We want more.
Doctor Who, under producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel, can scarcely be accused of false modesty. Case in point, the decision to end Season Twenty-Five with Stephen Wyatt’s “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” (Story Production Code 7J), a less-than-subtle title that refers as much to our favorite series, following a jaunty, peripatetic time traveller, as to the intergalactic circus that the Seventh Doctor and Ace decide to visit after a junk mail robot singing its praises materializes within the otherwise inviolable confines of the TARDIS. But with the series forever balanced between continuation and cancellation, a little horn-tooting can be forgiven.
An overall lack of nuanced presentation pervades Season Twenty-Five, and Wyatt’s entry continues the trend. The Doctor spends not five minutes on the planet Segonax, home of the Psychic Circus, before declaring, “Something evil’s happened here, I can feel it.” The Doctor likewise immediately declares the presence of evil in “The Happiness Patrol” rather than letting an unsettling atmosphere develop organically, an odd decision on the part of Wyatt and director Alan Wareing given that the story otherwise takes its time establishing much of anything at all. With four episodes to spare, there’s no narrative pressure here, and ample time is spent layering images and characters and scenes, a luxury after two three-episode stories in a row.
The juxtaposition of a circus tent replete with whip-wielding ringmaster (Ricco Ross) against two circus performers scurrying across wasteland fleeing from kites being flown by eerie clowns in a hearse—all while the Doctor and Ace eat creamed corn out of melons to ingratiate themselves with a local to get directions to the circus—leaves the audience quite befuddled, though not in a disagreeable way. Even the sudden appearance of the Captain Cook (T.P. McKenna), a nineteenth-century British explorer-type straight out of central casting, and his punk-rock partner Mags (Jessica Martin) digging a giant robot out of the ground comes as no real shock at all.
Indeed, throughout much of the first episode, one gets the overwhelming sense that only Doctor Who could throw this welter of concepts onto the screen and not have it written off immediately as farce; though the appearance of Mad Max-wannabe Nord (Daniel Peacock) on a motorized trike and nebbish teen Whizzkid (Gain Sammarco) on a BMX bike, both headed to the Psychic Circus, begins to strain the otherwise ample supplies of audience goodwill. Less charming, the Doctor’s behavior towards Ace, who shows a decided unease with the entire notion of circuses in general and clowns in particular. He practically browbeats his young charge into coming along, completely disregarding her near panic once they reach the rather undistinguished big top of the Psychic Circus. The show must go on, but a more clever means of getting our heroes into trouble might have been better in keeping with the Seventh Doctor’s near-paternal attitude towards the teen from Perivale.
And Ace, as it turns out, is not wrong in the least. Clowns are creepy…
The circus seemingly exists to put visitors into the ring to “perform” for an audience comprising a quintessentially-’60s British family (David Ashford, Janet Hargreaves, Kathryn Ludlow), the only spectators in attendance. Their enjoyment keeps the visitors alive for as long as boredom does not set in. Yet Wyatt’s script takes perhaps too long to explain just why, in the Doctor’s words, “a friendly hippie circus was turned into a trap for killing people,” with the circus members all playing to motivations that make no sense on the surface. Nearly everyone, from the ringmaster to the ticket-taking fortune teller Morgana (Deborah Manship), seems at odds with, or at least inured to, what is going on, suggesting they are all under some form of duress. Only the Chief Clown (Ian Reddington) appears to enjoy the spectacle of unwitting visitors churned into entertainment fodder for a nameless, faceless, eternally hungry audience.
This endless demand for wonder becomes, again, a less-than-subtle undercurrent in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” turning a haunted circus into a metaphor for the thankless task of producing, say, a television series with a limited budget and never enough time, burdened by twenty-five years of history that its most stalwart fans can recite at will and demand be honored at every turn. It turns out that Whizzkid, the overly earnest teen, is a huge admirer of the circus, having studied all its prior incarnations; he’s aware, of course, that it’s not as good as it was in the early days, but he’s still excited to be there. When it’s his turn in the ring, his performance fails to measure up—the critic cannot handle the pressure of the real thing. The figure of the Captain, a renowned intergalactic explorer, and his “companion” Mags similarly stand in as a pastiche of the Doctor and his assistant du jour, with endless recitations of past adventures and prior expeditions that no one really cares about. Even Morgana’s strained insistence to the force behind everything, that production remains on course and the entertainment will continue to flow ceaselessly, reads like pleadings to the upper floors of Television Centre.
But Wyatt, Nathan-Turner, and Cartmel would, certainly, never have compared the BBC hierarchy to a giant, malevolent eye in a well hidden in alien ruins underneath the big top, a force that draws Deadbeat (Chris Jury) and the rest of the troupe to permanently establish the Psychic Circus on Segonax. Once the Doctor discovers this evil force (and we know it to be malignant from his proclamation in the first episode), the story takes on a more traditional arc, with Ace sent to retrieve an object that will help defeat it while he occupies the attention of the circus by performing in the ring, pulling the Captain and Mags in with him to help even the odds. Just a shame that Mags turns out to be a werewolf, unleashed by the Captain to try to save his own skin.
The cinematography throughout calls to mind ’80s music videos, with quick cuts, tight angles, and flashing lights predominating, particularly when the lycanthropy strikes Mags. She turns on the Captain, his long maltreatment of her finally being paid off, clawing him down instead of the Doctor. When they escape the ring, the Ringmaster and Morgana become the sole entertainment left, quickly meeting their fate at the glowing eyes of the bored British family, who, as so often happens, are in fact the Gods of Ragnarok.
Despite the Doctor proclaiming to “have fought the Gods of Ragnarok all through time,” which comes as news to those of us who, like Whizzkid, are devoted fans, their sudden appearance falls about as flat as most of the acts in the main ring of the Psychic Circus. Even the Daleks, as shopworn as they are, receive a bit of exposition every time they roll on the screen; these apparently stalwart foes of the Doctor just sort of sit there, finally appearing in their true form, wearing angular stone helmets in their perch above a small stone arena. They were frankly more menacing in their streetwear, blankly eating crisps.
Regardless, the costuming of the Gods of Ragnarok is strong, as it is throughout “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” but the wan special effects as they throw their lightning bolts of boredom let proceedings down. Far more successful is the Doctor’s—or perhaps more appropriately, Sylvester McCoy’s—facility with some basic magic tricks, employed to keep them entertained. For all of Nathan-Turner and Saward’s thrashing about with the Seventh Doctor’s essential nature, they’ve at least continually played into McCoy’s natural theatrical gifts.
Just as suddenly as the Gods of Ragnarok appear, they are defeated by the Doctor, who fortuitously receives a mirrored eye medallion that Ace and Deadbeat recover from a broken down hippie bus guarded by a deranged ticket taking robot (Dean Hollingsworth, his second appearance as a mechanical menace after the very blue Karfel Android in “Timelash“). The Doctor merely reflects lightning bolts back at his apparently eternal foes and walks out of the ancient arena with the slightest coating of dust to show for it. Deadbeat and Mags decide to start another circus and the Doctor and Ace call curtains on their big top adventure.
Despite the rather large guest cast, only T.P. McKenna and Jessica Martin, as the self-centered Captain Cook and part-time werewolf Mags truly stand out. McKenna in particular carefully walks the line between knowing bore and clueless braggart. Cook’s self-assurance that he will be the one to survive any misfortune pairs neatly with the Doctor’s understated penchant for doing exactly that; it’s seldom that the audience feels one of the Doctor’s adversaries gets his just desserts, but when Mags kills him (tastefully off-screen), no tears are shed, nor indeed when the Gods of Ragnarok reanimate him in one final effort to keep the medallion from reaching our hero. Zombie Cook’s deadpan disbelief as he tumbles into the giant eye well suits the character to the last. Martin delivers on the “companion’s” exasperation with the leading figure quite neatly as well, bristling at Cook’s dismissal of her abilities in ways we’ve all wanted to see the Doctor’s companion express just a bit more frequently, and there’s the slightest hint that Mags might tag along in the TARDIS, given the extent that Marin and McCoy share the screen in this story and with her own “Doctor” meeting his demise.
Sophie Aldred’s Ace bears the emotional weight of the story, being the only figure to address the personal cost to the various members of the Psychic Circus as they suffer under the weight of delivering hapless victims over and over to the Gods of Ragnarok. Bereft of her Nitro Nine, she does get into a few more physical scrapes than normal—the super-explosive is much like a similarly numbered plot hindrance/solution, K-9, who often needs to be sidelined to allow a story to progress with some semblance of danger—but she manages to get out of trouble on her own, rather than relying on being rescued. Wyatt portrays Ace as simultaneously quite childish, with the fear of clowns, and as steely in the face of adversity; Aldred pulls off both facets of the teen, but the lack of some consistent (or at least consistently developing) character chafes this far into her tenure as sole companion.
Ever the consummate professional, Sylvester McCoy soldiers on in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” which oddly flattens out the harsher trajectory the rest of Season Twenty-Five’s stories have set for our newly mysterious and brooding Gallifreyan. “Silver Nemesis,” the story just prior (but shot after this one) sets the Doctor up as concealing some desperately dark secret, but here he’s happily at work perfecting his juggling skills. When the Seventh Doctor is called upon to be stern, McCoy delivers, but he just seems so much more at ease when the Doctor gets his way with a bit of physical legerdemain and clever wordplay, and he finally receives a story that rewards those strengths.
In many ways, “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” accurately represents late-stage Doctor Who—full of spectacle and high concept, but lacking enough substance to create a fulfilling experience. The parts are all there: McCoy and Aldred gamely show up each episode, the effects work as well as ever (at least when they lean on the tried and true rather than leveraging the latest computer graphics fad), and the germ of the story is strong enough to get audiences excited when they start to see the contours of the plot. It’s all undeniably fun. Alien ruins under a creepy circus with psychic undertones should write itself, but it just never comes together on the screen, making it a far cry from the taut psychological horror of “Snakedance” or even the whimsy of the last notionally circus-themed story, “Carnival of Monsters.” “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” looks the part of Doctor Who—and still, regardless, ably describes it—but there’s just something missing at this point.
(Previous Story: Silver Nemesis)
Post 161 of the Doctor Who Project