September 22: Shada Parts Four, Five, & Six

The Doctor tries to sneak past a burning Krarg. (Shada
Part Four) ©BBC

It's significantly harder to piece the story together based on these last three parts than it was for the first three, as there's so much that went unfilmed.  Parts four and five only have something like five minutes of footage a piece, and while there's more of part six it's almost entirely confined to Chronotis's TARDIS.  It's like watching clips from missing episodes, except here there aren't even any soundtracks to listen to in between scenes.  There is some nice material in what we have (such as the stuff on the derelict Think Tank), but the general sense, watching the stuff for parts four through six, is that there was an awful lot of tea drinking going on.  And one of the all-time stupid Doctor Who moments also exists in what they recorded; no, not the medal ceremony (although that is awfully self-indulgent), but the part where Claire Keightley, trying desperately to hold on to an increasingly hot control, suddenly decides to abandon her station (which has been already emphasized as incredibly important) in order to fetch a pencil so that she can hold down that control.  It's an unbelievably silly way to force the TARDIS controls to explode, and had this story actually aired it would likely be infamous in its execution.

But yes, it's very hard to get a sense of what Shada would have been like, and so it's nice to have the Ian Levine version to help fill in the gaps.  Obviously, as before, it's not a perfect solution (and why did they decide to give the Krargs glowing eyes, given that there's no evidence of this in the one scene with a Krarg that they shot?), but you do get a decent sense of the overall story.  In this version the virtues of the existing scenes become more apparent when spaced out -- instead of all smushed together -- and you get a better sense of what the storyline is and the threat that Skagra represents.  The idea of Skagra trying to put his mind into everyone else's ("With the aid of the sphere I shall make the whole of creation merge into one single mind, one godlike entity ... The universe, Doctor, shall be me!") is a nice one, and if Shada had been filmed the way it appears in the animation, with dark red corridors and lots of shadows (and there's no reason to think it wouldn't have been, since Williams was holding back money for this), then this might have been a winner.  There's also some great unfilmed dialogue (such as Skagra scoffing at the idea of taking over the universe: "How childish.  Who could possibly want to take over the Universe?"  "Exactly! That's what I keep on trying to tell people," the Doctor replies.  "It's a troublesome place, difficult to administer, and as a piece of real estate it's worthless because by definition there'd be no one to sell it to"), and it would have been neat to see the mental battle between the Doctor and Skagra.  If nothing else, the animated scenes suggest that this would have been worth doing -- more interesting than, say, The Creature from the Pit or The Horns of Nimon.

But despite narrations, novelizations, animations, and audio adaptations, we'll never truly know what Shada would have been like.  It's fun to speculate (and, incidentally, has anyone ever talked to designer Victor Meredith about what the unmade sets were going to look like?  He had to have designed them, right?), but that's all we can do.  What we do know about it suggests that it probably wouldn't have been the all-conquering gem that its reputation often claims it would have been -- it has some good ideas, but there's an awful lot of season 17-ness floating around (the milk/sugar joke, the medal ceremony, what one imagines the walk through the vortex would have been like), and there are a number of plotting problems as well (Chronotis's casual revelation to Skagra that he's actually Salyavin, the perfunctory manner in which Skagra is defeated).  But there's enough here to tantalize as well, to suggest that this would have been worth doing.  It would have been hugely flawed, of course, but the strength of the basic storyline makes it look like it would have been compelling despite the flaws.  In effect, it would have been the quintessential season 17 story.