Reach out and touch faith.

And so look, I’m just going to be flat-out cutting and nasty to a segment of the world here. And I’ll admit, I’m doing this in part for personal reasons, because the same “it doesn’t make sense” arguments that are raised about these stories are trotted out for large swaths of postmodern theory and philosophy that are kind of important to me and my life, and they’re used to marginalize my discipline in ways that are directly responsible for why there are no jobs in my field and I’m living in my parents’ basement. So I take this “it doesn’t make sense” argument a little personally, and in that spirit, I’d like to point out that the argument is not “it doesn’t make sense” but rather “I’m too thick to understand it.” It’s just that in a handful of cases – television and the humanities mainly – one’s inability to understand something is somehow the fault of the people who do understand it. Curiously, this logic does not apply to, say, quantum physics. Though increasingly it does seem to apply to climate change and evolution.

In light of this it is worth looking to the end of the story, with Ace’s assertion that she should have blown Gabriel Chase up instead of burning it down. This is perfect. Ace rejects arson, an approach that leaves a physical remnant – a Ghost Light of the mansion – in favor of explosion, an approach that would have blasted Gabriel Chase outwards, laying waste to the very notion of its identity as a fixed and certain point in space. Note also that the Doctor’s response, “Wicked,” is not merely a reiteration of Ace’s own slang but a reiteration of what Mrs. Pritchard accuses Gwendolyn of being when she begins to reject the constructed reality of Josiah’s household in favor of the truth about who her mother is, “wicked” being, in other words, a synonym for the rejection of illusion in favor of material practicality.

But it’s not right to suggest that Evil of the Daleks provides an origin for this story’s viewpoints. Ghost Light isn’t just a reiteration of 1967’s themes. It’s a return to them after a significant and substantial departure imposed by the implications of The War Games. The fact that the program drifted away from the unfettered mercury of the Troughton era and here returns to it full force is distinct from its development. Negating the negation of the mercury is distinct from mercury itself. Even the rooting of the program in mercury is fluid and changing, shifting endlessly.

The other major antecedent is, of course, 100,000 BC. Both stories, after all, feature cave men who worship overtly solar figures. Light is a reiteration of Orb. And so the very starting point of the series – its first story – is made suspicious. Light, a dangerous figure because he represents absolute and unchanging stasis – symbolically reflects the actual starting point of the series. Of course, the specific part of that story it reflects is the one nobody talks about – the lost back three quarters of the opener.…

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K-KLACK!

It’s July of 1991. Songs that hit number one this month are Jason Donovan’s “Any Dream Will Do” and Bryan Adams “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You,” while Erasure, Paula Abdul, and Guns N’ Roses also chart. In real news, the Warsaw Pact is dissolved, Boris Yeltsin becomes the first elected president of Russia, and Mike Tyson and Jeffery Dahmer are both arrested.

While in literature, the final Target novelization of the Sylvester McCoy era comes out as Ben Aaronovitch’s Battlefield is novelized by Marc Platt. For its part, Battlefield was transmitted from September 6-27 of 1989. During this time Black Box were at number one with “Right On Time,” while Alice Cooper, Tears for Fears, Tina Turner, Madonna, and, once again, Jason Donovan also charted. In real news, the IRA murder Heidi Hazell, the wife of a British soldier. John Major replaces Nigel Lawson as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The final election held under apartheid takes place in South Africa, and Vietnam withdraws from Cambodia after eleven years.

(In the gap between Battlefield and Greatest Show in the Galaxy, for reference, the famed fatwah on Salman Rushdie is issued, leading to the UK and Iran breaking off diplomatic relations. The Ayatollah Khomeini also, coincidentally, dies. Communism begins to fall on a number of fronts, most notably in Poland, where the recently unbanned union Solidarity wins elections. Communism stands up rather better in China, meanwhile, which just runs people over with tanks instead of allowing democratic reform. The poll tax is introduced in Scotland, the Exxon Valdez crashes, and the Hillsborough disaster kills 96 Liverpool supporters in Sheffield, followed by what is a strong contender for the most sickening moment in Rupert Murdoch’s career as the Sun falsely blames Liverpool fans for the tragedy.)

But in many ways, all of this is secondary to the Battlefield of 1991, and this fact is very important. Because one thing that happened during the Sylvester mcCoy era was that the novelizations of stories suddenly became important in a way that they hadn’t been since Malcolm Hulke was writing them – a fact that would prove extremely important when the series found itself continued as a line of novels from Virgin Books.

It’s a small sample size, due to there just not being that many Sylvester McCoy stories. There are about four novels that people really point to as dramatically expanding the scope of what the novels were: Remembrance of the Daleks, Battlefield, Ghost Light, and The Curse of Fenric. But these four proved to be significant simply because they provided the blueprint that the better entries in the Virgin line would follow.

They also, by and large, reflect a significant change in how Doctor Who was written in the Cartmel era. The writers of the Cartmel era, as discussed previously, were the first generation to have largely grown up on Doctor Who. And for several of them – most obviously Aaronovitch and Platt – the novelizations were a part of Doctor Who.…

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I’m happy. Hope you’re happy too.

On Sunday, July 8th, 2012, I finally ended my childhood. It was January 4th, 1989. Kylie and Jason were at number one – that being Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue, of course – with “Especially For You.” The three weeks previous had been “Mistletoe and Wine” by Cliff Richard. Erasure, U2, and Phil Collins also charted. The album charts were dominated by Now That’s What I Call Music 13, a collection notable for putting Duran Duran and Transvision in direct debate on consecutive tracks and then concluding the dialectic with The Human League’s “Love Is All That Matters,” a sequencing that I assume somebody had quite a bit of fun with.

In real news, Lyndon LaRouche, perpetual US Presidential candidate/huckster and source of some delightful early Wikipedia drama (Seriously, his followers actually stalked me to a Wikipedia meet-up once. It was fantastic.), was convicted of mail fraud. Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Scotland. And two days prior to the story in question’s airing thirty-five people were killed in a three-train collision in Clapham.

While on television was The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. It’s not the last Doctor Who story I’d never seen – that was Warrior’s Gate. But past Warrior’s Gate were scattered stories I’d only seen once, nearly twenty years ago, or ones that I had seen in the sense of “they were on a television while I was in the room, but I got distracted after five minutes and stopped paying attention.” The latter describes The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, a story I’ve liked the idea of for years, but somehow never got around to paying attention to. And so it is functionally the last new piece of classic Doctor Who to me – the last unchecked box of my favorite era of the series.

Of course, twenty-nine isn’t the worst age for childhood to end at. There’s a case to be made that I’m past due. And another still that one never ends it – that one’s life is circumscribed forever by the ghosts and echoes of childhood, the ever-expanding vista of the adult world mapped endlessly in fractal geometries within the private nations of our childhood homes. The latter case is, in the end, the one I’m more interested in.

As narratives pre-ordained to reach their appointed conclusion go, my childhood is apparently solid. There are few better places to end it than The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, itself a story about the slow and declining aftermath of youthful idealism. Stephen Wyatt, who shares the crown of “Cartmel-era writers with an axe to grind” with Ben Aaronovich, is taking dead aim at 60s idealism here: a bunch of “weirdos” (as the local businesswoman insists) with names like Flowerchild and Peacepipe have sold out, gotten themselves some evil corporate sponsors, and are recreationally killing people.

This message is overlaid on a strange dreamscape of images. The quarry planet is perfectly, gorgeously wrong for the circus setting, a fact that Wyatt’s script is happy to play on, reveling in the image of a lone creepy circus out in the wasteland.…

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But… Bella! We sparkle way more than Edward!

It’s November 23rd, 1988. Robin Beck remains at number one with “First Time,” a situation resolved two weeks later when Cliff Richard unseats her with “Mistletoe and Wine.” Phil Collins, Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, Rick Astley, and Salt-N-Pepa also chart.

In real news, Benazir Bhutto is sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan. The number of HIV positive people in the UK is pegged by a government report at 50,000, and it’s estimated that by 1992 as many as 17,000 people may die of the disease. Health Minister Edwina Currie causes a massive crash in egg sales through a carelessly worded claim about salmonella. The last shipbuilding facilities around Sunderland close. And Mystery Science Theater 3000 debuts.

While on television, Doctor Who attempts to provide MST3K with material. Silver Nemesis is the weakest of the eleven Cartmel-shaped stories: a messy and smoldering wreck of ill-defined ideas and unconfident execution. But this fact is in and of itself interesting and worth expanding on, simply because it is in many ways the only artifact of its kind: a really bad McCoy story that has no excuses based on the idea that the era was still coming together and figuring out what it was doing. This was made in between The Greatest Show in the Galaxy and The Happiness Patrol. It has no excuses. And so it’s the one point where we can meaningfully ask: what does bad Sylvester McCoy mean?

It’s easy to mistake the Cartmel era as being good because of its ideas. This is because the Cartmel era does, in fact, have some really good ideas. In this regard Silver Nemesis is in grand company. At the heart of the story is the Nemesis statue. Although it more colloquially refers to a general case of an archenemy, in mythological terms Nemesis is a primal force of retribution – the thing that balances the scales in reaction to one’s hubris. Astronomically, it refers to the idea that the sun has a twin star that has collapsed into a dwarf star, lurking unseen in the Oort cloud and causing mass extinctions according to a pre-ordained twenty-six million year cycle.

The statue Nemesis, on the other hand, travels in a quarter-century cycle in its disasters, bringing instead of extinctions various historical calamities. As About Time points out, this is hopeless – there’s no twenty-five year cycle of historical tragedies to build out from here. But the nature of this cyclic disaster is tied here to the history of the program, both extending out of its imagined past (more ancient Time Lords secrets) and tied to its debut. (This is perhaps tempting fate – changing a twenty-six million year cycle to a twenty-five year cycle is almost too apt given what happens for the program’s twenty-sixth anniversary.)

Nemesis, in other words, stalks the program as its dark other. And hey, look who’s back to accompany her: the program’s dark mirror images of humanity. For all that the story gets flak for the supposed reasoning here (“It’s the silver anniversary of Doctor Who and the Cybermen are silver, so why not add them?”)…

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You have to understand, the World Wide Web had only existed for a year. Even for an early adopter household like mine, with two parents both of whom had their own computers with modems and ability to dial in to the campus network and use the VAX, the fact of the matter is that the availability of information in the fall of 1992 was thin in ways that it’s difficult to really comprehend today. And my house, in terms of Doctor Who, was stuck in 1985. The Colin Baker era definitely existed, but my parents had, as I’ve mentioned before, hated it and stopped watching. I had Doctor Who: A Celebration as my only major reference source on the series.

I didn’t know, in other words, that the series had been cancelled, or how many post-Colin Baker Doctors there were, if any. And when, on the bookshelf of Target novelizations, I happened upon The Happiness Patrol, I had little context for it beyond the knowledge that the man in the white hat was not a Doctor I had seen before, nor was the logo familiar to me. For the first time since approaching the series without any context, in other words, I found myself approaching a Doctor Who story without the benefit of historicization. The book was, after all, just two-and-a-half years old. The McCoy era was only three years past.

I have maintained myself as an incidental character in this story since the late Pertwee era. This is, in part, why. Because here we get, as David Tennant puts it, my Doctor. The first one I learned about through experience, watching stories I hadn’t read summaries of. The one I grew up with. And Happiness Patrol, or at least its novel, was my first look into that era. We’re not long from catching up, chronologically, with my own experience of the show. I’ve long said I’d stop this blog when I lose the benefit of history. Here, though, I lose the benefit of double history, exiting the realm of things I’ve only known as historicized events and entering the realm of things I lived once. I myself am history. Or, in terms from Wednesday’s post, I myself am a fixed and certain part of the narrative. To excavate Doctor Who past this point is to excavate myself.

Personal archeology is always a dodgy process. There’s no way around it – at the age of ten I missed large swaths of The Happiness Patrol. I didn’t even have a solid idea who Ace was, little yet that Helen A was a Margaret Thatcher parody. For the most part it looked like standard and unambitious dystopia: a world where everyone is forced to be happy turning out to be an evil place seemed a relatively heavy-handed idea meant to teach me some sort of moral lesson. And yet there was something about it that crackled with the forbidden. Something about it that I was missing, but could tell that I was missing.…

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You… cheater!

It’s October 5th, 1988. U2 are at number one with “Desire,” unseated a week later by Whitney Houston with “One Moment in Time.” This lasts for two weeks before Enya takes over with “Orinoco Flow,” a song that holds Kylie Minogue out of #1. Erasure, Bobby McFerrin, Milli Vanilli, Rick Astley, Phil Collins, and Pet Shop Boys also chart. Since Dragonfire The KLF has also charted, under the name The Timelords, with “Doctorin’ the TARDIS,” but we’ll deal with it next Pop Between Realities entry.

In real news, first to catch up, Perl was created by Larry Wall, perestroika began in the USSR, and Canadian Celine Dion won the Eurovision contest for Switzerland. And the Local Government Act became law, including Section 28, more about which on Friday. While during this story, Ian Paisley denounces Pope John Paul II as the antichrist while he addresses the European Parliament, bits of Spycatcher are finally published in the media, Michael Dukakis spectacularly flubs a question about capital punishment in a US Presidential debate, and the UK government bans interviews with IRA members, which the BBC deals with by hiring actors to play IRA members and read actual IRA members’ interview quotes.

While on television, at long last, it’s Remembrance of the Daleks. The first unambiguous, widely recognized classic of Doctor Who since Caves of Androzani. A tentpole of Doctor Who history. And in all likelihood, the Doctor Who story I’ve seen the most times – although The Curse of Fenric is quite a contender as well. I won’t pretend that I have anything resembling impartiality here. I love Remembrance of the Daleks. It’s one of the stories that is simply and straightforwardly why I am a Doctor Who fan.

But where to start with it? The beginning, one imagines – that is, after all, where it starts. One of the most obvious things about Remembrance of the Daleks is the way in which it returns to the iconography of An Unearthly Child to tell its story. On paper, of course, this sounds like unbearable fanwank. But this obscures the way in which the story works. Yes, it’s packed to the gills with references to the past. But they’re just that – references. There are no real ways in which this story relies on knowledge of An Unearthly Child beyond the twin facts that it’s the first Doctor Who story and it’s being referenced repeatedly by this story. Having seen An Unearthly Child is helpful only in catching the specific references.

But equally, this isn’t the sort of empty wink of Attack of the Cybermen either. There the references to An Unearthly Child were wholly extraneous – little more than an easter egg that the show was inexplicably self-congratulatory over. Here, however, it’s crucial that An Unearthly Child is being referenced, but only inasmuch as it is a major part of Doctor Who’s mythology. What matters here is that we have returned to the beginning of the series. The important thing is the symbolism of this return, not the plot mechanics as such.…

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