Androids of Tara [2]

As the curtain rises on Episode One, the Doctor is playing chess. Not deep in concentration across a table, but lolling on the floor of the TARDIS, one end of his scarf wrapped around K-9.

There is no reason for the scarf to be wrapped around the dog: the Doctor has done it pointlessly, like a teenager wearing his school tie as a headband. He's being more than usually petulant. He makes a rude face at K-9 after making what he thinks is a clever move. He patronises K-9 when the robot makes what he considers to be a terrible one. When, inevitably, the Doctor loses, he unsportingly claims that chess is predictable and uninteresting.

We saw the same dynamic at the beginning of the Sunmakers. K-9 is good at chess and the Doctor is a bad loser. We're on K-9 and Romana's side: it's funny when the show-off Doctor is hoisted on his own multi-coloured petard. But one can't help thinking that the format is undermining the hero.

Why chess? Is this week's story going to be about whether it is better to follow textbook tactics or think outside the box? Is it going to be about the limits of artificial intelligence -- about whether organic life-forms can out-think artificial ones? Will we see the people of the universe reduced to pawns in a game between the Black Guardian and the White?

None of the above. In fact, the chess game has no relevance to the rest of the action. It's filler; there to represent down-time. George Lucas also showed an alien playing chess with a machine in order to indicate a transition between two adventures. Chewbacca, like the Doctor, is a terrible loser.

It's also there to indicate the Doctor's mood. The Doctor is signalling to Romana -- and to the White Guardian, if he is watching -- that he is bored with the quest and wants to opt out of it. And David Fisher is making very much the same point to us viewers; and very possibly to Graham Williams as well. The Key to Time theme has been an abject failure; and we're all heartily sick of it. Androids of Tara is about what happens when the hero (and the writer) opt out of the meta-plot. The Doctor is playing chess at Romana. One thinks of Marvin phoning up Zaphod in order to wash his head at him.

*

In Stones of Blood, the voice of the White Guardian popped up in the TARDIS to remind us that Season 16 was all about the Key To Time. In Androids of Tara, it falls to Romana to do so. And she uses some very interesting language:

"Aren't you forgetting something."

"I don't think so."

"What about our task. The Key to Time, remember?"

"Oh that old thing."

"Yes, that old thing. The Guardian did stress the need for urgency." 

The idea of the Doctor forgetting -- or pretending to forget -- his mission is distinctly odd. I suppose Sir Galahad might conceivably have said "My task is to find the Holy Grail" and Princess Leia might possibly have said  "My task is to deliver the secret plans". But it is strange for the Doctor to describe the quest for the Key to Time as a "task" -- as if saving the universe from eternal chaos is a chore; a bit of busy-work that he can't quite be bothered to get around to. He calls the most powerful artefact in the universe "that old thing". Arthur Dent used the same words to describe the eponymous Guide.

In previous seasons, the Doctor has been motivated by his innate sense of right and wrong; and his innate wish to find things out. But he doesn't have "missions" or "tasks": he wanders the universe quixotically getting involved in whatever is happening. When he is given a mission, by the Time Lords or the Brigadier, he resists it and complains about it. Going around the universe collecting plot coupons -- however valuable -- is a chore.

And it's a chore for the writers too. We can see Mr Fisher and Mr Holmes reluctantly working the Key into their stories, before getting on with the tale they would have told in any case. Only Douglas Adams seemed interested in finding ways to use the Key as a jumping off point for a narrative that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been there.

So. The Doctor goes on strike. He opts out of the story. He delegates the job of finding the Fourth Segment to Romana. She has been acting as a kind of stand-in Doctor for the past twelve weeks in any case. He announces that he is going to go fishing and leave her to it.

Romana doesn't know what fishing is. Are there no fish on Gallifrey? Not even singing ones, in pools of liquid gold? Or are Time Lords vegetarians -- or opposed to even the mildest of bloodsports? (Romana has also never heard of horses.) The Doctor claims to have learned about fishing from Isaac Walton -- of course -- so maybe the sport is unique to earth. For once, he doesn't say that he taught Walton all he knew, so perhaps this particular name-drop is even true. On the other hand, Romana appears to be a pretty advanced chess player, able to spot checkmate a dozen moves ahead by glancing at the board. Is she so brilliant -- is chess so simple? -- that she can play like a master after observing a single game? Or is chess another of the things that humans learned from Gallifrey?

Romana goes to a wardrobe and selects a new dress. The Doctor goes to a cupboard and selects a fishing rod. Romana's cupboard contains a selection of clothes, in alphabetical order; the Doctor's, naturally, is full of junk. 

Why do we need to see where the Doctor got his fishing rod, or indeed, where Romana got her frock? Last week, the Doctor produced a lawyer's wig out of thin air: if he had just emerged from the TARDIS with a fishing rod in his hand, we wouldn't have questioned it. When we first met Romana, she was wearing an elegant but impractical white gown. We didn't particularly wonder where she got the more sensible pink dress she was wearing in the Pirate Planet. But David Fisher apparently did wonder, because he dropped a tiny "Romana gets changed" sequence into Stones of Blood. She asks the Doctor if he likes her natty peach trouser-suit: the Doctor, of course, ignores her. So in this story, we actually see her choosing her dress.

I remember a bit of ephemera: a strip in a Countdown or TV Comic Summer Special in which the Third Doctor asks Jo Grant to change her clothes before travelling to the Olden Days. "My own clothes are suitable for any time period" he explained. Which makes sense. The Fourth Doctor's get-up is presumably equally inappropriate wherever he goes in the universe. 

It lampshades a problem that has never occurred to us before. very like Sarah-Jane suddenly wondering how she understands renaissance Italian. Maybe the same Time Lord Gift ensures that travellers always blend in with their surroundings. Or maybe it's a mechanism of the TARDIS: the Tomorrow People used to have Chameleon Circuits fitted into their spacesuits, I seem to remember. Back in the day, we tackled the question of "what does the Doctor eat" -- the TARDIS has a futuristic replicator which produces food-flavoured tablets. Much later, we learned that the TARDIS had a bathroom; although not, of course, a bathroom. The TARDIS was never just a travelling device: it is clear in Unearthly Child that the Doctor and Susan regard it as their home.

So: there could have been a futuristic Clothes Replicator which materialised genre-appropriate costumes at the push of a button. It could have been called the Loom. And I expect that canon-conscious fans would say that it does. The TARDIS can be what it likes, inside and outside, and it just so happens that, this week, the Time Lord Clothing Loom Interface has been configured to look like an old fashioned wardrobe. The console room in New New New Who seems to reconfigure itself on a season-by-season basis. 

But to me, that spoils the moment. Old Who is at its most sensible when it least makes sense. The TARDIS is a magic box, but it's also a rickety old machine that doesn't quite work. It's a piece of fabulously advanced Galifreyan technology; but it's also a sprawling, Hogwartian Gormenghast.

It certainly does have a wardrobe: Sarah-Jane once found one of Victoria's old dresses there. She also found a whole room full of wellington boots. The very first time we saw the interior, there were antique chairs, hatstands, and what looked like a wooden peacock positioned around the ultra-tech console. The TARDIS is very big, and the Doctor has been travelling for a very long time so of course he has acquired a lot of stuff. We first met him in a junk yard.

The final episodes of Invasion of Time weren't a one-off aberration. That's now what the TARDIS looks like. It's not a spaceship or a machine; it's where the Doctor and Romana go when they are not in a story. There is a sense that we are peeling away a backdrop, looking at a shabby bag-stage reality. Chess, fishing, clothes, bickering. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they are killing time until the writer thinks up something for them to do.

It's silly. It will get sillier. It could validly be seen as undermining or parodying the premise of the show. Up until Ribos Operation there was a viewpoint character, a human in the TARDIS. Now there is the Doctor and the lady Doctor. So if we get to glimpse their off-stage existence, it has to be weird, surreal, ridiculous. Soon enough, things will swing the other way and Peter Davison will reduce the TARDIS to a time travelling Premier Inn. 

There was a popular children's TV series about a little man who tried on historical costumes; and found himself transported back in time to the period of the clothes: the Wild West if he was trying on a cowboy suit; Ancient Rome if he was trying on a toga.

"Romana gets changed." At the beginning of the next series, we will see Romana emerging from a changing room in a series of different bodies.

Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara 

Available to Patreons  -- The Power of Kroll 

Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor

Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.