doctor who project – Movement Point

Doctor Who Project: Mindwarp

January 2, 2025 by Chris Baer

I endeavour to maintain a certain continuity.

Continuity stands as the primary problem with Doctor Who by its twenty-third season. Long-time producer John Nathan-Turner and equally long-serving script editor Eric Saward take pains to ensure that the Doctor’s weekly adventures not only reflect an awareness of the Time Lord’s nearly 150 prior stories but also refer to them whenever possible, rewarding those devoted viewers who will surely complain should a relevant canonical aside be skipped—or worse, be misconstrued. But those fans with knowledge of the Doctor’s entire history make up a steadily dwindling percentage of the possible audience, and more casual viewers, those vital to the series’ continued success, often feel like they’re entering a conversation they don’t fully comprehend when a call-back to a prior story occurs, especially when it’s not entirely germane to the events on offer.

Sometimes, however, there’s not enough continuity. The decision to present Season Twenty-three as a single fourteen episode story, “The Trial of a Time Lord,” comprised of four tightly interwoven sub-stories, to which Philip Martin’s “Mindwarp” (Story Production Code 7B) contributes episodes five through eight, highlights this dilemma. Viewers who do not watch from the beginning of the story arc need on-ramps to clarify what they might have missed; in theory, the fact that the sub-stories mostly stand on their own should limit what might be missed. Yet Martin’s entry picks up from the events of the first four episodes, “The Mysterious Planet,” with the scantest of recaps, scarcely addressing the most significant plot point introduced by writer Robert Holmes, that of a possible conspiracy on Gallifrey involving the Matrix. “Mindwarp” just assumes that viewers remember that subterfuge, or indeed even why the Doctor is in the dock at all, fighting for his life against the Valeyard (Michael Jayston), jumping headlong instead into the prosecutor’s next piece of evidence in the trial without dwelling on or developing the overall framing device tying the fourteen episodes together.

Doctor Who, it must be noted, has a history of long stories that can confuse viewers jumping in mid-stream—six episodes stories being fairly frequent through to the first half of Tom Baker’s run and the epic “The Daleks’ Master Plan” clocking in at a whopping twelve (or thirteen) episodes—none of which take pains to catch tardy audience members up to speed beyond the traditional cliffhanger reprises. Too, addressing “The Trial of a Time Lord” as its constituent parts is a more recent phenomenon, not in keeping with the experience of the audience at the time, but the lack of an extended recap of the end of “The Mysterious Planet” to start episode five, as would happen in any other story between parts, bespeaks the production team themselves treating the segments as separate narrative entities at the time. For a series attempting to stay alive, then, the lack of emphasis on engaging more casual viewers, perhaps even tuning in just because they saw Brian Blessed’s name in that week’s Radio Times listing for Doctor Who, suggests an overall blindness to the needs of less-than-rabid fans—a failing that has contributed mightily to the series being in its currently precarious state.

“Mindwarp” proper, the “evidence” being shown to the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) and the panel of Time Lords overseeing the Doctor’s trial for incessant interference with other culture and peoples, follows the Doctor and Peri as they land on the pink-tinted planet Thoros-Beta, the source of high-tech weaponry found on a backwater planet. The Doctor seeks to investigate this meddling in the development of a less advanced civilization—the same crime, the Valeyard eagerly notes, of which he himself is accused. Martin immediately leans into the conceit of the story being presented in a courtroom as evidence, with the Inquisitor wondering just why an introductory scene of our time travellers bantering about the TARDIS materializing in water is vital to the trial, leading to events skipping forward, something many a viewer, anxious to get to the action, has doubtless wanted as well.

The Doctor, in that “irrelevant” prologue scene, indicates that they have come to Thoros-Beta because of information received from a “Warlord of Thordon” as he was dying, pointing directly to an off-screen adventure to which the audience is not privy, in effect creating continuity unknown to all viewers, whether they are brand new or have hidden behind the couch since 1963. It’s a contextualized continuity reference, though, lacking the dissonant effect canonical name drops often engender. But the same cannot be said for the main revelation of the first episode, as the news that Thoros-Beta is also home to an oleaginous former foe of the Doctor lands with a thud…

Doctor Who Project: The Mysterious Planet

January 2, 2025December 2, 2024 by Chris Baer

I was beginning to fear you had lost yourself.

Season Twenty-three almost wasn’t to be. In February, 1985, midway through the airing of Season Twenty-two, news broke that the BBC had pulled the plug on the forthcoming season, then already in preparation, owing as much to budget woes as to a general sense of dissatisfaction with the show’s direction and popular reception. Not until December of the same year did Doctor Who get a new lease on life, with the BBC green-lighting a truncated Season Twenty-three consisting of fourteen twenty-five minute episodes stitched together under a single framing narrative, “The Trial of a Time Lord,” putting the Sixth Doctor (and the show itself) in the dock for crimes real and imagined.

The brainchild of longtime script editor Eric Saward, this series of four linked stories—”The Mysterious Planet,” “Mindwarp,” “Terror of the Vervoids,” and “The Ultimate Foe”—presents heretofore unseen events in the Doctor’s past and future as evidence in his trial, with far heavier narrative connections between the parts, written by different authors, than seen in the last thematically linked season, Season Sixteen’s Key to Time arc. The stakes could not be higher, either for the Doctor or for Doctor Who, with nearly eighteen months elapsing since the last time the Doctor appeared on televisions in the UK, in “Revelation of the Daleks” in late March, 1985. Significantly, no repeats of earlier episodes had occurred since then either, the last rerun being “The Five Doctors” in August 1984, this absence itself telling of the series’ regard (or lack thereof) at Television Centre.

Mindful of the need to get it right, producer John Nathan-Turner and Saward turn to veteran hand Robert Holmes for the first four episodes, “The Mysterious Planet” (Series Production Code 7A), returning the Sixth Doctor to the air on September 6, 1986, with a jaunty, revised opening theme. (Of note, the story is presented week-to-week under the rubric “The Trial of a Time Lord,” but most critical discourse has, broadly, settled on addressing the sub-stories by their working titles, corresponding to how the components were commissioned.) After an elaborate effects shot showing the TARDIS being drawn into a space station, Holmes wastes no time establishing the trial framing device, with the Doctor immediately confronting the Valeyard (Michael Jayston), prosecuting the charges against him for the benefit of a panel of Time Lords, presided over by the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham).

The Doctor’s crimes? “Conduct unbecoming a Time Lord” and “transgressing the First Law,” that broad Gallifreyan prohibition against “meddling” in the affairs of other peoples. For those paying attention at home, Holmes takes care to note that the Doctor has been on trial for the same charges before—resolved in the conclusion of “The War Games” which saw the Second Doctor sentenced to exile on Earth after a forced regeneration—and also that the Doctor has been stripped of his title as Lord President, last referenced in “The Five Doctors” and originally established in “The Invasion of Time” some eight years prior. Nathan-Turner and Saward here unravel awkward, narrative-constraining continuity while still referencing it, not unlike having K-9 get wet and short out whenever his ray gun snout would resolve a plot too quickly.

The framing narrative, with a jury of Time Lords watching the Doctor’s adventures on screen just like the audience at home, continues the metatextual self-referential tendency of Season Twenty-two; watching the watchers makes up much of the narrative heft of “Vengeance on Varos” and, to a lesser extent, “Revelation of the Daleks,” with “The Mysterious Planet” pausing the action frequently for the Doctor, the Inquisitor, and the Valeyard to comment incredulously on what has just been seen. The Valeyard explains the footage as deriving from the Matrix, that storehouse of all Time Lord knowledge, fed by the Doctor’s own experiences; a surreptitious surveillance device installed in every TARDIS, including the old Mark 40s, apparently, psychically records other moments outside those witnessed by Time Lords—a rather huge alteration to the Doctor Who canon, with potential ramifications for all future stories and also calling into question many outcomes of past stories, but a change necessary for the frame device to function.

And where do the Doctor’s “criminal” activities take place for this initial segment of his trial? Oh, just a barren little planet called Ravelox, in the Stellian Galaxy, devastated by a fireball that Gallifreyan records contend wiped out all life. Ravelox also happens to be known by a different name as well: Earth…

Doctor Who Project: Revelation of the Daleks

December 2, 2024November 2, 2024 by Chris Baer

Suddenly everyone sees and knows too much!

When in doubt, roll the Daleks out. As Season Twenty-Two of Doctor Who comes to a close, the fate of the series rests in the balance. Producer John Nathan-Turner pulls out all the stops to bring Colin Baker’s debut season to a strong finish by headlining the scourge of Skaros in script editor Eric Saward’s “Revelation of the Daleks” (Story Production Code 6Z). The problem remains, alas, that the Daleks, having been on the losing side of a dozen confrontations with the Doctor over the years, each more feeble than the last, have worn out their welcome; their staccato cries of “Exterminate!” and single-minded devotion to evil lack the ability to captivate the imagination in 1985 they possessed in 1963.

By the Third Doctor’s era, some twelve years prior, the Daleks already are little more than hapless tin cans, their worn-down props in desperate need of refurbishment. Indeed, Davros himself, creator of the Daleks (alongside Terry Nation, to be sure), becomes a mere cipher of the cunning, calculating, amoral foe first seen in the Fourth Doctor’s run, and by the time the Fifth Doctor confronts him in “Resurrection of the Daleks,” Davros exists on a one-dimensional plane, all vitriol and no guile. There’s nothing new under the Skarosian sun…

But somehow, Saward, Nathan-Turner, and director Graeme Harper—helming his second “finale” story after a strong showing with Season Twenty-One’s “The Caves of Androzani“—manage the unthinkable: they make Davros and the Daleks interesting again. True to the story’s title, there’s no hiding them, and scarcely eight minutes pass before the first Dalek, in resplendent white with gold roundels and trim, rolls onto the screen, followed by Davros (Terry Molloy)—or at least his head—spinning around madly, rejoicing that the Doctor has fallen into his trap. Wisely, Saward and company realize that there’s little point in sequestering the perfidious pepperpots until that traditional first episode cliffhanger, particularly given that “Revelation of the Daleks” is the last of the two part, ninety minute stories experimented with this season. No, these Daleks are “revealed” right away, and the audience gains awareness beyond the Doctor’s own, emphasizing that they are watching something happen to him rather than experiencing events alongside him. With few exceptions, it’s only the Doctor who is unaware that Daleks are puttering about, and their matter-of-fact presence, patrolling like robotic rent-a-cops amidst humans, adds greatly to their impact.

The emphasis on seeing the Doctor recurs throughout “Revelation of the Daleks,” which follows “Vengeance on Varos” in casting the audience very explicitly at the center of a panopticon; viewers watch others watch the Sixth Doctor and Peri on screens, much as the audience itself is doing at home, and characters frequently speak upwards towards cameras mounted high on walls in the halls of Tranquil Repose, a cryo-mortuary on Necros, devoted to housing victims of disease in cryogenic suspension until cures can be found for their maladies (a concept very much in vogue in the 1980s). The TARDIS arrives on the snowy plains of this necropolis planet so that our time travellers can attend the “funeral” of Professor Arthur Stengos, a renowned agronomist, and their travel by foot to the mortuary is monitored on a screen by Davros—and also, in an exceedingly jarring subversion of viewer expectations, by a nameless DJ (Alexei Sayle), played here as an amalgamation of Wolfman Jack and any number of stereotyped American personalities, who spins tunes from Earth’s past for the frozen inhabitants of the cryo-catacombs.

The viewer really doesn’t know what to expect, a rare experience on Doctor Who, made more intriguing by rather camp segments involving the vainglorious mortician Jobel (the incomparable Clive Swift, in a role inspired by embalmer Mr. Joyboy from Waugh’s The Loved One) and his blue uniformed cadre of assistants; a highly formalized and heavily stylized agri-factory owner, Kara (Eleanor Bron) in thrall to Davros, who stands in the way of her control of the food supply for the galaxy; plus an attack on the complex by corpse snatchers seeking the very body of Arthur Stengos that the Doctor has arrived to mourn. Combined with tense, almost discordant music courtesy of Roger Limb and exceptional direction by Harper, who employs camera angles shifting from point-of-view to (barely) steady-cam close-ups of action sequences and high, long shots showing off the set work and well chosen location scenes, the overall effect is one of welcome disorientation. This is not, Nathan-Turner seems to shout, your parents’ Doctor Who…

Doctor Who Project: Timelash

November 2, 2024October 2, 2024 by Chris Baer

Purposeful travel, not aimless wanderings.

Though it often feels to viewers that the Doctor’s adventures follow one after the other, significant gaps can be inferred between certain stories on Doctor Who. These lacunae offer fertile ground for writers to explore the ways the Doctor’s previous visits to a place have affected its development; at their best, as in the revelation of the Fourth Doctor’s face carved into a mountainside in “The Face of Evil,” such newly invented past interactions both deepen the stakes of the current narrative and remind viewers of our favorite Gallifreyan’s essentially unknowable history. First time series contributor Glen McCoy employs this device in “Timelash” (Story Production Code 6Y), which draws heavily on the Doctor having visited the planet Karfel in one of those heretofore unknown off-screen jaunts.

Karfel, currently under the dictatorial rule of the mysterious Borad (Robert Ashby/Denis Cary), has seen better days since that last encounter. All reflective objects have been banned, war is in the offing with another world, and a rebellion plots against the Borad, who never appears in person, only on viewscreens, attended solely by his tall, blue-skinned androids (Dean Hollingsworth). Those deemed disloyal suffer exile by means of the Timelash, a temporal corridor that, for reasons quite unexplained, leads back to twelfth century Earth. The Doctor and Peri inadvertently encounter this corridor while planning where to go on holiday, the TARDIS passing through right as Vena (Jeananne Crowley), a Karfelon councilor who has just seen her father killed and fiancé sentenced to exile, jumps into the time stream with a key needed to control all the energy on Karfel. She floats, ghost-like, through the blue box, which has the effect of briefly redirecting the Timelash to nineteenth century Earth—1885, to be precise—landing her with a clunk in the Scottish country home of one Herbert (David Chandler), an aspiring writer (hint) who happens to be conducting a seance at the time.

After the death of Vena’s father at the Borad’s surprisingly scaly hands, the ambitious Tekker (Paul Darrow, the second Blake’s 7 star to appear in as many episodes, after Jacqueline Pearce in “The Two Doctors“) takes over the figurehead leadership mantle of Maylin. He uses the Doctor’s subsequent arrival on Karfel to solve the problem of the missing key, which has vexed the Borad immensely. After the briefest of welcomes, he cajoles the Doctor into retrieving the key from the time corridor by threatening Peri. She, in turn, outwits her android captor and escapes into tunnels inhabited by reptilian creatures known as a Morlox (big hint). Members of the rebellion also hide in the tunnels, and they save her from the beast, in order to kill her as a spy. Peri survives only by name-dropping the Doctor, whose last visit has turned into a myth suppressed by the Borad, and then by correctly identifying Jo Grant’s picture in a locket given to one of the rebel’s grandfathers by the Doctor—the Third Doctor, as a hidden mural later confirms. But no sooner do the rebels spare her than one of the androids finds them.

The Sixth Doctor, meanwhile, calculates the exact moment to which the TARDIS has altered the Timelash’s end point and appears in Herbert’s hut shortly after Vena. Upon realizing that the legendary Doctor has returned to keep his “promise” to Karfel, Vena agrees to help him overthrow the Borad. Herbert, fascinated by the idea of a time machine (hint, hint), sneaks aboard the TARDIS, and the three travel back to Karfel posthaste. Tekker secures the amulet as soon as they arrive and orders an android to toss the Time Lord into the Timelash, after gloating at the Doctor’s naivety. And that’s just the first of two forty-five minute episodes…

Doctor Who Project: The Two Doctors

October 2, 2024September 2, 2024 by Chris Baer

My companion is not for sale!

Nostalgia carries a weight out of proportion to its actual heft, and no story in Doctor Who demonstrates the siren song of the past so clearly as Robert Homes’ “The Two Doctors” (Story Production Code 6W), bringing together Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor alongside Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor in three forty-five minute episodes stuffed with Sontarans, space stations, Spain, and a Scottish accent courtesy of Frazer Hines’ Jamie. The success (and publicity) of the recent “The Five Doctors“—originally to have been written by Holmes before Terrance Dicks took over the scripting duties for various and sundry reasons—almost certainly helps drive producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward’s desire to have Troughton and Hines return yet again to a show which, between the airing of the second and third episodes of “The Two Doctors” in late February 1985, finally receives its cancellation notice.

The axe doesn’t quite take this time around, leading instead to the odd structuring of the forthcoming Season Twenty-Three, but the incessant threat of impending doom leading up to this near demise must be seen as a factor in the constant recycling of old friends and foes alike, with several stories penned by trusted hands from the series’ past, such as Holmes, and four of the six stories in Season Twenty-Two featuring returning characters from Doctor Who‘s greatest hits collection. But upon seeing the Second Doctor and Jamie, initially shot in black and white before shifting to color, one cannot deny a sense of immediate delight. Nostalgia tugs at the hardest of hearts, after all, especially when two hearts are involved.

Nearly ten minutes elapse from the beginning of the story to the first appearance of the Sixth Doctor and Peri, with the opening scenes devoted to the Second Doctor and Jamie, who have arrived at Space Station Camera on an errand from the Time Lords. The dating here is fuzzy; the characters obviously have aged along with the actors, though this concern was entirely ignored in “The Five Doctors,” but given the reference to having dropped Victoria off to study graphology, the events here ostensibly occur between “The Evil of the Daleks” and “Fury from the Deep” from the perspective of the Second Doctor, that being the range of Victoria’s TARDIS tenure.

For the second story in a row (though “The Mark of the Rani” comes after “The Two Doctors” in terms of production dates), a group of incredible intellects serves as the initial locus of the action, with Space Station Camera, a pure research facility funded by the Third Zone governments and led by Joinson Dastari (Laurence Payne, channeling a somewhat glam Karl Lagerfeld), hosting the scientists Kartz and Reimer, whose time travel experiments have drawn the ire of the Time Lords. The Second Doctor, as an exile, is dispatched by Gallifrey to unofficially express their displeasure at this tinkering with the time continuum, but scarcely before he can finish haranguing Dastari, the Sontarans attack the station. Their assault is aided, for reasons initially unexplained, by Chessene (Jacqueline Pearce, better known as Servalan on Blake’s 7), a technologically augmented “Androgum” bio-engineered to “mega-genius level” by Dastari.

The appearance of the spherical Sontaran battle cruisers comes with little fanfare, as though the mere mention of the Sontaran threat should resonate with the audience. As has been typical of Nathan-Turner and Saward’s aegis, however, they forget that not everyone has a well-worn copy of Jean-Marc Lofficier’s two volume Target Programme Guide or Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration at hand. This menacing foe last appeared some seven years previously, in “The Invasion of Time,” where the Fourth Doctor fed them to carnivorous plants that just happen to grow in the TARDIS’ arboretum. They’re hardly household names in 1985. For those who caught the sole airings of the three prior Sontaran stories, the sight of a gloved, three-fingered hand holding a ray-gun stick brings a frisson of knowing pleasure; for everyone else, as with the Silurians and Sea Devils in “Warriors of the Deep,” it’s just another made-up word in a story rife with technobabble and typically dense Holmes-ian world building. Indeed, so little significance is placed on the revelation of the Sontarans—strangely, given that Holmes himself debuted them in “The Time Warrior“—that the first time viewers see one in full on screen (Varl, played by Tim Raynham), he is standing in the Spanish sun, in a villa just outside Seville…

Doctor Who Project: The Mark of the Rani

September 2, 2024August 2, 2024 by Chris Baer

It’ll be something devious and overcomplicated.

Every great hero comes matched to an equally great adversary: Holmes and Moriarty, Superman and Lex Luthor, Tom and Jerry, Kirk and Khan. For the Doctor, that iconic foe, that near-platonic opposite, comes not in the form the Daleks or the Cybermen, worthy opponents though they may be, but in the Master, the renegade Time Lord gifted with all the Doctor’s own advantages, from intellect to regeneration to a TARDIS. Their duels hold legendary status in Doctor Who, but also show a decidedly one-way record of victories in favor of Gallifrey’s favorite son, making for rousing storytelling but rather anticlimactic narratives. Pip and Jane Baker, established British TV writers penning their first of several Doctor Who tales, introduce a complication to the usual pas de deux in “The Mark of the Rani” (Story Production Code 6X), adding the Rani (Kate O’Mara), an amoral, exiled Time Lord, into the mix with their two episode, ninety-minute story, turning the typically double-sided affair into a Time Lord triangle. She doesn’t like either of them one bit, and the feeling is mutual all the way around.

A brilliant chemist, the Rani sets up shop in a Victorian mining town during the tumult of the Luddite riots, draining a brain fluid from miners who think they are going for a bath after a long shift; the chemical activates the brain’s sleep centers, and without it the victims turn into rambunctious, hyperactive louts whose behavior can be attributed to the machine-mashing Luddites, allowing her scheme to go unnoticed. (Her need for the chemical is off-handedly attributed to a planet she rules, where her biological tinkering with the inhabitants has prevented them from sleeping.) The setting, filmed partly on location at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust in Shropshire, plays to the BBC’s talent for clothing extras in period costume, and the sheer number of sartorially accurate people director Sarah Hellings has running around the streets and mineworks of Ironbridge’s preserved Victorian town in the opening minutes sells the reality of the time and place wonderfully, as well as if not better than any of Doctor Who‘s other “historical” stories.

If we’re in Earth’s past and the Master (Anthony Ainley) is involved, then odds remain good that he’s seeking, in Peri’s words, to “pervert history” in order to bend the planet to his will. An assemblage of geniuses, gathering at the behest of George Stephenson, one of the main sparks of the incipient Industrial Revolution, provides the Master with the opportunity to shape the course of events on Earth to create “the platform for the most devastating power in the universe,” answering only to him. The regenerating elephant in the room, the little matter of the Master’s seeming demise in “Planet of Fire,” is brushed past with a quick quip: “I’m indestructible. The whole universe knows that.” And, as ever with the Master, he cannot simply enact his plan, instead drawing the Doctor’s TARDIS off-course so that he might get his revenge on his nemesis as well. As events transpire, revenge may be a dish best served cold, but the Master keeps dropping it on the way to the table.

The Sixth Doctor and Peri thus appear on the scene, with Peri already dressed for a trip to Kew Gardens in the same era, the Master’s efforts changing only the physical, rather than temporal, location of the TARDIS’ landing spot. Before long they intervene in an attack by the Rani’s victims on a cart transporting machinery to George Stephenson (Gawn Grainger). The assailants all have a garish red circular mark on their neck from the Rani’s experiment, the eponymous Mark of the Rani, which draws the Doctor’s interest keenly. They set into town to meet Stephenson, with the Doctor eventually figuring out that the bath house is at the center of it all. So he decides to scruffy himself up and take a dip…