An Hour of Who a Day

December 30: "The End of the World"

So now that they've established the basic format of the show, it's time for the production team to flex their muscles a bit and take us to the far future -- further, perhaps, than we've ever gone before ("perhaps" because both The Ark and Frontios seem to be set after this event¹⁶⁵, and also we have no way of knowing when some of the adventures set on other planets (like, say, The Krotons or The Armageddon Factor) took place). And so we get to see the end of planet Earth, up close and personal, five billion years in the future. This looks like Doctor Who setting up its stall and saying, "Look, it's not just alien invasions on modern-day Earth; we can go anywhere, anywhen."

The Doctor tries to find out who sabotaged Platform One.
("The End of the World") ©BBC

The end of the world is certainly a good hook, and the cavalcade of alien visitors on Platform One, there to watch Earth burn, is a nicely varied bunch. (Although there's the moment where Rose, experiencing culture shock, remarks, "They're just so alien. The aliens are so alien." Which would be fine if it weren't for the fact that they all look humanoid, with two arms, two legs, one head, etc., except for the Face of Boe and, ironically, Cassandra.) And we get the introduction of the newest way to speed up the plot, the slightly psychic paper that lets the Doctor get in most anywhere he wants -- useful when you're regularly making stories half as long as they used to be.

But even though we're invited to gawp and stare at each alien arrival, the best parts of "The End of the World" are the character moments. We get Rose being overwhelmed at everything she's being shown (with, entertainingly, Soft Cell's cover of "Tainted Love" playing over her growing realization of where she is) and trying to explain herself to the Doctor. We also get the really sweet, quiet chat with the maintenance worker, Raffalo, which suggests that there are still some constants in the universe, even this far into the future. (You might be surprised to learn that this was an extra scene included when it was discovered the episode was running under length.) And we get the Doctor's steadfast refusal to answer questions about who he is and where he's from, which leads to the happy-go-lucky facade this Doctor's been affecting slipping for a moment. "This is who I am, right here, right now, all right? All that counts is here and now, and this is me," the Doctor barks angrily at Rose. And we see that while the Doctor pretends to be fun-loving and caring, he can be cold too; he's willing to let Cassandra die, apparently in retribution for Jabe's death. "Everything has its time, and everything dies," he says. (Note, too, how happy he seems to be when he realizes something is going wrong on Platform One. "That's not supposed to happen," he says with an intrigued smile.)

The actual plot itself is nothing too special -- although, pleasingly, the motivation behind sabotaging Platform One isn't about making a statement or a political act, but is instead about money. But they sell it really well, with lots of cracking glass and scorched marble as the raw unfiltered sunlight starts breaking through. And it's a good move to make the culprit Cassandra, rather than one of the aliens. And while the scene with the ventilation fans is incredibly dumb (and introduces some sort of special power for the Doctor that we never see again), the moment before, where Jabe tells the Doctor that she knows who he is and she's so sorry, and a tear falls from the Doctor's eye, is excellent.

Of course, that's setup for the big reveal at the end: that the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords ("There was a war and we lost"), thus becoming that old cliché the Lone Survivor. (Clearly something happened between the TV Movie and "Rose" that we don't know about yet.) But to their credit they make this work; Eccleston sells it really well, this moment of letting his guard down and letting Rose in, just a bit, and so it doesn't seem as hackneyed an idea as it could have been. Plus it gives the audience something to wonder about.

In many ways this is as calculated a piece of television as "Rose" was, only here the goal is to get the audience to accept "future" stories with strange-looking people, rather than the idea of an alien who saves the world from other alien invasions in a special machine. And like "Rose", this is an entertaining episode -- but "The End of the World" has the advantage of also feeling like it's telling its own story, rather than jumping into the middle of a different one. It's also nice to see a villain motivated by greed rather than a simple desire for power -- something we don't see enough of on Doctor Who. There are a couple less-successful moments here and there, but "The End of the World" shows that the revived BBC Wales version of the show is more than just a one-trick pony.

¹⁶⁵ A problem: the Doctor dates the events of The Ark as roughly ten million years in the future, which is a far cry from five billion. So either there was an impending Earth death that was avoided at the last minute (er, except we see the Earth burning up on-screen in "The Plague" (The Ark 2)...), or the Doctor is just really far off on his guess. (Which wouldn't be the first time -- see, for instance, his assertion in The Dalek Invasion of Earth that the events of The Daleks occurred "a million years ahead of us in the future", and then compare with comments in Planet of the Daleks (presumably contemporaneous with Frontier in Space -- so 2540 -- in order for the plot to have any hope of making sense) that the Doctor's journey into the Dalek city occurred "generations ago".)

December 29: "Rose"

Just to refresh your memory: in 2005 Doctor Who had been off the air for sixteen years, and while it was sort of fondly remembered by some for others it had been the brunt of a lot of criticism (it was cheap, it was silly, it wasn't very good, it was only for "sad" hardcore fans and people who already watched "cult" (aka SF/fantasy) shows and didn't have anything to offer anyone else). In other words, incoming showrunner Russell T Davies (at that point one of Britain's hottest writing talents) had his work cut out for him, to remind people why Doctor Who had at one point been the UK's most successful family show ever, and to prove that family viewing in general wasn't dead, contrary to the prevailing wisdom.

So that's probably why "Rose" sometimes looks like an incredibly calculated piece of television. It's designed to slowly ease you into the world of Doctor Who, rather than just drop you in it. Comparing it to the TV Movie (which is ostensibly doing the same thing) just highlights the changes: whereas the TV Movie started by dropping you into strange situations with alien names -- in effect highlighting its approach as a piece of genre television -- "Rose" instead begins with an ordinary girl working in a department store, living an ordinary life, and slowly introduces the unusual elements one at a time. She meets Autons (never named as such onscreen, but called that in the credits), and then a strange man called the Doctor who blows them up, and slowly but surely she's sucked into this new world that she never knew existed. This story is explicitly from Rose Tyler's point of view (the actual invasion plot -- essentially a remake of Spearhead from Space -- feels like it starts at the part three point of a 20th-century story and is generally relegated to the background, other than as motivation for the Doctor), and it's better for it.

Rose is mad at the Doctor for forgetting about Mickey. ("Rose") ©BBC

So yes, it's carefully calculated to slowly bring the general audience into a new and different world (rather than throw them into the deep end and expect they'll swim), but the thing about "Rose" is that it's also a very entertaining piece of television. There's an energy and infectious quality to these forty-five minutes that you can't help but get wrapped up in. Billie Piper surprises by being genuine and believable -- she's not mugging at the camera but is treating this all as being in deadly earnest. And Christopher Eccleston is something of a revelation -- there are multiple layers in his performance, a veneer of (occasionally forced) cheerfulness masking a darker, more serious aspect that occasionally breaks through. This makes him incredibly watchable as he veers from happy to intense in scenes, without it ever seeming like a break in character. It's also worth noting how different he seems from his predecessors -- the hidden depths, but also the look in general (short haircut, simple leather jacket with a shirt and dark pants), which suggests that this incarnation of the Doctor is trying to blend in, rather than being deliberately eccentric. It's also designed to not seem off-putting to a casual audience.

But this all also works in terms of Doctor Who. As has been pointed out many times before, the basic focus of this episode (essentially, something strange mixes into a domestic setting in contemporary London) isn't a million miles away from the last story of the original run, Survival. You can thus envision "Rose" as on the same trajectory as the series it's continuing on from without too much difficulty -- as it should be; this shouldn't seem like a sharp break with the past. And in fact, there was a slight sense of dread for many people (myself included) before "Rose" aired -- it could have been terrible, either a self-parody or something that didn't remotely seem like the Doctor Who that had gone before. But fortunately Russell T Davies, executive producer Julie Gardner, and producer Phil Collinson have the right sensibilities. Davies and Collinson are old-school fans (Davies even wrote one of Virgin's New Adventures, Damaged Goods) and know what the spirit of the show should be like, while Gardner, a recent convert, knows what will still appeal to a broader audience (not to say that Davies and Collinson don't; this is putting it very broadly). The result is impressive, and even if it's a bit too transitional to stand up on its own (once again, this is about introducing the show and its core ideas to Rose (and therefore the audience), not about telling a self-contained story in its own right), it nevertheless hits all the right notes. There are a lot of introductions, even for the fans (a newly-regenerated Doctor (well, that's what that scene with the mirror seems to suggest), a new companion, a new completely redesigned console room, forty-five-minute episodes that are largely self-contained, a new logo¹⁶³, a new video format (16:9 and frame-removed video¹⁶⁴)...), but far and away this is an episode that is designed to make those introductions in an explosively entertaining way. Doctor Who is back.

¹⁶³ If you look at all of Doctor Who's logos over the years, a curious pattern emerges: for the first 26 years of its life (plus the 16-year interregnum), the logos, while often changing dramatically in design, all follow a basic pattern: the word "Doctor" stacked on top of the word "Who". But from 2005 on, the words are lined up side-to-side.
¹⁶⁴ The last "proper" serial, Survival, was shot on 625-line PAL video running at 50 fields (essentially half-frames) a second. (The TV Movie was shot on 35mm film running at 24 frames per second -- not that you'd really know it from looking at the finished product, which looks like everything else on Fox from that time period.) Since Survival, the visual grammar of television had changed -- film was deemed to look better than video, so video was given a "filmized" look (essentially removing frames to make it run at the same rate as film), which allowed it to look like film but still retain the advantages of video. This is the format that Doctor Who was shot in, and the "film look" continues today even while the resolution has increased from SD to HD. (Another reason why the modern HDTVs that interpolate extra frames to give a "smoother" look are a bad idea.)

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).

December 27: Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death Parts One, Two, Three, & Four / Scream of the Shalka Episodes One & Two

North American VHS
release (from the
Amazon product page)

So after the TV Movie came to nothing¹⁶¹, Doctor Who started to fade from the public consciousness -- not completely, as sales of the video versions had always been healthy and you might find some of the novels in a bookstore, but without a continuing programme the show started to become a memory. And it was largely as a bit of nostalgia that the show returned for a comedy sketch in 1999, this time for a different charitable cause from Dimensions in Time. That had been for Children in Need; this was for something called Comic Relief.

But unlike some of the spoofs that had gone before, with lame jokes about wobbly sets and Daleks that can't climb stairs (because no one saw Remembrance of the Daleks), Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death (to give it its original broadcast title) is an affectionate parody from a fellow fan and professional television sitcom writer named Steven Moffat. And you can sense the love Moffat has for the show.

It's set after the TV Movie -- Rowan Atkinson is explicitly the ninth Doctor -- and in twenty minutes it both makes some pointed jokes and reminds you why the show was so popular in the first place. Atkinson looks like he's playing out a dream role; his Doctor is played with serious intent and he comes across as a very credible choice for the Doctor -- which makes all his deadpan jokes even funnier. Julia Sawalha is fun and charming as the Doctor's companion Emma, and Jonathan Pryce steals the screen by playing the Master incredibly OTT, trying to retain his dignity every time the Doctor punctures his self-inflated ego.

It's full of jokes (including a time travel one that in hindsight looks like Moffat flexing his muscles) and some fabulous performances -- including some wonderful cameos as the Doctor keeps regenerating. So we get Richard E. Grant as the tenth Doctor, Jim Broadbent as the eleventh Doctor, Hugh Grant as the twelfth, and Joanna Lumley as the thirteenth (in a nod to the suggestions that the Doctor could be a woman), and each of them make their mark in only a relatively short time, establishing each as different but the same. It's really wonderful to see. And then we get Daleks too! (Probably because Terry Nation's agent at the time he created the Daleks, Beryl Vertue, is Steven Moffat's mother-in-law.)

It's a cheeky but loving poke at a nostalgic favorite, pitched at just the right level, with jokes for both casual viewers and hardcore fans. Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death is wonderful.

But obviously that wasn't meant to start a series up, and nothing seemed forthcoming for the next couple years. There had apparently been a proposal or two in the meantime (a rising television writer named Russell T Davies pitched a low-budget version of the show around 2000 or so, and a producer named Dan Freedman had created an online audio story called Death Comes to Time in 2001-2002 and was clearly angling to start making real Who in the near future), but nothing had really come of any of it. So, with the show continuing to fade, the BBC website (called BBCi at that time) decided to create the official ongoing adventures of the Doctor as a webcast. Their debut story, scheduled to take advantage of the 40th anniversary in 2003, was called Scream of the Shalka. But unlike the previous webcasts (Death Comes to Time, Real Time, and Shada with Paul McGann), which had been audio stories with still pictures, Scream of the Shalka was a fully animated story (from Cosgrove Hall, who you may remember from the animated episodes of The Invasion).

In some ways Scream of the Shalka seems to be avoiding mistakes made by the TV Movie -- we get a brand-new Doctor (this time played by Richard E. Grant -- yes, the same one as in The Curse of Fatal Death -- but sounding an awful lot like Paul McGann for some reason) but no time is wasted with regeneration sequences or anything like that; instead new elements (like the TARDIS mobile and the new look of the console room) are introduced as they come up, tantalizing the viewer rather than clubbing them over the head with it.

They're also really trying to make this Doctor seem as different as possible from any others. He seems incredibly sarcastic and extremely unwilling to help -- he repeatedly rails at the sky about being forced to assist the humans and tries to only do the bare minimum. It's something of an off-putting characterization, but deliberately so -- one wonders if they'll soften this at all in the subsequent episodes.

The actual storyline feels generic (alien invasion) but with interesting bits (the Shalka are a special type of "goo" that live in volcanic rock and can control people with sound -- the eponymous scream), but with two short episodes it's hard to get a good grip on it yet. Still, there are tantalizing bits and enough unanswered questions (such as, most obviously, why are the Doctor and the Master now friends and traveling together?) to keep you intrigued. I'm curious to see where they go from here.

¹⁶¹ Well, nothing in TV terms. In the world of merchandise the TV Movie led to the establishment of the eighth Doctor as the current one, which meant that he was now the Doctor featured in Doctor Who Magazine's comic strip and was also the star of his own line of novels published by BBC Books (having taken the licence away from Virgin Publishing right around the time the McGann film came out). But those weren't the sort of things the general public were really aware of.

December 26: Dimensions in Time Parts One & Two / Doctor Who [The TV Movie]

And so now we've moved on to 1993. Doctor Who has been off the air for four years now, but the show's thirtieth anniversary is coming up. An effort to make a direct-to-video episode failed (for reasons not worth going into -- but there's a nice documentary on the Inferno Special Edition DVD if you're interested), but John Nathan-Turner (still nominally in charge of the show, as he's been responsible for clearing various video releases and putting together some compilations as well) doesn't want to let this anniversary go without some sort of commemoration. The result is Dimensions in Time: take a two-part mini-episode with as many returning Doctors, companions, and monsters as they could throw in, mix them all up with popular BBC soap EastEnders, and see what comes out -- all under the pretext of charity. (Indeed, one of the agreements for this special was that everyone would give their time for free so long as this special wasn't exploited commercially -- which is why you'll never see an official video release (though it's not hard to find online, if you're curious).)

Dimensions in Time is notorious in fandom, and if you want to take it seriously as part of Doctor Who (though no one has ever wanted to) then it's an incredibly frustrating piece of nonsense -- one that manages to be silly and rather pointless (the resolution is particularly dumb, as it depends upon the Rani (the main villain) being stupid and grabbing the Doctor's companion (who's also switching between different companions, somehow) when she's Romana and thus another Time Lord, and then allowing some flagrant technobabble to save the day) at the same time. To the people who were hoping for the show to come back in some form, this must have seemed like a flagrant slap in the face.

The sixth Doctor with the Brigadier. (Dimensions in Time
Part Two) ©BBC

Now, though, with Doctor Who firmly reestablished as one of the BBC's flagship shows, this looks more like a strange curiosity in hindsight. It looks like a testbed for some new 3-D technology involving how the brain perceives movement -- which means that the camera is constantly spinning around the performers (sometimes inducing a feel of dizziness for the viewer) -- more than a serious effort to bring the show back in any form, but the basic idea (the Rani is messing up the Doctor's time-stream to stop him from interfering with her plans to put him in a time loop forever) actually isn't that bad. And there is something rather wonderful in seeing all the old Doctors back in some form, along with some companions -- McCoy and Aldred in particular seem like they've never been away, so effortlessly do they slip into their old relationship. And so the first four minutes or so are generally entertaining -- it only starts to go horribly wrong when the Rani introduces a bunch of enemies of the Doctor (err, including some that shouldn't be enemies -- there's an Argolin, the Dragon from Dragonfire, and a really unhappy-looking Time Lord among all the other costumes they've pulled out of storage), at which point it just turns into a stupid runaround where they just try to match up Doctors and companions in classic and/or interesting ways (perhaps most notably, the sixth Doctor finally gets to share some screen time with the Brigadier) until the episode's over and the Rani is defeated.

It's incredibly silly and it has some atrocious dialogue ("Pickled in time, like gherkins in a jar!"), but at least it's short -- and now that this isn't the BBC's final word on Doctor Who, it's less of a bitter pill to swallow. It's awkward in many places and daft in many others, but if you can just sit back and accept that this was for charity, as a way to raise some money while seeing some old friends, then there's actually a bit to enjoy about Dimensions in Time. Seeing Jon Pertwee back in action alone almost (almost) makes this worth it.

But that was all the Doctor Who we got...until 1996, when a brand-new made-for-TV movie graced our screens -- the final product of a long gestation period.¹⁵⁹ And not only is this movie explicitly a continuation of the show we last saw in 1989, but it's also designed to be a pilot for a new series -- one that would be made in America. Obviously that series never materialized, but we did get this -- technically called just Doctor Who but usually referred to by various nicknames (one of my favorites being "Grace: 1999"). I'll just be calling it the TV Movie.

It's a really strange beast though, the TV Movie. It wants to be a brand-new, fresh start for the show -- but it also wants to acknowledge the past. No, more than that; it explicitly wants to wallow in in-jokes, in references and little "kisses to the past" (as producer Philip Segal called them). This is sort of fine when it's just sonic screwdrivers, jelly babies, and Seals of Rassilon (although one wonders what that fresh American audience made of those things), but whenever they want to do something a little further it seems to go wrong. It's perhaps most obvious in the utterly bizarre opening, where high-pitched Daleks sentence the Master to death by extermination (complete with a shot of cat eyes, which might be foreshadowing his "goo snake" form but is probably intended to be a reference to Survival) and then invite the seventh Doctor to come get him (and let's set aside the problem of how Skaro can exist when it blew up in Remembrance of the Daleks, as life is too short). And he does! Without any problems, it seems!

Sylvester McCoy regenerates into Paul McGann. (Doctor Who)
©BBC Worldwide/Universal

It's also really strange how they introduce an old Scottish gentleman as the apparent hero but then only keep him around for about fifteen minutes before they kill him and turn him into Paul McGann. It's nice to see Sylvester McCoy back (and no longer in that damn question mark pullover!), but it does give things a disjointed feel -- just as that American audience were starting to get the hang of things, they pull the rug out from under them and cast some new guy in the same role. This is because the production team have decided that they need to have a regeneration sequence (so, a lot like Time and the Rani there), no matter what it might mean for the storyline.

To be fair, they do try to make a virtue of this. Director Geoffrey Sax cleverly juxtaposes the changeover in Doctors with the Master-worm taking over the body of Bruce the ambulance driver, suggesting that these two are linked in some way (even beyond the "they're both Time Lords" connection). Not only that, but the use of Frankenstein (from Universal Pictures, so they had the rights) to show what's happening to the Doctor's body is also nicely done. It's just questionable whether this should have been there in the first place.

So we've got things included to make this more palatable for the fan audience. But then they've also thrown in things to make this more palatable to an American audience -- or rather what network executives think will be more palatable for an American audience. And so the Doctor is half-human, just like Spock from Star Trek (although this actually seems to be an artifact from an earlier draft, where the Doctor and the Master are brothers, their grandfather is Cardinal Barusa [sic], and their father was Ulysses, who came to Earth and married a human woman -- see, things could have been much worse¹⁶⁰); the TARDIS is disguised with a "cloaking device"; the world's most accurate clock is located in San Francisco (with banners that proclaim the beginning of San Francisco Mean Time -- let's hope this is a slogan rather than a genuine scientific move)... and the whole thing looks a lot like any other SF or drama show on Fox in 1996, and it's scored in a straightforward orchestral style -- the works of Tristram Cary and Delia Derbyshire are a long way from John Debney's Jerry Goldsmith-esque score.

It's not all bad, though, and in fact for the first half it's frequently enjoyable. Minus the reservations about some of the decisions at the script level, this has moments that sparkle -- having Paul McGann pull the surgical wiring out of his chest to prove he's the same person as Sylvester McCoy is a good move, the way the Master gets Chang Lee to trust him is really nicely done, and the Doctor grabbing the police officer's gun and threatening to shoot himself is an incredibly Doctor-ish moment. It's also well-directed by Sax -- no, scratch that; it's directed surprisingly well, with lots of interesting angles and shots to make this as dynamic a production as they can. And Sax has gotten some good performances out of people: Paul McGann is pretty much on form from the get-go, with a sense of breathless energy that serves the character well; Eric Roberts has decided to play the Master as flamboyantly OTT, which makes him incredibly watchable (and threatens to steal the show from the hero when they're both on screen together); and while Daphne Ashbrook has decided to play Grace with a slightly kooky sense, as if she knows she's on Doctor Who, Yee Jee Tso as Chang Lee surprises by being incredibly charming, even when he's aiding the Master -- and so although he's ostensibly a villain it doesn't really feel that way.

The Doctor thumps the TARDIS console. (Doctor Who) ©BBC
Worldwide/Universal

But ultimately this story falls well short of the mark. The problems it faces are rooted in the script, and while writer Matthew Jacobs does his best with the material he's given (with lots of quotable lines: "I love humans. Always seeing patterns in things that aren't there"; "These shoes! They fit perfectly!"; "This. Is. An ambulance!"; "I always drezzz for the occasion"; and many more), when it comes to working with all the nonsense inflicted upon him from earlier drafts he simply can't come up with a reason to make this work, either for the first-time audience (who presumably were confused by the technobabble and massive infodumps -- including, infamously, the speech to Grace in the park that starts with "He's planning to take my body" and ends with "...and he will take my body!") or for long-time fans (who just wondered what had happened to the show). It's a script that has to satisfy so many different masters that the end result frequently lacks heart -- it's full of set-pieces without any understanding as to why those set-pieces should be there.

It's a lot better than it could have been (seriously, check out the Leekley Bible in the book Doctor Who: Regeneration if you want to know about some of the horrors that could have been inflicted), and there are some good performances here -- Paul McGann was a great choice of Doctor (as anyone who's listened to his Big Finish audios can easily attest) and it's sad he didn't get another real shot at the role on-screen (other than a quick episode that manages to be better in 7 minutes than the 86 minutes they aired in 1996). It looks really good, thanks to Sax and his crew, and there's nothing it does that's horrifically vile or offensive. Of course, it needed to be a lot more than that, and both as a pilot and as an episode of Doctor Who it's frustrating -- you can see that many of the right pieces were there, but they can't make them cohere into something worthwhile. More than anything, the TV Movie suffers a death by committee -- no one singular authorial vision shines through (despite Sax's best efforts), and the result is a leaden mishmash.

¹⁵⁹ The TV Movie spent an incredibly long time in gestation -- its roots actually predate the end of the series. Entire books have been written on the subject, but here's a brief synopsis of events (and this is putting it very crudely):
There were a number of companies competing to make a feature film version of Doctor Who. One of the ones that actually got some traction was Amblin Entertainment (yes, the Spielberg company), although this appears to have at various points been both a movie and a full-fledged series. One of the biggest proponents of a deal on the American side was Philip Segal. An agreement was reached, and while the production changed companies (Spielberg apparently gave the project to Segal when he got a new job elsewhere) the show was still a go -- only this time it would air on the American Fox network. All of the negotiations and moves and script drafts dragged on such that it took until 1996 before they finally had something to show for it. But in the meantime, rather than commit to a full series, Fox decided to just go with a pilot and see what the reaction was. That reaction was strong in Britain but weak in America, and so the series was a no-go.
¹⁶⁰ And if this had been the case, you'd think it would have come up during The Myth Makers.

December 25: Survival Parts Two & Three

The pointed critique of the "might makes right" culture continues in these last two episodes. Sgt. Paterson talks a big game about being trained and knowing how to survive, but when push comes to shove he's useless. Midge tries to become the stronger person by trying to kill Derek on the Cheetah World but ends up essentially enslaved by the Master. And when Midge fails to kill the Doctor outright, the Master tells him to die ("Survival of the fittest. The weak must be eliminated so that the healthy can flourish. You know what to do, Midge"). It's not a story that has any sympathy for testosterone-fueled displays of force.

What Survival does have time for is a more overtly female approach. Ace gets in touch with her feminine side and feels free as she starts to turn into a Cheetah Person (and the scene in part two, with the red moon reflected in the water, makes this connection clear), rejecting male ideas about what it means to survive. From Karra the Cheetah Person's point of view, it's not about surviving or winning -- it's about the hunt, feeling the blood, satisfying the hunger. But go too far the other way and you run the risk of turning into a Cheetah Person, of giving in to your base urges completely, of fighting with each other even though you're linked somehow with the planet and the fighting causes the planet to disintegrate -- and this risk seems to be heightened if you then turn those Cheetah Person tendencies toward male-dominated activities like war. "If we fight like animals, we die like animals!" the Doctor shouts, refusing to give in (although the sight of the Doctor with cat eyes, as he prepares to kill the Master before he realizes what he's doing, is striking).

All right, so maybe this is taking things a bit too far, but the subtext is clearly there, even if it tends to remain a subtext. But writer Rona Munro (the fourth woman to write for the series, after Barbara Clegg, Paula Woolsey (maybe), and Jane Baker), like all the best writers of the last few years, is using Doctor Who to explore topics that are meaningful to her while wrapping it up in an SF context. The critique about "survival of the fittest" is definitely there, and in fact drives the whole episode. The references to womanhood (the moon bit, the fact that the women turn into cats -- and note how Karra turns back into a human woman when she dies) are also definitely there. Connecting the two themes takes a bit more work on the viewers' side.

But what's wonderful about Survival is that you can do this. The pieces are there for you to interact with. And what better way to explore these ideas of fighting and survival than with the Master? This is probably Anthony Ainley's best performance in the role, and it's easily the best characterization of the character since his return. Instead of giving him elaborate schemes to entrap the Doctor or take over the world, he's redesigned here to be the Doctor's opposite, with no more motivation needed than to use the Doctor to help him escape. And if the Doctor dies or succumbs to the effects of the planet, so be it. This is a Master operating on instinct. The best thing about this is that the Master doesn't end up distorting the story around him; instead he enhances the themes, showing that using the Cheetah powers for selfish reasons is just as bad as giving into them completely.

Survival's an impressively layered story, and its strengths lie in challenging the audience while still providing an entertaining tale. It confidently reasserts the basic principles of the show (as Terrance Dicks might say, "Never cruel or cowardly") and rejects the ideas of every man for himself. It provides a new dimension for the show's ideas about the function of the companion -- no other story yet has brought the companion back to their home just to see what the old gang is up to, but that's a driving force here -- which will become a key part of the 21st-century version. It provides us with reasons to think and reasons to cheer, all in a slick, self-assured package. (And it manages to do this in three episodes, without the feeling that there are necessary explanations omitted in the interests of time.) What better story is there for Doctor Who to bow out on?

Because yes, this is the final story of Doctor Who's original run. It's rather sad, that; this is a show that could have kept going for a good deal longer (particularly in its current incarnation, no longer slavishly deferring to the idea of "continuity" and what fandom at the time thought made a good story), and you get the sense that they could have gone anywhere from here. Alas, it wasn't to be.

They had an inkling at the time that they weren't going to get a 27th season. The reasons for this are a bit more complicated than you might think -- not only did BBC management not care for Doctor Who, but no one really wanted to produce it either (one of the reasons Nathan-Turner was producer as long as he was is because no one else was willing to be the producer). Then add in the fact that a recent directive decreed that 25% of all BBC output had to be made by outside companies -- a situation which seemed to the BBC to be ideal for Doctor Who but which would take time to work out the details -- and you can see why the wind was blowing against another season of Doctor Who. This is why Survival ends with that lovely little Cartmel-written speech from the Doctor (augmented by Dominic Glynn's gorgeously wistful little tune), because they thought it might be a while before the show was back:

There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do.

It's a shame that they stopped when they did, though. Season 26 has provided us with a run of stories even more confident and ambitious than last season's -- even Battlefield (the worst story of the season, which gives you some idea of how strong this year's stories have been) is full of good ideas and lovely moments, hanging on a narrative framework that's wonderfully overambitious. Obviously the BBC's management weren't too keen on the series (or else they wouldn't have kept scheduling it opposite Coronation Street), and the ratings had been down, but in some ways that didn't matter. John Nathan-Turner and Andrew Cartmel especially seem to have been delighting in telling audacious stories with complicated themes -- confident in the knowledge that they can be more adventurous and outrageous because no one in charge is paying them any attention. (Cartmel once famously said after the fact that his goal as script editor was to bring down the government -- which gives you some idea of the sorts of things he was looking for and the commitment he was willing to give.) They knew their days were numbered, but that didn't dissuade them. It helped that they were aided by Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, providing us with one of the best Doctors and one of the best companions (respectively) ever -- it's a shame they didn't really get to leave on their own terms. The result was a show that was back on the top of its game and ready to take on the world. It's hardly their fault the world wasn't that interested anymore.¹⁵⁸

¹⁵⁸ After Survival Part Three I watched the 1990 edition of Search Out Science -- an educational show -- that features the Doctor, Ace, and K-9 (and can be found on the Survival DVD if you're interested). To paraphrase About Time, it's proof, if nothing else, that children still wanted the Doctor around even if no one else did.

December 24: The Curse of Fenric Part Four / Survival Part One

This might be one of the best episodes Doctor Who's ever turned out. The first three parts of The Curse of Fenric have been leading up to this climactic episode, when Fenric is finally set free, using the body of Dr. Judson and ready to unleash his evil upon the world. "When it comes to death, quantity is so much more satisfying than quality," Fenric remarks. To that end Fenric wants to release Millington's toxin into the waters and pollute the entire planet, killing everyone. He's even brought the Ancient One (who appears to be the chief Haemovore) back in time from the distant future to help him achieve his goal.

This is a tense episode, as the soldiers fight a desperate battle first against the other soldiers (British vs. Soviet) and then together against their common enemy. I also really like the scene where, after the Haemovores have broken into the room where the Wrens are hiding, soldiers come in to evacuate them, only to find that they've all been turned into Haemovores -- and they all descend on one hapless soldier who's apparently paralyzed with fear. And meanwhile Fenric can't help but be pulled into the Doctor's trap: the same one that trapped him seventeen centuries ago.

But the best part is the ending sequence, where Ace inadvertently provides Fenric with the solution to the chess puzzle and then we get a taste of how long Fenric's been trying to manipulate the Doctor, by bringing one of his "wolves" (people descended from the Vikings who brought Fenric's flask to England) into contact with him. It's actually a really brutal sequence for Ace, as the Doctor systematically tears her down in front of Fenric:

SORIN: Kneel if you want the girl to live!
DOCTOR: (quietly) Kill her.
SORIN: (laughing) The Time Lord finally understands.
DOCTOR: Do you think I didn't know? The chess set in Lady Peinforte's study? I knew.
SORIN: Earlier than that, Time Lord. Before Cybermen. Ever since Iceworld, where you first met the girl.
DOCTOR: I knew. I knew she carried the evil inside her. Do you think I'd have chosen a social misfit if I hadn't known? She couldn't even pass her chemistry exams at school, and yet she manages to create a time storm in her bedroom. I saw your hand in it from the very beginning.
ACE: Doctor, no.
DOCTOR: She's an emotional cripple. I wouldn't waste my time on her, unless I had to use her somehow.

(from The Doctor Who Transcripts - The Curse of Fenric)

Turns out the Doctor's just trying to tear down Ace's psychic barrier so that the Ancient One can attack Fenric, but it still doesn't do much for Ace's psyche -- even if he does apologize afterwards ("I'd have done anything not to hurt you, but I had to save you from Fenric's evil curse. Your faith in me was holding the Haemovore back"). But what's really nice about this scene is how it seems to tie together a number of disparate elements, to make them seem bigger and more important than they initially appeared. (It also explains how both Ace and Lady Peinforte were able to travel from their own times to different ones.)

But then that's the real strength of this entire story. The Curse of Fenric manages to take a number of different elements (vampires, early computers, British and Soviet soldiers in World War II, and eeevil evilsincethedawnofTime) and put them together to create a compelling, weighty story. And not only that; it tackles things like the nature of faith (and how it doesn't have to be religious) and the futility of war ("War, a game played by politicians," one of the Soviet troops, Vershinin, says. "We were just pawns in the game, but the pawns are fighting together now. Eh, comrade?"), and it does it in a wonderfully subtle manner. All this and some fabulous acting and direction to boot (and full marks to director Nicholas Mallett for convincing John Nathan-Turner to let him film this all on location). Really, the DVD special edition is the way to go with this story (it adds in some needed scenes, reorders things, and regrades the visuals to make it look more consistent) -- one of the few DVD special editions that is actually worthwhile (as opposed to, say, the recut versions of Enlightenment or Planet of Fire, which are both entirely dispensable). But even the episodic version is a tremendous success. The Curse of Fenric is deservedly known as one of the best stories of the 1980s.

And now it's on to part one of Survival -- the final story in Doctor Who's original run. It's something of a bittersweet moment; even though we know the show will eventually return, this still feels like an ending. But, if this episode is anything to judge by, the show will be going out on a high note.

Even in this first episode Survival makes some of its themes clear. There's definitely a number of criticisms directed at the "dog eat dog"/"every man for himself" culture of the late '80s. Here it's stated (repeatedly) as "survival of the fittest", with the implications that you'd better be the fittest -- a position the Doctor clearly doesn't agree with.

The other interesting thing about this episode is the juxtaposition of the normal (contemporary Perivale) with the bizarre. It starts out with some odd shots and disappearing people, and it ends with strange cheetah-like people transporting people to another planet (which looks surprisingly alien, dry, and dusty -- they've done an excellent job of differentiating the two settings) -- and yet this combination never feels forced or unnatural. It's a logical progression of what we've seen: the Territorial Army sergeant is trying to teach survival of the fittest, but there's a species that's mastered this and the hunt, making them formidable.

Let's be honest; the cliffhanger's not that surprising, given that they've been showing us Anthony Ainley's distinctive eyes for much of the episode. The surprise isn't that the Master's back (and it has been a couple years, at least, so there's not the sense of inevitability about this appearance that there might have been a few seasons earlier) -- the surprise is that he appears to have cat eyes and some form of limited control over the Cheetah People (as the Doctor will call them in part two). And in a story with the theme of survival of the fittest, one wonders if the Master has become like the Cheetah People to become the fittest...