doctor who project – Page 4

Doctor Who Project: Frontios

August 26, 2024December 2, 2023 by Chris Baer

I think this joke’s gone far enough.

The degree to which Doctor Who has changed since Peter Davison took on the title role can best be seen through the lens of Christopher H. Bidmead’s “Frontios” (Story Production Code 6N), given the extent to which this story, by a former series script editor during Tom Baker’s run, feels completely out of sync with the tone and tenor of the Fifth Doctor’s past two seasons. As with Bidmead’s last script, “Castrovalva,” the Fifth Doctor’s inaugural story, “Frontios” is as much about creating a deep and rich world as it is about how the Doctor deals with the narrative dilemmas created by the same. There’s little to no character development across the four episodes on offer here, no room for the Doctor or his companions to reflect or pause; every scene pushes the action forward or establishes the complex setting, filled as it is with multiple speaking guest stars and a veritable mob of extras. And that’s even before Bidmead introduces the pillbug-like Tractators, the most alien-seeming creatures since the Menoptra from “The Web Planet,” strange precisely because of their vague familiarity and slow, dance-like movements (and, like the Menoptra, played by dancers rather than actors).

Everything about “Frontios” suggests grandeur, with several large, elaborate sets depicting a wrecked colony ship and an extensive tunnel system, all effectively filmed by veteran director Ron Jones to create a palpable sense of size and scope. Even the narrative setup, with the TARDIS triggering a temporal “boundary error” alarm as it enters the Veruna system in the far future, home to the sole surviving human outpost after the Earth is destroyed by its sun, bespeaks a tendency to set the stakes as high as possible. This is, to put it plainly, Fourth Doctor stuff—the last of this, the first of that, the end of the entire human species—for real this time. The Fifth Doctor has certainly confronted major crises, having averted the destruction of Earth in the 21st century just two stories before, but the scale of his confrontations has always leaned towards the intimate, the intricate. Not so “Frontios,” where the Doctor employs his words for deception and humor in a sweeping manner rather than diplomacy and empathy on an individual level.

A powerful gravity beam pulls the TARDIS to the site where, forty years prior, a colony ship from Earth crashed on the planet Frontios in mysterious circumstances. The Doctor wants nothing to do with the situation, emphasizing that the Time Lords forbid him to intervene with such a delicate pivot in time, but seeing people wounded by a meteorite bombardment that coincides with the blue box’s forced landing causes him to stay and help. He, Tegan, and Turlough quickly find themselves accused of helping to perpetuate an invasion of the planet, in league with the unknown force that has been saturating the colony site with space rocks for thirty years. Led by the callow Plantagenet (Jeff Rawle), son of the original expedition leader, Captain Revere, the colony teeters on the brink of extinction, with people mysteriously vanishing; eager to establish his command after the recent death of his father, the youngster prepares to have the Doctor executed, but neither the Time Lord nor the audience really notices. Bidmead, with the approval if not outright urging or instigation of producer John Nathan-Turner, goes where no story has gone before: he destroys the TARDIS…

Doctor Who Project: The Awakening

December 2, 2023November 2, 2023 by Chris Baer

It’s a living history.

Of all the many changes producer John Nathan-Turner brought to Doctor Who, the regular appearance of the two-episode story structure stands as one of the most successful. Forced by necessity to strip down the story to its basics, the writers for the two-part tales have consistently turned in taut, if not always coherent, narratives, and Eric Pringle’s “The Awakening” (Story Production Code 6M) stands as no exception. From the very start of the story, with a contemporary figure being menaced by Cavaliers on horseback, Pringle plays with the notions of temporal fluidity that are at the heart of Doctor Who—if the Time Lords can travel through time, so can other beings and forces, a plot device used frequently in the early days of the series but seldom evoked by the time Peter Davison dons the Fifth Doctor’s mantle.

The local magistrate, Sir George Hutchinson (Denis Lill) explains to the flustered schoolteacher, Jane Hampden (Polly James), that he and his fellows are merely re-enacting the events of the English Civil War, and that it’s all simply a bit of fun that the entire village has decided to participate in, except for her. Once they have simulated the final epic battle fought in village of Little Hodcombe between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads in 1643, all will go back to normal. It’s an interesting twist, as the viewer has been conditioned by the very nature of Doctor Who to accept, and indeed expect, the very real possibility that the figures had somehow appeared in 1984 from out of the past.

By virtue of lovely narrative happenstance, Tegan’s grandfather, the historian Andrew Verney (Frederick Hall), lives in Little Hodcombe, and the Fifth Doctor brings the TARDIS to town for a visit at the very same time as Sir George’s men are rounding up Roundhead stragglers. But instead of materializing normally, an unexpected energy field forces the blue box into the crumbling crypt of the long-abandoned local church. While heading to the village, the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough find themselves waylaid by the wanna-be Cavaliers, who forcibly escort them to Hutchinson. The magistrate’s demeanor turns from conciliatory to vindictive once Tegan mentions her grandfather, with Sir George ordering them to be held under guard.

Jane Hampden, along with the viewer, realizes not all is quite as it seems; the participants in the wargames, with the exception of Ben Wolsey (Glyn Houston), take proceedings with an earnestness that borders on the maniacal, treating the fighting as real. Once our time travellers inevitably escape, they split up, the better for Tegan and Turlough to get caught before the end of the first episode. The Doctor, having returned to the church, finds himself buffeted by phantom sounds of combat, then sees a roughly-clothed young man tear through a weak brick wall. Named Will Chandler (Keith Jayne), the lad is trying to escape the battle raging outside the church—in 1643. Some further narrow escapes, this time with Jane, now also on the run from Sir George, sees the three confronted, in proper end-of-episode fashion, by the source of all this confusion, the giant face of the Malus…

Doctor Who Project: Warriors of the Deep

November 2, 2023October 2, 2023 by Chris Baer

You must decide, Doctor.

As Season Twenty-One dawns—and with Peter Davison entering his final stories as the Fifth Doctor—producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward continue their policy of serving up deep cuts from Doctor Who‘s history, enlisting Johnny Byrne to dredge up the “Warriors of the Deep” (Story Production Code 6L), catching in the narrative net not one but two long dormant foes: the Silurians and their aquatic kin, the Sea Devils. Last seen during the Third Doctor’s run, these prehistoric reptilian rulers of Earth occupy a delicate space in the Doctor’s past; far from being mindless monsters or craven conquerers, they hold legitimate claim to co-existence with the “ape primitives” whose descendants came to rule the planet. Twice, in “Doctor Who and the Silurians” and “The Sea Devils,” the Doctor has attempted to bring about a truce between the humans and Silurian-kind, and twice he has presided instead over their destruction. Of his many regrets, the case can be made that these are the Doctor’s most keenly felt failings.

But Doctor Who has changed appreciably since, with the kind of moral nuance seen during Jon Pertwee’s turn as the Third Doctor giving way to a breezier, more rollicking and less ambiguous style by the time Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor steps from the stage. The overarching question for “Warriors of the Deep” is whether Byrne’s four-episode script can honor the duty owed to the Silurians by the Doctor while fitting Nathan-Turner’s requirements for contemporary Doctor Who, particularly given that both prior stories unfolded leisurely over six episodes, the better to balance action and adventure with diplomacy and discussion.

There’s no mystery as to the putative antagonists of “Warriors of the Deep,” with the Silurians revealed within the first ninety seconds after the title sequence fades from the screen. Their well-realized underwater battlecruiser plays cat and mouse with the scanners of Sea Base 4, crewed by a vaguely British military force whose uniforms and general base aesthetic owe a substantive stylistic debt to Space: 1999, with stark white techno-cool walls and color block attire. Set in 2084, exactly a hundred years from story’s first broadcast date, these soldiers represent one of two dominant political blocs on the planet, each ready to annihilate the other with “proton” missiles launched from underwater bases.

The Silurians’ motivation, however, remains initially unclear, as they first focus intently on reviving their Sea Devil brethren, entombed for “hundreds of years” after their hibernation process went awry. At this point, though, it becomes clear that a scrupulous adherence to the previously established, “canonical” Silurian/Sea Devil timeline will take a second place to the narrative needs of Byrne’s story. If the Sea Devils’ travails link directly to the Third Doctor having destroyed their underwater lair circa 1975—UNIT story dating being its own minefield—when his attempts to parley with them fail, caused equally by the Master’s conniving and the humans’ fear-based attack on their base, then scarcely a hundred years have passed, at odds with the stated passage of time. A minor quibble, to be sure, and one quickly forgiven by any devoted viewers who might notice, given that Silurians and Sea Devils finally appear on screen together for the first time…

Doctor Who Project: The Five Doctors

October 2, 2023September 2, 2023 by Chris Baer

Splendid fellows, all of you.

For a series about time travel, Doctor Who focuses on its own past almost as much as the historical past. From Season Eighteen on, under producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward, continuity references, those canonical recollections of various events and dramatis personae, have come to predominate, sometimes to the detriment of the storylines and befuddling more casual viewers who can’t tell an Omega from an Ogron. When faced with a marquee event such as the twentieth anniversary of Doctor Who, then, the danger is that the self-referential aspects will predominate, overwhelming the plot with a long string of cameos and call-backs. Thankfully, veteran Doctor Who hand Terrance Dicks provides “The Five Doctors” (Story Production Code 6K) with a script that neatly balances reverential appreciation of the series’ long tenure with a genuinely well-paced story that creates just as many memorable moments as it summons up from the show’s history.

Airing as a single ninety-minute episode on November 25, 1983, two days past the actual twentieth anniversary of the initial episode of “An Unearthly Child” first appearing on screens throughout the UK, “The Five Doctors” brings all five of the Doctor’s incarnations together in a story that plays to their individual strengths while still respecting the primacy of the current inhabitant of the role, Peter Davison. Well, sort of all five, with Richard Hundall standing in as the First Doctor for William Hartnell, who died some eight years earlier in 1975, and Tom Baker being represented solely through clips from “Shada,” which remained uncompleted and unaired due to industrial action at the end of Season Seventeen. Baker withdrew from active participation after originally agreeing to appear, but as much as it would have been nice to see that curly mop of hair back in action as the Fourth Doctor, his absence gives more room for Hundall, Patrick Troughton, and Jon Pertwee to strut their stuff upon the crowded stage.

Dicks’ story breaks very little new ground, being ultimately a rehash of “Arc of Infinity,” with its focus on Gallifreyan politics, and, curiously, the much maligned “Time-Flight” and “Death to the Daleks” in the exploration of an ancient—and lethally guarded—sanctum by the Doctor(s) and companions. His structuring of the story, though, contrives to keep the first three Doctors separate, each having been kidnapped, along with a companion, by a “time scoop” and deposited into a different part of the subtly-named Death Zone on Gallifrey, home of the long-abandoned Game of Rassilon that saw “lesser” beings forced to fight to the death. The Fourth Doctor and Romana (Lalla Ward), meanwhile, are plucked from punting the River Cam and trapped in the Vortex by a failed time scoop, the better to sideline them for the entirety of the story.

The Fifth Doctor painfully suffers the loss of each of his prior selves as they are removed from the time stream, and as he slips in and out of consciousness, he sets the TARDIS to find them. The blue box takes him, Tegan (Janet Fielding), and Turlough (Mark Strickson) to “nowhere, in no time,” in the latter’s words, a fine description of the Death Zone, which itself is a foggy plain of rocks, dominated by the Dark Tower, host to the Tomb of Rassilon. The scene, replete with the Third Doctor’s beloved Bessie driving down dusty slate-lined roads, very much calls to mind the antimatter world from the tenth anniversary story, “The Three Doctors,” and in truth, could any celebration of twenty years of Doctor Who fail to feature a quarry?…

Doctor Who Project: The King’s Demons

September 2, 2023August 2, 2023 by Chris Baer

Arise, Sir Doctor.

The TARDIS, according to the founding mythology of Doctor Who, was to be a vehicle with which to teach history; the Doctor, two schoolteachers, and a precocious teenage student were to travel in time to various historical settings, educating and exciting viewers in equal measure. The Daleks aside, the first several seasons bear out that emphasis, but eventually the “historical” became a rarely used device, as monsters and mayhem came to predominate. Why have mad Nero fiddling when you can have the Dalek emperor exploding? Under producer John Nathan-Turner, the historical begins to make something of a comeback during Peter Davison’s run as the Fifth Doctor, exemplified by Terence Dudley’s “The King’s Demons” (Story Production Code 6J) a two-episode story that serves as an A-level refresher course in British history, focusing as it does on a day in the life of King John (Gerald Flood).

Materializing suddenly during a joust between King John’s champion, Sir Gilles, and Hugh (Christopher Villiers) the impetuous son of Ranulf Fitzwilliam (Frank Windsor), the TARDIS causes horses to rear and peasants to fear, but the King greets this “blue engine” with surprising equanimity, welcoming the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough as his “demons” and providing them seats beside him to witness the resumption of the trial by combat. The French knight with the dodgy accent and even more dodgy facial makeup vanquishes his young foe, and only the Doctor’s pleas to the king spare Hugh’s life, after which everyone returns to Ranulf’s castle for a feast in honor of his highness.

Director Tony Virgo and the production staff raid the BBC’s costume and props stocks, creating an effective medieval atmosphere, with lingering shots of feasting tables piled high with roast beast, extended lute jam sessions, and panoramas of castle walls and crenelations. With only two episodes to work with, though, this scene-setting takes time perhaps better served by plot development—except that, to a real extent, the setting is the narrative, to a degree not seen since, well, “The Crusade” some eighteen years prior. The date of the story plays a significant role: March 4, 1215, the day King John took the Crusader’s oath and three months before he agreed to Magna Carta.

The Doctor, then, knows that King John should be in London on this day, not antagonizing a rural lord’s household for more money and men for the Crusades. Tegan doesn’t seem moved, even though she knows the basic story of King John’s life, but her seeming indifference points out just how beholden this story is on a thorough understanding of King John, specifically his reputation as something of a villain, who, along with his brothers, Henry II and Richard I, was scurrilously claimed to have been beholden to devils and demons. Contemporary viewers were expected to fill in the gaps in the narrative here and realize the significance of King John offering a seat at his table to those he himself calls “demons,” though Dudley, ostensibly with the aid of script editor Eric Saward, make sure to sketch in a few details for those not steeped in Angevin lore.

Quite quickly, given the short runtime of this story, the Doctor figures out that this king seems off somehow, with the arrival of Ranulf’s cousin, Geoffrey (Michael J. Jackson) from London where he just took the Crusader’s oath with King John confirming that an impostor stalks Fitzwilliam castle. After a duel of honor with Sir Gilles, in which the Doctor displays quite effective swordsmanship, the French knight is revealed to be, yes, Anthony Ainley in thick makeup, to absolutely no one’s surprise. The Master’s real revelation comes later, when the Doctor discovers the truth behind bad King John…

Doctor Who Project: Enlightenment

August 2, 2023July 2, 2023 by Chris Baer

They’ve hoisted their moonrakers.

Every so often, Doctor Who gets back to the essence of what makes it such a special series. It’s not the monsters or the special effects or even the main character, as appealing as those elements often are; rather, it’s the sense of wonder that only a show unmoored in time and space (and often reality) can provide. Barbara Clegg’s “Enlightenment” (Story Production Code 6H) returns Doctor Who to what it does best, juxtaposing the familiar with the outlandish, the expected with the dissonant, and the commonplace with the clever, all wrapped up in a neat four-episode package. If viewers had to suffer the conflict between the Black Guardian and White Guardian being shoehorned into the past two stories, “Enlightenment” pays off the toil with one of the strongest outings of the Fifth Doctor’s run.

Producer John Nathan-Turner teams up new series writer Barbara Clegg—the first woman to write for the series in its nearly twenty year history—with veteran series director Fiona Cumming to provide a visually fascinating and narratively complex tale of boredom, eternity, creativity, and, um, pirates in space. After the Doctor receives a garbled warning from the White Guardian, the TARDIS lands of its own accord in the hold of a vessel that is, to all appearances, an Edwardian-era racing yacht, replete with a complement of jack tars slinging period-appropriate slang. The entirety of the first episode sets up the belief that the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough have travelled back in time, a reasonable assumption for the audience to make given the show’s typical modus operandi, with the BBC’s extensive historical costume wardrobe on full display to heighten the verisimilitude.

Only when our heroes have been rounded up by the apparently omniscent Captain Striker (Keith Barron) and First Mate Marriner (Christopher Brown) do Clegg and Cumming begin to peel back the veil; the ship, the SS Shadow, is indeed what it seems, a period-appropriate yacht crewed by humans from the early 1900s, engaged in a race with other ships. It just so happens that the race takes place around the planets in Earth’s solar system; the competitor vessels hail from all eras of human sailing history, captained by beings who call themselves Eternals.

It’s a delightfully clever confounding of viewer expectations, but the effort expended in selling the “reality” of the setting, to say nothing of the show’s proclivity to take the Doctor and companions into Earth’s history, provides an actual moment of frisson, a pleasing shock that makes the cliffhanger of sail-powered ships against a starry background, spinnakers at full billow, as stunning as any Dalek popping up on cue at the end of an episode. So much of Doctor Who under producer John Nathan-Turner has been dedicated to rewarding viewers who pay attention to the nuances and details; this use of the series’ coded patterns, its history as a narrative construct as opposed to its lore, to flip the proverbial script on the audience stands as a far better use of two decades of stories than any call back to a brief moment in a nearly-forgotten episode.

There’s little danger of “Enlightenment” being forgotten, particularly given the strength of the guest cast. Barron and Brown, playing the bored Eternals Striker and Marriner, imbue their roles with a wan disinterest, the peregrinations of the Ephemerals all around them, the Doctor included, but fleeting annoyances. In truth, as the Doctor and Tegan discover, the Eternals, who exist outside of time itself, require the thoughts of those who exist within time’s flow in order to fill an emptiness of meaning in themselves. They have limitless power but no fulcrum with which to lever it into motion. The race, carried out with a scrupulous adherence to rules of authenticity, seeks to resolve that dilemma by offering the victor nothing short of enlightenment, “The wisdom which knows all things and which will enable me to achieve what I desire most,” according to Striker. It is this prize the White Guardian (Cyril Luckham, reprising the role from Season Sixteen) has warned the Doctor about, leading to the Time Lord’s attempt to stop any of the participants from gaining this goal. It seems, however, that the Doctor has met his match, not in the Black Guardian (Valentine Dyall) but in Wrack (Lynda Baron), the Eternal captain of a pirate sloop who plays her role to the hilt…