Eruditorum Press

May 18, 2011

Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea 6 (The Summer of Love)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum pop between realities, troughton 9

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 various and sundry objects from the summer of 1967, the so-called Summer of Love.

We have to start, I suppose, with Sergeant Pepper. There’s a monolithically long essay in About Time, after all, called “Did Sergeant Pepper Know the Doctor” that tackles this directly, although if we’re being honest it mentions both Sergeant Pepper and the Doctor somewhat less than its title might suggest. So let’s start with the album itself. The first thing to point out about it is that it is ostensibly the first ever “concept album.” In practice, hardly any concept albums are, and it’s difficult to quite figure out what the concept of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is or how it impacts most of the songs.

So when we call it a concept album, what do we mean? Generally what we mean is this – past Beatles albums were simply collections of songs with no unifying factor beyond having all been written and recorded around the same time and in the same set of sessions. Indeed, past albums from most bands were like this. What the Beatles did with Sergeant Pepper was add a continual soundscape between the songs so that they flowed into each other and the album basically never faded to silence from start to finish. Indeed, in the original UK vinyl pressings, it never faded to silence at all, the record being manufactured so that it would just play a continual noise loop at the end.

What was so significant about this was that it made the album one coherent experience instead of a set of short separate experiences. Even though there wasn’t really a unifying concept to the album, the album without question felt different from albums before it – bigger and stranger. Listening to it meant spending time in a weird new place – real, substantial time.

In other words, the album was a forty minute training wheels drug trip. This is the big connection between the album and psychedelia. Not the fact that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was obviously about LSD, but rather the fact that the album was a concentrated effort to create a strange and different mental space. Which is what psychedelia is actually supposed to be all about.

This is the thing that’s lost under the debauched patina of the Summer of Love. The description of it all as “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” turns the experience into an unchecked hedonism. Which, to be fair, in the classic Summer of Love – the Haight-Ashbury scene of San Francisco – it was. San Francisco in 1967 managed to be positioned, partially through actual events and partially through a gigantic self-feeding media story, as the place to be. And so San Francisco filled to the choking point with youth on break from school looking for what they were told was the cool place to be.…

May 16, 2011

Everything You Were, Everything You Stood For (The Evil of the Daleks)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum troughton 22

It’s OK, Mr. Emperor. Even the biggest Daleks suffer from
droopy eyestalk sometimes. It’s perfectly natural, and
doesn’t mean you’re not a real Dalek at all.

It’s May 20, 1967. The Tremeloes, best known as the band Decca signed instead of The Beatles, are at number one. The Tremeloes, like The Beatles, came from the Merseybeat scene we’ve talked about some already (which is also why The Beatles are spelled the way they are), and unlike The Beatles of 1967, were still churning out generic doo-wop inflected rock numbers such as “Silence is Golden,” which held number one for three weeks before Procul Harum takes number one with a nice, sweeping prog/psychedelic rock epic “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” which holds the number one for the remaining four weeks of this story. But let’s face it, the real news is this: Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is released, and becomes the soundtrack to the so-called Summer of Love, about which more on Wednesday.

In news that anchors who don’t sing won’t take, Celtic beat Inter Milan to win the European Cup, making them the first British team to do so. On one level, this continues the brief and shining moment of British domination of the sport. On another level, you have to understand Glaswegian sports fandom, the Old Firm rivalry, and sectarian violence to even start to understand what the phrase “Celtic won” means, and since none of those things are remotely relevant to Evil of the Daleks, hey look, we’ve moved on. (Though I’m sure it made Frazer Hines, a complete football nut, followed it avidly.) The Soviet Union, the US, and the UK agree not to put nuclear weapons in space, which is very nice of them.

In other news, let’s take a deep breath: Israeli/Egyptian tensions flare up mightily, the Six Day War breaks out and ends (these things happen when you put a six-day war in the midst of a seven-week Dalek serial), Biafra begins its futile attempt at independence, a Marxist rebellion begins in India, Loving v. Virginia is decided in the US, legalizing interracial marriage, Thurgood Marshall is nominated to the Supreme Court, two American race riots happen in Tampa and Buffalo, The EEC is merged with the ECSC and EAC to form the European Communities, and, three days after this story finishes, homosexuality is finally decriminalized in the UK, a move that most immediately impacts the artistic community, where it had long been an open secret (Doctor Who having prominently employed at least two semi-out gay men in its first three years – Max Adrian and Waris Hussein).

While on television, we have Evil of the Daleks. Which is as hard a story to see straight as exists in Doctor Who, so let’s just dust off the old-fashioned tricks and go through the thing linearly to see how it works, then sort out the rest.

There’s a fine and at times difficult to pin down line between a methodical, suspenseful pace and a slow one, and this story walks it.…

May 13, 2011

Smaller on the Inside (The Faceless Ones)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum troughton 14

The Doctor tries to sand his jowls off on an airplane wheel.

It’s April 8, 1967, and Englebert Humperdinck will not die. Actually, this is his last week at number one. Next week it’s Nancy and Frank Sinatra with “Somethin’ Stupid.” Once again we’re just seeing the pendulum in action here. It’s just that the pendulum is unusually swung at the moment – nothing all that interesting in the entire top 10 (though #11, Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze, reminds us that there is a counterculture out there). It peaks at #3, and The Who, The Mamas and the Papas, and Cat Stevens all break the top ten in the next few weeks as well, bolstered by a population who, having listened to Humperdinck for a month and a half, finally intuitively get what this revolution is all about. The flip side, and this is a lovely day to talk about it given that Eurovision is this weekend, is that the UK wins the Eurovision song contest with “Puppet on a String,” bringing this touching song about complete physical and emotional submission to your man to number one. (“If you say you love me madly, I’ll gladly be there like a puppet on a string.” Stay classy, British pop music.) Oh, and Pink Floyd chart, but nowhere near the top ten.

Whereas in the world of things that don’t sing, the Tories win the Greater London Council elections, never a good sign for Labour. Mass protests against the Vietnam War, Surveyor 3 lands on the Moon, Greece falls to a military dictatorship, the Soviets manage to kill an astronaut, and Prime Minister Harold Wilson announces that the UK will be applying to join the EEC.

Most of these can be slotted into standard 60s fare, but the last one might be lost on you, which probably also means that Mark Gatiss’s great joke about Euroskeptics in The Roundheads was lost on you too. So sad. Basically, the EEC is an earlier version of the European Union. It’s one of several “communities” to crop up after World War II – the first of them being the ECSC, European Coal and Steel Community, which sought to establish control over the basic supplies needed for war. A few more stabs in the dark in the general area of this eventually led to the EEC, which quickly became fairly powerful in that it made intra-European commerce more efficient, allowing Europe as a whole to remain a major force even as few of its component states retained the superpower status they had prior to the World Wars.

The thing is, the EEC and the UK kind of have a… history. Because shortly after it was founded, Charles DeGaulle shut down the process for countries to join because he didn’t want the UK to join, fearing that it would basically serve as a US puppet state. Given that the UK rarely required reasons to be ambivalent about its status in the European community, the re-opening of applications and the UK’s decision to apply in 1967 is, by any standard, a major shift in the general tone of European cooperation.…

May 11, 2011

Time Can Be Rewritten 5: The Roundheads (Mark Gatiss, BBC Books, 1997)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum time can be rewritten, troughton 5

It’s tough, in 2011, to express quite how depressing it was to be a Doctor Who fan in 1997. I gather it was bleak for most of the 90s, and for a fair share of the 80s, but I lack much to compare it to. But 1997 was a stunningly bad year. By then it was quite clear that the Paul McGann TV Movie was as big a bust commercially as it had been aesthetically. But worse than that, the TV Movie had been used as the excuse for bringing Virgin Books’s license to produce original Doctor Who fiction to an end, and to move the license in house to BBC Books. Financially this was a perfectly sound decision – the BBC understandably was not thrilled with another company making money doing something they could do perfectly well themselves.

Aesthetically, unfortunately, it was a train wreck, as we’ll see when we get to The Eight Doctors. Never mind that the second BBC Book – Vampire Science – was quite good. By then the Paul McGann years had suffered the same problem the Colin Baker years did – two staggeringly bad opening stories that eviscerated the possibility of long-term success. Then, five months in, the coup de grace. The one advantage the BBC Books plan maybe had over the Virgin plan was that BBC Books proudly said they had the rights to the Daleks. And so the fifth book of the BBC Books range – John Peel’s War of the Daleks – was a big deal. And it was an abomination – one of the most legendarily hated Doctor Who books ever, which, if you’re keeping track, means that in five months the BBC Books range had managed to release two epic turkeys. Add to that the fact that the series now had seemingly no feasible way back to television, and that nobody could actually tell you what the Eighth Doctor was like in a meaningful sense, and you have yourself some bleak times. It’s not that these times were any bleaker, objectively, than, say, 1991, when Virgin churned out three flat and fairly predictable novels to kick off their New Adventures series (or, really, two flat novels and one quite nice Terrance Dicks effort). It’s that they’re such an obvious consequence of a false dawn. It’s that it was impossible, in 1997, not to have the sense that Doctor Who had actually been in much better shape before it made a try at coming back – that it had done cancellation better the first time.

Which makes the events of November of 1997 all the more intriguing. In the main line of Eighth Doctor novels, something called Alien Bodies by Lawrence Miles happened. For those of you who are going to learn a huge amount about the world of Doctor Who novels when the blog actually gets to 1997 proper, Alien Bodies is a landmark book. There are a couple moments in the novels where everything changes – landmark novels that are as important as the landmark stories like The Tenth Planet in terms of the development of the series.…

May 9, 2011

The Scourge Of This Galaxy (The Macra Terror)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum troughton 11

There’s a dirty joke to be made about getting crabs at a
holiday camp, but we’re above that. Except when we’re not.

It’s March 11, 1967. In the charts, Engelbert Humperdinck is edging out The Beatles’ first single from the Sergeant Pepper sessions, Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields Forever. Improbably, he will do so for the entire run of this story, and The Beatles will fail to make number one with that single. In real news, the psychedelic movement spreads from San Francisco when a copy of the Human Be-In takes place in Central Park, and Pope Paul VI releases his encyclical Populorum progressio, affirming the Catholic Church’s commitment to social justice – a striking commitment to make in the larger context of the 1960s.

While on television, we get The Macra Terror. As with a lot of Season 4, this is one history screws us up on. The problem is the same problem we ran into with The War Machines – also by Ian Stuart Black, as it happens. This looks a lot like stuff that came after it, and so we view it as a “normal” story. Trouble is, it looks very different from the stuff that came before it, and so at the time was anything but a normal story.

This may seem like a surprising statement. After all, at its heart The Macra Terror looks pretty standard. The Doctor shows up somewhere monsters are doing bad things and stops the monsters. We did, in fact, just see this. And in terms of that basic plot summary, it’s actually the fourth one this season, and that’s discounting the subtle variation where a mad scientist is doing bad things instead of a monster. On paper this is a straightforward development of the standard theme of the show lately.

But even using history, there’s something a bit odd here. Seven monsters make their debut over the Troughton era – the Macra, the Chameleons, the Ice Warriors, the Yeti, the weed creature, the Quarks, and the Krotons. Of those, two – the Ice Warriors and the Yeti – appear again in the classic series. But one appears in the new series – the Macra. There is surely something worth remarking on when a monster is brought back after forty years – not just as a name check, but as an actual on-screen appearance as a story’s primary monster.

Admittedly part of it is pure whimsy on Russell T. Davies’s part – he’s said that he really just wanted to bring back an obscure and abandoned monster. And another part of it comes down to the specifics of what he is dong in Gridlock, which is to say, comes down to things we’ll deal with much, much later in the blog. But there is something about The Macra Terror that made it the pick of the litter of long-abandoned monsters.

The answer comes down to one of those great divides between people who come at the story from the novelization era of fandom, where it was “that Patrick Troughton story with the crabs” (A 1987 novelization, for those keeping track at home).…

May 6, 2011

Pop Between Realities, Home In Time For Tea 5 (Cathy Come Home)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum pop between realities, troughton 5

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. This time we look at the TV movie Cathy Come Home.

It’s November 16, 1966. We’ve been here before, actually, and so I’ll refer you there for the standard litany of pop songs and news events. But we’re going to need to flash back, because what we didn’t deal with in amongst everything else going on in Power of the Daleks was the fact that the BBC aired Cathy Come Home, a TV movie about homelessness that has been recognized, apparently, as the second best British TV program of all time. So since it’s one of apparently two things in the history of British television to be better than Doctor Who, I suppose we should talk about it.

At a glance, mind you, Cathy Come Home seems to be radically different from Doctor Who. One is a fairly theatrical science fiction show. The other is a pseudo-documentary about homelessness and urban poverty that makes heavy use of techniques from social realism. The similarities are in no way obvious. But as with Z Cars and Dixon of Dock Green, it’s instructive to look at other major pieces of television to understand what exactly is different about Doctor Who.

As I suggested, the main thing about Cathy Come Home is that it uses a pseudo-documentary style and hand held cameras to tell its story. This was certainly one of the big things noticed at the time, and Cathy Come Home became something of a flashpoint in a debate about the line between news and entertainment (a debate that has yet to resolve, but hey).

So in the (increasingly usual) spirit of my blowing a perfectly publishable academic paper topic on a few paragraphs of a blog (though to be fair, more people read this than will ever see one of my academic articles)…

The thing that the discussion over Cathy Come Home’s use of documentary techniques misses is the hindsight of it. Cathy Come Home works not because it attempts to fool the viewer into believing they are watching a documentary. It works because it trusts that the viewer has a sufficiently good intuitive understanding of televisual storytelling that it can import documentary narrative techniques into ordinary television.

I mean, the fact that Cathy Come Home went out as part of the Wednesday Play anthology series makes it pretty clear how the story was positioned at the time. A negligible number of viewers would have come to it thinking that they were getting a documentary, and the opening credits giving it a writer are a pretty unambiguous sign that it’s not a documentary. So the idea that its documentary techniques were ever deceptive requires that you assume camera movements are a bigger signifier of the genre of a piece of television than the opening credits and explicit presentation of the show.…

May 4, 2011

Every Single One Of Them, At Some Point In Their Lives, Will Look Back At This Man (The Moonbase)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum troughton 9

We are programmed just to do
Anything you want us to

It’s February 11, 1967. The Monkees top the charts, with the rest of the top ten including The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens, and The Move. In weeks to come, Petula Clark and Englebert Humperdinck will top the charts, while the rest of the top ten will see The Beatles, The Hollies, and Donovan chart as well. Non-musical news is slow this month, with a general heating of the Cold War providing the main backdrop.

And Doctor Who offers us The Moonbase. Which… well, let’s just say we have a lot to talk about. Eventually we’ll get into how this story marks the completion of the Troughton transition and conclusively establishes a new paradigm for what Doctor Who is. But to see why this story changed everything forever, we’re going to have to understand why this story was inevitably going to be made.

The inevitability of a lunar story in the late 60s has been remarked upon before, and is fairly obvious. But one thing that the frequent discussion of Doctor Who’s transition away from the exoticism of Hartnell stories and towards things like this overlooks is the fact that the very things that made a lunar story inevitable are the same things that are why the larger transition of Doctor Who towards the “base under siege” model took place.

Since I am apparently possessed with a strange and obsessive need to reference The Web Planet in every entry (mostly because it embodies the explorer spirit of the Hartnell era better than anything else), it is worth contrasting this story with that one, especially given that The Web Planet’s most obvious visual inspiration was Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon. The Web Planet is a story where a world with a thin atmosphere is nevertheless lush and full of strange life. And it aired in February of 1965.

The thing is, there’s a huge line in science fiction that can be drawn in July of 1965. Before that, you get things like, on the paranoid side, Quatermass, which assumes that space is teeming with awful threats, and on the more optimistic side, The Web Planet, which, even though it’s set in a different galaxy (but see Miles and Wood for several discussions of the extremely sloppy way in which the word “galaxy” is used throughout Doctor Who), tells us that space is teeming with fascinating and theatrical worlds. The default assumption was that planets were full of interesting stuff, and when you went to them, you’d encounter it.

Then came July of 1965, and, more importantly, the Mariner 4 probe. This, perhaps more than anything, explains the stark change over the third season of Doctor Who – more or less concurrently with the end of The Time Meddler, Mariner 4 flew by Mars and determined that there was almost certainly not life on Mars, nor had there probably ever been ancient civilizations there. Space, in point of fact, was more or less empty.…

May 2, 2011

Dwarf

Jack Graham day of the moon, imperialism, nixon, robin hood, series 6, steven moffat, superstition, the slow death of western civilisation, the stolen earth, the x files, vietnam 6

In response to ‘Day of the Moon’

So… the Doctor is now turned on by talking about shooting people and is happy to shake hands with a genocidal mass murderer. Meanwhile, he hypnotises the entire human race into becoming unthinking, automatic killers in order to wipe out a race who stand around in corners doing nothing.

Of course, we know they’re evil (and thus deserve it) because they’re ugly. And say generic evil things. And killed a lady in a toilet once for no reason at all.

I can handle the Doctor having a different morality. Shaking hands with Nixon (who was, by the way, as fascinating and complex as he was despicable… not that you’d know it from watching this) and utilising him as an ally…. yeah, okay. The Doc’s an alien. He’s not Noam Chomsky (not that one should need to be).

The trouble is that Moffat evidently has no awareness of any kind of the queasiness (to put it mildly) inherent in a largely neutral portrayal (some digs about tapes and being “tricky” aside) of a man who conspired to sabotage peace talks in order to get elected and dropped tonnes of bombs (not to mention flaming glue) on a nation of poor peasants.

I mean, Moffat gets that Nixon was a bit right-wing… but this is expressed in a scene where his eyes boggle at the idea of an FBI officer having a boyfriend. In other words, it’s a cultural problem. The mass murder is not on the radar.

“There are no monsters in the Oval office” said Nixon in that prologue thing. Even I thought that just HAD to be intended as ironic or double edged in some way. That it just HAD to be leading to some kind of criticism of the man. What a fool I was.

I’m not going to launch a rant about US Imperialism… but America is, and was then, an empire.

Moffat fails to notice this. Okay, maybe that’s not what the story is about… except that the story isn’t just about ‘America’ as a culture or a nation of people. (In fact, the American people barely figure at all.) It’s focused on the American President. The American Government. The American military-industrial complex. The American federal law-enforcement service. And so on. They all feature. Much more than ANY other aspect of America.

Moffat even mentions Rome. An empire. Is a parallel drawn? Even obliquely? Nope. It ain’t even on the radar. In a story in which the Doctor explicitly (and fatuously) talks about “leading a revolution” against “the Romans”, the Doctor ends up shaking hands with Nixon.

Do I want Doctor Who to be left-wing propaganda for kids? No, of course not. That isn’t what I’m saying. But pardon me if I can’t resist remarking on the sheer mindless complacency of what I just saw. The writer’s sheer unawareness of even the vaguest of issues raised by the semiotics that he’s playing with.

To move beyond the more predictable (for me) political whinges…

It’s quite an achievement… to fill 45 minutes with the breezy, showoffish, tricksy manipulation of plot images and motifs, and to:

a) create not one of them… that’s NOT ONE… that was vaguely original, that hadn’t been seen or done somewhere else before,

and

b) to include not one… that’s NOT ONE… actual, distinct, discernible IDEA.…

May 2, 2011

Another Rotten Gloomy Old Tunnel (The Underwater Menace)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum troughton 9

They’re not fish from space, they’re ballerinas!

It’s January 14, 1967. Tom Jones has yet to give up number one, though he will in a week when The Monkees take number one with “I’m a Believer.” It is worth remarking on the nature of The Monkees as a band – an American band manufactured for popular success in an attempt to reverse-engineer the Beatles at the exact same time that the Beatles were busy exploding their own formula recording Sergeant Pepper. In fact, the top three singles when the second episode of The Underwater Menace aired are an instruction manual in 1967 – corporate pseudo-mods, Tom Jones, and The Who with “Happy Jack,” complete with psychedelic cover. The Monkees retain number one for the duration of The Underwater Menace, with #2 and #3 switching to Cat Stevens in his first really big single and The Move, a Birmingham rock band, with “Night of Fear,” a song that is very obviously about a bad acid trip.

Meanwhile, in news that does not sing, the US is found out for experimenting with germ warfare, the opening strains of the Summer of Love happen in San Francisco with the Human Be-In, which also introduces psychedelic culture to the masses (never mind that Doctor Who did it two months earlier. In a week or so we’ll watch, astonished, as Doctor Who invents steampunk in 1967 and gets no credit for that either). The UK begins negotiating to enter the European Economic Community, pre-human fossils are discovered in Kenya… and we’re so far two days into the four weeks this story ran. Thankfully things slow down, and over the rest of it the major news consists of the UK nationalizing 90% of the steel industry, the Apollo 1 disaster happens, and the US, USSR, and UK (who were apparently still expected to make it to space in 1967 – a fact that may be relevant in 1970 for our purposes) sign the Outer Space Treaty to demilitarize space.

If you have the sense that the 1960s are kicking into high gear very suddenly, you’re not far off. So I am deeply amused to bring you The Underwater Menace, which, according to Doctor Who Magazine’s definitive “Mighty 200” fan poll, is the worst story we’ve yet covered – one of the ten worst Doctor Who stories of all time, in fact. And so, even though its quality is by miles the least interesting thing about The Underwater Menace, I suppose we should start there.

The case for the prosecution is that the script makes no sense, the villain is ludicrous, and the whole thing is an effects-driven wreck of a story assembled under pressure. Wood and Miles take it to task for the fact that “it displays utter contempt for the audience. It’s not so much that it isn’t trying, it’s that it doesn’t think we care that it isn’t trying.” Shearman and Hadoke are kinder, both admitting that they love the story’s barminess.

It’s certainly the case that few of the usual reasons for writing off this story seem to hold up to scrutiny.…

April 29, 2011

Fry Something (The Highlanders)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum troughton 9

Jamie McCrimmon, in his debut.

It’s December 16, 1966, and time for us to ring in 1967. Almost everything you need to know about music in 1966 can be explained by the fact that Tom Jones is at #1 with “The Green Green Grass of Home,” while The Kinks are at #7 with “Dead End Street,” a song about inescapable economic despair with a chorus of “We are strictly second class / we don’t understand /why we should be on dead end street/People are living on dead end street / gonna die on dead end street” while a background shout of “dead end!” repeats. (To be fair, after two verses of maudlin sentimentality, “The Green Green Grass of Home” turns out to be about waiting on death row, but the degree to which this feels like a pale imitation of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Silent Night/7 O’Clock News,” which does the smash fade from sentimentality to harsh materialism with far greater aplomb, and was released in the US, at least, two months earlier ultimately reminds us that this is still Tom Jones we are talking about.) Tom Jones will hold the #1 spot for the entirety of this story.

In actual news, meanwhile, you’ve got a nice illustration of how 60s news works in hindsight. You’ve got basically three categories of events. The first is of significance only to people who think that the 60s are about youth cultural revolution. For instance, The Doors releasing their self-titled debut on January 4th. The second is of significance only to people who think the 60s are about an obnoxious assault on traditional culture. For instance, the theft of millions of dollars of art from the Dulwich Art Gallery in England. And then there are the ones that are significant to both groups, and thus reveal the fault lines in what was actually going on at the time. For instance, Prime Minister Harold Wilson withdrawing all offered settlements with Rhodesia and insisting that the UK will only recognize a majority-black Rhodesian government.

This paradigm is not entirely unhelpful in understanding Doctor Who in its fourth season. On the one hand, you have the stuff that’s chum for fans of later eras: The Doctor is funny! Lots of contemporary Earth stuff! On the other hand, you have the stuff that feeds the Troughton-era backlash that seems to have seized Doctor Who fandom somewhere along the line – stuff that amounts to the loss of things that were around in the Hartnell era: No historicals! Endless bases under endless sieges! And on the third hand, because this is British science fiction and we have Zaphod Beeblebrox handy whenever we want him, you have stuff that turns to Marmite: Monsters! And… um… more monsters, really.

The underlying issue is this. In its first season, Doctor Who flailed around and tried to figure out what it was. In its second season, though, Doctor Who was ruthlessly confident about what it was. That confidence was arguably misplaced at times, but it was unquestionably there.…

«‹ 328 329 330 331 ›»