s television, or, perhaps more accurately, look reasonably like a modern sense of what compelling early 70s television would look like.
If there’s an objection to be had – and I’m not entirely convinced there is – it’s in the choice of stories to air after it, which is Spearhead From Space. But this objection is rather churlish. Unlike Tomb of the Cybermen, it’s not really that you wish they’d picked a better story, or that they’d had a better story available to pick. Spearhead From Space is absolutely brilliant. And as Moffat enthusiastically points out in his introduction to it, it’s gloriously weird in a very Doctor Who sort of way. It’s a fantastic choice of Pertwee stories to show in 2013.
No, the problem is that you almost wish they’d picked a crappier one. The realization that the Pertwee era doesn’t quite fit into any coherent narrative of Doctor Who’s history has led to a genuinely unfortunate squeamishness about it. And so we get a very weird sort and not entirely accurate message out of this program. Yes, the Pertwee era had some real strengths, and yes, it was massively popular television, but the stuff that was popular doesn’t much look like Spearhead From Space.
Am I saying they should have inflicted The Claws of Axos upon an unsuspecting population? Well, yes, because that’s some of the most fun you can have with a Doctor Who DVD there, since The Claws of Axos is wall-to-wall “what the fuck” in a way that very few things that aren’t The Web Planet are.…
It’s not surprising that the Troughton era is, in effect, reduced to a celebration of Troughton’s acting, and for the most part, this is a dramatic improvement over the standard narrative prior to this. It is, like the Hartnell era, still entirely about leading up to the present day – the main hook for Troughton is that Matt Smith based his performance on him. This is put up front and trumpeted. So celebrating Troughton for his acting is necessarily about glorifying the present.
All the same, it’s not wrong. And it’s worth contrasting with the previous official narrative of the Troughton era, in which Season Five was the high point of it because it had all the monsters. Sure, the Ice Warriors get center stage for a bit in what is, in hindsight, blatantly just a teaser for Cold War (with Moffat reflecting that we never see the actual Ice Warriors), but the previous take on the Troughton era where he was the clownish Doctor and it was good because it had Yeti isn’t even alluded to.
Instead we focus on Troughton’s acting, which is fitting, because it really is extraordinary, in a way that holds up today. He’s astonishingly subtle and meticulous. He always was. And Tennant’s statement that every Doctor is really just doing variations on Troughton now is absolutely true. And it’s a triumphant moment to see Troughton himself get the credit for that, because he genuinely deserves it. He invented the part of the Doctor as we know it today.
The problem, if you think it’s a problem, is that there’s nothing to replace the celebration of the monsters. The Troughton era becomes almost entirely about glorifying Troughton’s performance. Of course, this isn’t entirely unfair. The era played the base under siege card too many times, and didn’t do enough brilliant and weird stuff. It’s not that the bases under siege were bad, but the mix was off on the era. And, of course, there’s the problem of what survives in the archives (or possibly of what Phil Morris has turned over) that makes it tricky to valorize any particular part of the Troughton era except for Season Six, which is the toughest to glamorize in many ways.
Not that they don’t give it a good try with an impassioned defense of Zoe that, watching it, also feels overdue. Moffat speaks with genuine conviction of the way in which Zoe was a triumph for young female audiences because she was made so competent, and it’s true. She may have gotten gratuitous catsuit ass shots, but she was a bolder character than the show had tried with the female companion since Susan petered out.
(Also hilarious is John Barrowman’s account of being excited to see Jamie debut and enthusiastically telling his mother there was a Scotsman on Doctor Who, since he would have been doing that from inside the womb.)
But for all of this, there is something frustrating about where the narrative focus ends up. The selected story for showing after this special was Tomb of the Cybermen, because of course it was.…
Sorry to those of you who are already annoyed about how much I’m delaying ending this thing. You can always stop reading and end it now – I won’t mind. But I’ve always put on the brakes at the end of an era, slowing down and relishing the opportunity to make a definitive statement. The end of the blog, unsurprisingly, is going to be like that but even moreso. The last entry will go up February 9th. It’s scheduled through, I know what I’m doing with it, we’re doing the ending of TARDIS Eruditorum with deliberation and knowledge, and it’s not going to be much more self-indulgent than the end of Sandman.
But first, we’re going to go through these BBC America specials done, one a month in 2013, to lead up to the 50th Anniversary. Mostly because it’s an opportunity to look at how Doctor Who itself gave an official self-history at the same moment as we wrap up our history of it. These will generally be short entries. But they’re worth doing, as part of the end of the ritual.
These are basically clip shows with talking heads and a generic narrator to link up the talking heads. In practice, this one is narrated by David Tennant and Steven Moffat, who do most of the heavy lifting of actually explaining the Hartnell era. They slot into their respective roles quite well. Tennant enjoys giving the sort of official factual fan history, dutifully trotting out the basic descriptions and acting as the sort of head teacher and guide. He’s good at it, providing your basic factual history.
What’s more interesting is Moffat’s role. Moffat, as executive producer, now, as he’s put it, doesn’t get to have opinions about Doctor Who anymore. But here he’s called on not only to have opinions, but to contribute to a narrative of how Doctor Who has always been brilliant – a narrative that we know full well he doesn’t actually subscribe to, because he’s too much the critically-minded professional to forgive things like The Web Planet.
The magic of this, though, is that he handles this challenge not by doing what one suspects Russell T Davies usually did to arrive at his “it’s all marvelous” policy and simply lying through his teeth, but by actually identifying small bits that he thinks work well. The result enlivens this considerably, because you have Moffat picking up on small and odd details that he loves – for instance, he gives a quite enthused account of how The Daleks is satisfying because it’s not actually building the Daleks to return, and so they have their own self-contained concept, which makes them work better. One suspects that this is more or less the only thing he likes about the Daleks, along with the Dalek reveal and the first cliffhanger. But it’s a compelling case, and actually looks at The Daleks as a weird historical artifact. His accounts of why Barbara works and of the Doctor’s declaration that he’s going to fight the Daleks in The Dalek Invasion of Earth are similarly magnificently chosen details.…
Abominable special effects. |