Friday, April 26, 2024

Doctor Who Season 16: The Pirate Planet -- Afterthought

I've never seen Aida, but I've known the music since I was a small boy: and how good it is. It's rather the fashion over here now amongst the musical snobs to look down their noses when Verdi is mentioned and talk about the "cheapness of his thematic material."  What they really mean is that Verdi could write tunes and they can't!

C.S Lewis


I watched the Pirate Planet, from beginning to end, twice, with a great big grin on my face. I watched the Church on Ruby Lane with a sinking feeling; it did what (I assume) it set out to do: but what it set out to do is of no interest to me.


And as surely as Basil Brush follows Grandstand, someone is already typing that this is the voice of Nostalgia talking; that fans have always said that Doctor Who isn't as good as it used to be; and that what I mistake for "good writing" is simply the air that kills blowing at me from some blue remembered madeleines.


It would even be possible to blame it on political reaction. I say that things from the 1970s are better than things from the 2020s because I secretly yearn for Mrs Thatcher, Clause 29, and the National Front. Or, more plausibly, if you know me, for the Winter of Discontent, Tony Benn, and British Leyland.


When a Western opera aficionado hears Chinese classical music for the first time, she may not understand what is going on. And if she's a certain kind of person, she may say that it's a cacophonous racket because Asia hasn't worked out how to write proper tunes yet. Nothing against Johnny Chinaman of course. He thought up fireworks and printing. But we thought up melody and cutlery.


A very stupid man once said that Roman letters were proper writing and Arabic letters were merely scribble (and therefore government bodies ought not to provide translations).  A very clever one once said that English church bells were intrinsically more beautiful than the Muslim call to prayer and this proved that white people's non-existent imaginary friend was better than brown people's non-existent imaginary friend. I assume that everyone reading this would agree that these were examples of what a very wise man once described as "a simple case of dislike for the unlike".


But styles and fashions do change. In his lifetime, William Ainsworth was more popular than Dickens. Young people nowadays find even Dickens a little hard to take.


I recently decided I ought to have a glance at Isaac Asimov, having muchly enjoyed Apple TV's 22 part dramatisation of the first three pages of the Foundation Trilogy. I had it my head that I was letting myself in for a kind of nerdy pulp; Robert E Howard but with equations rather than boobies. I was pleasantly surprised to find myself thinking "Gosh: this is actually rather decently done." Asimov is no prose-stylist, and there are no characters to speak of, but the long short stories ask questions and provide answers, offer setups and present pay-offs, and cleverly imply an interesting future-history with a minimum of exposition.


So. Should we say "nowadays writers don't know how to tell stories"?


Or indeed "these darn millennials don't know how to listen to stories"?


Or, even "the Deep State has BANNED proper stories"? 


Or would it be better to say: "Ho, and indeed, hum. The style of storytelling which was in vogue forty five years ago is out of vogue now. By 2069 the fashion will probably have shifted the other way"?


"But Andrew -- set up and pay off, foreshadowing and consistency, tension and jeopardy -- this isn't some fashionable narrative vogue, limited to a particular time and place like inter-titles, grease paint and masks. That is in fact what 'story' means: if you are correct that Douglas Adams can do it [or chooses to] and Russell T Davies can't [or chooses not to] then Douglas Adams is, in fact, the better storyteller."


No: I'm sorry; I can't be having that.


It would be on the exact level of the people in 1964 (and there were many) who said that since She Loves You (Yeah Yeah Yeah) didn't follow the expected canons of song-writing at the time, what the Beatles were writing was not music. And that it followed that they were a threat to civilisation, corrupting the youth of Athens. And, presumably, woke. 


And She Loves You (Yeah Yeah Yeah) was, as a matter of fact, radically different to everything which had come before it. And if you define "what came before" as "music" then She Loves You is, indeed "not music". And the fact that the song doesn't sound particularly strange to contemporary ears proves just how talented and influential the Beatles were. Not that that particularly needs to be proved.


"But Andrew: what you mean by 'story' is roughly what Aristotle meant by 'story'. If some people really prefer The Church on Ruby Lane to The Pirate Planet then that's a very temporary and silly blip in the grand scheme of history. "


I am reluctant to go very far down that path. Yes, some very great people with very strange middle names [Note 1] have talked about The Great Tradition and Great Western Man. But statements like "Aristotle had it right and any deviation from the Poetics is a temporary western decadence" are now the province of far-right thinkers with Greek statues in their avatars. Go very far down that path and you'll find yourself wearing a "Make English Literature Great Again"  cricket cap. 


It isn't true that How Much Is That Doggie In The Window is proper music and Hound Dog is just noise. But it is true that performers have occasionally created shows in which they hit instruments, scream, and generate feedback. Perhaps those performances could be described as "just noise".  In which case we would have to say "Ho, and indeed, hum: some people apparently find people standing on a stage making noise sufficiently interesting that they will pay money to listen to it." Artists have occasionally thrown paint randomly at canvasses and displayed the resultant mess in an art gallery. You can define art in such a way that random craft-less work is Not Art. But it can clearly be interesting, or interesting to some people. It can be quite bracing to go a gallery in the expectation of seeing a room full of pretty water-colours of flowers, and find that what you are actually looking at is a man with a blue face screaming at you. I believe that there is an exhibition in London right now where you have to squeeze between two naked people to get into the gallery. 


The Avant Garde is a thing. But if generating feedback and taking your clothes off completely replaced learning the chord shapes and mastering perspective, I might say that the world had gone a bit peculiar.



Should a person of my age be trying to understand this newfangled modern story-thing? 


And equally should a younger person be trying to get their head round older television? 


Should we cling to the idea that Jack Kirby was quite good at drawing comics and wave him under the noses on the faces of the young people; or should we just accept that our taste for the Galactus Trilogy and the New Gods saga is a preference for the disposable populist entertainment of one era over the disposable populist entertainment of another era? 


And if we can say that about Kirby (or Douglas Adams, or the Beatles) why can we not say it about Shakespeare or Milton or Jane Austen or any other sacred literary cow? 


A few weeks ago I sang (to use the term very loosely indeed) "Bold Sir John..." [Note 2] at a Bristol folk sing-a-round I attend,  and was surprised that most of the younger contingent had never heard of the Two Ronnies. But honestly, why should they have done?


Virtually the whole of Old Who recently became available on I-Player, meaning a lot of Very Young People are seeing it for the first time. I have been uncomfortable with the way in which even some Old Fans have taken for granted that the pacing of the older stories is an objective flaw: that the first black and white Dalek story would be materially improved if the chasm-jumping sequence were removed.


I entirely agree that the sequence takes a long time to get where it is going. I also agree that the dialogue in Intolerance is inaudible and that Twelve Angry Men does not contain any memorable show-tunes. But you can't cut the scene without cutting the characters of Antadus and Ganatus (and therefore Barbara's relationship with Ganatus). The fact that the Thals have names and up to a point personalities is a big part of the ambience of the story. It's what makes them different from the Daleks.


There is now a colorized, shortened version of the story. Some people think it is an improvement. To me, it feels like a montage;  a series of fragments of a longer whole strung together without transitions. The silly incidental music adds to the sense that we are watching a trailer or a highlights reel. The actual colorization is by no means unconvincing.


Messing with the past? Rewriting history? Cancel culture and Nineteen Eighty-Four? I could see the point of remounting Terry Nation's original script, with modern special effects and a contemporary cast. I could see the point of a modern writer creating a completely new script based on Nation's story line. But the 1963 Dead Planet is the 1963 Dead Planet and it should be allowed to stand, or fall, as such. 


And no: this is not all the same argument as the one about bleeping the N-word from Celestial Toyroom.


"But Andrew: aren't you in effect immunising all old television from criticism? 'This is old' is not a response to 'this is boring' any more than it is a response to 'this is racist'. Isn't it entirely possible that some Olden Days television was slow and brilliant; and some Olden Days television was slow and terrible? And can't we have a critical discussion about which sides of the line cherished chunks of Who-lore fall on?"


Yes: yes we can. There are classic silent movies and dreadful silent movies and an awful lot of mediocre silent movies. But I suspect that the only way of telling one from the other is learning the language, figuring out how they work -- which is to say: by watching a lot of silent movies. And of course, the passage of time and the volatility of celluloid has destroyed many of the sibylline books, meaning that even the worst of the silent era is of some interest and value. But "This is silent" is not a critical judgement. 


We don't object to English versions of the Aeneid or the Divine Comedy. It is possible to imagine a prose retelling of Paradise Lost. Shakespeare-in-modern-English is of use to some students, however silly it sounds to those of us who know the plays well. "Is it more noble to suffer through all the terrible things fate throws at you, or to fight off your troubles, and in doing so, end them completely?" It is an old joke that the definition of poetry is "that which is lost in translation".


The person who can read poetry in three languages is better off than the person who can only read it in one. I don't know if the English person with a superficial knowledge of German, Latin and Norwegian is better off than the native English speaker who has lived in China for a decade and knows all the nuances and colloquialisms. Differently off, I suppose. If you just don't grok silent cinema and can't be bothered to get the hang of it, there are quite a number of excellent talkies for you to enjoy.


My quarrel is with the person who doubts that silent movies can contain any artistry at all: who thinks that colourising the Marx Brothers and dubbing Metropolis necessarily makes them "better". 


And that person may not even exist. 


Lewis said that no-one should attempt to write English criticism until they have a fluency in Anglo-Saxon. Probably someone who refused to watch anything in black and white or with subtitles wouldn't be a great guide to the history of cinema. You may recall me sneering audibly at people who thought that prior to Frank Miller all American superhero comics were precisely like the Adam West TV Batman. 


Some of us do conceptualise Doctor Who as a Great Tradition. We came into fandom at the time when documenting and summarising the great old stories was the main activity, and it is hard for us to believe that anyone could call themselves a Doctor Who fan and not treat The Tomb of the Cybermen with deep respect and even reverence. 


But that's just another form of gatekeeping. If you haven't sat through Rosenkavalier at Le Scala, you simply have no right to enjoy a CD of arias and waltz music. 


Say you like football? Then name them all.


The Pirate Planet is joyous; funny and clever and well crafted. Perhaps the stories from 2018 onwards had a different kind of joy and a different kind of craft, a craft that I can't perceive, in the same way that (I fully believe) jazz obeys musical principles that I don't understand. Or perhaps my liking for craftspersonship is itself old fashioned. Perhaps, as Prof Richard Dawkins says about absolutely everything, it's exactly like the Emperor's New Clothes.


"This young's folks music has no tune". 


"Oh, get with the hip random vibe grandad. It's not meant to."


Or, if you like, deploy the nuclear option.


"It's all just a matter of taste. When you say that Douglas Adams is a good writer, you are just making meaningless noises. The only definitely true thing is that you happen to like him." 


What was it Hamlet said? "Nothing is inherently good or bad: it's what you think about it that makes it so."


NOTE 1: Staples, Stearns

NOTE 2: The twit, the twit, the twit, the twit/the twittering of the birds all day/ The bum, the bum, the bum, the bum/ The bumblebees at play. 





Serious face.


I currently have 62 Patreon followers, paying me very roughly £80 dollars per article.

Every single follow is a huge vote of confidence and massively appreciated; as, indeed, is every comment and every reader. (I am reminded of aline by favourite singer/songwriter: “It still blows my mind each time they let me play to anyone.”)

However, it remains true that I lost about five followers during March, on top of the ones I have lost since the beginning of the year, and any further drop in followers would be A Little Alarming.

I reduced the amount of hours I work on my day-job in 2022 specifically to spend more time writing; and Patreon remains my primary income stream.

I am only semi-serious when I say that I think my political writing drives people away. Certainly people have walked away (and in some cases stopped talking to me altogether) because of my shockingly right wing / shockingly left wing views. But I am sure it’s mostly because Times Are Hard and setting up monthly payments is a certain amount of hassle.


I also have to consider that I have over the last twenty years said absolutely everything I have to say on absolutely every subject, and that it is time to start looking for another hobby. I turn out to be quite good at singing sea shanties, for certain values of "singing". And obviously the Trolls said a long time ago that I had simply lost my marbles.

It’s definitely the case that if I find my Patreon followers go UP this month when I start writing about Doctor Who again, I am more likely to write about Doctor Who (or start some other Great Big Geek project). I set up a little Readers Poll for Patreon Supporters, which seems to show that the engaged followers are basically fine with me going off on one about Woke from time to time.

Coming this month:

I am writing my way around the 1978 Doctor Who story Stones of Blood, including a wild digression about Ley-lines, stone-circles and evangelicalism. I am hoping to do another Video Diary before too long. 

If this is even slightly interesting, do please consider clicking on the little button and pushing my follower back up to a healthy 70 or so. 









Monday, April 22, 2024

Doctor Who Season 16: The Pirate Planet (4)

A cave. A group of mysterious cultists with silly make up and saffron robes. They chant about the Life Force and talk Old Fashioned. ("The time of knowing shall be soon and fast upon that shall follow the time of vengeance.") They make telepathic contact with a young man with 1970s hair. The camera filter goes funny and they declare that they have "found another" and that he must be "harvested". We've all seen the Tomorrow People: it is clear that he is about to Break Out. The robed Telepaths come and take the young man away from his family. His grandfather fears and hates the Telepaths; but his sister and her boyfriend think that the Evil Dictator who rules the planet and has banned telepathy and freedom of thought is far worse. It turns out that the Telepaths are the last remnant of the original inhabitants of the planet; before it was conquered by the Evil Leader and his Evil Stormtroopers. The Doctor makes friends with them. Together they break into the Evil Leader's strong hold, shut down his Anti-Telepath ray, sabotage his power generator and blow up his base. The planet is now free and everyone lives happily ever after. Hooray!

This is not the plot of the Pirate Planet.

At any rate, not the whole plot, nor the interesting part of the plot, nor the part of the plot which anyone remembers. When I sat down to re-watch the serial, I was quite surprised that almost the first thing that we see are the Mentiads, standing in a circle and chanting. They seem to have come in from a different story, the Daemons, say, or Fendahl. 

Robed mystics with telepathy, telekinesis, plugged into the very essence of creation, who overthrow an evil cyborg technocrat. They could have wandered in from an entirely different franchise. They don't say "May the life-force be with you" but one fears that they might.

Now, it would be quite tempting to attribute the Mentiad sub-plot and it's rather lacklustre dialogue to script editor Anthony Read, and to say that the highly imaginative and witty piratical material came from the genius of Douglas Adams. Next season, we'll be praising script editor Douglas Adams for all the funny lines and blaming Terry Nation and David Fisher for all the boring ones. And certainly, the serio-comic Adamsian space-opera is set alongside the most generic of generic Doctor Who storylines. Cultists who stand in a circle and chant. Natives who think that being oppressed is "just the way things are"; while other natives half-heartedly say "we have been quiet for too long." They could just as well be Thals or Xenons or Two-Legs on Metabelis 3. David Warwick (Kimus) works quite hard to deliver heroic lines with a pantomime seriousness, but even a very good actor couldn't do much to salvage "Bandraginus Five, by every last breath in my body, you'll be avenged." [NOTE 1]

But what if the bifurcation of the story were intentional -- or at any rate, a happy accident? What if the corridors, the caves, the pathetic rebels and the Tomorrow Zombies are what Doctor Who looked like before 1977, and Captains and Queens and shrunken planets are what it will look like from here on in? In this corridor, the dying embers of Sydney Newman and monochrome tea-times: in this one, George Lucas and punk-rock filtered through the prophetic mind of Douglas Adams before Apple Macs even existed.  

Forward or backwards? Old Old Who or New Old Who? Can the two visions ever come into balance? At the exact centre of the story is a queen who literally wants to hold back time, abort change, and return everything to how it was in the good old days. 


In Episode One, Kimus asks the Doctor what he does for a living. "I save planets, mostly" replies the Doctor.

In the very next scene (the next line, in fact) the Captain asks Romana to define her "function". "Well, as a Time Lord I can travel about in space, and of course time" she replies. [NOTE 2]

Romana's answer is the one that the Doctor himself might have given at any time over the last fifteen years. She's actually an agent of the Time Lord Council and the White Guardian: she could very well have said "I am a student" or "I am seeking for the Key to Time." But she prefers to just say that she is a traveller. The Doctor, on the other hand, now defines himself by his function in the story. It's the same definition Tom Baker himself used: the role of the Doctor is simply that of a "benevolent alien".

"I travel in time and space". A glance back to the black and white era. A citizen of the universe; and a lady, to boot. 

"I save planets, mostly." A superhero who saves the universe on a monthly basis; one who knows the rules and can even wink at the audience. 

What the show used to be; what the show is now. 

Can the Doctor Who accommodate both visions? 

Or must the Doctor bi-generate?


There is very little world-building in classic Who. Season Sixteen may consist of six linked stories; but there is nothing but the recurrent Key to suggest that the segments are taking place in a shared universe. You might suppose that Queen Xanxia -- who in her day staged galactic wars -- would have known, or been known by the "Greater Cyrrhenic Empire" or to have interacted with "Pontonese Ships". The Ribos Operation was about a con-man trying to sell a valueless mineral mine to a mark; this one is about a villain who strip mines planets for their mineral wealth. Might Garron not have been aware of Bandraginus Five? Might the Captain not have been aware of the Mining Conglomerate? Might the precious mineral discovered lying in the street not have been Jethric? Kimus doesn't know of the existence of planets other than Zanak: when his world teleports to other locations he thinks that the patterns of the "points of light in the sky" change. By the end of the story he knows they are other suns, and that the planet itself moves. Which is very like what Binro went through in the previous story. But nothing whatsoever is made of this connection. Doctor Who, prior to the wilderness years simply never worked like that. Cameos and Easter Eggs, possibly: consistent setting and backstory, never, never, never. The Whoniverse is a fan mirage.


So it is not surprising that there is so little development in the relationship between the Doctor and Romana. Doctor Who isn't, and can't ever be a soap opera. The writers have presumably been briefed that the Doctor has a new assistant, and that she is clever, but not quite as clever as she thinks she is; that she is a recent graduate; and slightly disdainful of the Doctor. But each of them seems free to re-invent their relationship within the brief.  A few years later, Matthew Waterhouse would complain that he was playing a completely different Adric in each story. [NOTE 3]

In the Ribos Operation, there was tension between the Doctor, who has experience and street smarts, and Romana, who has up-to-date scientific expertise. She keeps being annoyingly right; but he keeps smugly saving the day. She hugs him when he saves her from the monster, but she doesn't back down over his egotism or his lack of academic status. This added up to some passable comedy drama, but it tended to reduce the Doctor to a stooge in his own show.

The opening scenes of Pirate Planet have some of the same dynamic: although it is now Romana who is being petulant and sniping, and the Doctor who is relatively unfazed by it. Her crack about not understanding the TARDIS because she skipped the class on antiques (and preferred "the lifecycle of the Gallifreyan flutter-wing") is pretty childish. But there is a glint in both her's and the Doctor's eyes which suggests that they are just going through the motions.

The Doctor flies the TARDIS intuitively; Romana wants to do it by the book. The manual -- which is, rather delightfully, a huge leather Bible on a lectern -- says that you should check the "synchronic feedback circuit" and activate the "multi-loop synthesiser" before landing. The Doctor says he never bothers, offers to demonstrate a "really smooth materialisation" and (of course) crashes the ship. Romana, following the correct procedure, brings them in safely. 

Pompous people slipping on banana skins will always be funny, but if the point of your hero is that he is clever then "clever people are not as clever as they think they are" is not a card you want to play too often. (If, on the other hand your here were very, very strong, it would not be a particularly good idea to play up to the stereotype that strong people are stupid. Comic book and movie versions of Conan too often turn Bob Howard's intelligent barbarian into a brainless brick.)

As it turns out, it isn't quite the Doctor's fault. The crash happened because something else -- the planet Zanak -- was trying to materialise in the same place at the same time.

Once the Doctor and Romana are on the surface of Zanak, the relationship seems to reconfigure. The script recognises that if you have two characters, both Time Peers, both more or less immortal, and both with infinite reserves of pseudo-science and pseudo-history to draw on, what you have got is not the Doctor and his Assistant, but two versions of the Doctor. Look at the way Romana interacts with the Captain's guard in Episode Two ("Thank you; will you drive, I assume you know where you are going?") and the contempt she shows for the Captain and his Nurse ("I was never any good at antiques"). Either line could have just as easily have been delivered by the Doctor.

Now, "Two Doctors", as opposed to "the Doctor and his Beautiful Assistant" has some narrative advantages. It means that the Doctor can be learning about the Mentiads while Romana is being interviewed by the Captain; and the Doctor can be talking to the Captain while Romana and the Mentiads are trying to find another way into the hyperdrive engine room. And a bright, independent companion is a good deal less irritating -- and less sexist -- than one whose main role is to scream and ask the Doctor to explain how brilliant he is.

But equally,  "Two Doctors" create narrative problems which didn't exist before. Writers have generally resisted multi-Doctor crossovers for exactly that reason: but it's hard to write convincing dialogue for three (or five) competing egos. Robert Holmes' pitch for the Five Doctors and the Terrance Dicks script that was actually filmed, both went to some lengths to keep Pertwee, Troughton and Davison apart for most of the tale. Baker, of course, declined to be involved.


So: Episode Three of the Pirate Planet begins with a colossal expository dollop: we find out what the Captain is doing (materialising his hollow planet around other planets and stripmining them) and what this has to do with the Mentiads (killing planets releases the Life Force, which causes latent telepaths to Break Out). The Doctor and Romana both contribute to the explanations, talking over each other in a not particularly funny way.

DOCTOR: At almost the same moment it vanishes, it rematerialises in another part of the galaxy around another, slightly smaller, planet.

ROMANA: In this case, a planet called Calufrax.

DOCTOR: Yes. So your planet...

ROMANA: ....Zanak....

DOCTOR: [Glares]

ROMANA: Just helping you along, Doctor.

Adams does his best (did I mention he's quite good at dialogue?) but it quickly becomes annoying.

There are moments when the old patriarchal patronisation kicks in. The Doctor reveals very obvious plot points which the audience have already got to, and Romana exclaims "of course!" as if he is a genius. When it transpires that the Queen is behind the whole evil enterprise, and the Captain was only pretending to be a pantomime pirate, the Doctor becomes more school-teachery than Jon Pertwee ever was. "Let that be a lesson to you, my girl".  He really does call her "my girl".

At the end of the story they go back to the TARDIS together. It's a rare instance in the classic era of the TARDIS itself being used to solve a problem; and of the Ship itself being put at risk. 

And, if we are paying attention, there is a massive call back to Episode One. 

To prevent Zanak materialising around the Earth, the Doctor decides to deliberately materialise the TARDIS in the same place at the same time. If he gets it wrong, TARDIS and planet are both going to come to an explosive end. 

And sure enough, as he is going through this incredibly difficult operation we hear him say "Multi-loop stabiliser; synchronic feedback." He's doing it by the book: as Romana advised him in Episode One. In the end, the scheme is only partly successful and he has to invoke his own telepathy, the Mentiads, and a convenient spanner to damage the hyperdrive engines. So once again, they were both right: book learning and seat of the pants intuition together saves the day. And the Doctor and Romana stop scoring points off each other. "It was nice working with you" says the Doctor, when it looks as if they are going to die. "You too" replies the Doctor. The Doctor and Romana -- the Boy Doctor and the Girl Doctor -- have achieved a kind of balance.


In order to get a degree in English Literature, you have to have a good answer to the question "Why does Hamlet delay?" Why doesn't he just kill the King as soon as the Ghost has set him the quest? There are lots of possible answers: because he doubts the Ghost's veracity; because he doesn't have the opportunity; because he has studied Freud's Introductory Lectures; because he's a Calvinist; because he's not a Calvinist.

But the truthful answer is always: because if Hamlet killed Claudius in Act II Scene 1 the play would be very short.

Put more simply: Hamlet procrastinates because Hamlet is a play about procrastination. 


In Episode Three of the Pirate Planet, the Doctor tells Romana that the Captain wants to find out why they have come to Zanak.

"The reason we've come here is to find the second segment of the key" replies Romana "In case you'd forgotten". And, in fact, we had. Zanak and the Captain were quite exciting enough without worrying about the Guardian's cosmic jigsaw. Romana is about to claim that getting involved in what's happening on the planet is a distraction, but the Doctor interrupts her: "Getting involved in all this is the only way to find it."

It's either an admission of defeat, or Douglas Adams bragging that he has done something immensely clever. The only way in which the Doctor can find the second segment is for him to do exactly what he would have done in any case.

The Key to Time Saga is an argument about the essence of Doctor Who. The aimless wanderer now has a device which sends him to very specific times and places. The curious fellow who always gets involved is now under a divine mandate to turn up, grab the quest-objective, and leave.

Except that the Doctor's wanderings were never aimless. The Tracer has not changed the format: it has simply made explicit what has always been the case. The Doctor always ended up exactly where the Plot required him to be -- exactly where the writer decided to send him. The Plot has been made manifest; but it was never not there. Perhaps in this Season the Doctor can see it a little more clearly.  

Up to now every Doctor Who story has always begun with the question "Why doesn't the Doctor just leave?" And the answer, give or take a fluid link and a dematerialisation circuit, has always been: "Because he's the Doctor, that's why. 

But in Season Sixteen, that answer doesn't apply. Once the Doctor finds the Segment -- and he has an Anti-Plot device which infallibly points him to it -- he has no reason to stay and every reason to leave. The forces of Plot have to come up with strategies to keep him on Calufrax or Ribos . Otherwise, the Season would be very short indeed.


The First Segment was the intersection of a series of intrigues which would have carried on whether the Doctor had shown up or not. It kept him on the periphery of the action; reducing him to a supporting character on his own show. 

The Second Segment, as the Doctor directly acknowledges, is The Plot itself. For the first half of the story, the Tracer appears to be malfunctioning. It appears to have taken the Doctor to the wrong planet -- Zanak instead of Calufrax -- and it doesn't direct him to any single location. Viewers realise, a shade before the Doctor does, that it is behaving like a compass at the South Pole -- trying to point in all directions at once because everywhere is North.

The Doctor has to work out what is going on before he can put his hands on the Key and end the narrative. Once the puzzle is solved, the Plot focuses down on a single location: Calufrax ceases to be the narrative environment, and becomes an object within it, a tiny shrunken head in the Captain's trophy room. But the Doctor can't remove it until he understands the Captain's grand scheme. When everything falls into place, twenty two minutes into Episode Four, the story dutifully comes to an end.

If the Doctor had arrived on Calufrax / Zanak through the random wanderings of the TARDIS he would undoubtedly have been fascinated by the missing planet, and by the precious stones lying in the street. He would certainly have been horrified by what the Captain was doing, and he would definitely have sided with the Mentiads once he understood who they were. And there is no doubt that he would have tried to overthrow the Queen and save the Earth from being smothered. The Key to Time has negligible effect on the story we have just watched. 


People writing about the Key to Time often point to balance as a unifying theme. The meta-plot is about finding a mid-point between the Black and White Guardians; and the individual stories keep referencing the idea of balance: the unending war between heat and ice in Ribos mythology; the Captain's collection of dead planets held in perfect gravitational balance. Could we not also say that the Pirate Planet strives to find a balancing point between Plot and Anti-Plot?

Or would it be better simply to say that the Plot is in this case so huge and the Captain's power so evil, that the Doctor can't possibly ignore it, Black Guardian or no Black Guardian?

Or should we merely say that Adams made the not unsensible decision to pretty much ignore the overarching theme and wrote a damn fine space opera instead?



[NOTE 1] It is possible that Adams is consciously parodying or exaggerating some of the cliches of Doctor Who. The air-cars and the inertia corridor could be read as reaction against the preponderance of corridors. Villains honestly, no-kidding say things like "Guards, seize them!" "Die, you fool, die" "You shall die for your insolence" and "You dare to mock me." When the Doctor literally says "Take me to your leader" he must surely be doing it deliberately.

[NOTE 2] Romana definitely says "Time Lord", as opposed to "Time Lady". When they first met, she told the Doctor that she would be happy with the male sobriquet Fred. Despite her elegant dresses, gender is not, at this point, that big a deal in Time Lord society.

[NOTE 3] There is a fan tradition that "Time Lord" refers to an elite ruling class on Gallifrey, and that there are a number of artisans and technicians who are not in that illustrious caste. Romana is young by Time Lord standards but she appears to have already reached that exalted status: unless, perchance "Time Lord" is the title automatically bestowed on one on graduation. Terrance Dicks once joked that the existence of The Doctor and The Master rather implied that somewhere in space and time there must be a traveller called The Bachelor. The Doctor and Romana seem to treat "Time Lord" as synonymous with "Gallifreyan".





Serious face.


I currently have 62 Patreon followers, paying me very roughly £80 dollars per article.

Every single follow is a huge vote of confidence and massively appreciated; as, indeed, is every comment and every reader. (I am reminded of aline by favourite singer/songwriter: “It still blows my mind each time they let me play to anyone.”)

However, it remains true that I lost about five followers during March, on top of the ones I have lost since the beginning of the year, and any further drop in followers would be A Little Alarming.

I reduced the amount of hours I work on my day-job in 2022 specifically to spend more time writing; and Patreon remains my primary income stream.

I am only semi-serious when I say that I think my political writing drives people away. Certainly people have walked away (and in some cases stopped talking to me altogether) because of my shockingly right wing / shockingly left wing views. But I am sure it’s mostly because Times Are Hard and setting up monthly payments is a certain amount of hassle.


I also have to consider that I have over the last twenty years said absolutely everything I have to say on absolutely every subject, and that it is time to start looking for another hobby. I turn out to be quite good at singing sea shanties, for certain values of "singing". And obviously the Trolls said a long time ago that I had simply lost my marbles.

It’s definitely the case that if I find my Patreon followers go UP this month when I start writing about Doctor Who again, I am more likely to write about Doctor Who (or start some other Great Big Geek project). I set up a little Readers Poll for Patreon Supporters, which seems to show that the engaged followers are basically fine with me going off on one about Woke from time to time.

Coming this month:

I am writing my way around the 1978 Doctor Who story Stones of Blood, including a wild digression about Ley-lines, stone-circles and evangelicalism. I am hoping to do another Video Diary before too long. 

If this is even slightly interesting, do please consider clicking on the little button and pushing my follower back up to a healthy 70 or so. 









Thursday, April 18, 2024

Doctor Who Season 16: The Pirate Planet (3)

The story is not called Planet of the Pirates.  And "The Space Pirates" was already taken.

It is implied that, before his arrival on Zanak, a space pirate is what the Captain was. The Doctor says he can see the attraction of the profession -- "the thrill, the danger, and the derring do". Historically, pirates were everything the Doctor hates: big ships that picked on little ships and stole their lunch money. Most of them survived for only a few months before being sunk or hanged. We are told that the Captain's piratical persona is a ruse: a role he has adopted in order to conceal the fact that he's actually a brilliant hyper-space scientist. It isn't hard to think of other characters who hide behind scarves and yo-yos and jelly babies to encourage people to underestimate them.

But we never quite get a sense of the Captain playing a role. And in any case: what role? Pirates have parrots because John Silver had a parrot: they have hooked hands because James Hook had a hooked hand. But the Captain has never read Robert Louis Stevenson or JM Barrie. He's never been anywhere near the planet earth. [NOTE 1]

The robot parrot executioner is called the Polyphase Avitron. This is a quite good joke. "Polyphase" is a kind of electrical circuit (or sounds as if it could be) and "avitron" is as good a word as any for a flying robot. Polly is, of course, a cliched name for a parrot, possibly because polly-ticians are known to repeat the same thing over and over again. Adams reportedly wanted the robot to say "Pieces of silicate" and "pretty Polyphase Avitron" but marginally wiser heads prevailed. [NOTE 2]

But do we immediately understand that the robot is meant to be parrotical? Do we even understand that the elaborate helmet that the Captain wears, with a perspex monocle over one eye, is meant to suggest an eyepatch? I recall, when it was first shown in black-and-white in the corner of my living room, my father remarking "It's all got a bit too clever, hasn't it?" Possibly it had. [NOTE 3]

At the end of Episode Three, the Captain makes the Doctor walk the plank, because of course he does. All Doctor Who stories, it will be recalled, must feature at least one execution. Spaceships do not, as a general rule, have gangplanks: the science fiction equivalent of the plank would be the airlock. There is precious little evidence of real pirates ever using that particular method of killing captives. But a quick brainstorm around the word "pirate" would yield: "parrot, hook, eyepatch, plank". Bruce Purchase mercifully resists any temptation to say "Arrr!" [NOTE 4]

If you are not paying attention, you might say that this monumental cliche is followed by an humongous cheat. The Captain is throwing the Doctor into a ravine, not into the sea. We see the Doctor fall. We hear the Doctor scream. Mrs Whitehouse presumably spent the whole of the following week thinking that the Doctor was really dead, or imagining that he was still falling. But we all know that the Doctor can't die. And he's not due to regenerate for another two and a half seasons. And Doctor Who rarely cheats: not in the way that Republic Serials used to.

What's the solution? Maybe he falls onto -- say -- the back of an extremely large passing bird?

In fact, the solution is Sherlock Holmes' solution. The Doctor has no difficulty getting out of the chasm for the simple reason that he was never in it. At the beginning of Episode Four, we hear all the baddies laughing at the Doctor. And then we realise that the Doctor is laughing with them. Last season ended with the Doctor laughing because the special effects department had supplied him with a less unwieldy K-9. Adams has made the trademark guffaw part of the actual plot.

Of course the Doctor didn't fall to his death. What fell to its death was a kind of hard-light simulacrum, of the Doctor, controlled by the real Doctor. It's referred to as a hologram, still quite a neologism in 1978. But what falls off the plank is clearly not a simple projection of a 3D image, but some kind of autonomous back-up persona, capable of independent or apparently independent action.

Last season, we couldn't quite make up our minds whether a "clone" was a biological replica grown from a single cell, a sort of autonomous 3D photocopy, or a microcosmic avatar. Indeed, if Doctor Who were remotely interested in world-building, Adams could have said that the projection-Doctor that falls to its death in Pirate planet is the Same Kind of Thing as the Doctor/Leela micro-clones in Invisible Enemy. But he doesn't.

Twists involving doppelgängers always feel a bit dishonest. Ronald Knox's decalogue specifically prohibited their use in "fair play" whodunnits. But I am inclined to forgive this particular narrative trespass. In Episode Three the Doctor was shown picking up a mysterious piece of equipment from the mysterious Queen's mysterious mausoleum. It is, of course, the hologram projector. He doesn't tell us that it is a hologram projector: but he looks at it pointedly, as if to say "This is a plot device: it is going to be important later on." If we are paying very close attention indeed, we might notice that the Doctor who walks into the Bridge and is made to walk the plank is not holding the device. (Shades of Matt Smith's jacket!) But this was 1978. No-one had video recorders. DVDs were science fiction and Douglas Adams blocked novelisations of his works. Literally no-one would have remembered those kinds of tiny details between episodes. But Adams put it there. He was writing with some sense of narrative integrity.

The device hasn't been introduced simply in order to facilitate an escape. It's part of a huge plot reveal. A minor background character -- the Captain's nurse -- is herself a hologram, and always has been. Arguably, the hologram projector wasn't thought up to extricate the Doctor from an impossible cliffhanger: the cliffhanger was introduced to reveal to the audience the existence of the projector. The very small surprise that the Doctor survived the fall is trumped by the very big surprise that the Nurse isn't what she appeared to be -- which, in fact, turns the whole narrative on its head. In Episode Three, the Captain was a greedy braggart who wanted money and jewels. By Episode Four, he is the puppet of the Nurse, who is a projection of the evil Queen, who needs mineral resources to prolong her life and (this is a bit vague) regenerate into her own hologram.

Adams is very good at these kinds of foreshadowings and revelations; set-ups and pay-offs. In Episode One, Mr Fibuli tells the Captain that "there is something rather curious" about the planet they are about to obliterate. In Episode Four the Doctor spots that Calufrax is "an artificially metricised structure consisting of a substance with a variable atomic weight": and therefore the Second Segment of the Key to Time. ("Of course!" says Romana. She says that a lot.) In Episode One, an old man mentions that, nasty as the Captain is, he is nowhere near as bad as Queen Xanxia used to be in the olden days; in Episode Four, the mostly dead Queen is revealed to have been running the whole plot from the beginning. (She reassembled the dying Captain, but has forced him to use his hyperspace expertise to freeze her in time in the moment before she dies, while somehow transferring her consciousness to the hologram.)

And, yes, some of it is contrived. There is a sense that Adams knew the kinds of things he wanted to put into the story, and has to use a bit of brute force to connect them together. But he really does try. The Mentiads -- the chanting telepaths from the opening scenes -- turn out to be the local resistance movement. How do they connect with the Captain? Because when a planet is destroyed, its life-force is released, and you would naturally expect that to trigger or enhance the power of latent telepathy. The Doctor has come to Calufrax in search of the Key to Time: but the Captain has come there because it is a source of a rare mineral which he can use to power a plot device to block the Mentiads mental powers.

Pure babble, of course. But at least some work has been done to tie the two plot threads together. And there is a certain pleasure in watching it all unroll. We perceive a narrative structure even though we might be pressed, in the cold light of day, to explain it all.

What would have happened if Jodie Whittaker or David Tennant had been thrown from the top of a mountain into a ravine? I am very much afraid that the hologram projector would have been pulled out of the Doctor's bottom, with no foreshadowing whatsoever. Or else it would have been revealed that hard-light projections are an innate property of sonic screwdrivers. Or that Time Lords have a built in ability to be in two places at the same time. Or that a second Doctor can be magicked up if his companions have beautiful happy thoughts. Or if he is hit very hard with a gigantic fairground hammer.

I would judge that to be bad storytelling. But Russell T Davies might say that the set-up is ponderous, and that since we know the Doctor can do anything there is no point in explaining how he did this one particular thing. Or that the plank-walking is a fun thing to happen in a piratical themed story, and the great thing is to move onto the next fun thing. And that no one is going to remember the projector from seven days ago in any case.

And he wouldn't definitely be wrong.


[NOTE 1] Head canon 1: Pirates, like Christmas, are a kind of archetype that exists all over the universe. Head canon 2: The story is taking place in the Far Future, when Earth literature has spread all through the universe, its origins long-forgotten. (The Captain has read Pirate stories in the original Klingon.) Head Canon 3: The human idea of piracy came from contact with space pirates in the ancient world. 

[NOTE 2] The Parrot repeats both phrases back at the Captain in Goss's extended novelisation; in the shorter version the Captain says "pretty Polyphase Avitron" in an internal monologue.

[NOTE 3] James Goss describes the Captain as much more like a zombie or cyborg than he appears in the TV show: "the remains of a very large man" "a green eyepatch flowed dangerously, metal lips sneered, and even half of his beard was iron". He also says that he smelt of cooking meat, which would have been hard to convey on TV.

[NOTE 4] Robert Louis Stevenson gave John Silver a Bristol accent, and Robert Newton exaggerated it: but in 1978 we had not quite reached the point where a pirate was defined as "a person who says Arrr". In 1986, Baker himself would perfectly embody the cliche as Captain Redbeard Rum, opposite Simon Jones (Arthur Dent) as Walter Raleigh.




Serious face.


I currently have 62 Patreon followers, paying me very roughly £80 dollars per article.

Every single follow is a huge vote of confidence and massively appreciated; as, indeed, is every comment and every reader. (I am reminded of aline by favourite singer/songwriter: “It still blows my mind each time they let me play to anyone.”)

However, it remains true that I lost about five followers during March, on top of the ones I have lost since the beginning of the year, and any further drop in followers would be A Little Alarming.

I reduced the amount of hours I work on my day-job in 2022 specifically to spend more time writing; and Patreon remains my primary income stream.

I am only semi-serious when I say that I think my political writing drives people away. Certainly people have walked away (and in some cases stopped talking to me altogether) because of my shockingly right wing / shockingly left wing views. But I am sure it’s mostly because Times Are Hard and setting up monthly payments is a certain amount of hassle.


I also have to consider that I have over the last twenty years said absolutely everything I have to say on absolutely every subject, and that it is time to start looking for another hobby. I turn out to be quite good at singing sea shanties, for certain values of "singing". And obviously the Trolls said a long time ago that I had simply lost my marbles.

It’s definitely the case that if I find my Patreon followers go UP this month when I start writing about Doctor Who again, I am more likely to write about Doctor Who (or start some other Great Big Geek project). I set up a little Readers Poll for Patreon Supporters, which seems to show that the engaged followers are basically fine with me going off on one about Woke from time to time.

Coming this month:

I am writing my way around the 1978 Doctor Who story Stones of Blood, including a wild digression about Ley-lines, stone-circles and evangelicalism. I am hoping to do another Video Diary before too long. 

If this is even slightly interesting, do please consider clicking on the little button and pushing my follower back up to a healthy 70 or so.