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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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Victory of the Icon 3

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I have a massive, endlessly-lengthening list of books, old and new, that I want to get around to reading.  Donny Gluckstein’s new book A People’s History of the Second World War just went straight in near the top of the list.

Gluckstein’s argument seems to be that WWII was actually two wars, fought in parallel.  One was an imperialist squabble between established empires and up-and-coming imperialist nations that were set to clash with them.  Britain, France, Russia and America (which was already a continental empire and was ready to expand globally) found themselves violently competing for hegemony with Germany, Italy and Japan.  Running beneath this conflict there was a people’s war against fascism (the form taken by the new empires) underpinned by dreams of freedom and democracy.  The imperialists running the first war knew that had to appeal to the priorities of the people fighting the second war in order to enlist their support, hence the democratic rhetoric.

I mention this here because Gluckstein has done an interview for New Left Project, in which he has some things to say about Winston Churchill, the subject of my irregular ‘Victory of the Icon‘ posts.

Churchill was always very clear that his mission in the war was to defend the British empire, not promote the interests of ordinary citizens. He was not ideologically committed to destroy fascism. He made statements such as the following when he met Mussolini in 1927: ‘If I had been an Italian I would have been with you from the start in your struggle against the bestial passions of Leninism’. During the Spanish civil war he backed Franco (whose survival depended on Hitler and Mussolini’s massive material support), and afterwards he defended Franco when some argued that his regime was the unfinished business of WWII. Churchill also backed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria before the war.

During the war itself Churchill was very resistant to the notion of opening a second front (a landing in France) to relieve pressure on Russia. The focus of British strategy until 1944 was to avoid confronting the Nazis in Europe, and instead defend the imperial routes. That is why the main fighting was in North Africa (Tobruk, El Alamein). When the tide turned on the Eastern Front and it looked like Russia would sweep across Europe Churchill suddenly threw his efforts into the D-Day landings.

For ordinary British people the war had a very different meaning. It was a war against Nazism and fascism, for liberation and democracy. Churchill was fighting to defend the status quo of 1939 which, at home, had meant mass unemployment, appalling poverty and deprivation. The majority were not going to put their lives at risk to continue with that. Nor would they be duped with the sort of propaganda issued in the First World War (such as Lord Kitchener’s famous poster – ‘Your country needs you!’) They had seen what imperialist war meant.

And:

Churchill was an important figure in the sense that the British ruling class was divided about what to do with Germany.

…

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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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Time Can Be Rewritten(…ish) 24

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…ish is one of those pieces that is desperate for you to recognize how clever it is, which would be irritating if it weren’t so damned clever. Indeed, it’s sufficiently clever that an irritating number of reviewers seem to think that this is a lot of clever presentation wrapped around an overly simple story. This, however, involves an unfortunate confusion of plot with story. The plot is standard Doctor Who fare – an expedition to an alien planet inadvertently collects something… evil. It escapes back among the humans and threatens to cause untold devastation. After uncovering malfeasance among the people who went on the expedition the Doctor stops the evil thing and saves the day. As basic as they come, really.

The only tricky bit, really, is that the “something evil” is, in fact, a word and that the nature of the threat is the complete collapse of all language and meaning. The word – referred to as the “ish” – destroys meaning itself – as, of course, does the suffix itself. The threat is that the ish will be unleashed into the Omniverbum, which is essentially the Word of “in the beginning was the” fame.

It’s just that this tricky bit causes the story to extend considerably beyond the straightforward plot. It also, however, enables a mass of cleverness, some of which is oft-noted and some of which is less so. The most obvious thing to observe is that this is a story that required Baker’s Doctor. One of the key characteristics of Baker’s Doctor is a degree of pomposity. Unfortunately, as Tat Wood rather cuttingly observed in About Time, this tends to manifest such that Baker comes off as a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person is like. Which is to say that the writers had an irritating tendency to write with the thesaurus open such that Baker’s Doctor displays a certain… ludicrous logorrhea, if you will. (The trait is, of course, compounded when Pip and Jane Baker are writing for him, since their tendency is to write everybody verbosely to begin with.)

So for a story that is about words and language there was really only one Doctor to choose. And the story is littered with bits of wordplay and what is less continuity porn than continuity erotica – a bevy of jokes that are both terribly obscure and utterly artful. (An impossibly large encyclopedia volume beginning with DAL, for instance. Or a Delphon joke.) There’s also a rampant set of jokes referencing post-structuralist literary theory – several bits of dialogue are straight lifts from major postmodernist thinkers. (I caught at the very least a Lacan and a Deleuze reference) This is also a compelling bit of timing. The era this story is set during was the real breakout of postmodernism, both in popular culture and in academia, and a story that is about postmodern literary theory is a natural fit – a story that on the one hand would never have been made in the era itself, but on the other still speaks to the cultural concerns of the era.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 12 (Steve Parkhouse)

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So, I’ll admit, part of why I’ve been dragging my feet on ever doing a comics entry post-Tom Baker is that I knew that I was going to get pilloried in a way I haven’t been pilloried since pointing out that Inferno’s pacing is a complete shambles. Because everybody points to the Sixth Doctor comics, and particularly the Steve Parkhouse-penned/John Ridgway-drawn ones that are the ones I’m really focusing on this entry (The Grant Morrison ones will get a look when we cover The Invisibles, which will be next year), are apparently widely praised as the best Sixth Doctor stories in existence and as highlights and classics.

And, I mean, they’re good, but… they have real and massive problems of their own. Or, actually, not of their own. For the most part their problems go hand in glove with the problems we noted last time in the series in general. What is good about them is largely (though not exclusively) that they are ambitious and epic in a way that the television series was not in the mid-1980s, and that they have a level of consistent aesthetic and atmosphere that the series lacked.

The thing is, both of those are in many ways functions of the medium. One of the advantages that comics have over other visual media is that the budget and what is depicted are utterly unrelated. Whereas if Steve Parkhouse were to try to write “Voyager” (his most acclaimed story) for television, well, one doesn’t imagine he’d have gotten much further than “EXT. VAST FROZEN WASTELAND – NIGHT,” and if he somehow had, “an ice covered tall ship rests among the frozen peaks” would have been the end. Similarly, when you’re only dealing with a writer and an artist as creative personnel it’s not exactly the same challenge to get them all on the same creative page as it is to get a bunch of designers, musicians, costumers and actors on the same page as the writer, script editor, and producer.

So yes, both of these things are accomplished by the Parkhouse comics quite well, but to use them as the basis for a comparison with the television series is a bit pointless. It’s one of the basic differences between the media. The real question is whether these are good comics.

Certainly it’s easy to see the appeal. “”Voyager”” rightly gets the bulk of the credit – it’s an absolutely gorgeous and lush story full of creepy and haunting images. (I’m usually skeptical of colorization of black and white comics, but IDW’s color version of “Voyager” is absolutely gorgeous) There’s a long-standing train of thought within Doctor Who in which the Doctor is cast into hallucinatory or surreal realms, dating back at the very least to The Celestial Toymaker and, I would argue, all the way back to The Edge of Destruction. But there can be no doubt that “Voyager” is one of the most successful applications of this.

Much of its success comes from excellent taste in what images to use.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 31 (The Singing Detective, Edge of Darkness)

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The weakness of Doctor Who in 1985-86 would be one thing if it were a weak period for British television in general. Instead, however, two of the most acclaimed British television productions of all time aired during the Colin Baker era. The first, at the end of 1985, was Edge of Darkness. The second, airing at the tail end of Trial of a Time Lord, about 26 hours after each of the last four episodes and then for another two weeks after, was The Singing Detective.

For those not reflexively versed in the nuances of British television, Edge of Darkness is a conspiracy thriller written by the creator of Z-Cars and directed by Martin Campbell, who went on to be a serious director who did such high profile work as the Daniel Craig Casino Royale and, less satisfyingly, the recent Green Lantern film. If the name sounds vaguely familiar as a Mel Gibson film, I’m very sorry for you, as that’s Martin Campbell remaking the series as a film a few years back and very much not good. The plot concerns a police detective whose daughter is gunned down in front of him and the nuclear conspiracy that unfolds as he investigates her death and discovers that she, not he, was the target.

The Singing Detective, on the other hand, is one of the two things that people point towards when picking the masterpiece of Dennis Potter, himself the consensus best writer in British television history. It stars Michael Gambon as a writer with a debilitating skin condition (one that Potter himself also suffered from) who drifts among his stay in the hospital, the detective novel he’s writing in his head (in which Gambon also plays the  lead, the eponymous singing detective), and memories from his childhood.

It goes without saying that both are very, very good. Less clear is whether they’re meaningfully comparable with Doctor Who. Certainly both have wildly higher production standards. Indeed, in the case of The Singing Detective the production standards were actually too high – Dennis Potter had wanted the hospital scenes shot on video to look like a sitcom, but he was overruled and the whole thing was done on film. As a result, both are much better looking than Doctor Who.

And this is not, to be clear, just a special effects thing. Television is a visual medium. We Doctor Who fans are used to overlooking bad effects, but in doing so we can be prone to blinding ourselves to just how much good directing can matter. (Consider the degree to which Revelation of the Daleks was salvaged by Graeme Harper. Even in the new series directors matter to a great extent – consider how much The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex were elevated by Nick Hurran’s revelatory direction.) It’s not just that Edge of Darkness and The Singing Detective look ritzier, they’re fundamentally better and more complexly shot pieces of television. Doctor Who didn’t have the money to let directors cut loose the way they can in these shows, and as a result struggled to get directors as good as these – one of the few claims in the infamous Eric Saward Starburst interview I have no trouble believing.…

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You Were Expecting Someone Else 11 (Slipback)

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With Doctor Who off the air for eighteen months everyone involved was, for obvious reasons, interested in finding some way to get some new Doctor Who out. And so they ended up doing a radio series of six ten minute episodes written by Eric Saward. The end home of this series was part of a BBC Radio 4 children’s magazine show entitled Pirate Radio 4. Since he was writing for an overtly children’s audience Saward, to his credit, recognized that his usual space marine action approach was a no go. Accordingly, he channelled Douglas Adams.

Wait, what?

Let’s not forget that one of the foundational myths of the Nathan-Turner era is that the show was irrevocably broken by the Graham Williams era and that it was “silly.” Eric Saward was among the pilers-on, accusing the Williams era of insulting the audience. Now, suddenly, he’s trying to mimic the approach of Williams’s script editor?

The problem is that between the time when that myth was laid down – 1980 or so – and 1985 – there’d been a necessary reevaluation of things. In 1980 Douglas Adams was a comedy writer who’d had a decent success with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with the novel coming out towards the end of his time on the show. Accordingly, he could be dismissed as having made the show silly. But 1985 he’d gotten to book four of the trilogy and was a reliably best-selling author. And suddenly he was a major point of legitimacy for Doctor Who – someone the program wanted to boast about its association with instead of boasting about moving past.

But more than that, there is something odd about the spectacle of Eric Saward writing light comedy. I mean, he attempted dark comedy on a regular basis – there’s a great moment in the infamous Starburst interview when, pressed on the idea that Doctor Who isn’t funny anymore, he pointed out that Vengeance on Varos, The Two Doctors, and Revelation of the Daleks are all comedies. Which, I mean, they technically are, but… this is clearly not what those critics meant. This, though, is the only real instance of him doing an extended piece of straightforward comedy in Doctor Who on his own initiative (as opposed to in the course of a salvage job).

It’s not very good, but it’s not very good in the same ways that The Visitation is not very good – a case of the whole being markedly less than the sum of its recycled parts. Many, if not most, of the ideas are genuinely funny, but the story is in many ways wholly encapsulated by the drunk ditz computer, a funny idea that overstays its welcome by a considerable margin. Still, it’s nowhere near as bad as its reputation. Doctor Who has always faltered when people attempt explicitly “for children” versions of it. This is no worse than The Pescatons before it or The Infinite Quest after it, if we’re being honest. Indeed, it’s probably better than either.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 23 (The Nightmare Fair)

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Right. So, a little over a year ago I had a blog that was just starting to get some attention. And I came upon a story that, well, kinda sucked. And the thing is, it was a story that had a surprisingly good reputation, but the story itself was really, really rubbish. Plus there were some really uncomfortable racial elements to it, and it was the second story in a row to have those, and I wrote an entry that tore the story to shreds. And writing it, I was getting a nice build-up going, so I went for broke in the conclusion and suggested that the story should be exiled from the canon on the grounds that it’s racist and terrible.

So, funny thing, it turns out that if, right when people are just starting to take notice of your blog, you viciously slaughter a mildly sacred cow this rapidly becomes one of the things you’re best known or. It’s not actually one of my most read posts, which I’m fine with, but to this day if I see a link in my referral logs from something I haven’t heard about before and I click through, over half the time it’s someone citing my blog to say that the story is a bit racist. It is unmistakably the case that The Celestial Toymaker (or, really, the combination of that and The Daleks’ Masterplan three entries earlier) is where my blog made itself. Because apparently nobody had really made the observation that The Celestial Toymaker was a piece of racist crap. (And it was. And it’s deliberate. I didn’t quote the novelization in the entry, but I’d like to point out the quote I’ve been pointing to since writing the entry: “The Toymaker was lounging in a black Chinese chair behind a laquered Chinese desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl and scenes of chinese life,” and, its counterpart a few sentences later, “The Toymaker stood up, a tall imposing figure, dressed as a Chinese mandarin with a circular black hat embossed with a heavy gold thread, a large silver red and blue collar and a heavy, stiffly embroidered black robe encrusted with rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls set against a background of coiled Chinese dragons.” Also, the Toymaker is Chinese.)

So you can imagine that it was somewhat comforting to open up Graham Williams’s The Nightmare Fair and discover that someone actually had noticed this problem before me. After a bunch of referring to the Toymaker as a Mandarin, Williams, at about the halfway point of the book, drops all pretense and just becomes a wonderfully snarky jerk about the fact that watching Michael Gough pretend to be Asian is kind of horrifying. My favorite bit, for what it’s worth, is “Stefan carefully tore off the printed sheet and made his way towards the Mandarin, who was standing, listening attentively to a technician in a white coat who looked distinctly as though he had the better right to the eastern style wardrobe the Mandarin favoured.”…

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