TV Club: Doctor Who, The Seeds Of Doom

“The Seeds Of Doom” (season 13, episodes 21-26; originally aired Jan. 31-March 6, 1976)

Horror and good old-fashioned scariness have always been a big part of Doctor Who’s appeal. The standard joke in the early ’60s was that kids watched the show from behind the sofa, not on it, for fear of the Daleks. The Silence and the Weeping Angels serve the same function today. But in seasons 12 to 14, the early years of Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, the series made horror a driving force. The show started to push at the boundaries of what you could get away with in family-friendly TV, with a focus on the intensity of the violence and the creep factor that echoed Hammer Studios movies. It had the desired effect of getting attention, good and bad—ratings went up, but so did complaints from censorious conservatives. That was a primary factor in why the BBC broke up the creative team after season 14, packing off producer Philip Hinchcliffe to take over crime series Target, with script editor Robert Holmes leaving soon after. But it was a great ride while it lasted—out of the 17 serials made in these three years, I’d call 10 absolute classics, and none of the remainder are less than watchable and entertaining.

And “The Seeds Of Doom” is one of the greats. A tightly written and directed horror/thriller about an alien weed called a Krynoid, it’s anchored by a great performance by Baker that capitalizes on the rapid mood swings and charismatic intensity of his Doctor to underscore the atmosphere of unearthly danger with grim hints of what he knows but isn’t telling us about Krynoids, and then to work as his own comic relief with a zinger and a toothy smile that lightens the mood without letting you forget there’s an apocalypse blooming in the garden.

Originally published Sept. 16, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, Ghost Light

“Ghost Light” (season 26, episodes 5-7. Originally aired Oct. 4-18, 1989)

“Ghost Light” has a fitting title: It was the last Doctor Who serial to be filmed before the show was cancelled. (The last story broadcast was “Survival,” but it went before the cameras before “Ghost Light” did.) After this, except for one brief, tragic misfire, Doctor Who really did become a ghost, doomed to wander the earth as a forgotten-cult-TV spectre in the form of quasi-canonical novels and radiodramas until the day it would finally, like its hero, regenerate into a new form.

That title is also pretty ironic, considering that “Ghost Light” has a well-earned reputation as the murkiest, most difficult Doctor Who story ever televised. What begins as a mysterious Victorian ghost story shot through with surreal images and an array of insane characters to rival Alice In Wonderland swings wildly into a sci-fi tale about ancient aliens and evolution, refusing to make it easy to figure out how everything connects. Even the BBC’s official website for the story suggests that “in order to appreciate fully what’s going on it is probably necessary to watch ‘Ghost Light’ two or three times.” Naturally that’s made “Ghost Light” awfully divisive; its proponents suggest that there’s a brilliant story to be cherished here if you’re only willing to work to solve the puzzle that writer Marc Platt lays out. The other school grumbles that if it’s a puzzle, it’s still missing too many pieces to be properly solved, and it’s only a puzzle because the script does such a poor job of explaining anything. That’s compounded by post-production problems that reduce comprehensibility even further, including a bad sound mix that renders some dialogue totally inaudible, and drastic editing to make it fit the three-episode running time. I lean toward the second school.

Originally published Aug. 19, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, Remembrance Of The Daleks

“Remembrance Of The Daleks” (season 25, episodes 1-4. Originally aired Oct. 5-26, 1988)

Even when a TV series has a plot device like time travel—perhaps especially when a TV series has a plot device like time travel—it’s awfully dangerous to go messing around with the established history that helps create its central premise, particularly when the show has built up 25 seasons’ worth of continuity baggage in the interim. So the sheer audacity of what “Remembrance Of The Daleks” tries to do by revisiting the time and place of the Doctor’s earliest-known adventure is little short of breathtaking once you realize what the writers are up to: Redefining the reason why the Doctor fled his home planet all those years ago, and thus implicitly suggesting that he’s never quite been the person we thought he was.

That’s the kind of thing that can completely wreck a series from within, and it’s a credit to writer Ben Aaronovich and script editor Andrew Cartmel that the gamble works as well as it does. Whether it was a good idea to have tried in the first place is, I think, debatable. But let’s come back to that later; there’s a lot happening in “Remembrance Of The Daleks,” and I shouldn’t jump too far ahead.

First, a little bit about where we are in the series right now: “Remembrance” kicks off season 25, the second year of Sylvester McCoy’s run as the Seventh Doctor, which began in the aftermath of the utterly disastrous “Trial Of A Time Lord” arc two years earlier when both script editor Eric Saward and star Colin Baker had both abruptly left or been forced out, ending Doctor Who’s most unwatchable era. Producer John Nathan-Turner (who somewhat surprisingly still had his job) brought in McCoy and a new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, to rejuvenate the series and find some new, more palatable direction. And although McCoy’s introduction, “Time And The Rani,” was unpromisingly silly and vapid, Doctor Who did improve, though it took the show the better part of the next season to find its feet. Ratings were still way down, and Doctor Who would wind up cancelled two years later anyway—but on the whole, the final two seasons were smarter, better-written, and more full of ambitious ideas than Doctor Who had been in years. They weren’t always able to actually achieve those high ambitions, hampered by Cartmel’s inexperience and the show’s low budget, but even the failures here are more compelling than the best stuff from the years immediately prior.

Originally published Aug. 5, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, Black Orchid

“Black Orchid” (season 19, episodes 17-18. Originally aired March 1-2, 1982)

The most succinct description of what sets “Black Orchid” apart from the rest of Doctor Who is that it’s the last of the “pure historicals”—that is, a tale that is set in the past, taking advantage of the Doctor’s ability to travel through time, but otherwise not involving any science-fictional element. In fact, it’s not only the last of them but a weird anomaly, because this is the kind of story that Doctor Who simply stopped doing at all very early in its run. The pure historical is almost entirely an artifact of William Hartnell’s First Doctor era, when the show not only hewed closer to its original mission to educate as well as entertain, but had a much broader conception of what kind of stories Doctor Who should be trying to tell.

I’ve noted before that one of the strengths of Doctor Who is that its format allows it to drop into not just any time or place, but any genre, any kind of story. The Doctor can appear in the middle of a pastiche on Victorian pulp fiction or Frankenstein movies or Asimov’s robot tales, swashbuckle with pirates or match wits with Emperor Nero, teach cavemen the secret of fire or carry the Olympic torch. After the pure historical died out, though, whenever the series played around with other genres, it followed a basic rule: Whatever kind of story the Doctor drops into, it’s always warped into a Doctor Who version of that story. “The Unicorn And The Wasp,” for instance, tweaks the standard format of an Agatha Christie mystery by sandwiching it between Doctor Who’s science-fiction elements—the Doctor replaces the traditional detective figure, and a giant alien wasp replaces the traditional Christie killer. “Talons Of Weng-Chiang” does the same thing with the Sherlock Holmes/Fu Manchu style of late-1800s adventure fiction. But the sci-fi element is always there—without it, you don’t really have a Doctor Who story at all. In the Hartnell era, the pure historicals were the exception to that rule, but that loophole was closed quickly and firmly after Patrick Troughton took over the lead role in season four: His second serial, 1966’s “The Highlanders,” was the last time history would trump science fiction in a Doctor Who story.

Except once.

Originally published July 22, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, Revelation Of The Daleks

“Revelation Of The Daleks” (season 22, episodes 13-14. Originally aired March 23-30, 1985)

The thing about Eric Saward, who wrote this script and helped set the tone of Doctor Who overall as script editor during much of the Fifth and all of the Sixth Doctor eras, is that it’s sometimes hard to tell whether he actually liked Doctor Who at all. The worldview he brings to the show is so grim and bleak, so full of pointless violence and brutal ugliness and repugnant imagery, and so insistent on presenting the Doctor and his companions as incompetent and basically useless, that it can feel like he was deliberately trying to torpedo the whole concept of the series from inside.

And I think to some extent that’s true: Especially in Britain, early-‘80s sci-fi was full of dark, nilihistic, punk-influenced satire that spit on the utopian idealism of the 1960s and sneered at the future, which a lot of us thought was disquietingly likely to end in nuclear holocaust. Uncomplicated heroism and optimistic outlooks weren’t fashionable, and even though Doctor Who had never been merely that kind of simplistic adventure show, it always changed with the times, and it makes sense that it should have gone in the direction of Terry Gilliam, Repo Man, The Road Warrior and 2000 AD when that was the trend.

And so in season 22, we got a Doctor Who replete with black-comedy elements like “Vengeance On Varos,” which skewered capitalism, violence-crazed media and the passive complacency they create in their citizens; the pro-vegetarian “The Two Doctors,” which briefly turned Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor into a cannibal; and the season-ending “Revelation Of The Daleks,” which takes aim at consumerism, fear of death and the hypocrisies they create in us—the shoddy way we sometimes treat the memory of the deceased, and our tendency to ignore the unpleasant side of how our food and the other things we buy are actually made. (In other words: Meat-is-murder cannibalism again.) And it has a twist ending that, at least as an idea, is truly shocking and puts a knife in the heart of one of Doctor Who’s core concepts.

Sounds great, right? Yeah, not so much. The problem is that Eric Saward is simply not a strong enough writer to pull this off, failing to provide the clever dialogue, well-thought-out underlying concepts or basic plot mechanics that might have made this work, and also apparently actively hostile to the notion that anyone in Doctor Who, or watching it, should be having any fun. (Quite literally: At the end of the story, Peri begs the Doctor to take her “somewhere fun,” and he reacts as if he thinks it’s the stupidest idea he’s ever heard.) Like far too much of the series during this period, “Revelation Of The Daleks” is a grim, depressing slog. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that this was the last serial broadcast before Doctor Who was forced into an 18-month hiatus by BBC executives who had grown hostile to it.

Originally published June 25, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, The Ribos Operation

“The Ribos Operation” (season 16, episodes 1-4. Originally aired Sept. 2-23, 1978)

At its heart, “The Ribos Operation” is playing for relatively small stakes in comparison to the kind of thing you usually get with Doctor Who. It’s a story about a con game gone wrong between two hard-luck grifters and a fallen aristocrat who thinks they’re his route back into power. Though it’s set on a faraway planet with connections to a vast interstellar empire, mainly it’s just about the con, and how the Doctor’s own little quest gets in the way of that. But wrapped around “The Ribos Operation” is a much broader story of literally cosmic scope, and it’s there that we should start.

By Doctor Who’s sixteenth season, the show had run into a problem inevitable for any series that lasts that long—it was outgrowing its own founding mythology. The seemingly all-powerful Time Lords had been a lingering background presence for years, first as the unknown people the Doctor was running away from, then later a persistent source of unwanted control. But by this point, the question was: What do you do when your hero finally defeats the one foe he was never supposed to be able to defeat?

Originally published June 24, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, Resurrection Of The Daleks

“Resurrection Of The Daleks” (season 21, episodes 11-14. Originally aired Feb. 8-15, 1984)

On most TV dramas nowadays, the head writer and the executive producer are usually the same person—which makes a lot of sense, because that way there’s one unifying vision of where the show is headed. It’s been true of Doctor Who since the 2005 relaunch, with Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffatt in turn holding the reins, but that wasn’t how it worked during the 1963-1989 era, which instead divided the job between a producer in overall charge of the series and a script editor who oversaw just the writing. The producer was the boss and guided the show on a broad scale, but script editors had day-to-day, hands-on control of the stories, arguably making them more important in creating the tone and personality of the series in any given period—and also more important than the actor playing the Doctor, who might have been the public face of the series but didn’t actually tell the stories.

And so it’s also often been true that when the script editor wrote a Doctor Who script himself, as opposed to reworking some other writer’s earlier draft, that story captured the pure spirit of that period of the show better than the others of its season. It’s certainly true of the current series, with both Davies and Moffatt handling the season finales and other crucial episodes themselves, and it was true in 1970s Doctor Who with shows like Robert Holmes’ “The Deadly Assassin” and Douglas Adams’ “City Of Death,” among the best the series ever did.

And then there’s “Resurrection Of The Daleks,” another script-editor’s script, which holds down the middle of Peter Davison’s final season as the Fifth Doctor. To be sure, it’s a pretty pure crystallization of what Eric Saward and his boss, John Nathan-Turner, were going for in season 21—the gritty and dark atmosphere, the attempt at complex plotting, the choice to forgo a heroic conception of the Doctor in favor of a fallible and even weak protagonist, and the wholehearted embrace of the show’s long history as a living part of the series. But it’s also a painfully clear example of how Saward and JNT consistently screwed up the potential of any of those elements to create great TV storytelling, and indeed often failed to demonstrate basic competence at anything beyond cheap spectacle. “Gritty and dark” too often meant merely that the characters were bitter and unpleasant, “complex plotting” that there were too many characters and subplots and no real idea of where any of them were going, a fallible hero often was merely a passive and kind of boring one, and embracing history meant merely rehashing iconic moments from older episodes without any particular understanding of how they worked or why they were so well remembered in the first place.

Originally published June 10, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, The Claws Of Axos

“The Claws Of Axos” (season 8, episodes 11-14. Originally aired March 13-April 3, 1971)

Once you’ve watched enough Doctor Who to be able to recognize recurring scriptwriters, you start to get a feel for what you can expect from any given story that has their name on the credits. Robert Holmes was Doctor Who’s Alan Moore—a guy who knew the show’s conventions and formulas so well that he could tell a story that tore those conventions apart and reassembled them while still staying true to their spirit. Terry Nation was the series’ first major heavy hitter, and you could always rely on him for solidly paced action-adventure, but left to his own devices he also kept recycling the same ideas over and over again.

And then there’s the team of Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who debuted with the Third Doctor adventure “The Claws Of Axos.” Baker and Martin were mainstays of the show throughout the 1970s, with nine scripts to their credit solo or as a team, including the 10th-anniversary special “The Three Doctors” and “The Invisible Enemy,” which introduced the Doctor’s robot dog K9. They’re responsible for the equivalent of two full seasons of Doctor Who, and as such you have to count them as one of the series’ major creative forces. But the thing about them is that none of those nine stories is really good enough to be a true classic—none have the dazzling dialogue, tightly focused plots or audacious metatextuality that marks the best of Doctor Who. “The Claws Of Axos” certainly doesn’t break that mold—it’s just about the gold standard of adequacy for this era of Doctor Who. It’s certainly entertaining and far from terrible. There’s plenty of exciting action and stuntwork, a genuinely creepy alien monster in the Axons, and it works in season eight’s overarching villain—the Master—in a way that not only justifies his scheming presence but helps set up the most compelling twist in the story: The surprisingly believable idea that the Doctor is just as untrustworthy as the Master is, and is willing to sell out humanity for his own aims. But that doesn’t excuse its flaws, some of which stem from the limitations of the budget and the special effects but the worst of which are straight-up script problems, namely the badly mishandled subplot about Chinn, the petty-tyrant bureaucrat whose greed plays right into the Axons’ hands (and tumorous tentacles), and the near-total sidelining of the pretty sizable cast of regular co-stars in favor of a one-off side character. It’s not particularly bad, especially by Doctor Who standards, but if “City Of Death” is a home run and “The Twin Dilemma” is a foul tip that hits the batter in the face and breaks his nose, “The Claws Of Axos” is a base hit, solid and respectable but unexceptional.

Originally published May 27, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, “Destiny Of The Daleks”

“Destiny Of The Daleks” (season 17, episodes 1-4. Originally aired Sept. 1-22, 1979)

Just going by pedigree of the writers involved, “Destiny Of The Daleks” should be a lot better than it is. It marked the final Doctor Who script from Terry Nation, one of the series’ oldest and most reliable writers and the creator of the Daleks. The story also marked the debut—as script editor—of the inimitable Douglas Adams, who had written “The Pirate Planet” for season 16 the year before and was now taking over the big chair. And “Destiny Of The Daleks” was a huge success at the time, setting new viewership records for the series along with the following story, “City Of Death”—both helped a lot by a strike that had taken the BBC’s main competitor, ITV, out of action. But although there’s a lot to enjoy here, especially in the early episodes, in the end the story fizzles out. It’s dragged down chiefly by a revisionist take on the Daleks and their creator Davros that makes both less interesting and fails to build on the promise of their previous appearance in “Genesis Of The Daleks.” It’s sunk further by miring the pepperpots in a stalemate with a deadly dull army of alien robots, the Movellans, who look something like Milli Vanilli in white disco outfits.

Most of what works well here is loaded in the first half of the story, so let’s start there.

Originally published May 13, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, “The War Machines”

“The War Machines” (season 3, episodes 42-45. Originally aired June 25-July 16, 1966)

“The War Machines” closed out Doctor Who’s third season in 1966, but like “The Time Meddler” the year before, it doesn’t quite have the feel of a modern season finale—it doesn’t feel like the endpoint of some larger storyline in the series, though it does see an important cast change as the Doctor’s companion Dodo leaves in favor of newcomers Ben and Polly. But especially in hindsight, “The War Machines” did help set the stage for the truly seismic changes that were looming just over the horizon for Doctor Who. Two serials later, in “The Tenth Planet,” the series would undergo the single most important cast change in its history, when William Hartnell collapsed on the floor of the TARDIS and got up as Patrick Troughton—the first regeneration. It wasn’t just the lead actor that would change, but the style of the show itself—and while “The War Machines” didn’t anticipate the regeneration itself (I’m not sure if that idea had even been thought of yet), it did mark a bold step toward the kind of action-driven thrillers that would be the hallmark of the Second Doctor era.

In terms of the plot itself, “War Machines” is pretty good if not a classic, with an appealing B-movie sensibility—this feels like a better, if equally cheaply made, version of the kind of movie featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000. (The War Machines themselves strike me as oversized versions of the homemade battletanks you see on Robot Wars, but like so many things with this series, you have to be willing to take the idea behind the actual effect seriously if you’re going to be able to enjoy Doctor Who the way it ought to be enjoyed.) The Doctor lands in London with his current companion, Dodo, and is immediately swept up in an attempted takeover of the world by WOTAN, a highly advanced computer that (like Skynet in The Terminator) has achieved sentience and thinks it can do better than the imperfect humans who created it. Using mind control, WOTAN assembles an army of humans to do its bidding, and eventually builds a fleet of self-propelled robot tanks—one of which is captured and reprogrammed by the Doctor, who sends it home to kill its papa. Along the way, Dodo befriends Polly, the assistant to the scientist who built WOTAN, and later Ben, a lonely and disconsolate sailor who’s at loose ends due to six months’ shore leave and doesn’t know what to do with himself. Both Dodo and Polly are snared in WOTAN’s web. After the Doctor snaps her out of her WOTAN-induced brainwashing, Dodo winds up disappearing almost entirely from the story in favor of her replacements, in what might be the cruelest ditching of a companion in the entire series. More on that in a moment.

Originally published April 29, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.