You know, I think I’m rather enjoying this.
Having already shown a deft hand at nostalgia in “Remembrance of the Daleks,” Ben Aaronovitch opens Doctor Who‘s final season with “Battlefield” (Story Production Code 7N), returning a beloved ally rather than a shopworn foe to the series: the Brigadier. Two of them, actually. In short order viewers see Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney) wrestling with a potted tree in a garden center, having given up both teaching (as established in “Mawdryn Undead“) and brigadiering; and then Brigadier Winifred Bambera (Angela Bruce), rushing to the scene of an accident near (fictional) Lake Vortigern in Southern England, where a nuclear missile convoy has crashed into an archeological dig site with typical UNIT efficiency.
The Doctor detects a broadcast from the selfsame time and location in a very gloomy TARDIS and heads there forthwith. (Per Paul Kirkley’s Space Helmet for a Cow , the console prop had been discarded between seasons and not yet fully replaced, necessitating some lighting slight-of-hand). Pulling out a set of old UNIT identification cards from his hat (belonging to the Third Doctor and Liz Shaw) for himself and Ace, the Doctor attempts to convince Brigadier Bambera to let him poke around, but apparently she never got the memo about the Doctor and his ontological eccentricities. All the while, projectiles from space fall into nearby hills, eliciting very little curiosity from anyone but Ace. These meteors contain armored knights with futuristic weaponry, also summoned, apparently, by the signal from the vicinity of the dig site.
Aaronovitch and director Michael Kerrigan waste little time in “Battlefield,” with the largest group of knights engaging a solitary knight in battle—via sword, blaster, and grenade, in traditional knightly fashion—by the halfway mark of the first of four episodes. Even with a large guest cast and multiple plot strands to establish, including Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart coming out of retirement once Bambera reports the Doctor’s return to UNIT HQ, the action keeps pace with the exposition. (Though perhaps, as in the Third Doctor’s UNIT days, Kerrigan devotes a bit too much time to a helicopter flying back and forth, if only to get as much value out of the aircraft rental as they can.)
Copious references to the Arthur legend leave little doubt about the story’s direction—the local pub’s CAMRA-listed beer is called “Arthur’s Ale” after all—so that when one of the knights, Ancelyn (Marcus Gilbert), calls the Doctor “Merlin,” the experience is one of knowing appreciation rather than shock, at least until he starts talking about time travel and the relative dimensionality of the TARDIS. Pulling the Arthurian romance into the future rather than sending the Doctor back to the past feels like one of those obvious concepts that somehow never made it into Doctor Who until now, and the anachronism of plate armor together with laser guns comes across as clever and fresh.
Too, the conflation of the Doctor with Merlin fits neatly into the effort by producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel to deepen the sense of mystery behind the Doctor’s past (and his future possibilities). “Oh, he has many names, but in my reckoning, he is Merlin,” proclaims Ancelyn, even as the Doctor evinces no knowledge of the knight or of the summons from Excalibur that has led everyone to this moment—including Mordred (Christopher Bowen), leader of the other group of knights, who cowers upon realizing the old foe Merlin has returned. And where Mordred can be found, his mother cannot be far away…
Jean Marsh marks a bravura return to Doctor Who as the sorceress Morgaine (aka Morgana Le Fey), fittingly alongside Nicholas Courtney, with whom she appeared (as Sara Kingdom) in “The Daleks’ Master Plan” twenty-odd years earlier. Mordred uses his sword, “brother to Excalibur,” to create a rift in time and space, bringing Morgaine from her universe into the current one, aligning with the Doctor’s supposition that Earth looks to be “the centre of a war that doesn’t even belong to this dimension.” This notion of an alternate universe has seldom been engaged with on Doctor Who, and happily so—it can provide far too easy a rug to sweep narrative discontinuities under—but Aaronovitch uses the conceit to great effect, neatly explaining away the knights with ray guns and an Earth on which Arthur and his cohort stand not as legend, but as fact. And, perhaps, even another Doctor, at work as Merlin, in another universe.
The Doctor becomes convinced that his future self, as Merlin, constructed an elaborate spaceship underneath Lake Vortigern in the eighth century to house Excalibur. Connected to the shore via a buried concrete tunnel that Ace helpfully excavates with Nitro Nine, our heroes proceed to trigger every trap that the (future) Doctor left to deter would-be Kings of England from claiming the sword. Ace activates the last of the pitfalls when she pulls the fabled weapon from beside the body of an alternate dimension’s Arthur; in the ensuing confusion, she stumbles into an escape capsule that fills rapidly with water, eventually sending her to the surface, where she becomes the Lady of the Lake, wielding Excalibur from beneath the waves. It’s left to Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart to rescue the Doctor from the spaceship, in a most pleasant reunion for the old friends.
Despite a few moments of exposition regarding the Arthur legend—as when archeologist Peter Warmsly (James Ellis) signposts Ace’s aquatic upswelling with Excalibur by discussing the Lady of the Lake—it’s notable that Aaronovitch spends very little time actually unspooling the nuts and bolts of the Arthurian romance. As with “The King’s Demons,” about the Master’s efforts to stop Magna Carta from being signed, it’s simply taken as a given that the audience knows this formative national mythology, freeing up narrative space for other plot threads. It’s a shame, in its way, because the emotional core of Morgaine’s conflict with Arthur, which notionally drives the story, would have made for fascinating viewing at the hands of Jean Marsh, who imbues the sorceress with an honorable pathos. In its stead, we do get lots of explosions.
Much like Aaronovitch’s last story, very little expense is spared in the production, as befits a season opening tale. Large casts of costumed extras swarm about, raiding the BBC’s sword prop room, and Marsh’s costume for Morgaine looks very much the part of a high sorceress. The water escape scene with Ace requires a tank setup, which arguably could have had more money spent on it, given the cracks seen forming on the tank, which were very much not intentional. The tank collapsed right after Sophie Aldred was hurriedly pulled free, again per Kirkley.
Narrative effectively takes a back seat in the third episode, dominated as it is by an elaborate series of effects, including several bombastic (and bomb-tastic) set pieces as the good guys race with Excalibur back to the local pub while harassed by Morgaine’s now-considerable army. Lethbridge-Stewart has rallied UNIT’s forces as well, bringing ammunition specially designed to confront the kinds of foes that Doctor tends to show up with, and a massive fight rages over the dig site, with the new weapons effective against the knights’ space armor. He even brings Bessie, last seen, along with the Brig, in “The Five Doctors.”
The Doctor has left Ace and a local woman of Ace’s age, Shou Yuing (Ling Tai) to guard Excalibur, with instructions that they stand inside a chalk circle with the sword once things start getting strange, as they promptly do. Morgaine cannot cross the protective magic made from a darts scoreboard chalk stick, so she summons the Destroyer (Marek Anton), a demon with an impressively rendered blue face (indeed, the finest “creature” ever put on film by the BBC’s hard-working effects crew), who has no such hang ups. The sword of legend changes hands several times as the Doctor, Brigadier, and Ace chase Morgaine and the Destroyer via an “interstitial vortex” that leads…down the road a ways to a castle. The stakes promise to be incredibly high, with the Destroyer wanting to devour the planet and Morgaine and Mordred taking control of the nuclear missile UNIT left sitting around, but it all ends with a resounding whimper.
UNIT’s special ammunition includes the silver bullets needed to dispatch the Destroyer, with Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart destroying the blue beastie in a fine valedictory moment of heroism. The Doctor, meanwhile, discovers that the Arthur in the underwater spaceship rests not in eternal slumber, as Morgaine believes, but instead lies dead. The news that Arthur died a thousand years prior shakes the sorceress to her core:
Morgaine: Arthur, who burned like star fire.
The Doctor: Gone.
Morgaine: And was as beautiful. Where does he lie? I would look at him one final time.
The Doctor: He’s gone to dust.
Morgaine: Then I shall not even have that comfort. I shall never see him again. Arthur. We were together in the woods of Celadon. The air was like honey.
The moment carries a potency that the narrative has not earned, with the performances of Jean Marsh and Sylvester McCoy providing the emotional heft. This desire to reconnect with Arthur—in battle, in love, in experience—drives Morgaine, explains the entirety of her behavior, and it’s not touched upon once in the entire story. As noted, the motivation perhaps exists inherently in the Arthurian romance, but to not draw upon it in the script when sheer minutes are spent on helicopter fly-bys feels wasteful. To then wrap up her story by having Brigadier Bambera offhandedly incarcerate her and Mordred adds to the insult to the character—and to the audience, for having foolishly invested something in the narrative.
Still, viewers receive a pleasant concluding scene with the Doctor, Ancelyn, and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart relaxing in the latter’s garden. Doris (Angela Douglas), the Brig’s spouse, decides to take Ace, Shou Yuing, and Bambera out for a drive in Bessie, leaving the menfolk to scrounge up supper and tend to the lawn in their absence, an invocation of a return to normalcy, even if the matter of repatriating the wayward knight to his proper time and universe remains breezily unresolved (as with how UNIT plans to keep a sorceress under lock and key). It’s not an unwelcome coda, but on the heels of such a disjointed conclusion to the narrative proper, it lands awkwardly, saved only by the nostalgic glee of seeing Lethbridge-Stewart (and Bessie!) once more.
Nicholas Courtney and Jean Marsh, of course, stand out amongst the sizable guest cast, and both play their roles with gusto, understanding the slight degree of over-acting that Doctor Who requires to cut through the explosions and elaborate costumes. The Brigadier’s full, even-tempered embrace of the madness that the Doctor brings with him carries with it a memory of just how hard-earned that understanding has been for the character, a far cry from the initial disbelief at Yeti wandering around the Underground; Courtney sells the Brig’s exasperation with—and deep appreciation of—the Doctor to the full. As for Marsh, her performance gives a depth to Morgaine that the script neglects to provide; she melds honor with venom, tenderness with steel, and creates a sense of power to the sorceress that all the exquisite costuming and special effects in the BBC’s library could not hope to match (though they help). To bring both actors back in the same story makes for an organic reunion that more deliberate nostalgia traps like “The Five Doctors” cannot hope to replicate.
Special mention must also go, however, to Angela Bruce and Marcus Gilbert for their portrayals of Brigadier Bambera and Ancelyn, whose martial prowess leads them into an unlikely romance between a professional military officer and the haughty “Knight General of the Britons,” forged on the field of battle. Both actors play their characters as headstrong warriors, and it’s to their credit, and Aaronovitch’s script, that the growing attraction develops both gradually and believably, making for a nice side story, weaving some narrative interest in amidst the otherwise slightly tedious scenes of mass carnage.
Sophie Aldred starts off Ace’s second full season as companion with another action-packed outing. Once more the plucky teen from Perivale holds scenes on her own, and Aldred continues to perform many of her own stunts, including the aforementioned infamous water tank debacle. The character’s penchant for explosives and disregarding the Doctor’s orders to stay behind serve the narrative well here, and Aldred manages to hold the line between cocky and overwhelmed; Ace frequently gets in over her head, but she doesn’t back down. The rapport between Aldred and McCoy feels well established by this point, and the fondness carries through when the Doctor expresses relief that Morgaine and the Destroyer have not killed Ace.
The Seventh Doctor continues to be a character in development, with Sylvester McCoy leaning heavily—and, it must be said, successfully—into the sterner, harder vision of the character as developed by Nathan-Turner and Cartmel. This is still a hero who eschews violence, so legendarily that his bluff to kill Mordred is seen as such immediately by Morgaine, but he has started to lose reserves of patience, and with it some of the more sympathetic aspects of the character. After all-but-exterminating the Daleks and Cybermen last season, the viewer is less than sure sure of that pacifism. McCoy has the scowls and the intense stares down pat at this point, which suits Aaronovitch’s script well. The Doctor’s new mental abilities, being able to psychically convince locals to evacuate their homes and then knocking out Mordred with a simple finger on his temple, come across as gimmicks that would make earlier stories quite a bit less involved if he had them previously. Still, we have in “Battlefield” the Seventh Doctor in full form, with McCoy in command of the character, no mean feat after only two (short) seasons.
Ben Aaronovitch’s “Battlefield” presents a pitch perfect version of a Third Doctor story—UNIT, the Brig, Bessie, a location a stone’s throw from London, explosions, a helicopter, and a slightly-misunderstood, not-wholly-evil foe. By all rights, it should be a resounding success, particularly as it engages with the notion that the Doctor is interacting with a past or future version of himself that the audience has not seen, a device used multiple times in the Seventh Doctor’s era to some success. And when “Battlefield” works, it’s a reminder that Doctor Who can fill the screen with wonder and delight, with intelligent scripts and clever plotting that both honor and extend the show’s rich heritage. It would take a hardened heart not to smile as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and the Doctor reunite, or when Ace becomes the Lady of the Lake. Such disjointed moments, delightful as they are, do not suffice, though, to enable the audience to overlook the simplistic ending of chucking Morgaine into jail and calling it a day, nor the complete disregard for just why this universe plays host to the Arthurians of another universe. The spectacle is as fine as ever as Doctor Who approaches its end, but the substance cracks like a shoddy water tank hastily thrown together in Television Centre…
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Post 162 of the Doctor Who Project