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His Face, His Hair, Look at It: The Doctors Revisited (Patrick Troughton)

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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.…

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Reimagined Moments #3

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Onboard the Silver Carrier, the Doctor and Jamie are eating square blocks of food from a dispenser.

“Doctor, what do you think Victoria’s doing now?”

“Now?  Well, she’s dead Jamie.”

“Dead???”

“Yes, of course.  We left her in the late-twentieth century.  Looking at this technology, we must be at least a couple of hundred years on from then.  So unless she somehow managed to live to be more than 200 years old, she’ll have aged and died a long time ago.  Right now she’s probably just a brittle skeleton lying in a coffin, the flesh long since having bloated and peeled away and rotted and been consumed by bacteria and maggots and weavils and worms and stuff.  Unless they burned her up in a big fire.  In which case she’s probably scattered around somewhere in tiny fragments or sitting in a vase.”…

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Lesterson has brought his new toy, his reactivated alien machine, to Governor Hensall’s office.  He boasts of how it could revolutionise life in the Colony.  It can end their labour problems, their economic problems… all their problems.

“It can do many things,” agrees the Doctor, “but what it does best is exterminate human beings!  It destroys them… without pity…”

He continues.  And the machine speaks too.

“I – AM – YOUR – SER-VANT,” it says, an unconscious admission in its strange inflection.  It says this again and again and again.

The two voices overlap, trying to shout each other down.

The tool, the machine, the product, bellows that it is our servant, while one man desperately claims that it’s a killer, an apocalypse in waiting.

The two claims merge until they become one contradictory truth.

Later, the Dalek (I choose to believe it’s the same one) murders Hensall on Bragen’s orders.

It turns to Bragen.

It has a question.  The tool that kills, the dead labour, the mass produced thing, the weapon, the tank, the gothic monster, the repressed thing returning, the fascist principle that mirrors Bragen’s own, the social-Darwinist that embraces the idea of the racial struggle for survival against all other competing races… has a question for Bragen.  For humanity.

“WHY – DO – HU-MAN – BE-INGS – KILL – HU-MAN – BE-INGS?”

 Good question.  One of the few genuinely good questions asked by anyone in this story.

Bragen, of course, cannot answer.

He has no idea.

(UPDATED 21/11/13) …

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Dreams About Unicorns

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On ‘The Mind Robber’.  A regurgitation of something originally buried in the middle of an old post.

1. The Review

Just one of the best things ever, this story is a gloriously trippy metafictional journey into Doctor Who‘s own status as a text.

‘Robber’ picks up the Troughton era handbook for writers, stamps on it, scrawls insulting and anarchistic slogans upon its pages, rips it up and sets fire to the pieces. There is no isolated base, no croaky computer, no catalgue of disposable characters who are laser-beamed to death, no unstable authority figure, no creeping infiltration, no standard fight sequence for Jamie, no scene where someone goes into a bonkers tirade and storms out of a control centre… instead we have a deeply trippy ride through sheer weirdness; a totally unpredictable variation of content, style and pace from episode to episode; an intelligently created elllision of symbolism and literalism; a classic surreal quest narrative drawing on Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland yet beholden to neither.

The Doctor and his friends leave their universe and enter a non-spatial, non-temporal buffer zone… and this buffer zone is a world of fiction. An empty nothingness until imagination works upon it, it soon fills with robots and unicorns and princesses and forests of words.

They’ve landed in a metaphysical space instead of a physical one, and the threats they encounter are metaphysical too – they run the risk of being translated into other identities, of losing their faces, of being turned into bit players in other people’s stories, of being made into fiction themselves (which, as this story constantly reminds us by constantly saying the opposite, they already are).

They are stalked by the ultimate variety of faceless, functional, baddie goons: toy soldiers. As if to swipe at the mechanical nature of so much scriptwriting, these goons have got dirty great wind-up keys sticking out of their backs. In this story, the ultimate threat is to become the functional plaything of the desperate hack writer. The soldiers not only hunt our heroes, they also represent what our heroes are threatened with (both literally and figuratively): being clockwork cyphers who just ‘go’ when the lazy writer winds them up and sets them off.

And this is the central threat, even of the somewhat contrived Earth-invasion plot that surfaces towards the end. Mankind would become fiction. Ironically enough, via the creative imagination, we’d all be stripped of our free will. We’d be crushed inside the pages of a book by a domineering Master Brain that controls even the writer with a stentorian bark that is channelled through his own mouth. That’s what it would be like to be a character in someone else’s book, or a fact pushed around by someone else’s editor, or a mortal pushed around by a god (which is exactly what a writer looks like from the point-of-view of a character).

This is Doctor Who investigating its own nature as part imagineering stream-of-consciousness fantasy, part lumbering and mechanical genre hack-work.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 8: The Two Doctors

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At last, the Doctor is confronted with the horror of
a wardrobe choice worse than plaid pants.

It’s February 16, 1985, which is, if we are being honest, yet another odd time for it to be on the road from June of 1969 to January of 1970, but hey, there was still an awful lot of acid going around in 1969, and who are we to question it. Perhaps Doctor Who just nipped off to Woodstock and lost track of things like everyone else. We’ll be here again later, so we may as well skip the music and news and get on to the meat of things, namely the latest adventure of Patrick Troughton, a story called The Two Doctors.

Starting off, it’s shocking how much has changed in this six month gap between seasons six and seven. I mean, look at the new opening credits. The starfield opening is certainly lush, and it’s hard to imagine how it was done with 1970s theme music, but what the heck is with this awful theme music? This isn’t going to stay around for the whole decade, is it? Still, things pick up immediately after. And you get to see the switch to color live! They turn the switch right in the middle of the episode, with the opening scene fading from black and white to color! That’s cool!

Hm. Much as it’s tempting to just continue to review this trying to maintain the conceit that it is a Patrick Troughton story, I think we have to admit, this approach is not even remotely maintainable through the full two and a half hours of The Two Doctors. So let’s back up and take this more honestly. Monday we looked at the slightly bewildering Season 6B idea on its own, as a follow-up to the Troughton era, and found it wanting. Today, in the second and final part of our tour of a fictional season of Doctor Who, we look at the story most responsible for this idea. It’s fair, before we get too deep into this, to ask why we’re even monkeying around here in the first place instead of being into the Pertwee era already.

The answer, roughly, is that this whole idea is too self-evidently ludicrous to take seriously. It is obvious watching The War Games that there is no Season 6B. Or, actually, no. It’s not obvious, because The War Games is so far from supporting a Season 6B that in and of itself, nobody would have come up with such a silly idea. (OK, not quite nobody) Season 6B, in terms of The War Games, isn’t even wrong. It has no relationship whatsoever with The War Games. And yet multiple writers have opted to set stories in this obvious anachronism. It’s a paradox within Doctor Who – something that clearly does exist from one perspective, and clearly doesn’t from another.

I should also, I suppose, briefly disclaim regarding the Colin Baker era, given that it is possibly the most contentious era of Doctor Who there is, save possibly the Sylvester McCoy era.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 7: World Game (Terrance Dicks, BBC Books, 2005)

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Perhaps the image of Patrick
Troughton as Napoleon is actually
all that needs to be said about this
book.

It’s October of 2005. This means, in practice, that we’re between the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant years. We’ve already talked about this time period a bit with The Time Travelers, so I’ll just refer you there for the general time, but suffice it to say that these are the dying embers of the BBC Books line, coming out after the series has conclusively moved on to other things.

What are we doing here? I don’t just mean reading BBC Books from a zombie phase when the line had ceased to have any possible relevance – after all, The Time Travelers firmly established that there was gold in the dying days of BBC Books. I mean doing a Second Doctor story written nearly 20 years after Troughton’s death and set after The War Games.

Well, see, it turns out that for plot related reasons, some 1980s reunion stories that featured Patrick Troughton (and to a lesser extent a 1973 one) opened up some seemingly massive continuity errors, mostly in the form of having Troughton’s Doctor interacting with the Time Lords and knowing about the outcome of his trial. This bothered people for a while, until the fine folks of The Discontinuity Guide proposed something called “Season 6B,” the consequence of which make up this novel.

I’d explain the idea of Season 6B, but it’s one of those absolutely ludicrous moments of Doctor Who that is probably best approached experientially instead of from a distance. And anyway, the point of doing this as a Time Can Be Rewritten entry is that we’re approaching Season 6B in part as if it were actually meant to slot into 1960s Doctor Who. Never mind what it explains and why from 1980s Doctor Who. After all, why should the 1980s get to come and unambiguously muck up our 1960s when the 1960s don’t get the right to sneak into the 1980s and wreck havoc with them?

Of course, this approach acquires an interesting relationship with the rails that is not entirely based on contact more or less at the first page. Dicks’s novel begins with “the genuine and original summary record of the trial of the Doctor,” noting that the version “with which we were, until now, familiar was substantially re-edited for the public record.” We then get a differing version of the trial from the one we saw on television in 1969. One in which the Doctor’s plea about fighting evil is not, as in the original, “accepted,” but is merely said to be “not without merit,” after which the Doctor is sentenced to death.

There’s a couple of things to note here, but let’s start with the fact that this fails spectacularly to fit with what we saw on screen. Dicks is making a very bizarre claim here – one that is not merely a retcon, but something with far wider-reaching implications. It’s not just that what we saw on television is here said to be wrong (which is already a bit of a strange claim for the novels to make, given that in almost every fan’s assessment they are given a less privileged place in Doctor Who than the televised stories), it’s that it’s said to be wrong because the Time Lords have been censoring material that could be viewed as damaging to them.…

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Tied To One Planet (The War Games)

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Oh no, Jamie! World War I! This is almost as bad as
watching The Dominators!

It’s April 19, 1969. Desmond Dekker and the Aces are at number one with “The Israelites,” the first reggae song to hit number one in the UK. One week later The Beatles take number one with “Get Back,” their second to last number one single in the UK. It stays at number one for six weeks. Also in the charts over this time are The Who, Fleetwood Mac, Herman’s Hermits, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, The Isley Brothers, Simon and Garfunkel, Tom Jones, and The Fifth Dimension. Of these luminaries, it is of course Tommy Roe who unseats The Beatles with “Dizzy,” before he himself is unseated by “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” the last time The Beatles ever hit number one. This happens the same week that episode nine of The War Games airs, and remains through the rest of Patrick Troughton’s tenure as the Doctor.

While in news of reality, British troops arrive in Northern Ireland to provide support for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, Robin Knox-Johnston completes a solo circumnavigation, and Charles de Gaulle steps down. In the US, the first death from AIDS occurs, although it will be years before what happened is understood. Apollo 10 launches. There’s a bit of trivia most people would get wrong – what happened first, the first American death from AIDS or the moon landing? And, to grab a quick bit of intercontinental spirit, John Lennon and Yoko Ono do their Bed-In in Montreal.

But let’s actually take one historical event in this time period and unpack it, because it was truly something special, and forms a vital metaphor for The War Games. In Berkeley California, People’s Park was opened. Those of you with particular love of grammar fascism will note my use of the passive voice there. It is deliberate. It is difficult to call something like People’s Park something that opened. That implies some degree of planning and design. In practice, People’s Park was a plot of land seized by Berkeley University via eminent domain and then abandoned when proper construction stalled. Community members, irritated at this, proposed developing a portion of the plot as a park. And then, in the classic California guerilla theater style that had been out of date since 1967, they occupied the area and developed it into a park.

Then things got amazing. Governor Ronald Reagan, who had run on a platform that included accusing California’s colleges of breeding “communist sympathizers, protesters, and sex deviants,” overrode the University’s promise not to begin developing the property without warning and consulting with the protesters, constructed an 8-foot fence around the unused lot to keep people from planting flowers there. A small riot erupted over this with protesters attempting to re-enter the park. Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s chief of staff and future attorney general, took charge of the response, authorizing police to use whatever means they wanted. Clad in riot gear with their badges obscured to prevent identification, the police stormed in, beating protesters and, in an egregious case, firing shotguns loaded with buckshot far more dangerous and lethal than normally accepted for crowd control.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 4 (TV Comic)

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It’s been a while since we’ve been over on this end of the Doctor Who pool, and with the Troughton era coming to an end imminently, it seemed like a good time to pop back over and look. Especially because last time we were looking at the World Distributors annuals, and this time we’re looking at the Polystyle TV Comics strips.

What’s funny, though, is that despite being a completely different company and publication, it’s tough to make too much out of the differences between the two sets of comics. This might not seem surprising given that they are both telling Doctor Who stories, and thus presumably have some unifying influence. Except that both are so wildly different from the television series that it ends up being mildly surprising to watch them end up more or less on the same planet given how far afield they are from the target.

And yet somehow the comics end up with an odd consistency to them. It’s tempting to allude to some vague sense of a proper order of things in Doctor Who here – the occasional and uncanny sense we’ve had before that this ship is not as rudderless as it should be. But in this case, it seems to me there’s a much more prosaic option – given what British comics were, there was only one way the strip could have been, and both World Distributors and Polystyle did it that way.

For an American comic book fan, there is a lot about the British comics industry that is puzzling. But the thing that should be noted first is that virtually nobody talks about British comic books. It’s not that there aren’t any. It’s just that there aren’t very many, and fewer still that actually matter. Instead, the primary form for British comics is the anthology magazine. The most famous of these are probably, in terms of children’s comics, The Beano and The Dandy, and in terms of science fiction, Eagle and 2000 AD. (Though some would make a case for Eclipse, those people are inevitably Americans who forget that the British comics scene extended beyond Alan Moore. Or, more depressingly, Brits who forget that.) The format of these was generally simple – a couple strips of maybe 4-8 pages each, published weekly.

I could – and really should some day – write a book about how this format shaped British comics. But one of the big things is that it meant that comics often had a bit of a house style. A magazine still had to feel coherent, after all. Furthermore, there’s a fairly tight structure to these strips. With eight pages, fitting a cliffhanger, resolution of last week’s cliffhanger, advancement of the plot, and some exposition to catch people up who have forgotten since last week is a challenge. And so the pace of any action-based strip had to be fairly frenetic.

Even in a setting like the World Distributors Annuals, which don’t serialize stories, the structure this implies is prevalent simply because it’s the structure people expect action comics to be in.…

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If We Don’t Do Something Quickly (The Space Pirates)

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One odd thing about The Space Pirates is that, with
Milo Clancy here, Doctor Who has another one of those
odd “it invented X many years too early” as it
inadvertently creates Firefly in 1969.

It’s March 8th, 1969. Peter Sarstedt is still at number one with “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely),” which I’m just now listening to, because apparently this is some grave flaw in my cultural upbringing. And… ummm… this is one of those you had to be there things, isn’t it? Not that the rest of the charts are any better – Cilla Black, Dean Martin, Engelbert Humperdinck, Glen Campbell… we’re not exactly dealing with pioneering music that advanced the art. I mean, all lovely stuff, and the Bee Gees and Marvin Gaye are nice touches, especially when “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” unseats Sarstedt. It’s almost enough not to notice the UK’s 1969 Eurovision entry in #2, Lulu’s “Boom Bang-a-Bang.” Almost. (And Lulu co-wins that year, I regret to inform you.)

While in real news, Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth. A small dustup in the colony of Anguilla results in British troops being quasi-peacably deployed there, and the TV mast at Emley Moore collapses due to ice buildup. In other countries’ news, former US President Dwight Eisenhower dies, Golda Meir becomes Prime Minister of Israel, and James Earl Ray pleads guilty to the Martin Luther King assassination, which, to give you an idea just how much was going on in 1968, I really missed covering in any detail because I was too busy doing Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech in that entry. Oh, and if you want to be technical about it, The Impossible Astronaut takes place between the transmission of episodes 5 and 6 of this story.

So this story. Another entry into the bottom ten of all time – in fact, this is apparently the worst Troughton story ever. It has a seriously bad reputation – largely due to the “one surviving episode” problem we’ve mentioned as afflicting The Underwater Menace. But this lets us segue into something else that’s really important about this story – it’s a missing story.

We’ve evaded talking about this phenomenon at any great length, and now we’re at the last missing episodes of Doctor Who (although some colorization gaps exist in the Pertwee era, everything from that era exists in some form), so I suppose we’d better. The idea of missing stories is a strange one to people. Inevitably a new fan of Doctor Who, high on the fumes of Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, will declare that they want to watch the whole classic series, and one of us old-timers will have to gently explain to a baffled 21st century television viewer that, actually, you can’t do that. This is very strange to them. And understandably – as Miles and Wood point out, it’s difficult to imagine 15% of Buffy the Vampire Slayer simply not existing in any form.

Historically, what happened basically comes down to “The BBC didn’t make preservation a priority.”…

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Skulking About The Galaxy In An Ancient Spaceship (The Seeds of Death)

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The Doctor after an encounter with the
Seeds of Death. There is no
innuendo about this, right?

It’s January 25, 1969. Marmalade are still at number one with Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, but after one week are overtaken by Fleetwood Mac, who are here seen in their early stage, i.e. not the one anyone recognizes as Fleetwood Mac, in that Christine McVie, Lindsey Buckingham, and Stevie Nicks were not yet in the band. From there it’s The Move with Blackberry Way, a bleak and dour song from a band previously known for cheery psychedelia. Welcome to 1969. From there it’s two weeks of Amen Corner’s (If Paradise Is) Half as Nice, then, for the last week of this story, Peter Sarstedt’s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely),” which is apparently a big deal, but I confess I’ve never heard of the song.

In other news, Ian Paisley is arrested for political demonstrations in Ireland and jailed for three months, one of the more radical moments in his long political career, there’s some vandalism of art at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yasser Arafat is elected leader of the PLO, and, ironically, St. Valentine is stricken from the Roman calendar of saints on Valentine’s Day. But perhaps most importantly, The Beatles give their last public performance, an impromptu rooftop concert broken up by the police.

The elegiac feel of this concert mirrors an elegiac feel to The Seeds of Death that has been remarked upon by more than one commentator. This makes sense – especially through the lens of history. This is the last time Troughton appeared in what was by and large his archetypal mode of story – the base under siege. It was the last time Troughton met one of the big monsters. And Troughton’s departure was announced during this story’s filming. The sense of an era coming to an end is unavoidable.

But there’s more that’s elegiac than that. The most elegiac aspect, in fact, seems audacious for the time: space travel is portrayed as an outdated and abandoned technology. Miles and Wood, quite cleverly, relate this to the common news story of the day of train lines running their last service. This is the central cleverness of The Seeds of Death – it takes the hottest and most advanced form of transportation technology of 1969 and treats it like the one that’s going obsolete.

From our post-space vantage, this seems oddly prescient. Even if space rockets were rendered obsolete not by teleporters but by, essentially, their own lack of relevance, the image of an old man in a museum full of rockets mourning the abandonment of space is a crushingly familiar one in 2011 as the US prepares to abandon the Space Shuttle program with no clear plan for a replacement emerging. (Yes, a replacement program exists, but nobody would be so absurd as to call it a certainty that it will ever happen.)

I suspect in many ways that my generation is the last one to really feel this.…

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