doctor who

Though we know you only as a record in our charts of space and time, yet you seem to us like an old friend.

It’s not often that the Doctor is expected. Typically he turns up as an uninvited guest at best—and a meddlesome pest in need of eradication at worst—or else, as in “The Celestial Toymaker,” he is plucked from the time-space continuum against his will. Yet in Ian Stuart Black’s “The Savages” (Production Code AA), the highly advanced civilization where the Doctor, Dodo, and Steven land has been tracking the TARDIS and eagerly awaits his arrival. Very shortly, however, the Doctor turns into said meddlesome pest.

From the start of the four episode story, we see the central conceit at work: this highly civilized planet is also home to the eponymous Savages, whose spear-and-loin-cloth costume and speech patterns stand at odds with the funky helmets and futuristic stylings of the Elders and those who live in the City, where art and culture and scientific discovery reign supreme. Not much narrative effort is spent providing a cohesive back history for this planet—the City has no name, nor does the planet, and no dates are given. But quickly, we realize that not all is as it seems in this utopia. How could it be with those helmets?

The Doctor is at first warmly welcomed by the Elders, who have studied his travels through space and time and plotted his eventual arrival. “You are known to us as the Traveller from Beyond Time,” proclaims Exorse, one of the City’s guards, upon greeting the Doctor in the scrubland beyond the City walls. (Given that the Doctor cannot at this point direct the TARDIS in any direction at all, he somehow manages to conceal his wonder at their ability to do so.) The Elders wish to learn from the Doctor, even granting him a position as an honorary Elder. The Doctor seems eager to share his knowledge, as he too is aware of this civilization, apparently reputed far and wide for its advancement, but first he wants to understand how they have built this remarkable civilization.

The head Elder, Jano, tells the Doctor that they harness “only a very special form of animal vitality” to give new power to members of their community who are in need of it, forever keeping them full of energy. This “one simple discovery” has allowed them to create a miraculous civilization.

Dodo, in her customary function as plot device, gets separated from the guides showing her and Steven around the City and follows a secret passage to the laboratory where the truth is revealed: Animal Vitality is People!

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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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Even after all this time he cannot understand. I dare not change history.

Early Doctor Who specialized in the “historical” story, in keeping with its original remit as an educational show and, indeed, as a means of leveraging the BBC’s enormous investment in period costumes, sets, and actors. By the middle of the third season, the show had already visited prehistoric times, Kublai Khan’s China, the Aztec empire, revolutionary France, Nero’s Rome, the Crusades, and mythological Greece, not to mention Britain in various times and places. But is an historical Doctor Who story actually an “historical” if no one knows the history involved?

In John Lucarotti’s “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve” (Story Production Code W), the Doctor and Steven arrive in sixteenth century France just outside of Paris, fresh from the deaths of pseudo-companions Sara Kingdom and Katarina—though notably the story does not make mention of those events. One might have expected lighter fare after the dark ending of the prior story, but instead we are treated to the eponymous massacre of Protestants by Catholics in Paris and surroundings in 1572. Even for contemporary viewers, the history on display here is not considered common knowledge. Lucarotti spends several scenes establishing the animosity between Protestants and Catholics in the era, ostensibly for Steven’s benefit, as he is as lost as the viewer. Prior historicals never spent this much explicit effort setting the stage for events.

The effect mirrors the kind of exposition one finds in stories taking place in far futures, where, say, the conflict between the Sensorites and the humans needs to be explicated for the plot to function. There’s a tension in this story that is lacking in the other historicals—while the title hints at what is to come, the viewer’s own historical knowledge doesn’t fill in the gaps in the same way that the presence of Nero guarantees that Rome is going to burn by the final episode. Thus, there’s a real uncertainty as to the target of the assassination plot by Catherine de Medici revealed early in the story: is it King Charles of France, the Protestant prince Navarre, a member of the court? The end result is the most compelling of the historicals to date, mostly because the Doctor doesn’t actually do anything at all in the whole story.

Lucarotti’s story features less of the Doctor than any other story to date (though not less of William Hartnell), as our time traveller is absent from the middle two episodes, leaving lone companion Steven to carry the narrative burden, which Peter Purves carries off nicely. Steven could have avoided all the trouble in the story, though, if the Doctor had given him sous instead of golden écu.

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