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When You’re Living Your Life One Day After Another (Fury From the Deep)

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OH MY GOD! I SAW UNDER JAMIE’S KILT!

Hi! So, how was A Good Man Goes to War? I hope it was good. I wrote this post a full week ago, and since I suspect that there are going to be things that it would make sense to point to in A Good Man Goes to War here, I figured I should remind you of that fact. 

It’s March 16, 1968, and Israeli novelty blues are still at the top of the charts. It is replaced by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich with “The Legend of Xanadu,” which sits oddly on the line between novelty and love song. In week three The Beatles ride in to save us with Lady Madonna, and in week five it’s Cliff Richard. Honestly, I’m at a loss – this is not music I’m terribly familiar with. Cliff Richard appears to veer in his career from young rock guy to evangelical Christian. I see lower in the charts things like 1910 Fruitgum Company, which I have never heard of. I look at the cover and think “Ooh, that looks like a nice bit of psychedelia.” And it turns out to be bubblegum pop. Let’s call that the defining image of these weeks.

In real news, the British Foreign Secretary resigned seemingly over a drunken row with the Prime Minister, the Mai Lai massacre took place, 91 people are injured in a London protest against the Vietnam War, 200 more are arrested. Aer Lingus flight 172 crashes, killing 61. Lyndon Johnson declares he will not seek re-election, which was probably a good idea on paper, though as it turns out, this upcoming US Presidential Election is going to go somewhat badly for the planet. (I am rather more a hippie than an archeologist). Martin Luther King is murdered. Political assassinations in Germany. And, just to wrap off these uneventful six weeks, on the day the final episode of Fury From the Deep is transmitted, Enoch Powell makes the famous Rivers of Blood speech in which he rails against excessive immigration into Great Britain, complains that the British way of life is being destroyed, and warns:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood”. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

In other words, this is the bit of history that we’re talking about when we talk about the turbulence of the 1960s.…

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Missing Codec

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Old Who was not fundamentally about characters or characterisation.

At its best, it used characterisation as a way of expressing its actual concerns, which were narrative or semiotic or conceptual or thematic or mythic or political or satirical… or any combination thereof.

We know everything we need to know about who Kalik, Orum and Pletrac are, how they think, etc. for the pastiche/satire/parable/joke to work.

It simply isn’t interested in how Kalik feels about his mother.

It certainly isn’t interested in how the Doctor feels. Or hardly ever. Even when the Doctor goes home for the first time, we don’t see him soulfully staring at his childhood haunts or standing in the rain over the grave of his deserted Mum. Instead, he gets caught up in a satirical political thriller that turns into a surreal duel and then an apocalyptic techno-melodrama.

Of course, there’s plenty of characterisation in ‘The Deadly Assassin’. Even minor characters have ways of thinking and speaking. Hildred is a brutal bungler. Borusa is principled in some ways, cynical in others, and has a sneaking admiration for his wayward ex-pupil, etc.

Worldbuilding, in the service of conceptual or historical or political ideas, needs this kind of characterisation.  The more charged the concepts or history or ideas being explored, the more charged the emotion. New Who has never done anything as moving (to me) as “Binro was right.”  Meanwhile, Romana isn’t pregnant or anything. 

Yes, the Doctor looks sad when Jo decides to marry Jones.  At the very end of a story about an evil chemical company befouling an environment full of unemployed people as part of a world domination plot by a mad computer.

When people criticise old Who for not paying enough attention to characterisation, they are often talking about  the portrayal of reactive personal emotions, i.e. the kind that make people cry when they lose somebody they love.

This is to forget that drama can be equally compelling when characterisation consists of political or intellectual emotions.

The little sad sting at the end of ‘Green Death’ is effective, but the meat of the story is a conflict (albeit very broadly sketched) of viewpoints about ecology, technology and the limits of private power.

None of this means, by the way, that old Who didn’t sometimes explore reactive personal emotions or neglect political and intellectual emotions. Because it did both, sometimes to egregious degrees.

Nor do I mean to suggest that new Who always neglects the political and intellectual emotions, because it doesn’t. Well, it didn’t used to anyway… before it came under the control of a man who can suggest visiting Marie Antoinette as an example of a nice day out, akin to a visit to the beach for any decent man, without even realising that he’s just said something political.

Fundamentally, however, to criticse old Who for not paying enough attention to characterisation, motivation, emotion etc. is a bit like criticising a lasagne for not playing DIVX files. That isn’t what its for.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten 6: The Dark Path (David McIntee, Virgin Books, March 1997)

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It’s March of 1997. Depending on the week, either No Doubt is at number one with “Don’t Speak,” or the Spice Girls are with “Mama.” Other options in the top ten include the Backstreet Boys, Boyzone, R Kelly, Ant and Dec, Bush, and the Bee Gees. If you think one of those things is not like the others, I certainly don’t disagree.

You’re hopefully, by this point, getting enough of a sense of the general shape of the 1989-2005 period of Doctor Who that “March of 1997” already gives you some clues. If not, what we’ve got here is the second to last month of Virgin Books before they lost the license to BBC Books. In this period, Virgin, facing their own end and with little to gain or lose, basically proceeded to cut loose with some of the best and most challenging books of their line, but all of this was frankly dampened by the kind of funereal atmosphere. Not everyone had loved the Virgin line, but it had some strong admirers who were crushed to see it go. The prospect of the BBC starting up an in-house line based on the TV Movie was hardly inspiring, especially given the murmurs that the line was to be the anti-Virgin – an explicit reaction against the Virgin era’s excesses and a return to simpler, less challenging prose. In practice the BBC Books line would be weirder and more interesting than that, but it looked bad from the outset.

Meanwhile, Virgin was releasing its last books in a sort of maudlin celebration of the line’s potential. In the second to last month, they released two books. One, Marc Platt’s Lungbarrow, was an ambitious retconning of the history of Gallifrey and the apparent culmination of the last plot strands left lingering from when the series was on television. The other – The Dark Path – was a long awaited attempt to tackle a massive continuity point and deliver what is one of the most wanted untold tales in Doctor Who.

As a result, there’s something almost actively insane about reviewing it within the Troughton era. The supposed conceit of the Missing and Past Doctor Adventures is that the stories they tell could be inserted into their assumed eras. As we’ve seen that’s always been a bit of a myth – even the most faithful recreation we’ve looked at, Gareth Roberts’s The Plotters, takes liberties that could not have been taken in the era whose television the book imitates the tone of. Other times it’s nearly shattered – The Man in the Velvet Mask is flagrantly and deliberately a vision of the Hartnell era distinct from what we see on the screen. But both of those were still fundamentally comments on the Hartnell era. One attempts to work within the format of the Hartnell era to tell a story that wouldn’t have made it to screen with the actors in question or in the year it would have aired. The other attempts to show a counter-narrative to the Hartnell era.…

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Help, Brigadier, Help! (The Web of Fear)

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The funniest thing about one of these sitting on a toilet
is actually that their roars are the sound of a toilet flushing
slowed down. Maybe that’s why they go to Tooting Bec.
So they can get the sound clips for their roars…

It’s February 3, 1968. The Love Affair are at number one with “Everlasting Love,” a piece of production line pop given a reasonably psychedelic spin in album art. It’s unseated by Manfred Mann covering Dylan, who are in turn unseated by Esther and Abi Ofarim’s “Cinderella Rockafella” a novelty blues song by an Israeli double act. (Look, you have to get used to these things. Eventually I’m going to have to talk about how “Do the Bartman” hits number one in between KLF and The Clash, and I’m going to have to do it with a straight face, so if you can’t deal with Israeli novelty blues, we’re in trouble.)

As 1968 progresses, it becomes increasingly hard to read events outside of a larger narrative. When we see three college students killed when police break up a civil rights rally at an all-white bowling alley in South Carolina, or the the Tet Offensive ends, it’s very hard not to read these as part of the ongoing progression towards the collapse of the idealism of the 1960s. Music echoes this with an increasing number of songs that are not quite the unambitious conservative pop of Engelbert Humperdinck, but are also not exactly The Beatles, The Who, or Jimi Hendrix.

While on television, we get The Web of Fear. Once again, we’re stuck with a story where the history of it is frustratingly and maddeningly layered. Basically, the core issue is this – the story was tremendously popular and influential, and ended up having a much larger impact than anyone making it anticipated or intended, and as a result watching it there’s tons of stuff that works oddly because you know how it turns out. Really, this is true of both of the Yeti stories. Even though the Yeti never appear again except in cameo, these two stories remain important because they introduce someone who goes on to have a large role in the series. I am talking, of course, about John Levene, who is inside one of the Yeti costumes in each story and goes on to play Sergeant Benton through Jon Pertwee’s tenure as the Doctor.

Sorry, that probably whizzed over some people’s heads. Let’s back up. Starting in season seven, about two years after this story aired, Doctor Who gets a complete revamp in which it is set entirely on Earth with the Doctor teaming up with UNIT, an international military force, to fight aliens in modern day Britain. We’ll be spending a lot of time talking about that. But as it turns out, one of the major characters in UNIT is Brigadier General Aleister Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, better known as The Brigadier.

The Brigadier appears in the season six story The Invasion, which was in part an effort to test out the UNIT concept before they committed to it for the whole series.…

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Three Act Tragedy

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And so it came to pass that Series 3 ended with a trilogy.  And Jack looked upon the trilogy.  And Jack saw that it was… umm… er…

‘Utopia’

Good stuff; the Master’s return at the end is the least of it.  We have to put up with some of the obligatory “gee, aren’t humans just neat?!” stuff from the Doctor, but it passes soon enough. Yana is a touching, melancholic figure. Chantho is one of my favourite characters in all Who. The scene where the Doctor and Jack finally discuss Jack’s immortality is beautifully scripted and acted. The desolated conglomeration is beautiful.

The whole set up is pregnant with intricate, sombre, uncomfortable implications. At the end of everything, with even the galaxies disappearing… amidst a wasteland, haunted by a dead city and one lone survivor (who still clings to her obsolete cultural norms)… amidst all these things, there are two groups of humans… the unreasoningly fierce and cruel “futurekind”, with their gnashing sharp teeth, their flaming torches and their mindless desire to destroy… and the refugees who huddle together for warmth; who value family and friendship; who have created structure and purpose out of bits of scrap, food and dreams of impossible deliverance… and the Futurekind want to smash these aspirations for no real reason, while the refugees keep building even as they near the point of maximum entropy.

This is ‘Gridlock’ part II… but it’s less comfortable than ‘Gridlock’.  More bleak.  More gloomy.  More fully liberal.  Hence, more reactionary.

The faith of the refugees is in a better world, like the faith of the gridlockers… but they refugees have given it a name that has political rather than religious associations. ‘Utopia’ is usually thought of now as representing some age-old impossible dream of social perfection and total human equality.  In the mainstream discourse, to be Utopian is to share the putative mistakes and delusions of the founders of the 20th century totalitarians. Lenin wanted to make a paradise; that’s why he ended up making Hell on Earth. (This isn’t my view, by the way. It is as simplistic and ahistorical as it is popular.)

‘Utopia’ is one of those stories that I love despite the fact that it’s highly open to a reactionary reading (like ‘Frontios’ for example, with which it shares some ideas).

In ‘Utopia’, the supposed dual nature of humanity is externalised in the form of two seperate tribes (who fight for no reason, as tribes always do in this view of the world), one of which is ‘civilised’ and one of which is ‘barbarous’ for no real reason. There is no reconciling this ‘clash of civilisations’. The nice people, who are associated in the text with science, technology, modernity, family life, democracy (via the concept of Utopia itself), must fight and/or escape the barbarians (with their medieval ways)… or be destroyed.

In the end, they simply have to leave the Futurekind behind (to die) as they blast off in search of Utopia. At least this story holds out some hope that Utopia (i.e.…

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Look at How Cool This Stuff Is (The Enemy of the World)

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People do not remark on the fact that Salamander
dresses like Jon Pertwee enough. This is sad, as there
are some great jokes about Pertwee as an evil version
of the Doctor to be made here.


It’s December 23, 1967. The Beatles are at number one with “Hello Goodbye.” Also at number three with the Magical Mystery Tour EP. They’ll hold it for five weeks, which is good, because the rest of the top ten for those weeks leaves more than a little to be desired. At week six, the bottom falls out and Georgie Fame takes over with the Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde.

In terms of news, we have the origin of the term “black hole,” which will be a term with surprisingly large impact on the series. Prime Minister Wilson endorses the “I’m Backing Britain” campaign asking people to work an extra half hour without pay, which ends up being a complete turkey. The Prague Spring gets underway, which is a bit unusual given that it’s January. And the Vietnam War keeps it up.

But look, the real news is this. Doctor Who airs The Enemy of the World. And I am here to tell you that it is the best Doctor Who story up to this point. It is, in fact, one of the all time greats of the series. It is a criminal offense that there are people who think of this as the red-headed stepchild of season five and prefer the monster stories. This story is absolutely incredible, light years ahead of its time, and still fantastic to this day. I’m honestly at a loss for why this does not have the wild and ecstatic praise reserved for it that Marco Polo or The Massacre, both of which it runs rings around. I’ll take it as a given that it’s never going to attain the luster of The Tomb of the Cybermen or something by virtue of it being mostly missing, but there’s really no excuse for it not being recognized by those who have seen it as an absolute triumph. Because it is. This story belongs on the list with things like City of Death, Caves of Androzani, Doomsday, and Blink. It’s that good.

(For the sake of completists, since I have declared this the best story to date, I will say that previously I consider An Unearthly Child/100,000 BC, The Aztecs, The Rescue, and Power of the Daleks to be the best stories to date.)

Let’s just dive right into it. The usual thing everybody knows about this story is that it’s another in an oddly long line of identical duplicate stories that Doctor Who does. The first, of course, is The Massacre. In this one, Patrick Troughton gets to pull double duty as both the Doctor and the villainous Salamander. The second thing that everybody knows about this story is that it’s Doctor Who Does James Bond. This should not be a surprise to us today, when the default mode of Doctor Who is “Doctor Who does X” where X is some other genre – The Curse of the Black Spot being the most recent flagrant example.…

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Village People

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A (positive) review of ‘Amy’s Choice’.  Because not even I can complain all the time.

Okay, that’s better.  The best episode for quite some time.  The first really good one since ‘Turn Left’.  Nothing major… but genuinely clever and verbally playful, with nice imagery and a texture of ideas, hints and suggestions.

Simon Kinnear called this, with his customary acuity, a “Freudian farce”.  The Dream Lord is the truth of the Doctor as an older man, lusting after a young redhead… or at least, lusting after her attention and loyalty and esteem.  He and Rory compete over her as though she’s territory.  The Doctor wants Amy’s bump to disappear so that the bumpless reality will prove to be real.  Meanwhile, the ancient beings inside the elderly Ledworth residents annihilate the village’s children.  The aliens are even ‘oral’.  “They’re not going to be peeping out of anywhere else are they?” asks Rory pertinently.

This is all played for laughs and, refreshingly, it’s actually funny.  (Thinking back, I remember quite liking How Do You Want Me? whereas Chalk just made me want to kick things.)

The unreal tweeness of Ledworth, which was such a bore in ‘The Eleventh Hour’, here becomes the perfect figurative backdrop to a story about people who are negotiating and renegotiating (with themselves as much as with each other) their emotional priorities and allegiances, their desires, etc.  In this story, Ledworth manages to be less the unironic cutesy St. Mary Mead / Avengers setting and becomes a bit more… well, it’s funny but here they manage to make it both more real (with the snobbery of “Upper Ledworth” for example) and more genuinely dreamlike.  All the more dreamlike for being sparing with the wanton surrealism.

There’s a witty aesthetic connectedness about it, even down to the way the shifts in reality (which seem like multiple awakenings from dazed unconsciousness) are heralded by the sound of birds tweeting, which recalls the cartoon way of signifying concussion as much it reminds us of Ledworth’s rural pleasures.  The first instance of this sort of thing even has a neat verbal pun.  The Doctor slips into and then wakes from oblivion as he tries to say the phrase “good old days”… or should that be “daze”?

There’s something smart about the way the three characters compare their different interpretations of the same dream.  The differences in emphasis are telling.  Amy’s “little village” becomes Rory’s “sweet little village”.  The Doctor’s “nightmare” becomes, for reasons of tact, “a really good… mare”.  These are gags, but also failures to communicate.  For once, the constant quipping seems to actually be playful with language rather than just showoffish… and actually serves plot, concept and characterisation (at least some of the time).  And then, just as the puns are about to get tiresome, the episode realises this and starts playing them self-consciously, with the Dream Lord complaining that they’re lost on the Doctor (and us).

Toby Jones is excellent… and his character is effective, not least because he seems more like the old Doctor (I mean the old, prehistoric, C20th Doctor) than any of the new fellas, least of all the latest incumbent (who is good, by the way, given something interesting and not-entirely-glib to do). …

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The Big Squib

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Acres of irrelevant grumbling about the Series 5 finale.

Oh great.  River’s back.  Again.  Un-yippee and un-hurrah.  Still, Moffat must have his opportunity to present female characters as self-involved, smug enigmas who lead men around by their noses, put them through hell for the sake of hapless devotion, boss them about and remain pretty little puzzleboxes that men have to try and solve.  In these episodes, he does this with no less than two man/woman couples.

The first episode is just loads of portentous narrative procrastination, albeit to a less egregious extent than ‘End of Time’ Part 1.  There is some pleasure to be taken in the cobwebby, Indiana Jones-film look of the underground chamber, and River’s pleasantly spooky trip to Amy’s empty house… but, really, how generic is all this?  A secret chamber under Stonehenge?  An ancient artefact that has something scary inside it? 

Mind you, they could’ve turned it around if the contents/purpose of the Pandorica hadn’t been so obvious right from the start.  I can honestly say that I knew, ages before we were told, that the Pandorica would either have the Doctor inside it, or would be empty and waiting for him (especially since this story seems to owe so much to Alien Bodies).  The only thing worse than what we got would’ve been a gateway into another universe (a universe of evil, natch), which lets loose unspeakable ‘Old Ones’ or some other ‘horror from before time’ when opened.  So it could’ve been worse.  But could also have been much better.

Sadly, we are soon confronted with a huge alliance of returning monsters who, in line with Moffat’s usual disinterest in evil, are trying to save the universe… by locking the Doctor up in a box rather than just killing him.  For some reason.

The Doctor indulges in his now customary bit of ludicrous, embarassing and deeply inappropriate macho posturing.  What a bad-ass I am, he essentially shouts to a sky full of heavily armed battle cruisers.  Laughably, they bottle it rather than just zapping him.  This is so dumb it defies description.  I mean, I know the Doctor always wins… but surely they don’t need to be scared of him when he’s standing in plain view under their laser beams, waggling his weaponless hands?  Just zap the silly sod!  You don’t even have to go anywhere near him!

On the subject of that speech… really, when did the character turn into this kind of person?  When did this become the point of him?  I hate this depiction of the Doctor as a bumptious, boastful, mouthy, showoff incredibly aware of himself as a Hero. I realise the scene in question is meant to show him bluffing, but still…

The Doctor always used to occasionally be a bit big headed (i.e. “he’s almost as clever as I am” etc) but it always seemed like self-mockery or good humour. These days the Doctor seems to seek out opportunities to talk like a lame-ass ‘tough cop’ cypher (i.e.…

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 7 (The Prisoner, You Only Live Twice)

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Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea is a recurring feature in which things that are not Doctor Who are looked at in terms of their relation to Doctor Who. Today we look at two classics of British spy fiction from 1967, the James Bond film You Only Live Twice and the ITV television series The Prisoner.

Well this is certainly a bit of an awkward pairing. I mean, never before has “Well, do both of the espionage things you need to do in one entry” seemed like quite so staggering a task. They may both feature secret agents, be British, and be from 1967, but that’s about where the similarities between James Bond in You Only Live Twice and The Prisoner end.

Let’s start with Bond, since that’s the one that’s kind of long overdue in this blog. The thing to note regarding You Only Live Twice is that it is a movie that expects nothing out of its audience. It would be easy to describe this as having a sort of cynical contempt for its audience, but it’s more complex than that. It is not as though the movie thinks little of its audience and thus concludes that it can be lazy. No, the movie thinks little of its audience and then goes out of its way to please them.

There’s something almost giddily entertaining about the movie’s complete lack of irony. Later James Bond movies would begin to poke fun at the series’ tropes, using things like Bond’s refined tastes for comedic scenes. But this movie is caught in a bizarre midpoint in the franchise. It’s well established enough that everybody knows that Bond likes vodka martinis (though here he seems quite pleased to get one stirred) and is a rakish womanizer. But it’s not well enough established to play Bond complimenting his host on the choice of vodka or describing at some length the proper temperature for sake to be served at for laughs. Instead these scenes are presented with a sort of earnest conviction that the audience really just wants to see Sean Connery explaining the proper presentation of sake. And apparently, given how the movie did, they were right.

But perhaps the most astonishing thing about You Only Live Twice is its structure. When some of the production documents for the first Indiana Jones movie leaked onto the Internet a few years back, one of the things people excitedly pointed at was the fact that Spielberg and Lucas talked explicitly about using the structure of a serial and putting a cliffhanger in at regular intervals. This is indeed a clever trick, but for some reason people seemed to think that Lucas and Spielberg were the first people to think of it, as opposed to the first people to have their discussion about it leaked onto the Internet. Because once you’re past the opening credits sequence of You Only Live Twice, with very few exceptions, the movie is structured as a serial comprised of five minute episodes.…

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I Never Had a Life Like That (The Ice Warriors)

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Deborah Watling frantically calls for the producer to
point out that doing little green men for black and
white television is a bit naff if you stop to think about it.

Just a quick note that, in preparation for going on vacation for ten days in June, starting now and continuing for a few weeks I’m working on building a backlog of posts and scheduling them to update automatically. This won’t affect the posting schedule at all – new content should be up on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays for the foreseeable future. However, it means that the sense of the present in the entries is steadily going to drift. Monday’s entry on The Enemy of the World, for instance, is extremely likely to be written before The Almost People airs. So if a post comes along that fails to make a spectacularly obvious point comparing the most recent episode to whatever episode I’m looking at, it’s probably because I wrote it a week before you read it.

It’s November 11, 1967. The Foundations, a British Motown group, are at number one, because these things happen in the UK charts. Two weeks later it gets unseated by Long John Baldry’s “Let The Heartaches Begin.” Knowing nothing about this song, I listened to 90 seconds of it. Look, we all make mistakes in life. But on week two of this rather unfortunate moment in pop history we can already see relief riding triumphantly up the charts, arriving decisively when The Beatles “Hello, Goodbye” shows up. What are the UK charts going to do when they don’t have The Beatles to save them from their own ill-advised taste?

Whereas in real news, the Vietnam War continues to be a massive problem that is seemingly about to bring down Johnson’s Presidency via a Primary challenge, the value of the UK Pound finds itself a cliff and leaps off of it with impressive zeal, and the Concorde makes its debut. Of these, the devaluation of the Pound is of the most interest to us, as it is a part of a larger economic recession hitting the UK in this period, and setting a fair amount of the national mood firmly on “pessimistic.”

Whereas on television we have the Ice Warriors. Regular readers of this blog will note that I have been getting increasingly exasperated with base under siege stories. But I haven’t entirely dealt with why. So since The Ice Warriors is a quite good piece of storytelling with only a few particularly overt flaws (of which the title characters are probably the biggest), it seems like the perfect place to look at the underlying problems here.

The easiest way to see the difference is to fire up The Rebel Flesh (which by the time this posts is hopefully on iTunes) and compare it to this story. Both of them are bases under siege. In fact, as the good folks at Tachyon TV pointed out (and to be fair, so did I, but they had the good sense to do it in public so they’d get credit for it), The Rebel Flesh feels like a Troughton story.…

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