December 28: Scream of the Shalka Episodes Three, Four, Five, & Six

It's interesting to see the parallels between what writer Paul Cornell and the rest of the production team do in Scream of the Shalka and what Russell T Davies is about to do in the revived BBC Wales version of the series.  Both teams want to shake the Doctor up, give him some dark past to brood about; the Shalka team go about it with references to some unseen story where the Doctor lost someone, BBC Wales gives him the Last Great Time War and everything that entails.

The Master and the Doctor in the TARDIS. (Scream of the
Shalka Episode Four) ©BBC

But what's curious is that both want to start the Doctor from a damaged place and then have him slowly warm up over time.  It's not quite clear why they're both starting from this point (and certainly they weren't influenced by each other) -- they must have both wanted an element of mystery to the character and come up with similar ways of achieving it.  Obviously they're not identical (there's no robot Master in the TARDIS in "Rose", for instance), but the similarities are intriguing.

One of the differences is that Richard E. Grant's Doctor comes to his epiphany quite quickly.  He's not completely there by the end of the story, but he's certainly made some progress -- the thought of losing someone else as he falls into a black hole (it makes sense in context) seems to lead him to reconsider some of his recent choices, and he's no longer completely unwilling to help humanity out.  This does help in thawing his character out over the course of the story, which is good -- even though he's still sarcastic and acerbic at times, he's recognizably the same character.  But Richard E. Grant still manages to make his mark on the character -- it's hard to imagine any of the previous Doctors resolving the story by singing showtunes and hitting the right pitch to incapacitate the villains, but Grant makes it seem like a natural part of his Doctor.

He's aided by a good cast -- Sophie Okonedo is really charming as Alison, giving us a brave and determined performance, and Sir Derek Jacobi is obviously wonderful as the robot Master, who seems to be friendly but with a suggestion of more nefarious motives.  And there's a quick cameo in episode five from David Tennant, who literally begged his way onto the production when he learned that Doctor Who was recording in the studio next to where he was.

So it's a decent script -- a tad traditional in its approach to Doctor Who, but as it's giving us a different Doctor you can see why they went this direction -- and a good cast.  In a way it's unfortunate that real-world events overshadowed Scream of the Shalka; the webcast was announced in July 2003 for November, but by the time November rolled around, the news had already been circulating for two months that live-action Doctor Who would be returning to BBC1 in 2005, and thus Shalka was doomed before it began, relegated to non-canonical status.  This is sad; as I said, there are some interesting ideas here and it would have been nice to have seen more.  But Richard E. Grant's Doctor would become little more than a footnote in the history of the show, a curious might-have-been rather than the definite article.¹⁶²  Far and away the most influential thing about Scream of the Shalka is that their efforts in untangling the rights issues in the wake of the TV Movie (where ownership was shared between the BBC, Universal, and Fox -- this is one of the things that delayed a region 1 release for so long) so that they could pave the way for their webcast was key in the approval of the BBC Wales version.

So we've spent the last three days seeing some of the ways in which Doctor Who lived on (or attempted to) after its indefinite hiatus in 1989.  But (with the qualified exception of the TV Movie, which really did try to spark something even if it followed the patterns of the others), these have all either been efforts to recapture a feeling of nostalgia or targeted at a smaller, more dedicated fan audience.  Fortunately, this approach would be discarded in 2005 in favor of an all-inclusive effort to gain as wide an audience as possible...







¹⁶² One of the advantages of Russell T Davies' "no previous knowledge required" approach to Doctor Who was that owing to the lack of any definitive evidence to the contrary (even something as simple as Eccleston mentioning he's the ninth Doctor, which doesn't happen), you could wind fans up online by arguing that Richard E. Grant belonged between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston and that Scream of the Shalka was in fact canon.  It was an entertaining argument that you could make for a surprisingly long time (it wasn't really until "The Name of the Doctor" et seq., that this door was definitively closed).