They were a group of live-action anthropomorphic animals who played bubble-gum pop music, provided the frame for a Saturday morning cartoon anthology TV show, and had their theme tune covered by Bob Marley.
At some point after the live action series had passed into folk memory there was an attempt to revive them as a cartoon with an actual storyline. The conceit was that the live-action characters jumped into, or through, a magic billboard and became part of the picture. They were cartoon characters when they were inside the bill-board, but returned to being live-action beasts when they emerged from it.
Children’s TV always did like to play around with the Fourth Wall. One of the big breakthroughs of Play School (the BBC 2 show for pre-schoolers) was that the presenters understood that they had to talk to the camera as if it was a child. This meant that every little boy in England thought that Brian Cant was addressing him directly; and Mr Cant, in turn, often pretended that he could hear the kids talking back at him. Blue Peter, with its emphasis on letters, badges, competitions, appeals, and pyromaniac Girl Guides arguably made that wall permeable in a rather more literal sense.
When I was a child, I was a little bit too clever for my own good, and inclined to over-think TV shows and stories. Thank goodness I grew out of that. It troubled me that pantomime characters inhabited a world of their own (with a past and a future and rooms and corridors that we never saw) while at the same time being continuously aware of the audience. “Because it’s a theatrical artifice” was not an answer that I was prepared to accept, so I formulated a theory that the stories took place in, let’s call it, The Pantoverse, which suffered from the random occurrence of, for the sake of argument, dimensional rifts. Robin Hood was consciously aware that, near a particular tree in Sherwood Forest there existed a star-gate: a window-between-the-world through which he could watch the children of earth watching him, and solicit advice as to who may or may not have been behind him. Which is presumably why so much of the action manages to take place alongside that particular tree.
In Nightmare of Eden, this seems to be literally true. Tryst (the Zoologist with the silly accent) can look at alien lifeforms through the screen of his Magic TV: but there are rifts or dimensional portals or weak points or at any rate, something, through which the aliens can look out at him.
Of course, Tryst doesn’t really have a Magic TV. What he has (obviously) is a Continuous Event Transmuter, which “converts specimens into electromagnetic signals” and stores them on a crystal. It isn’t a mere recording device: the specimens “are actually in the crystal” where they continue to “live and evolve”. The projection screen allows Tryst to observe what is happening inside the crystal. The collision of the two ships creates an anomaly which allows two way traffic between the world inside the crystal and the world outside it, via the screen. As you would expect.
This isn’t an entirely original thought. In Carnival of Monsters, the side-show busker Vog displays captive aliens in a device called the miniscope, which appears to physically shrink specimens to microscopic size. Superman’s opponent Brainiac used to physically shrink cities and display them in bottles. I recall a Jackonory tale about an elf that turned actual buildings into tiny replicas.
Google AI tells me that this was “almost certainly” After the Goat Man; “almost certainly” The Witch in Our Attic, and “almost certainly” and Older Kind of Magic. It is almost certainly none of the above. ChatGPT, to its credit, explained why it didn’t know.
There has been a certain amount of debate about how teleportation would work: do we envisage the cast of Star Trek being whooshed bodily from location to location through dimensional space tunnels; or is the device somehow dismantling the traveller’s atoms in one location, and reassembling them in the correct configuration somewhere else? And if it’s the latter, isn’t the teleport effectively destroying the original person and creating a new, indistinguishable replica? And if so, does that matter?
One answer may be: if you believe in an immortal soul, then yes; if you do not believe in an immortal soul, then no.
Or, put another way: if you think being killed and replaced with a copy is different from being instantly moved from one place to another, then perhaps something very like an immortal soul is what you in fact believe in.
I can’t see how a set of signals stored on a very small crystal can be anything other than a data-set: an atomic recipe for making a very accurate replica of the environment you have destroyed. But the Doctor and Romana are clearly conceived of as stepping through the screen into a physical space beyond it.
Granted that the creatures we see on the CET screen were already in danger of extinction, has Tryst preserved actual living specimens, or merely taken very lifelike 3D photographs of them? (Invisible Enemy equivocated about whether the “replicas” of the Doctor and Leela were to be thought of as clones, 3D photographs, or some kind of avatar.)
Nightmare of Eden is not remotely interested in these conundrums. The CET is simply a cog in a pretty complicated plot machine. We know that someone is smuggling drugs; and we know that there are no drugs on the ship: so it follows that the drugs must be hidden on one of Tryst’s crystals: that is to say, inside one of the simulated worlds on the big screen. But where?
By the end of Episode Two, a number of the aliens which have escaped from the CET are rampaging around the ship. The Big Reveal is that when they are killed, their bodies disappear, Yoda-like, and turn into huge piles of white powder.
Well, if giant Sandworms can secrete Plot Device Powder as part of their natural life cycle, I suppose we shouldn’t balk at purple aliens who are literally made of cocaine. But I can’t help wondering if Bob Baker’s original idea might have been a bit less silly. It would have been much easier to swallow the idea that the Mandrel body happened to contain a substance that was addictive to humans, which could be refined and extracted by, say, a very well trained biologist? Perhaps the idea of them spontaneously turning into drugs at the moment of death was a visual representation of that more complex idea? And while we are speculating: supposing the Mandrel had not been semi-intelligent humanoids that stagger around the set on two legs. Suppose they had been animals — gerbils or buffalo or worms — that Tryst was planning to exploit? Would that have made the whole thing more plausibly dark and less grotesquely silly? (Conversely, had they been actual humans with personalities, would that have made Tryst more interestingly depraved?)
Tryst’s plan is to transmit the contents of the Eden Crystal to his accomplice on the other ship; and then to use the CET to restore the digitised Mandrel to reality; with the intention of harvesting the drugs at a later date. The Doctor manages to reverse the process, so the smugglers are transmitted into the projection, from where they can be extracted and handed over to the authorities.
Some writers say that science fiction is very easy to write. A mainstream writer needs to come up with a drug-smuggling plot that is at least somewhat related to drug-manufacture and distribution in the real world; and he probably needs to do some research into enforcement and detection methods to make their capture convincing. But the science fiction writer is free to just say “hocus pocus screen-o catch-o”.
Bob Baker has actually set up something rather clever. But if you haven’t been paying full attention to the Doctor’s chat, you might suspect him of using arbitrary technobabble.
Magic, or science? It is implied that the CET functions according to TARDIS adjacent principals: if a Police Box can be vastly bigger on the inside than the outside, then why shouldn’t Tryst’s Give-a-Show Projector be allowed to see a world in a grain of sand? The Doctor and Romana regard the machine as primitive and unsafe; but only at a technological level: they talk about its spatial integrator, its holistic retention circuit, and its dimensional osmosis damper. (I suppose if purple aliens made of heroin are spilling through the screen, you really should have dampened your dimensional osmosis.)
I think this is a bit of a pity. Humans always treat the TARDIS dimensions as a thing of wonder, but it now seems that quite clever humans can build machines based on similar principles. But since Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords have been little more than a very advanced but correspondingly decadent alien race. Two stories ago a quite clever human with a silly accent constructed a perfectly viable Time Machine.
What happened to the magic of Doctor Who? It turned out to be indistinguishable from any sufficiently advanced technology.
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