Eruditorum Press

Our business actually is to reason and compare

The Ground’s Attacking Us (Frontios)

52

The skies of November turn gloomy.
It’s January 26th, 1984. Frankie Goes to Hollywood finally get around to being at number one, and stays there all story. By the end of it, Cyndi Lauper has made it to right below them with “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” with The Eurythmics, Queen, and Echo & The Bunnymen also charting, the latter with the sublimely good “The Killing Moon.” So the pop charts have gone and restored order, which is often a good sign for what’s on television.

The news, on the other hand, is wholly mediocre. The big one is that the Winter Olympics kick off the day after this story airs its final installment, but that has relevance for the next story, not really this one. Nissan announces plans to open a plant in Great Britain, which will be the first time that non-British cars will be built in the UK. The first embryo transfer resulting in a live birth is announced? An untethered space walk? It’s not thrilling news.

It is, however, thrilling television, as we’ve got Frontios on tap, and as it happens, Frontios is quite good. Perhaps the easiest thing to say about Frontios is that it is not at all the script you would expect from Christopher H. Bidmead. Not merely based on Logopolis or Castrovalva, although it’s very much unlike either of those, but based on the entirety of Season 18, one does not expect to see Bidmead going for body horror and grimy militarism. Nevertheless, this is unmistakably a Bidmead script. His stocks in trade – lost knowledge of the ancients, eccentric spaces – are all here. It’s just that they’re serving a story about slugs using human corpses for labor instead of some fugue on Escher or computers.

There is an almost ritual element to the progression of Season 21. After so long mining every part of Doctor Who’s history save for its alchemical spark the series unexpectedly brings back two of its last three alchemists in Bidmead and, later, Holmes. On top of that, there is an odd focus on the buried. Story after story in this season focuses on imagery of caves, tunnels, or the deep. With the miners’ strike looming, there is in hindsight something slightly uncanny about this. It is not quite a thematic link – the issues of the strike are not well reflected across Season 21, although there are moments that come close. But it remains striking, as Doctor Who finally stirs, even if temporarily, from its season-long torpor of museum pieces, and has a resurgence of alchemy to see it obliquely reflect the looming politics of the day.

But there is something troubling and unsettling about the alchemy in these stories, and Frontios is a prime example. Bidmead has always had a love of eccentric spaces, but here the unfathomable depths of Frontios and the outer reaches of time do not hide a sense of wonder but a sense of raw horror. And not just any horror, but good old-fashioned body horror.…

Continue Reading

Grinding Engines

, , , , , , , , , , , 1 





The mechanical sciences attained to a degree of perfection which,  though obscurely foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted madness  to have prophesied in a preceding age.  Commerce was pursued with a  perpetually increasing vigour, and the same area of the Earth was  perpetually compelled to furnish  more and more subsistence. The means  and sources of knowledge were thus increased  together with knowledge  itself, and the instruments of knowledge. The benefit of  this increase  of the powers of man became, in consequence of the inartificial forms  into  which mankind was distributed, an instrument of his additional  evil. The capabilities of  happiness were increased, and applied to the  augmentation of misery. Modern society is  thus an engine assumed to be  for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle  mechanism  augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or  raising  water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or  breaking to pieces the wheels  of which it is composed. 


–  Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819-1820 






Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won. 


He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin.  Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room atone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.


– Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?


Entropy is a concern of science-fiction as a whole.…

			    
		    
Continue Reading


		
	    
	

	
		

		
	

	
	



							

	    
		

		


								

		
	

				
			
Tea From An Urn (The Awakening)

							

											
					
					
											 					
					        
	       67	    
						

				
			
			
				


        
		









Don’t make me crumble menacingly at you.






It’s January 19th, 1984. Paul McCartney is still at number one with “Pipes of Peace,” with Frankie Goes to Hollywood now up to number two. The lower reaches of the charts are basically as described last time, so let’s go even lower and see if there’s anything interesting. The Police have “King of Pain” near its peak, which isn’t nearly as high as you’d expect for that song. The Smiths are in with “This Charming Man.” There. That’s worth noting. Ooh, and on the album charts the first volume of Now That’s What I Call Music! is at number one. So there’s a symbol of the death of culture and hope. In real news, though it’s between this story and the next, we may as well give this one credit for the Apple Macintosh being introduced, just because otherwise I’d have absolutely nothing to talk about before I moved on to Doctor Who.


So here is something that I didn’t realize how much I’d missed writing about until I sat down for this entry: a thoroughly underrated gem. Not one I have to provide some rescue operation on like Terminus, but a story that’s just quite marvelous and largely overlooked. I think the last one of these was, what, Stones of Blood? Regardless, The Awakening is absolutely marvelous.


Perhaps the most striking thing about The Awakening, at least to a modern eye, is that it figures out how to do the two-part story. Or, at least, rediscovers it – David Whitaker had the gist of this figured out in the mid-60s. (Then again, to some extent the entire history of Doctor Who after 1968 is just people figuring out what David Whitaker understood all along.) But as The Awakening is the only 45-minute Doctor Who story to work between The Rescue and Rose, it bears some analysis on those grounds alone.


To some extent, of course, its central innovation is just blindingly obvious: it gets the cliffhanger to work right. Let’s look at the cliffhangers of the two-parters quickly, starting with the post-Rescue ones. The Sontaran Experiment ends with revealing the villain of the piece. Black Orchid ends with the incident that kicks off the murder mystery. The King’s Demons ends with the revelation of the Master. All three of these are cliffhangers in what we might call the game-change mould – they’re revelations that promise a shift in the nature of the story.


Compare those to Whitaker’s two cliffhangers on his two-parters. The Rescue has the Doctor stumbling upon a spike trap, and The Edge of Destruction has a particularly vivid  moment of the crew betraying each other. These are not cliffhangers that change the shape of the story, they’re sudden intrusions of danger that we know will be squared away within a minute or two of the start of the next episode so we can get back to the plot.


In most circumstances it is the game-change cliffhangers that are most interesting.…

			    
		    
Continue Reading


		
	    
	

	
		

		
	

	
	



							

	    
		

		


								

		
	

				
			
300 Million Years Out Of Your Comfort Zone (Warriors of the Deep)

							

											
					
					
											 					
					        
	       46	    
						

				
			
			
				


        
		









Gronda Gronda?






It’s January 5th, 1984. The Flying Pickets are at number one with “Only You,” with Paul McCartney’s “Pipes of Peace” knocking them off a week later as they manage one of the most impressive drops I’ve ever seen from a number one single, plunging down to ten. Billy Joel, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, Culture Club, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood all also chart, the latter with “Relax.” (Frankie Goes to Hollywood, it should be noted for Americans, were not a one hit wonder in the UK at all.)


In the month and change since The Five Doctors, Lynda Mann is murdered, though the newsy part of that came many years later when the murderer, Colin Pitchfork, became the first person in Britain to be convicted based on DNA evidence. An IRA car bomb exploded outside Harrods in the Christmas shopping center. And Pope John Paul II visited the man who attempted to assassinate him to forgive him. While during this story a hurricane-force storm kills six in Britain.


While on television. A commenter made the quite valid point that my entries on the Davison era have been markedly closer to the critical consensus than in any other era. This is true, and I’ve kind of internally conceptualized much of this stretch as being about providing a more thorough account of the logic behind the consensus than about changing it. Largely because I think the overall consensus on this part of the Nathan-Turner era is solid, which, in turn, is because it’s just about the most analyzed portion of Doctor Who around save, perhaps, for the new series, which is so deliciously oversignified that the existing critical consensus can’t be grasped at all.


All of which said, I think the era as a whole gets an unfairly rough ride. There are systemic problems, which I’ve pointed out at length and will continue to do so, but there are also moments of real quality, including in oft-overlooked stories. And then there is Warriors of the Deep, about which I sadly, if unexpectedly, find myself with virtually nothing good to say.


That said, much of the criticism of the story is, if not inaccurate, at the very least faintly unfair. Yes, the effects on it are lamentable, but I’ve kept a decent policy of not criticizing Doctor Who for poor effects and I’m not going to break it here. The Myrka is deeply, deeply unfortunate, but to suggest that it, or any of the shoddiness of this story, is the actual problem with the story is ridiculous. They’re symptoms of the problem. The story wouldn’t be significantly improved by better effects. It just wouldn’t have quite as obvious a punching bag.


Michael Grade, responsible for pulling the trigger on the 1985 hiatus, has apparently cited this story as the one that persuaded him that Doctor Who was crap, a claim that Eric Saward took issue with, pointing out that Grade was in a position to give the program more money. But the flip side of this is what possible reason Michael Grade would have for giving more money to a program that’s blowing what it has on a pantomime horse.…

			    
		    
Continue Reading


		
	    
	

	
		

		
	

	
	



							

	    
		

		


								

		
	

				
			
Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 28 (The Adventure Game)

							

											
					
					
											 , 					
					        
	       33	    
						

				
			
			
				


        
		
I am not entirely convinced that I have, in the course of writing this blog, actually watched anything weirder than The Adventure Game. It is the sort of thing that, as one watches, one has the increasingly clear realization that nobody who has never seen this would ever believe me about what it’s like. The Adventure Game is really the first 1980s example of what we saw back with Children of the Stones – one of those pieces of television that sticks, deeply embedded, in the brain to later come out in a triumphantly cathartic conversation to the effect of “yes, yes, I remember that!”


The easiest way to describe The Adventure Game is that it’s what everybody who foolishly wants the Celestial Toymaker to come back should watch instead. It is, in effect, that story done right and as an ongoing series. In each episode a trio of celebrities from the B-list or below (possibly far below – I’m not actually sure everybody who appears on the show is actually a celebrity) are stuck on a fictitious alien planet and left to escape by playing odd real-life board games and solving puzzles. And, you know. Talking to angry plants that they have to address with the proper terms of respect or risk evaporation. Like you do.


What is most important to The Adventure Game is not its almost completely incoherent worldbuilding but its sense of tone. All of the elements are familiar in the abstract as parts of a Captain Kangaroo-esque children’s television. But instead of being presented straightforwardly as a world that the viewing children are invited to understand The Adventure Game presents its world as a puzzle to be continually figured out.


A prime example is Rongad, a character in the third and fourth series of the show, who speaks backwards. That is, he reverses the letter order of every word he says as well as his sentence structure. In a normal piece of children’s television, this would be presented as, essentially, an in joke for savvy viewers. His appearances would serve to reintroduce the central concept, and the pleasure would be in the ability of the audience to make sense of the apparent randomness.


But The Adventure Game doesn’t give them the chance. Even if you know the trick to Rongad it’s impossible to make sense of what he’s saying simply because auditory parsing of backwards English at conversational speeds is not actually possible. So instead we get a world in which there are rules, but even knowing the rules is not entirely useful. The show is not a comforting piece about learning by repetition but one about playing within a set of rules.


This, of course, corresponds with what the show is actually about. The actual content of the show is based on watching the guest stars try to figure out puzzles and maneuver their way through Arg. So, for instance, in the episode of most interest to Doctor Who fans, the one where Janet Fielding plays, there’s a puzzle based around floating an egg up from the bottom of a glass to acquire a piece of string tied around it, and the fact that the egg will float in salt water.…

			    
		    
Continue Reading


		
	    
	

	
		

		
	

	
	



							

	    
		

		


								

		
	

				
			
In The Great Days of Rassilon, Five Great Principles Were Laid Down (The Five Doctors)

							

											
					
					
											 					
					        
	       122	    
						

				
			
			
				


        
		














In many ways, every single thing I could possibly say about this story is


encoded thematically within this image. All of which said, whose hand is


on waxwork Tom Baker’s shoulder, exactly?








It’s November 23rd, 1983. Lionel Richie is at number one with “All Night Long (All Night),” as for one of only two times in Doctor Who we are forced to use the American charts, as this story actually aired two days earlier in the US than it did in the UK. This fact reflects the way in which Doctor Who, in the 1980s, was increasingly turning into a global export – a massive brand that raked in money for the BBC. This, of course, is not what you expect. In any other context global success would matter tremendously and would justify the show’s continued existence. But the BBC is beholden to different rules, as is appropriate given the nature of its funding. The license payers deserve not to be ignored in favor of Americans. And so far from being a reason to keep the show on the air, Nathan-Turner’s mad quest to chase American cult television fans at the expense of the license payers is, increasingly, a major problem.


Not, however, here – a story that is rightfully and properly delightful when it airs on November 25th, 1983. Billy Joel is at number one with “Uptown Girl,” with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson below him with “Say Say Say.” The Cure are also in the top ten with “The Love Cats.”


In real news, since March sci-fi and the real world have merged uncomfortably with Ronald Reagan announcing the space-based and comically unfeasible Strategic Defense Initiative, derisively nicknamed “Star Wars.” Samantha Smith manages the impressive feat of being used as a cheap propaganda tool by both the USSR and the US. Her resulting celebrity is the only reason she is on the plane whose crash kills her at the age of thirteen two years later.


Margaret Thatcher wins reelection in June in a landslide whereby an outright majority of voters opted for more liberal parties, resulting in Thatcher having a 61% majority in the House of Commons. This massive vote of confidence emboldens Thatcher’s government, and the Thatcherism we all know and loathe really begins here. Pioneer 10 flees the solar system four days later.


The Famicom, known in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System, launches in Japan. The Global Positioning System is announced to be opened for civilian use. The GNU project is publicly announced. 38 IRA prisoners escape from Maze prison. And US cruise missiles arrive at Greenham Common.


While, of course, on television we have a big one. The Five Doctors.


The problem with occasionally doing what I think of as the gonzo entries is that there is occasionally the sense that I’m expected, for a given “big” story, to provide one. In practice it’s a bit more idiosyncratic than that. What makes a classic story and what makes a story that lends itself to an over the top gonzo entry do not, in fact, completely coincide.…

			    
		    
Continue Reading


		
	    
	

	
		

		
	

	
	



							

	    
		

		


								

		
	

				
			
How Curses Work 3: That Whole Rabbits/Tennis Connection There

							

											
					
					
											 , , , , , , , , , , , 					
					        
	       4	    
						

				
			
			
				


        
		
I always dimly assumed that Stephen Harris – whatever combination of real people he may pseudonymically represent – got the idea for a story about pyramids on Mars from all that guff about there supposedly being pyramids and giant monkey faces on Mars. 


However, I learn that the ‘face’ and ‘pyramids’ on Mars were not ‘discovered’ until the NASA Viking missions, which didn’t snap pictures of the region of Mars known as Cydonia (where all the pyramids, town squares and giant useless chimp portraits are said to be) until after ‘Pyramids of Mars’ was broadcast.


The whole pyramids / Mars thing is alive and well today, beyond Who-dom.  Viz, this species of utter balls:






 




This kind of drivel has not been stopped – or even slowed – by better and more detailed images taken by NASA since.


Here, for instance is an image of the ‘pyramid’, taken by Mars Global Surveyor in 2001:






Self-evidently NOT an artificial, architectural structure, I’m sure you’ll agree.  (If you don’t, you have no business reading this blog.  Go away immediately.)


Here, is the spooky ‘simian’ ‘face’ on Mars, imaged by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007:






Looks exactly like Roddy McDowell in Planet of Apes, doesn’t it?


And yet, despite the fact that we now have very detailed images of this LUMP OF ROCK clearly showing it to NOT be a sculpted face, a brief (and depressing) googling session will turn up wonders such as this…






Sometimes, scientists must wonder why they bloody bloody bloody-well bloody bother.


But, yet again it seems, good old Who may claim to have ‘got there first’.  Hinchcliffe and Holmes did the pyramids / Mars thing before anybody thought there were any Martian pyramids.  That’s almost as good as predicting a woman Prime Minister and the existence of Jim’ll Fix It… and it tops Bob Holmes’ previous best of satirising Star Trek: The Next Generation before most British people had even seen Kirk and Spock.


Back before Viking, if Mars had structures (an idea which the Mariner missions had already dented), they were supposed to be canals… even though the guy who first talked about Martian canals was being metaphorical.  In Italian.


Of course, most of ‘Pyramids of Mars’ is a concentrated rip-off of Hammer’s The Mummy with some von Daniken-esque seasoning… but still, it seems to have done something original.  ”Egyptology and Mars”, as Lawrence Scarman put it, before such a connection had appeared elsewhere.


(If anyone knows of previous connections, please do let me know.)


Even some of those who take the pyramid/face stuff seriously seem happily aware of Doctor Who‘s prior claim:






So – without wanting to become like one of those pompous bumholes like David Aaronovitch (yes, a relation) who write smug, chin-scratchy things about conspiracy theorists and homeopaths – what does this all mean? 


After a cursory glance at many of the sites where people pick over photos of Mars looking for evidence of alien buildings, I’m very tempted to wonder about the readiness of our culture to associate Mars with the motifs of the ancient East.…

			    
		    
Continue Reading


		
	    
	

	
		

		
	

	
	



							

	    
		

		


								

		
	

				
			
You Were Expecting Someone Else 9 (Longleat, Doctor Who Monthly, the Peter Davison Comics)

							

											
					
					
											 , 					
					        
	       27	    
						

				
			
			
				


        
		


Longleat, by any measure, is an archeology project. Certainly I have nothing that could accurately be called a memory of it, having been one and not there. But grasping about for equivalencies proves oddly unsatisfying. It was a major convention in 1983, yes. In this regard, it was a known quantity. But analogy is terribly unhelpful here. To compare it to the 2012 “official convention” in Cardiff – an event I just escaped from a few hours ago at time of writing – is pointless. The Cardiff convention was a slickly professional affair and, more to the point, was executed by a BBC that had full mastery of the concept of fandom and its relationship with Doctor Who. Its slickness was in most regards cover for the real key fact, which is that it was an official convention in every sense of the word – a convention that actively promoted an official narrative of what the series was and how it was loved.


Longleat, by and large, was the opposite. If anything it marked the point where it became possible to talk about alternatives to the official narrative in a meaningful sense. But to understand this we need to move over and look at Doctor Who Magazine, at this stage called Doctor Who Monthly. We talked a bit about the rise of the fan industrial complex towards the end of the Graham Williams era, but by late 1983 it was in full effect. Starting with Season Nineteen the magazine offered a thoroughly familiar and reliable structure. First it would leak scattered tidbits of information about a story in its Gallifrey Guardian column, which offered a smattering of Doctor Who news items. Then, in the last issue that would hit the stands prior to a story’s transmission, a one page preview spelling out much of the premise would be released. Finally, usually about two issues later, the magazine would run a review of the story, typically positive and never flamingly negative. Some months thereafter would come things like the end of season poll and the periodic John Nathan-Turner interview that would further cement the official “end consensus” on a story.


What’s important to stress about this structure, though, is that the information was carefully tuned to regulate and shape how the stories were watched and remembered. This is most obvious with a story like Earthshock, where, of course, Nathan-Turner’s insistence on keeping the return of the Cybermen a secret required that the story be previewed in a manner almost but not entirely unrelated to what the story was actually about.


In other words, Doctor Who Magazine had become a major part of formulating a paratext of Doctor Who that resulted in a highly complex structure for interaction with the series. This contextualizing of the current series was reinforced by an active effort to historicize the past of the series, with features not only covering the plots of long-lost Hrtnell and Troughton stories but also including interviews with writers and directors of past stories that served to educate the reader about the material reality of television production.…

			    
		    
Continue Reading


		
	    
	

	
		

		
	

	
	



							

	    
		

		


								

		
	

				
			
How Curses Work 2: This Fez is Loaded

							

											
					
					
											 , , , , , , , , , , , , , 					
					        
	       3	    
						

				
			
			
				


        
		
The utility to Western imperialism of depicting Arabs with the kind of culturalist discourse of modern vs. pre-modern, secularism vs. cultish religion, democracy vs. theocracy, civilisation vs. medievalism, rationalism vs. fanaticism (translated out of code: good Westerners vs. bad Arabs) that followed in the wake of the “war on terror” is obvious.


This way of constructing Arab and/or Middle Eastern cultural identities in Western art, literature, media and ideology, is very old. 


Edward Said‘s seminal book Orientalism outlines the way in which the West has constructed the East as an exotic, romantic, cruel, sensuous, decadent, fanatical, inscrutable Other.  (…though it is occasionally weakened – in my presumptuous and insignificant opinion – by the problems underlying Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’, which Said utilises.)


Jack Shaheen‘s book Reel Bad Arabs reveals how Hollywood has vilified and dehumanized Arabs.  Here’s a great short documentary demonstrating his thesis.  It’s central message may not come as a surprise to you, but it’s still salutary to see the evidence collated and concentrated.


Such representations of Arabs pop up in the Doctor Who story ‘Pyramids of Mars’ (1975) as part of the show’s tactic, at that time, of raiding the motifs of the pop-gothic… with Hammer as a major influence.  The Hammer version of The Mummy is the place, above all others, where the Egyptian Fanatic (that character we were talking about in the previous post) is best seen.  The character in that film, played by George Pastell, is the template for Namin in ‘Pyramids of Mars’.











“Where ‘dem infidels at???”






Namin is a murderous, raging fanatic.  He goes one better than Pastell’s character in the Hammer Mummy: he actually takes over the English country mansion of the Explorer, invading it using forged (or coerced) letters of authority from the Explorer, taking up the Explorer’s place, raging at the Explorer’s servant, barring the Explorer’s brother, insulting and shooting the Explorer’s friend, etc.  Inverting real history, the Egyptian invades England, violently taking over.  Terrance Dicks’ novelisation makes it clear that Namin is the last in a long line of fanatical worshippers of the old gods, as per standard stereotypes.  At one point, Namin even insinuates that Dr Warlock is being racist – or at least xenophobic – in suspecting him of nefarious activities, asking sarcastically if Warlock will report him to the police for being “a foreigner”.  Warlock then gets to smash such petty and self-serving nonsense aside.  Don’t bring up racism; I only suspect you because you’re a wrong’un.  Thus is the depiction of the Arab as a sinister, fanatical invader self-alibied, self-excused… with all criticism automatically and pre-emptively effaced in a “Political correctness gone mad!” moment avant la lettre.  It’s a moment when Doctor Who itself says “bloody minorities, coming over here… and then squealing about ‘racism’ when we complain about what they get up to!”  It’s one of the ugliest moments in the history of the show.


But Namin isn’t just an evil Arab.  He’s an evil religious Arab.  In the original version of his essay about ‘Pyramids of Mars’ at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, Philip Sandifer (while, it should be stressed, criticising the use of nasty stereotypes)  accidentally referred to Namin as a Muslim… and got taken to task for it in the comments.…

			    
		    
Continue Reading


		
	    
	

	
		

		
	

	
	



							

	    
		

		


								

		
	

				
			
A Space Helmet For a Cow (The King’s Demons)

							

											
					
					
											 					
					        
	       18	    
						

				
			
			
				


        
		









At least someone stepped in and stopped Nathan-Turner
from his original plan of using Twiki.		






It’s March 15th, 1983. Bonnie Tyler remains at number one with “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” with The Eurythmics “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” nipping at its heels, and the rest of the charts being a similar burst of pure and unadulterated 1980s of the sort that you really probably need to cut with some do-wop or something lest you risk an overdose. Also in music news is the debut of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk dance two days prior to this story beginning transmission. In real news, Thatcher’s government passes massive tax cuts. That’s about all we’ve got.


Speaking of not having much, it is difficult to say anything about The Kings Demons, which stands as one of the most strikingly unambitious scripts of the Davison era. It was, admittedly, not supposed to be the season finale, so we can at least give it a break on those grounds and acknowledge that this is not another case of the foolishness that led to things like Time-Flight and The Twin Dilemma being used as finales. But it does represent the degree to which the two-episode stories that every season of the Davison era is saddled with are unfortunate at best.


One gets the intense sense that this script is a dumping ground. Terence Dudley, with whom Saward did not get on, is brought back and given the short script. Anthony Ainley’s Master, who here becomes nearly impossible to take seriously, gets abandoned in it. And so too is the introduction of Kamelion. To be fair, not all of this is intentional. The degree to which Kamelion was not going to prove at all workable was not really clear until the story filmed, and the decision to keep bringing Ainley back demonstrates that he was not intended to be snubbed with this assignment. But intentionality counts for less than one might hope in these things. Shoved after the Black Guardian trilogy, at the end of the season, and a two parter to boot, this story gives nothing so much as a sense of all the steam going out of Doctor Who.


For the most part the “something old returns in every story” idea this season has not been the disaster it could have been. Everything, at least, had a fresh take on its returning concepts, even if, in the case of The Arc of Infinity, that fresh take was to abandon all notion of the concepts themselves in favor of soul-crushing tedium. But here we’re back to the awkwardness of The Visitation’s redoing of The Time Warrior – an ugly case of everything in this story having been taken from other stories and just redone with an “it worked before so it must work again” attitude.


This contributes to something I’ve been accusing Doctor Who of for a while now, which is the use of simulacra of actual content. Whether it be Earthshock’s hollow aping of the form of a dramatic death, Arc of Infinity’s empty recitations of past concepts or, really, several other bits over the past two years.…

			    
		    
Continue Reading


		
	    
	

	
		

		
	

	
	



					    

		
«‹ 305  306  307  308 ›»