Movement Point

Ain’t it wonderful, honey, what a man’ll do for what he truly believes in?

Even the best of the Doctor Who historicals suffer one fundamental flaw: the historical personages tend to overshadow the Doctor and his companions, particularly when the history is well known. In the non-historical stories, the writers cannot afford to have our intrepid heroes off-screen for long, lest the audience wonder just why these generic aliens and anonymous humans are hatching plans to disengage the Framistat of Doom. In the historicals, though, a little bit of set dressing goes a long way, and there’s no compunction about ten minutes of, say, King Richard the Lionheart and his knights conversing about Saladin, or a humorous interlude between Priam, Paris, and Cassandra. Striking a balance between the historical figures and the Doctor takes some doing, and, to my admitted surprise, Donald Cotton succeeds in “The Gunfighters” (Story Production Code Z), despite some rather dodgy American accents.

On the face of it, the premise is about as wobbly as the accents and the bar prop in the Last Chance Saloon: the Doctor needs a dentist (there being no facilities for dealing with dental care on the TARDIS, nor even any painkillers, despite being a craft capable of travelling in four dimensions), so at their very next stop, they must seek one out. Our time travellers just happen to land in Tombstone, Arizona, shortly before the shootout between the Earps and the Clantons. Four episodes of horses and nooses and gunplay and dusty shot glasses are sure to follow, a feeling not diminished by the ever-present saloon ballad that kicks in right after the opening title music. And yet, much like the last historical, “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve,” Cotton’s story manages to be not about the events at the O.K. Corral so much as about the Doctor’s belief system, all tied together with a rather clever case of mistaken identity.

For you see, the Clantons are in town, along with a hired gun, to find—and then, as these things tend to happen, to kill—Doc Holliday, who earlier killed a Clanton brother. They’ve never seen Doc Holliday before, but they know of his fondness for liquor and gambling, so they wait for their prey to make himself known in the Last Chance Saloon. When Dodo and Steven enter the saloon to secure lodging for the night (needing a break from the bedrooms in the TARDIS, I suppose), they happen to mention the Doctor. The Clantons put two and two together to get five, assuming that they mean Doc Holliday, the first time in the series that the Doctor’s moniker has put him into real danger.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has his aching tooth extracted by Doc Holliday, who has that very day opened a dental surgery in Tombstone. Holliday gets wind of the Clantons’ intentions and, more importantly, their misapprehension, and frames the Doctor, giving him a gun belt and a revolver with Holliday’s brand engraved on it, claiming the Doctor’s just not dressed right without it. When the Clantons kill the Doctor, they’ll assume they killed Holliday.

Upon entering the Last Chance Saloon, the Doctor is quickly surrounded by the Clantons. The Doctor knows his American folk history (he’s a big fan of the era, apparently) and knows he’s in a spot of bother. Despite his protestations, the Clantons are sure they’ve got the right Doc. The Doctor draws Holliday’s revolver and the Clantons’ hired gun falls to the ground, shot. Holliday took the shot from a hidden vantage point, allowing the Doctor and Steven to disarm the Clantons. But how is the Doctor, a confirmed proponent of non-violence, to survive in an era and locale where bullets, not words, solve almost all disputes?

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I’m not sure that I like these clowns!

As we near the end of Doctor Who‘s third season, the Doctor and his intrepid companions have confronted many foes since in 1963: dastardly Daleks, malicious Monoids, tetchy Trojans, and an aggressive Animus, to name a few. So perhaps we can forgive whoever commissioned Brian Hayles to provide the Doctor with his most frightful opponents yet in “The Celestial Toymaker” (Story Production Code Y)—clowns. And also an overgrown schoolboy, characters from a pantomime, and some living playing cards.

In fairness, the notion of the Doctor meeting an immortal gamemaster, the eponymous Celestial Toymaker, who seeks to entrap the Doctor for all time as a worthy opponent, sounds quite promising. With his mind alone, the Toymaker (Michael Gough) has the power to affect the TARDIS and the Doctor himself, making him a more dangerous foe than any the Doctor has yet met. And, more to the point, the Doctor has met him before and escaped.

While most of the stories to this point have featured lead-outs from the prior story, providing a thin narrative continuity, “The Celestial Toymaker” continues referring to the events on “The Ark” for a good portion of the first episode. The Toymaker has the ability to make the Doctor disappear and become intangible, changes taken at first to be linked the similarly incorporeal Refusians. It’s not until the Doctor realizes that he is confronting the Toymaker that he definitively dismisses the notion that the Refusians are involved:

Well, I don’t think it was the Refusians’ influence that made me become intangible. No! I think it was something here, and I don’t like the feel of the place any more than you do, but, ah, we have to face up to it. You know, I think I was meant to come here.

The Toymaker seems to have the measure of the Doctor. He realized that getting the Doctor out of the TARDIS was a simple matter of blanking the screens, knowing that his insatiable curiosity would lead him to investigate. And the Doctor, for his part, acknowledges that the Toymaker is a notorious figure who lures unwary travelers to his realm in order to trap them, for his own amusement. The Toymaker does seem to adhere to a particular set of rules, however, and he offers the Doctor, Steven, and Dodo the chance to escape, by winning his games, albeit games tilted to his favor.

A battle of wits between old foes should be in the offing; instead, we get electrified hopscotch and two episodes of a disembodied hand playing Solitaire. Oh, yes, and the clowns.

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Remember your journey is very important, young man. Therefore, you must travel with understanding as well as hope.

No sooner do we see Dodo running into the TARDIS than we see her running back out, into a jungle. In a spaceship. With an elephant. Wearing medieval clothing. (Dodo, not the elephant.) All watched over by a single-eyed humanoid creature. Paul Erickson and Lesley Scott waste no time getting the narrative going in “The Ark” (Story Production Code X), cutting from a lushly realized jungle setting to a futuristic control room, where a human judge wearing flip-flops sentences an unmindful technician to the punishment of seven hundred years of miniaturization for having failed to pay attention to a gauge. And did we mention the elephant?

“The Ark” exists in full on film, and happily so. Director Michael Imison and crew put together a quite lavish studio production, with wonderful high angle shots and detailed sets. There’s a panning shot that catches a moving snake on a tree for no more than half a second—even the elephant serves as little more than a quick prop to establish the profusion of Earth wildlife contained inside the giant generation ship our travellers find themselves on. I can only imagine the effort taken to get an elephant into the studio. Careful placement of trees and doors, accentuated by weaving camera work, further provides a sense of space and dimension, allowing the setting to become a character in its own right, one arguably more interesting than the other characters we meet in this four-episode story.

The Doctor quickly realizes that they have landed in no ordinary jungle, noting the odd combination of wildlife but mostly because, as he tells Steven, “it’s a jungle with a steel sky!” He further determines that the jungle floor vibrates slightly, but before he can explore further, he and his companions are captured by the human Guardians and their servants/slaves, the mute Monoids. A brief expository interlude fills in the gaps in our knowledge: the Earth is dying, roughly ten million years in the future, and being left “for the last time,” with all of Earth’s humans and a sampling of the wildlife on board a generation ship bound for the distant planet Refusis Two (a planet name one might expect from Terry Nation). Most of the humans and Monoids have been miniaturized for the generations-long journey, due to be completed in seven hundred years.

For so advanced an era, though, much knowledge has been lost through war and general decay. Rather than using some form of automation, the few non-miniaturized humans who serve as the giant ship’s crew rely on the Monoids as servants, even though preparing food takes little more effort than dropping a pill in water. They know little about the planet they’ve set their sights on colonizing, and frankly plan on annihilating the indigenous inhabitants on landing if they put up a fuss.

Not very advanced, then—more caretakers of tradition than technology—but still, all seems well and good. The Commander of the spaceship, which Dodo christens the Ark, seems content that the Doctor and friends mean no harm, despite some misgivings by the Deputy Commander, and our intrepid adventurers about to return to the TARDIS when Dodo sneezes. And causes a plague.

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