Not A Scholar: 2024

I suppose Orinoco must still be picking up the litter in some park somewhere and I don't know about it and that makes me feel sad. The Clangers have had a hundred and four new adventures, of which I have only shared five or six. That makes me slightly sad as well. I haven't thought about Doctor Doolittle or Hal and Roger for decades. Maybe I should see if they are on social media.

Strange, the loyalty you feel to people who don't exist.

Some of our childhood friends grew up with us. Some people think it is terribly smart to say "Doctor Who is just a children's programme" or "Star Wars is just a 1970s B movie" but if they really thought that was true there would be no point in saying it. No-one has ever pointed out that actually Bagpuss is a children's programme.

"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"

Even at the age of ten, I could see that Hugh Walters had run out of steam. The formula of the series has become narrower and narrower and finally disappeared up Uranus.

It's not hard to see why. Space travel, simply as such, is not very interesting. Four guys in a small box, floating in literal nothingness a long way away from anything else. Space travel stories are mostly not about the getting there, but about what happens when you arrive. And if you don't know very much about planetary physics and have ruled out aliens, one destination is a lot like another.

Is space itself interesting? Hugh Walters occasionally pauses to tell us that it is very big, very black, and has lots of stars in it:

“Though he’d seen it many times before, the vision of space never failed to make Morey catch his breath. Innumerable points of brilliant light shone unwinkingly from every direction. He knew that the void itself, not having the power to reflect light, would be like black velvet, but there were so many stars that he scarcely saw a black patch at all."

There is some implication that the astronauts find just being up there among the sparkly velvet a spiritual experience, or (though Walters doesn't put it like that) an addiction. But I can't help feeling that it would have been safer and cheaper to go and swoon over some Lake District daffodils. Or possibly find a waterfall and have sublime feelings about it.

When I Was Very Young, I wanted more than anything to be an Astronaut. I think I harmed my Academic Career by insisting on doing science subjects, even though my bent was clearly towards the humanities. "O" Level Biology kept alive the dream of someday being a Space Man. Now I Am Six I read about the nasty rich guy's fantasy of space colonisation and I think "Even if I had a trillion pounds, I wouldn't spend it on being shot into near orbit and floating for a few seconds in a vacuum."

I couldn't have articulated any of this when I was ten, of course. But I vividly remember sitting on the bed in my Granny's spare room reading Nearly Neptune and thinking "They are going to sacrifice their lives for each other. Again. That's all that ever happens in these stories now." Expressions like "jump the shark" weren't in vogue. But you don't have to have an 'A' Level in English literature to spot that the ghost is always the fairground owner in a mask, and Dennis always ends up across his Dad's knee.

Did I stop reading the books? Of course I didn't stop reading the books. Do you imagine that I would allow my friend Chris to go on a space mission without me? But the Tripods increasingly became my drug of choice.

"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"

My four friends are shot in the direction of Neptune in a rocket. There is a technical fault. All seems lost. The ground crew give them up for dead. But with some technical acumen and a last minute intervention by God, they survive, and come back to earth, and start planning for their next trip. Which is to say, the plot of Nearly Neptune is exactly the same as the plot of the previous ten books: but there are no telepathic twins, floating martian ghosts, alien fungi, subterranean eggs or unexplained domes to add spice. There isn't even a Russian saboteur or a nasty boffin who turns out to have a heart of gold.

"Neptune!" Morey exclaimed "Why Neptune?"

Why indeed? One imagines Hugh Walters sitting at his typewriter coming up with titles -- Yacht to Uranus? Unicycle to Uranus? Yodelling On Uranus? -- and then giving up.

"Neptune is more favourably placed" explains Sir George Boffin "it will be several years before we could have another shot at it.

Walters is shamelessly good at dramatic opening lines. Of course I didn't actually believe that Chris or any of his three companions were dead, exclamation mark. True, Stan Lee had taught me that good guys did sometimes get killed off; but I knew perfectly well that entire casts never get wiped out on page one. Still, it was a good hook. And it could have been a good structural twist. Why not skip over the boring set up (briefing, training, launch) and skip straight to the part where there has been a Terrible Disaster and our heroes are facing Certain Death?

But Walters cannot resist the power of The Formula. Admittedly, we spend Chapter One in ground control. Sir George Benson, the chief boffin is "overwhelmed with grief" and Whiskers, the funny boffin is "smitten with deep grief". But Gillanders, the Australian Boffin says that "They accepted the risks openly and cheerfully" and everyone pulls themselves together.

By Chapter Two, we have gone into a flashback sequence. It's rather tiresomely written in the past perfect ("It had been six months before that Sir George Benson sent for his favourite crew") but otherwise it's business as usual. "Rides on the giant centrifuge had been childsplay....They had also to spend periods in hot and cold chambers to test out the insulation of their suits". By chapter three we're seeing the story from Chris's point of view. I suppose there are homeopathic qualities of dramatic irony because we know something is going to go horribly wrong. But something always goes horribly wrong.

"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"

Was Walters a plotter or a pantser? He typed for an hour each morning before going off to the furniture warehouse; and churned out two books each year. Did he write that first sentence knowing why our heroes were (apparently) dead? Or was he one of those writers who just put paper in the typewriter and started to type?

It's rather common in old-fashioned 2-cents a word pulp stories for Heroes to wake up in white rooms suffering from memory loss. They stagger through mysterious doorways into blank white landscapes. They keep drinking coffee or whiskey or in some cases smoking joints. We see the story forming in the authors head and on the page. Douglas Adams posthumous Dirk Gentley novel had the hero just walking randomly around London looking for a case to solve.

Miss Griffiths often told us to write a story on a set subject, say, A Picnic By The Sea or What Would Happen If Jesus Came To Tea. We wrote directly into our exercise books; in long hand with fountain pens, and were expected to finish inside an hour.

Did this first exposure to the idea of "writing" privilege pantsing over plotting? Did the emphasis on neat cursive writing tacitly teach us that revision was cheating? Crossings out were a mortal sin. What kind of writer does that tend to produce? A blocked writer, reluctant to put pen to paper until the perfect sentence has formed in their head? A dull writer, forced safely to write cliche and unadorned prose, with lots of adjectives? It was a beautiful sunny day when there was a knock at my shiny green door. Who should it be but sweet little baby Jesus himself. Would you like a nice cup of hot tea in a red mug I said brightly oh yes please he replied happily? I have always thought that the popularity of J.K Rowling owes something to the fact that her prose is the sort of prose that junior school English teachers would think was good prose.

But maybe the school teachers were unconsciously breeding poets in the mould of Ted Hughes and Alan Ginsburg where first thoughts are the best thoughts, the mind is tethered directly to the writing hand and once the thought fox has left his footprint in the white room it is really too late to change anything?

I think Walters wrote the first sentence at the top of his page, and trusted that the momentum would carry him through the set-up and the first few chapters, and that he would find out what the terrible disaster was at the same time the boffins and the readers did. I think he got to the Midpoint and realised he still had no idea what was going to happen; and said "Oh, soddit. Mechanical failure due to human error."

He drops a little hint that the ship is going to be pierced by a meteor. Holes made by tiny ones are automatically patched, but large ones could portentously puncture the oxygen tanks and the fuel pods. "But this was so unlikely that the possibility could be forgotten". And Walters does, indeed, forget it. The disaster just kind of happens.

"For some unaccountable reason there was a loose connection among the hundreds of wires that were housed within the hypo control casing."

You're the effing writer, Hugh: account for it.

The boys wake up from suspended animation. They find that the loose wire has caused a fire, wasting a lot of oxygen and fuel and filling the ship up with smoke. Chris "his chest feeling as if it was ready to burst" goes to the store room and "exerting every ounce of his ebbing strength" he manages to open the locker doors and find some space helmets. He "feels the perspiration running down his face" but "feels a great flood of relief" when he is able to use the space helmets to revive the other astronauts. They temporarily abandon ship. The sight of "the star-spangled heavens" fills Chris "with wonder at its indescribable beauty" but he also shivers when he sees the "vast emptiness surrounding the four astronauts". Everyone agrees that they are "tiny specks of life in a vast hostile universe".

Fortunately, the tiny specks of life manage to get the radio working and tell Mission Control that Chris Godfrey and his three companions are still alive. Unfortunately, the retro rockets are bust, so there is no way of turning the ship round. Fortunately, it would be possible for someone to go out into space, physically push the ship, and allow Newtonian mechanics to do the rest. Unfortunately, the person doing so would shoot himself off into space and never be heard from again. Fortunately, while Chris is nobly sacrificing himself, Tony, the only competent person on board, works out a way of using oxygen to fix the jet packs ("compressed air guns") and the ship is turned around without anyone being deaded. Unfortunately, the journey home will take eight months. Fortunately, Tony is able to fix the cryogenic system. Unfortunately, there are only two functioning chambers. And very unfortunately there isn't enough food for even two crewmen to survive that long. So while two of the crew are in with a good chance of getting home, the other two are quite definitely and irrevocably going to die. Which is very unfortunate indeed.

Walters has backed himself into a corner which raises genuine moral questions about life and death -- questions about the ethics of suicide and euthanasia. Questions about faith and mortality. Chris has been said to be an active church-goer. You might imagine he would at some point say something about heaven. Or ask one of the boffins to read them the Last Rites. I suppose Serge is a godless commie. I know it's a kids' book, but it's a kid's book which is all about dying. And it's rather peculiar about the subject of death.

George Boffin, on earth, wonders whether to leave the radio connected or not.

"Would it be kind to let he astronauts end their days in privacy? Or should they keep in contact right to the end? Benson didn't think he could stand that."

When he realises that he may have to decide which two get the cryogenic couches, he again seems to focus on his own discomfort:

"Now two only must be selected to live....It was going to be a ghastly job making the decision."

Chris naturally assumes that, as captain, he will sacrifice himself for his crew: and Serge and Morey both beg to be allowed to be one of the ones who cops it. Chris is a little disappointed that Tony is the only one not to volunteer. But of course, once he has completed the repairs, Tony goes off by himself, slips into a space suit, and jumps out of the airlock. Why he bothers with the spacesuit is not entirely clear. But while he "floats in space and lets oblivion come creeping over him" "a feeling of guilt floods over" all the others. They were all planning to leap out of the airlock as well, and are ashamed that Tony got there first. So they all go outside, drag him back inside, and try to have a civilised discussion about the situation:

"I’m sure we’d all be prepared to take a one-way walk into space but we must decide rationally who’s to do it.”

“Have you thought, Chris, how the two survivors will feel?” Serge asked quietly. “I don’t want to be one of them.”

“Nor me,” Morey burst out. “I couldn’t face life with that on my mind.”

Everyone wants to die on behalf of his friends because it would be too painful to know that one of his friends had died on behalf of him. Which makes you think that if they were really heroic, they guys would be offering to stay alive to spare their friends the emotional trauma. I am reminded of the old joke about the sadist and the masochist.) (*) Walters would have been a young child at the end of World War 1 and a young adult at the end of World War II: one wonders if some traumatic survivor guilt is working its way out in these stories?

When the team learned that they were going to Neptune, they were as "excited as schoolboys". When they thought about the dangers, they were "as gay as schoolboys". Early in the mission, Whiskers told Tony that he would "give him a good hiding" when he gets home if he was not more "respectful to his elders". By my sums, Chris is 37 and Tony is 29. But Walters is still writing them as if they were the adolescent heroes of Blast Off At Woomera and the Domes of Pico. Like the First World War poets, he sees a certain poignant beauty in the idea of young men expiring together before old age and women can spoil them. They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man, the lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

"We've always been together" Tony insisted "And we must be together to the end. Let's step out with arms linked and keep it that way."

In the end, they agree to, er, take it in turns, with two guys spending some time in cold sleep while the others try to survive on as little food and oxygen as possible, and then swapping places. Exactly how this helps, I don't know. I would have thought it introduces a ghoulishly random element, so that the two who are in deep freeze when the others drop dead from starvation get to go home. I suppose it means that no-one has to make the terrible choice. The discussion become even more ghoulish. What's to stop the two chaps who are awake killing themselves as soon as the other two chaps are asleep? They'd promise not too. But wouldn't giving your life for your best friend make it okay to break a promise, even if you'd crossed your heart and pinky promised?

“No, I don’t. If we give our word to each other, that’s more binding than anything,” Chris said.

“But we can easily counter that. We’d all give an undertaking that if any pair of us woke up to find the other two had broken their solemn pledge, then the survivors, too, would step out into space.”

The Russians used experimental dogs to test the early space craft. One wonders whether UNEXA ever used trained lemmings.

And in the end, there is a deus ex machina. Something in the original malfunction has affected the ship's heating system; so the two crewmen who were awake when it finally blows (Chris and Morey, as it happens) are accidentally put into cold sleep. When he introduced the concept, Walters had thought through how cryogenics might work: he talked about little implants to keep the heart functioning an special injections of space anti-freeze to stop the blood from freezing. But it seems that to get our heroes out of a hole, it works just as well to go to sleep in a chilly space capsule.

This is the twelfth novel and Chris's eleventh space expedition. Internal chronology suggests that twenty years have passed since his first adventure, and astronauts have to retire at the age of 40. Sir George, who must be close to 65, announces his retirement at the end of this book. Australian Boffin Billy Gilanders takes over as head of UNEXA, and asks Chris to be his deputy. Chris isn't too sure:

"He should have been proud, of course But was he? Was it worthwhile being recommended for this marvellous appointment if it meant the end of his journeys in space? He must take a long, long time before he made up his mind."

This question is considerably more interesting than anything which happens in this morbidly lacklustre volume.

(*) "Please, please, will you beat me?" "No."

Andrew has been re-reading a few of these books every autumn for the last few years. Read the other essays right here....

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Thursday, September 26, 2024

Arts Diary: The Critic

Arts Diary: The Critic: Everyman

Arts Diary: The Substance

Arts Diary: The Substance: Everyman

The Armageddon Factor (X)

“Remember me to Galifrey”

In 1972, Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks co-authored a book called The Making of Doctor Who.

Doctor Who was just barely old enough to have a history (a whole nine years) and the book mythologised that history. It told us about the creation of Doctor Who; described the filming of a typical story; provided a pseudo-scientific explanation of the TARDIS’s dimensions and even included a religious essay by a vicar.

The core of the book was a summary of the Doctor’s adventures, in the form of in-universe texts. There were Time Lord's legal documents relating to the Doctor's trial and exile; and memos from the Brigadier to Geneva about his new scientific adviser. The actual stories aren’t referred to by name; although there is a chart listing them by production code. Geeky Doctor Who fans could have endless fun cross-referencing the summaries in Making of Doctor Who with the synopses in the Radio Time Tenth Anniversary Special. Because that was all there was.

The Time Lord legal documents refer to the Accused as "∂³ Σ x²". The editorial material says that this is the Doctor's “real name”: a mathematical formula.

Dicks and Hulke were closely involved in the creation of Doctor Who lore-- they were the ones who came up with the idea of Time Lords, probably the most important pillar of the mythos after the TARDIS itself. This doesn't make their every breath canonical. But it is striking that the book gives the Brigadier’s first name as “Alistair”, something not mentioned on screen until Planet of the Spiders.

In 1980, Marvel Comics reprinted the comic strips from Doctor Who Weekly in an American format. Editor Mary-Jo Duffy wrote a text feature bringing readers up to speed on who the Doctor was. Her essay states, parenthetically, that the Doctor's “real name” is ∂³Σx², as if that was a generally established fact. This strongly suggests that the Making of Doctor Who was in use as a “series bible”—or just possibly, that there was a separate internal document that the book drew on.

The point of calling the Doctor “∂³Σx²” is that his name is unpronounceable to humans. If one read the formula off the page it would be something like “derivative cubed sigma ex squared"; but presumably the signs have a Galifreyan meaning distinct from human algebra. In the Three Doctors (also written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin) one of the Founding Fathers of the Time Lords is referred to by the single Greek letter Omega. In other stories, Time Lords have titles like the Doctor (the Master, the Monk, the Valeyard) or what appear to be straightforward forenames (Borusa, Morbius, Romanadvoratrelundar.)

Now, in Armageddon Factor, the Doctor encounters Drax, a Time Lord (or at any rate Gallifreyan) technician who he knew as a student. We aren’t specifically told that they attended the Time Lord Academy: simply that they were on a “tech course” together. [1] Very interestingly, Drax refers to the Doctor by name. And the name he gives him consists of two Greek letters: Theta Sigma. The Doctor asks him to call him Doctor, but he persists in saying “Theet".

If Bob Baker and Dave Martin, like Mary-Jo Duffy, were working from the Making of Doctor Who they might have assumed that the ∂ was a Greek letter and wrongly guessed that it was a “theta”. Or they might have made up the Theta part. (There's a cursive form of theta which looks a lot like the partial derivative sign: so someone who had studied Greek but didn't use it much might mistake one for the other.)[2] There is no particular reason why "Θ Σ" couldn't be an ironic contraction of "∂³Σx²": in the same way that Peggy is short for Margaret and Jack is short for John. In the Happiness Patrol, the Seventh Doctor states unequivocally that Theta Sigma was a college nick-name.

This seems to be an example of canon-drift. A fact, detached from its original narrative context has become something which “everybody knows”. The whole point of Hulke and Dicks coinage of “derivative cubed sigma ex squared” was that it was a miraculous name; a name which underlined the pure alienness of the Time Lords. If the letters simply translated into sounds, then the Doctor might as well have been called “Deesexxx”. The idea of a Time Lord who presents as a South London Car Mechanic; and who trivially calls the Doctor “Theet” removes the very sense of otherness that the name was supposed to suggest.

A contemporary letter-writer to the DWAS fanzine TARDIS said that revealing that the Doctor is called “Theeta Sigma” had exploded the last vestige of mystery from the character. Which is partly true: although the taboo of speaking the Doctor's name has largely been imagined by fans; and is rarely a plot point in the actual story. [3]

Objectively, it is hard to see how knowing that the Doctor is called Theeta Signma spoils Doctor Who. Ribos Operation wasn’t ruined because we know that beyond the control room, the TARDIS is made of bricks and mortar. Face of Evil is not spoiled because the Time Lords turned out not to be quite as mysterious and omnipotent as we once thought. Destiny of the Daleks and Creature from the Pit would be the same stories if the Doctor's name had remained an ultimate mystery.

But this stuff does tell us something about the tone of the series and the style that Read and Williams and Adams are bringing to the show. To say “irreverence” implies that Doctor Who has a quality of holiness which deserves respect, which is obviously absurd. (This was very slightly before Life of Brian.) But it is quite true that the show has become more and more playful. Nothing is off limits; the present scene and the current one-liner are all that count, continuity and world-building be damned. The idea that the Doctor had a silly nick name at college--and that he is annoyed and embarrassed when an old mate uses it--is fun in the moment. But if you see it as making an irrevocable addition to the backstory, it's at best pointless and at worst destructive.

The Doctor is not David Copperfield. He’s not even Conan the Barbarian. The Hyperborean Legion invented facts about Conan the Barbarian that surprised Robert E Howard: but pretending that Conan was an historical character about whom facts could be invented was very much in tune with the game Bob was playing. Doctor Who--the Doctor Who of seasons fifteen, sixteen and seventeen--is a quite different beast.

The incumbent producer and the incoming script editor have laid their cards on the table. This is not your grandfather's Doctor Who.

Fans rejected the approach: Season 17 was universally despised. In 1983 an essay in the programme for the infamous Longleat twentieth anniversary celebration (author: Levine, I) stated, unequivocally, that Graham Williams’ approach was bad-wrong and that John Nathan-Turner fixed everything in the early 80s.

What will Doctor Who be like from now on? The Key to Time asks the question. Season 17 answers it. Minotaur in y-fronts; Time Lords fellating alien tentacles; cameos by comedians and heroes who howl “my arms! my legs! my everything" when they are injured.

Is this the moment when Doctor Who truly became itself? Or the day the series died?

[1] This was 450 years ago. The birthday scene in Stones of Blood would have established the Doctor’s age as 751; making the Doctor 300 years old when he was a student; which is fairly consistent with the Doctor’s apparent age of around 45. In Power of Kroll he gives his age as “nearly 760”.

[2] Thanks to Patreons KD & DG for this scholarly observation!

[3] Ian Chesterton asks “doctor who?” in the second episode; a soldier asks the same question in the Highlanders; and famously the Post Office Tower computer thinks Doctor Who is his actual name; but I don’t think the words are spoken again until Tegan blurts “doctor whoever you are” in Baker’s final story.

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.

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

The Armageddon Factor (IX)

7 Feb 1979

“Then Mentalis will go into it’s Armageddon sequence, and we’ll be bits of dust flying round the cosmos.”

Ribos Operation, Pirate Planet and Androids of Tara are, in their different ways, excellent Who stories. Power of Kroll and Stones of Blood are pretty poor, but with redeeming features. Armageddon Factor is outright bad.

The first episode contains a tolerably interesting set-up. Two planets are engaged in an endless war. A pacifist Princess and her boy-friend are secretly making contact with the peace movement on the other side. There are odd flares of inventiveness: the story opens with a painfully romantic scene which turns out to be a war-time propaganda movie; while hopelessly biassed news-broadcasts play in the background. John Woodvine is good value as the warmongering Marshall, but his attempts to evoke Winston Churchill in his speeches tip into parody. His bumbling henchmen Merek is pure panto. After the embarrassment of Power of Kroll the special effects are rather decent. The visual effects team know how to do model spaceships. Star Wars is now firmly lodged in the Zeitgeist; the shots of the Marshall and Merek in the cockpit of their flagship evoke the Millennium Falcon a bit too specifically; and it's compulsory for cameras to pan the underside of big spaceships.

If I were going to attempt what Other Bloggers call “a redemptive reading", I would say that the failure of Armageddon Factor is the point of the story. Power of Kroll followed the Doctor Who template just about as closely as anything possibly could. The opening episode of Armageddon Factor suggests that Bob Baker and Dave Martin are going to do the same kind of thing: a generic Doctor Who space opera with an anti-Cold-War message. (This was before the series became political.)

It is the presence of the Key to Time which disrupts this perfectly good idea: which causes the action to stop dead for two episodes. What might have been a story about the Doctor brokering peace between two warring factions becomes a quarrel about the last plot coupon; with a strong female character reduced the status of playing piece and finally an interestingly shaped crystal.

The Key, simply by existing marks the end of Doctor Who; the end, in fact, of all stories. That’s what the Guardian said at the beginning, after all. If the Doctor refuses the quest, nothing will ever happen to him again. An over-arching plot device means the end of all plots. So this final story has to fail: it has to show us what Doctor Who would be like if the Quest succeeded. The Doctor’s rejection of the Key resets the format; returns us to the premise of a wandering free-agent Doctor.

There is a third factor in play in the war between Atrios and Zeos: a planet of evil on which a villainous villain called The Shadow villainously lives. He answers directly to the Black Guardian and is trying to get to the Sixth Key before the Doctor does. He mind-controls the Marshall from behind a mirror.

The Shadow has no motivation whatsoever: he is just evil. He has no back story or history and is not even very interesting to look at.

Couldn't we at least have said he was the Master? The Master working for the Black Guardian while the Doctor worked for the White one would have had a certain obvious panache.

The Shadow can't finish a single sentence without engaging in evil laughter. When the Black Guardian turns out to be Valentine Dyall, there is a serious danger of an Evil Laughter arms race breaking out. (This was before the television version of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, but after the LP version: it's complicated.) [*] The idea that an Evil Force and a Mad Computer are keeping two sides at war unnecessarily doesn't really say a great deal about the nuclear arms race, or indeed about anything else.

I won't say that Lalla Ward looks anything like Carrie Fisher or even that her hairstyle looks like Princess Leia's; and the Shadow certainly looks nothing like Darth Vader. But when a princess-shaped McGuffin is menaced by a card-carrying Dark Lord, you can’t help picking up a certain post-Star-Wars energy. Like Leia, Astra is simultaneously a self-assured independent woman and a damsel in distress. I’m not sure how great a feminist statement that is.

The Doctor is able to infer the shape of the final segment of the Key from the other five, which feels a bit like solving a Rubik Cube by steaming the stickers off. (This was before Rubik Cubes.) Is the physical shape of the Key what gives it it’s power? Bob and Dave extrapolated this development from the previous five stories: it’s not implicit in Graham Williams cosmological brain-fart. The Doctor is able to use the five-and-a-bit segments to literally stop the story; to entrap the only interesting character in a time loop for the whole of episodes four, five and six, while he flits between the two planets, interacting with a mad computer, a temporarily mad K-9 and a maddeningly unfunny cockney Time Lord. At the beginning of Episode Six he gets shrunk really small; from which nothing interesting follows.

The evil Shadow's evil planet of evil resembles nothing so much as a room in the Clacton seaside haunted house. The Doctor and Romana are ferried between Zeos and Atrios by trans-mat, without the remotest sense that the two planets are different. We might as well be running down corridors on different sides of a large office block.

Many bad stories have been redeemed by a cast who are having fun; but Tom Baker seems to phone in his performance; his Thespian wit reduced to a sustained, disengaged sulk. It might be that the Doctor resents the fact that the White Guardian still controls him. It might be that Tom Baker resents the fact that he's been denied his talking cabbage. It might simply be that Tom Baker is a very good actor, and five years is too long to be stuck in a single role. But no-one seems to be putting in the slightest effort.

It is the presence of the Key—the McGuffin which everyone is looking for—which kills the story. The presence of the Shadow —the villain who is just there to be villainous—invades the centre of the Zeos/Atrios plot and stops it developing. The Doctor's partial control over the Key ensures that for three episodes, nothing happens. When Drax the Time Lord garage mechanic crops up, we feel a bit like the Samuel Beckett's tramps when two additional characters arrive in Waiting For Godot: “Reinforcements! Now we're sure to see the episode through.” Drax has a funny accent, but a funny accent is not sufficient to redeem two whole episodes of narrative impasse.

There could have been a plot: there was supposed to have been a plot.

It turns out that Princess Astra herself is the Sixth Segment: in order for the Doctor to complete the quest, a human being has to be imprisoned in a glass cube for eternity. She herself is more or less okay with the idea this because it is her Destiny.

Now, this should have created some tension and jeopardy: a bona fide moral dilemma. To save the universe, the Doctor must effectively kill Princess Astra. Has he that right? This was the sort of dilemma which Douglas Adams had in mind in his original brain-storm document.

But nothing really comes of it: it’s simply the clue which allows the Doctor to spot that the White Guardian must really be the Black Guardian because the White Guardian couldn’t be quite that callous about a human life.

So was the Quest was impossible from the beginning--could it only be completed by the sacrifice of an innocent life, something the Doctor would never, ever permit? Has the Black Guardian been terribly clever, hiding one of the keys in a form that was morally inaccessible to the forces of goodness?

Imagine a more interesting ending to The Armageddon Factor. Imagine something truly apocalyptic. The Black Guardian is winning. The Universe is degenerating into chaos. Earth is about to be destroyed. Mary Tamm is going to be vaporised. And the Doctor can end it all and restore order. All he has to do is slay Lalla Ward.

WWTDD?

The Indian Epic Maharbarat, or at any rate the Peter Brook movie, ends with the hero Arjun reaching the gates to heaven. The Hindu equivalent of St Peter welcomes him, but says that Heaven has a strict “no dogs allowed” policy. Arjun refuses to enter heaven: he won’t accept enlightenment if even one creature remains in darkness. So, of course, he is allowed in: the dog was the final test.

In the great universe of counterfactuals, perhaps there is one in which the Doctor saves the universe by refusing to sacrifice Astra. Perhaps the Black Guardian’s entire scheme was to destroy the Doctor by making him transgress his own morality. I think that even faced with eternal chaos, the Doctor would have been one of those who walked away from omelas.

[*] Dyall played the medical student who lends Trevor Howard his apartment keys in Brief Encounter: I never knew that.

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.

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

Armageddon Factor (VIII)

10 Feb 1979

“Now no one knows where we’re going. Not even the Black Guardian.”

It isn't possible, is it, that Graham Williams embarked on the Key to Time saga without a clear idea of how he would end it?

It isn't possible that he sent the Doctor off on a scavenger hunt for the ultimate weapon, and then handed the final episode to a couple of decent but plodding Who scriptwriters and said “Finish this off however you like”?

We know about the terrible fate that befell the Trial of a Time Lord: how Robert Holmes died and Eric Saward walked out and the fourteen part saga had to be wound up by two equally decent but equally plodding scriptwriters, on a set which had already been built, with a lawyer standing over them preventing them using any of the original scenario.

No such shenanigans seem to have befallen the Key To Time. Graham Williams handed the ending of the saga to Bob Baker and Dave Martin of his own free will.

Did Williams always conceive the Sixteenth Season as a cosmic shaggy dog story? Did the back of his original envelope say “In Episode One, the Doctor is told by the Guardian to collect the segments of the Key. In Episode Twenty Six, the Doctor refuses to hand the segments over and disperses them again"?

That could have been the plot. The Doctor could have been told to assemble a weapon that was too powerful for any one person to control. Each story could have turned on one person being tempted or corrupted by the awesome power of the Key. In the final story the Doctor himself would have been tempted by it. So he would have cast it into Mount Doom.

The sudden revelation that the Doctor might have misidentified the Guardian could have been foreshadowed. Imagine if, in the Ribos Operation, after the Doctor had been sent on his cosmic errand, Cyril Luckham had turned to the audience and said “little does he know that I am really the BLACK Guardian, not the White one. Bwahahaha!” The question “Will the Doctor realise he's been fooled?” could then have hung over each story like a thing which hangs over a story. Each Segment would have tempted the Doctor to act against his own conscience; but in each story he would have found a solution which enabled him to retained the moral high ground.

But as it is, Armageddon Factor ends with a cosmic reset. The Doctor proves that the White Guardian is the Black Guardian. Very probably he gets killed on the next zebra crossing.

The psychotic Marshall fires his last nuke at the planet Zeos. But the Doctor diverts it, and it hits the Planet of Evil, the lair of the Black Guardian’s evil minion. It isn't quite clear if he uses the TARDIS to generate the force field, or if he uses the Zeon’s own war computer. He definitely does not use the Key to Time. Which would make a kind of sense, and given the story a kind of unity.

Romana assumes that the TARDIS is returning to Gallifrey.There is a major plot glitch here, I think. Romana was told to fetch the key by the President of the Time Lords on Gallifrey; she naturally assumes that she has to return home and deliver it to him there. So when the Guardian appears, she is surprised. The Doctor reveals that the President of Gallifrey had been the Guardian all along!

But Romana already knows this. The Doctor told her, in the entirely pointless TARDIS interior scene in Stones of Blood.

We now know that that scene was a very late addition to the script, hurriedly written when the “birthday cake” sequence was deemed too silly. It appears that the ending of Armageddon Factor was written before that change was made. We think that Douglas Adams wrote the Armageddon Factor epilogue and Anthony Read wrote the Stones of Blood prologue. Is it possible that the incoming and outgoing script editors simply failed to compare notes.

I wonder...

The final story in Season 15 was set on Gallifrey. It was all about the appointment of a new President. There is a snooty Time Lord lady called Rodan, who is not entirely dissimilar to Romana. And it includes a sub-plot about the Great Key.

Could it be that the Key to Time saga was originally going to be trailed at the end of the Invasion of Time? Is it possible that, after Leela announced her intention to stay on Gallifrey; Borusa was going to order Rodan to join the Doctor in the TARDIS to help him on a mission of utmost importance? The scenes in Armageddon Factor and Stones of Blood could then be explained as ret-cons made necessary by the sudden introduction of the two Guardians.

Certainly, Borusa imposing a new companion and a new mission on the Doctor would have been a dramatic way to end to the previous season--much superior to Tom Baker gurning over his flat-pack K-9 Mark 2. But it fell through because Hilary Ryan didn't want the gig.

Total speculation.

But in the extant script, Romana believes she was sent on the Quest by the President, not the Guardian; she's disabused of this misconception twice; and it has no bearing whatsoever on the story.

The White Guardian appears; and asks for the Key. The Doctor spots that he is now being played by an actor generally associated with evil roles, and refuses to give it to him.

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.

Monday, September 23, 2024

Armageddon Factor (VII)

10 Feb 1979

“Key to time I command you...to stay exactly where you are...”

The Doctor says that he has complete control over the Key to Time, that it gives him power over every particle in the universe; that he can make Romana do whatever he wants and that from now on there is no such thing as Free Will.

We have conceptualised the White Guardian as an authorial self-insertion; the personification of the Plot. But the Doctor's possession of the completed Key gives control of the Plot back to him. He can decide what happens in the universe; he can decide what other characters do. For some time, he’s been aware that he’s the main character in a TV show; in recent stories, he’s become increasingly aware of the audience. Now he’s in charge of the Whoniverse itself.

This development came at a time when Tom Baker—by his own admission—was becoming insufferable. He was aware that Doctor Who was now his own show; he knew how to set up shots better than some of the producers; he improvised dialogue of his own and refused to say certain lines in the script. And he had distinct ideas about where the series should go next. Not all his ideas were terrible: a Victorian street urchin or a portly comedic lady would indeed have been interesting departures from the traditional companion persona. The idea of a talking alien cabbage that lived on the Doctor's shoulder, not so much. Towards the end of Season 16, Tom started to make veiled threats that he would quit the show if his suggestions were not taken up; reasoning that the series couldn't continue without him.

And while all that is happening behind the scenes the on-screen Doctor appears to turn evil and demand complete control over the universe.

Tom Baker plays an excellent villain. He flaps his eyelids and goes cross-eyed and overacts shamelessly. He’s more compelling than he’s been at any time in the last six episodes.

But he’s only bluffing.

“Are you all right?” asks Romana

“Well of course I'm all right”, says the Doctor, “but what if I wasn’t?”

For a brief moment, it seems as if something interesting is going to happen: something that would have made the whole Key to Time saga worthwhile.

Imagine that this was an end-of-season cliffhanger. Imagine a Season 17 in which Romana was the main protagonist, and a corrupt, Key to Time wielding Doctor, the main villain. (This was before Dark Phoenix.) Gandalf wouldn't take the Ring, not because he thought that it would turn him evil but because he knew that he would try to use its power for good. “Gandalf as ring-lord would have been far worse than Sauron", wrote Tolkien.” Imagine a universe in which the Doctor himself had become the Guardian of Time.

The Doctor once had the power to destroy the Daleks in his hands. He decided not to use it. He agonised: he was torn. The audience felt that their hero was facing a genuine moral dilemma. Tom brought his considerable acting ability to bear on the scene. A writer I respect and admire once called it the greatest moment in the greatest episode of the greatest story of the greatest TV show of all time. But the denouement of Key to Time is tossed out lightly and played for laughs. The Doctor is not tempted. The Doctor was never tempted. The joke is on us and Romana for briefly supposing that he might have been.

The Planet of Evil blows up. The Black Guardian’s minion grovels that he has failed in his mission and that the Doctor now possesses the Key. But it turns out that the Black Guardian intended the Shadow to fail. “Your death is already encompassed in my designs” he rants “The Doctor will deliver the Key to Time to me."

As Evil Villain plans go, it’s not a bad one. The Doctor has spent six months rushing all over the universe collecting the Segments. The Black Guardian could have engaged in a race, sending the Shadow to hunt down each segment before the Doctor could get to them. But instead, he has sat back, allowed the Doctor to gather the five Segments at his leisure, and sent his Minion to grab the last one before the Doctor gets there.

The sequence in which the Segments are collected seems to be significant. The Sixth segment is not merely “the sixth segment which the Doctor went looking for” but “the segment with a built-in quality of six-ness about it”. Astra is “the sixth child, of the sixth dynasty, of the sixth royal house of the planet Atrios". Presumably, as long as Dynasty Five remained in power and the King and Queen only had five little princes and princesses, the Key was irretrievable. (Did the Swampie Holy Relic only become the Fifth Key when the squid swallowed it, I wonder? Do keys exist in particular places, but also at particular moments?)

But the Black Guardian has been even cleverer. He was bluffing from the beginning. He never meant the Shadow to get the Sixth Segment. He intended the Doctor to complete the Key. The Dark Side positively wanted the Light Side’s agent to obtain the Ultimate Weapon, so that they could steal it from him. The Doctor was unwittingly playing into the Black Guardian’s hands the whole time. If he succeeded, he would have failed.

The Doctor doesn’t fall for the bluff. He breaks the Tracer and sends the pieces back to their original locations. I was going to say this renders the previous twenty five weeks pointless; but that’s not quite true. Key or no Key, the Doctor overthrew the Pirate Captain and freed the Swampies from their colonial oppressors. He did, in fact, exactly what he would have done if he’d fetched up on Delta Magna or Calufrax without any Tracer telling him where to go. The best way of defeating the Black Guardian would have been to ignore the segments altogether.

The entire quest, and the entire season, has been a complete waste...of Time.

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.

Sunday, September 22, 2024

The Armageddon Factor (VI)

June 21 1978

“How do you know the secret of our planet?”

A Dalek appears in a TV studio in the twentieth century. It claims to have abandoned earth; to have no more interest in it. It is menaced by a golden retriever with the highly original name “Goldie". (One wonders how a Cybermen would have fared.) It encounters an Earth Dalek, constructed over a three year period out of cardboard and, many of us suspect, sticky-back plastic. The Earth Dalek seems, if anything, shinier and more convincing than the actual Dalek. The Dalek regards the location of its home-world, Skaro, to be a great secret and is surprised that the Earth Dalek knows its name. It warns us that it will be returning to TV, fighting its old enemy the Doctors, and drops a broad hint about the plot. “Davros, our creator, programmed us to conquer the universe.”

It is 21 June, 1979. Season 17 of Doctor Who will begin on 1st September. The Doctor doesn't know that he's going back to Skaro. He certainly doesn't know that he's going to have a rematch with Davros. But we viewers have been told. By an actual Dalek. Two months in advance.

Clip

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.

Saturday, September 21, 2024

The Armageddon Factor [V]

12 August 1978

“Daleks? Never heard of them.”

And so the Key to Time saga comes to an end.

As endings go, it kind of works.

The TARDIS is in a forest, on a planet with purple sky.

A voice calls the Doctor's name. The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS. He complains about having been disturbed. The voice tells him that he is going to meet the Daleks again. The Doctor first claims not to know what they are: but then he turns serious and demands more information. The voice won't tell him.

“Forewarned is forearmed: you will now forget.” The Doctor loses all conscious memory of the warning; but the voice laughs and the TARDIS de-materialises.

Whose was the voice? It could be the White Guardian, giving him insider information about his future. The

Doctor did complete his mission, after all, so perhaps the Guardian feels he owes him a favour. Or perhaps the Guardian is sending him on a new mission. He doesn't just say that the Doctor will meet the Daleks; he says that he will be “pitted against them.” Perhaps that's why he laughs: the Doctor has installed a randomiser on the TARDIS, but the Guardian is still directing his flight. Pot Luck is as big a plot device as the Tracer. That would be a good joke.

But the laughter sounds evil, so perhaps we have heard the voice of the Black Guardian, sending the Doctor off to face his arch-foes as a punishment for denying him the key?

We never find out. The Doctor forgets all about the meeting.

And that's not the strangest thing about this vignette. The strangest this is that the Doctor complains that the voice has woken him up “in the middle of August". And as the TARDIS departs, we see that there is a sign hanging on the door.

“Do not disturb until September 1st."

There is much in the Big Book Of Doctor Who Lore which we do not know. We have never seen the Doctor's bedroom in the TARDIS; the only time we've seen him asleep is when he's been in hospitals of various kind. Odin—at least in Stan Lee's version—sometimes sleeps for weeks at a time. It provides Loki with endless opportunities to usurp the throne of Asgard. So maybe Time Lords hibernate. It would be no weirder than the multiple hearts and the body swapping.

We have never tackled the question about whether or not the Doctor goes to the loo.

The deleted birthday scene in Stones of Blood would have merged the Watsonian Doctor and the Doylist Doctor into a single figure: it would have said, beyond a peradventure, that the Doctor is a character in a TV series called Doctor Who, and knows he is. This vignette pushes the device to its logical conclusion. The fourth wall has finally been abolished.

The 1970s hadn’t quite ended. The shops still lose early on a Thursday and all day on a Sunday. There is a clear demarcation between the football season and the cricket season. In the summertime, the Blue Peter team go on holiday; the Why Don't You Kids materialise on weekday mornings, and there are bumper issues of 2000AD and TV Comic. Doctor-Who-The-TV show is off air between March and August. And whatever is true of Doctor-Who-The-TV show is true of Doctor-Who-the-Character. If it's the birthday of Doctor Who, then it's the Doctor's birthday. If Doctor Who is not on TV, then the Doctor himself is asleep, If there is an inter-season minisode then the Doctor has been woken up.

In one way it makes the show less “realistic": the fourth-wall breaking Doctor Who who shares his birthday with the TV show that shares his name can't really be accommodated into a believable Whoniverse. But in another way, it gives him a different kind of reality: a self contained reality, a reality that exists behind that piece of glass in the box in your living room. Everything is part of the story and all stories are true; even trailers and Blue Peter items. Dougal the dog sometimes said “hi” to Bert Ford because the weather forecast came on after the puppet show. Val Doonican once claimed to be pals with Starksy and Hutch for the same reason. George and Mildred and the Six Million Dollar Man can share a turkey because both of them are in the TV Times over Christmas.

"You will be pitted against a race known as the Daleks.”

And so the Key to Time saga comes to an end. It began with the Author sending the Doctor on a mission. He was given a plot device that told him which planet to go to; and what to do when he got there; and a companion to remind him to stick to the plot. And the Doctor obtained the ultimate plot device, the device which made him, potentially, the Author of all the stories. And he threw it away, broke the plot device in two; repudiated the Story Teller and announced that from now on his life would be guided by nothing but random chance and his own curiosity.

And while he was sleeping, the Author spoke to him again and told him that the very first thing that Random Chance would take would be to the home of his greatest enemies. The same place that the Time Lords once sent him, oh so unwillingly. Because, after all, the Doctor was always guided by random chance and his own curiosity; chance and curiosity —and the Doctor himself—were always there to drive the Plot.

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.