rewatching

My theories appall you, my heresies outrage you, I never answer letters, and you don’t like my tie.

Doctor Who under producer John Nathan-Turner draws heavily on the concept of the Doctor’s long life, filled with adventures that the audience knows nothing about; these lacunae add mystery and motivation to the stories we do see, with the peripatetic Gallifreyan having been to a planet before, altering its trajectory, or having previously crossed paths with a foe we’re only meeting for the first time. Marc Platt, in “Ghost Light” (Story Production Code 7Q), takes this device a step further, basing his tale of Victorian horror on a moment from a companion’s past instead of drawing on the Doctor’s history. Ace, as a thirteen year-old in Perivale, hopped the fence of a decrepit house, only to find something terrifying within; and the Doctor, for reasons that seem somewhat callous, takes her to that house in the nineteenth century to confront her fear. (After disregarding her coulrophobia in “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” with nearly catastrophic results, one might think the Doctor would leave well enough alone.)

The setting certainly qualifies as eminently creepy, with a maid sliding a tray of food through a slot in a thick, barred metal door for unknown beasts; a mentally-addled explorer, Redvers Fenn-Cooper (Michael Cochrane) wandering the halls of the dimly lit manor in search of himself; large stuffed emus with glowing eyes at every intersection, seemingly watching all that transpires; and the lord of the house, Josiah Smith (Ian Hogg), flinching from light despite his sunglasses. Platt and director Alan Wareing take pains to develop a gloomy, uneasy atmosphere, giving viewers nothing solid to grasp (and very little to see), essential for horror to take root. Indeed, the three episode “Ghost Light” marks Doctor Who‘s first attempt at genuine, claustrophobic frightfulness since “Horror of Fang Rock,” notable for being confined, mostly, to a single indoor location, as with the present story.

The Doctor and Ace appear just as an envoy from the Royal Society, the Reverend Ernest Matthews (John Nettleton) arrives to take Josiah to task for supporting Darwin’s theory of evolution. Curiously, no one seems surprised in the slightest at the time travellers’ sudden presence, though Ace’s off-the-shoulder blouse causes extreme consternation. After a slight moment of dismay when Redvers, tied up in a straitjacket and locked in a barren room, is bombarded by light from his radioactive snuffbox, everyone seems quite content to sit down for a pleasant evening meal, looked after by the requisite evil Victorian housekeeper, Mrs. Pritchard (Sylvia Syms), and the head butler, Nimrod (Carl Forgione), who just so happens to be a Neanderthal. It’s that kind of story.

Upon realizing that the Doctor has brought her to Perivale, to the one house she never wanted to visit again, Ace runs away, blindly taking the lift into the cellar where the ominous metal door has been opened somehow. The inhabitants have knocked out Nimrod, who was operating a distinctly non-Victorian control panel beneath a glowing panel of lights, and they set their sights on Ace. Mrs. Pritchard, alas, has shut down the lift, leaving Ace to confront two of the most nattily dressed monsters since the Jagaroth…

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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…

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We want more.

Doctor Who, under producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Andrew Cartmel, can scarcely be accused of false modesty. Case in point, the decision to end Season Twenty-Five with Stephen Wyatt’s “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” (Story Production Code 7J), a less-than-subtle title that refers as much to our favorite series, following a jaunty, peripatetic time traveller, as to the intergalactic circus that the Seventh Doctor and Ace decide to visit after a junk mail robot singing its praises materializes within the otherwise inviolable confines of the TARDIS. But with the series forever balanced between continuation and cancellation, a little horn-tooting can be forgiven.

An overall lack of nuanced presentation pervades Season Twenty-Five, and Wyatt’s entry continues the trend. The Doctor spends not five minutes on the planet Segonax, home of the Psychic Circus, before declaring, “Something evil’s happened here, I can feel it.” The Doctor likewise immediately declares the presence of evil in “The Happiness Patrol” rather than letting an unsettling atmosphere develop organically, an odd decision on the part of Wyatt and director Alan Wareing given that the story otherwise takes its time establishing much of anything at all. With four episodes to spare, there’s no narrative pressure here, and ample time is spent layering images and characters and scenes, a luxury after two three-episode stories in a row.

The juxtaposition of a circus tent replete with whip-wielding ringmaster (Ricco Ross) against two circus performers scurrying across wasteland fleeing from kites being flown by eerie clowns in a hearse—all while the Doctor and Ace eat creamed corn out of melons to ingratiate themselves with a local to get directions to the circus—leaves the audience quite befuddled, though not in a disagreeable way. Even the sudden appearance of the Captain Cook (T.P. McKenna), a nineteenth-century British explorer-type straight out of central casting, and his punk-rock partner Mags (Jessica Martin) digging a giant robot out of the ground comes as no real shock at all.

Indeed, throughout much of the first episode, one gets the overwhelming sense that only Doctor Who could throw this welter of concepts onto the screen and not have it written off immediately as farce; though the appearance of Mad Max-wannabe Nord (Daniel Peacock) on a motorized trike and nebbish teen Whizzkid (Gain Sammarco) on a BMX bike, both headed to the Psychic Circus, begins to strain the otherwise ample supplies of audience goodwill. Less charming, the Doctor’s behavior towards Ace, who shows a decided unease with the entire notion of circuses in general and clowns in particular. He practically browbeats his young charge into coming along, completely disregarding her near panic once they reach the rather undistinguished big top of the Psychic Circus. The show must go on, but a more clever means of getting our heroes into trouble might have been better in keeping with the Seventh Doctor’s near-paternal attitude towards the teen from Perivale.

And Ace, as it turns out, is not wrong in the least. Clowns are creepy…

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Time to get really depressed.

Doctor Who has long been a vehicle for discussing social problems, using the lens of science fiction to create future (or past) dystopias that subtly reflect current travails with enough distance to dissect them fearlessly. The commentary, particularly strong in the era of Robert Sloman and Robert Holmes, seldom winds up as a stirring call to action, balancing entertainment against enlightenment quite neatly, leaving audiences at least a little more aware amidst the explosions and escapades. Graeme Curry, in “The Happiness Patrol” (Story Production Code 7L), follows this tradition after a fashion, tackling neither racism nor environmental decay, neither poverty nor the ills of unbridled capitalism. He rails against being phony.

From the opening shots of this three episode story, we see a bleak cityscape with piped-in muzak and a constant suggestion of fog, barren of ornamentation or individuality, a setting conducive to nothing but misery; yet being a “killjoy” here is a capital offense, punishable by instant death from the roving Happiness Patrols, staffed by women in pink wigs, mini skirts, and copious amounts of facial makeup. Veteran Doctor Who director Chris Clough amplifies the visual disconnection between giddy expectation and sombre reality well, but the basic story does not ever delve more deeply than the notion that people deserve to be allowed to be sad, darn it!

Keeping with the Seventh Doctor’s newly proactive streak, as seen with his somewhat casual eradication of his longtime foes in “Remembrance of the Daleks,” he and Ace arrive on the human colony Terra Alpha several centuries into the future (from 1988) to investigate rumors of “something evil,” not exactly a nuanced introduction to the situation. After being arrested on an immigration violation by the Happiness Patrol, they learn of the various disappearances that take place routinely on Terra Alpha at the behest of its ruler, Helen A. (Sheila Hancock), who wants people to be happy at any cost, and viewers are treated to a scene of one particularly sticky means of execution, death by hot strawberry fondant. The action goes off the rails rather quickly after this sweetly lethal treat.

For much of producer John Nathan-Turner’s run on the show, Doctor Who has dabbled in au courant philosophical and critical concepts, with media studies in particular being a particular wellspring: “Vengeance on Varos” serves as the show’s answer to McLuhan, an extended rumination on the televised versus the real, the image versus the substance, a theme repeated throughout the Sixth Doctor’s tenure; and “Dragonfire” revels in cinematic and existential references. Here, Curry seeks to expound upon “Weltschmerz,” the ineffable pain of existing in a world suffused with suffering. Heady stuff for a children’s show.

Doctor Who can certainly contain such discussions, being no stranger to either religious or ethical debate (albeit mostly filtered through aliens and their totally-not-human cultures). The mode taken with “The Happiness Patrol,” though, leans so heavily into an over-the-top dystopia, very much akin to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil from just a few years prior, that the entirety of the story is taken up with set pieces showing off just how absurd Terra Alpha has become, leaving no room for actual examination of sorrow, grief, and happiness, to say nothing of the loaded use of the term “disappearances,” an echo of Pinochet’s Chile and the Argentinian Junta. And that’s without addressing Curry’s signal, and somewhat regrettable, addition to the show’s rogues’ gallery…

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