The Horns of Nimon

In the totally canonical Curse of Fatal Death it is established that nature abhors the absence of the Doctor. If his existence is threatened then the Universe itself will intervene to save him. 

At the end of the Key to Time saga, the Doctor seems to have become consciously aware that he is a fictional character. He has entirely ceased to take the Universe seriously. But the Universe only exists for the Doctor’s benefit. If he has stopped believing in it, then mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world. 

So the Universe herself intervenes. She divides the Doctor into two beings: a Serious Doctor and a Silly Doctor. It may be pure coincidence that the Serious Doctor happens to be female and the Silly Doctor happens to be Male: or it may be that the Universe is making a sly feminist joke. 

The Fourth Doctor was always a multi-faceted character: that was what made him so fascinating. He could pivot from the serious to the silly in a moment; he would treat the gravest subjects lightly and the most frivolous ones with gravity. But after the Universe’s intervention, we are left with a female Doctor who has no sense of levity; and a male Doctor who is incapable of being serious. Neither of them could carry a TV show or save the planet alone; together, they add up to a hero. 

When did the split occur? Perhaps, as soon as the Guardian decided to gather the segments of the Key, the Meta-Doctor became an inevitability. The origins of Romana are somewhat occluded: she arrived in the TARDIS claiming to have been sent on a mission by the Time Lord President; but later learns that the person who instructed her was the White Guardian. 

How if the Guardian had borrowed one or more of the Doctor’s lives and formed a woman out of them? This kind of thing is possible: in future stories we are going to see it giving rise to beings like “the Watcher” and “the Valeyard”. Before Romana, the Doctor was always represented as a brilliant scientist and a pioneer, after her arival, he was revealed to have been an academic failure. And this makes perfect sense. His Feminine self contained the Doctor's learning and expertise; while the Male persona retained his experience and intuition. 

But by the time of her anomalous regeneration in Destiny of the Daleks Romana is clearly fully aware of her role: she presents herself in an exact replica of the Doctor’s clothes; and then in a “feminine” version of them. But it is only now, in The Horns of Nimon, that her function becomes explicit.

She even has her own sonic screwdriver.

It’s the Doctor who dismantles the TARDIS on a whim, and Romana who tries to persuade him not to. It’s Romana who verbally chastises Soldeed before his death. “The Nimon told you what you wanted to hear, promised you what you wanted to have. They are parasitic nomads who’ve been feeding off your selfishness and gullibility.” She delivers the lines dead-pan: it is no longer possible to imagine the Doctor doing so. 

Look at the Episode Two cliffhanger, and its resolution. Romana is doing a perfectly workpersonlike job shepherding the young people (who have been sent from Aneth as a sacrifice) through the labyrinth, and doing her best to keep their spirits up. They discover the Nimon’s larder, which looks something like the frozen humans on the wirrn-infested Ark and something like the tombs of the Cybermen on Telos. “ I'd guess that the Nimon feeds by ingesting the binding energy of organic compounds such as flesh” she techno-babbles. The nasty Co-Pilot appears and summonses the Nimon; he grovels about, zaps it with an ineffectual ray-gun, and is shot himself with its luminous horns.

This may not be the greatest piece of TV ever, and you might think they could have reshot the scene when the co-pilot’s pants very obviously split, but we are clearly watching a bog-standard episode of Doctor Who. You are a liar and a coward. You will die. Mercy Lord Nimon. The episode ends with the Nimon advancing on the captives, and Romana thrusting her arms out, as if that would help. 

And then, at the beginning of Episode Three, the Doctor arrives.

He is holding a large red cloth, or a very small cape. His opening gambit is “Is this a private party or can anyone join in?” He treats the monster as if it were a naughty child or a yappy puppy-dog “Tell me are you really terribly fierce”? He holds the red rag as if he were a bull fighter; the Nimon lowers its horns as if to charge, but instead zaps the rag. One of the cryogenically frozen extras falls to the floor. It isn’t entirely clear what happens next: I think Romana shoots the controls with the Co-Pilot’s zap gun to create some smoke to cover the sacrifices' escape. The Doctor puts the red cape over the face of the boy who fell out of the larder.

It's not, truthfully, all that funny. And it begs all sorts of questions. Does the Doctor seriously imagine that the Nimon is likely to react to a red rag in the same way as the earth creatures that they happen to resemble? Or is he intending to mock it by pretending that he thinks it is an actual bull? (But why does he suppose that the Nimon will get the joke?) Or did a race-memory of the Nimon's literal attraction to red things give rise to the human blood sport of bull fighting?

Actual bulls are, as everyone knows, colour blind.

These are of course, silly questions. We can all see what has happened. When the Doctor arrives, the episode changes from melodrama to farce.

And that might have been an interesting direction for some future iteration of Doctor Who to have travelled in. The Sensible Doctor is the problem-solving scientist; the Silly Doctor is the trickster who enters into the narrative and changes the rules. She may think she is in a story about the Minoan Bull, but he will treat it as a skit on Spanish toreadors.

But the Silly Doctor does understand that he is in a Doctor Who story. He knows the rules of the game and keeps complaining about them. He points out that whenever he uses the phrase “what could possibly go wrong”, something does go wrong. He observes that whenever he arrives on a planet “there are always people pointing guns or phasers or blasters at him”. He responds to the phaser-wielding guards with the biggest cliche of all: “Take me to your leader.”

And we know the rules too. We are not surprised that, when the Doctor tries to fix the TARDIS console, it blows up in his face. We are not even surprised that he responds calmly "Well, thats odd". ("Don't you think that's odd, K9?" About two thirds of his humour now depends on irritating repetition.) But we were perhaps not quite expecting the explosion to be accompanied by Monty Python level comedy sound effects: an explosion, a siren, an electronic whizz, a boing, a twang.  

“But Andrew: the TARDIS is an alien craft, and for all we know removing the gravitic anonomyser would produce a sound like a schoolboy vibrating a wooden ruler on his desk.” 

Yes: indeed. But the fact remains: the universe is now such that when the TARDIS is in proximity to the Doctor it produces funny noises. 

And then there is K9.

At the beginning of Episode One, when K9 appears damaged, the Doctor literally tries to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. ("But Andrew, how do you know that K9 is not the kind of computer that can be rebooted by air from a Time Lord's lungs?") When the robot is about to say something inappropriate, the Doctor covers its mouth. And when it appears that the TARDIS is going to be crushed by a black hole, the Doctor literally puts his arms around the machine for comfort. Indeed, he produces, from nowhere, a red rosette marked First Prize and attaches it to K9's ear, adding that he is “the best dog I ever had”.

K9 is, so far as we know, the only dog he has ever had. And in any case, he is not actually a dog.

There has been more than one science-fiction reworking of the Pinocchio story: the robot that wants to be, or believes itself to be, human. But K9 does not seem to perceive himself as a dog. It isn't quite clear if he has any self-awareness at all. Nearly all his humour comes from an inability to understand human language and idioms. (When the Doctor uses an unfunny mixed metaphor, up a gumtree without a paddle, K9 takes him literally.) But the Doctor treats him as a living creature, referring to him as "my dog" and calling him "good dog" and "good boy". (If he is sentient, this is actually rather degrading.) One almost feels that the Doctor is treating K9 as a toy: an inanimate object that it pleases him to pretend is a domesticated animal.

Do Time Lords even keep pets? Is there a Gallifreyan equivalent to the Terran dog? Or is this another example of the Doctor hyper-correcting: pretending to have a dog like the mortals on his favourite planet, but not quite grokking how it works?

The Doctor saves the TARDIS by putting it into a spin so it skims off the surface of the high gravity asteroid. And then he muses out loud “Sometimes I think I'm wasted just rushing around the universe saving planets from destruction. With a talent like mine, I might have been a great slow bowler.”

He is joking, obviously: although later stories will flirt more seriously with the idea that the Doctor might eventually retire. But to whom is the joke directed? K9 doesn’t understand humour. Is the Doctor breaking the fourth wall? Talking nonsense for the benefit of "all of you at home"? “Rushing around the universe saving planets from destruction” is very much how a casual viewer might perceive the character of the Doctor. It's not quite how the in-universe Doctor would see himself.

My sense is that at the moment he says the words, he means them. He genuinely does think he would rather have been a cricketer than a time-traveller. He speaks whatever thought happens to have flitted across his mind. Perhaps when he was split into two beings, one of the things he lost was his "filter".

The Doctor doesn’t only say goodbye to K9: he also says goodbye to the TARDIS. Sailors, of course, do refer to their ships as "she": but the Doctor literally speaks of his time-machine as if it were a human friend."Well, it's been a great, great partnership, old girl”. And at the end of the story, he says that the "old girl" still has a lot of life left in her. Romana takes him to be talking about her, although he is actually talking about his ship. At first she scowls, and then smiles at the Doctor's little joke. It seems to convey a genuine partnership; a rapport. The two sides of the Doctor are complimentary, not antagonistic. (Lalla Ward is very good at acting.)

Perhaps, in fact when he says "you've got a few millennia left in you" he is talking about the Doctors Who, both of her, and the series which bears their name.

Despite hitting rock-bottom, it is going to survive. For a few seasons more. The Universe can't bear to be without Doctor Who and this is the nearest thing to Doctor Who she has been able to salvage. If you agreed with this essay, then please consider supporting Andrew's patreon.  If you did not agree with this essay, then please consider supporting Andrew's patreon. 

The Horns of Nimon

 

History has been wilfully unfair to The Horns of Nimon. 

Dig up your John-Marc L’Officier programme guide, or just google the Radio Times Archive. 

The Horns of Nimon, Episode One: 22nd December 1979 

The Horns of Nimon, Episode Two: 29th December 1979

The Horns of Nimon, Episode Three: 5th January 1980

The Horns of Nimon, Episode Four: 12th January 1980

A few days before Christmas Eve; a few days before Hogmanay; Twelfth Night; the first week of Spring Term. 

Panto season. 

Did you really expect to see a story about minotaurs in space treated with high seriousness during the Christmas Holidays? And do you suppose that the extreme silliness of the story was an unfortunate mistake? 

Look at any one of Soldeed’s scenes, if you can bear it. Look at his big entrance in Episode One. The Nimon have promised a new fleet of ships for the failing Skonnon empire; and one of his minions asks “are we on the brink of having the promise fulfilled." 

“I believe we are” says Soldeed. “I dooo believe we ARE!” And then he raises his arm, stares manically into camera and says “The second Skonnon empire WILL be borrrrn!”

Or look at his excruciating death-scene in Episode Four. His dialogue is somewhere between a chant and a howl; the sort of fake weeping that Stan Laurel used to indulge in. “My drer-heams of CON.......Quest” he yodels, sticking his fingers in his cheeks. Zapped by his own rod-of-power, he collapses against a wall, whimpering “You are all doomed!” before expiring in a fit of maniacal giggles. 

This cannot be failed seriousness: this must be deliberate spoof. The actor must be taking direction: “This is a daft skit about monsters in fright masks. You aren’t just playing a Doctor Who bad guy: you are playing every Doctor Who bad guy. There is going to be a scene where you, the good guys, and the monsters are hiding behind consoles in the baddies control centre and if you do it right, kids up and down the country will be shouting ‘he’s behind you’ into their TVs. Just have fun. Be as broad as you like. It’s panto season. Basically pretend we cast you as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Babes in the Wood.”

Or take a look at the actual script. Soldeed says things like “You meddling fool” and “After him, you fools, you dolts.” The Starship Pilot calls his co-pilot “You blundering fool” and “You blundering idiot”. The Co-Pilot calls the cargo of slaves “weakling scum” no less than five times. Soldeed’s counterpart on the the planet Crionth gets barely five minutes of screen time, during which he gets to say “It’s too late for me” “I’m done for” and “I’ll hold them off for as long as I possibly can.”

This must be deliberate. 

Or take a look at the costumes. The Skonnos soldiers' helmets are moulded in strange, non-euclidian shapes with guffaw-inducing plumes. One wishes that Tom Baker could have snipped them off with a pair of over-sized scissors, like Harpo did to the Freedonian soldiers in Duck Soup. 

The story is a half-hearted checklist of Doctor Who tropes. Alien invaders. Endless corridors (that all look the same). Priests who know very well that their god isn’t really a god, with silly robes and a Skeletor style sceptre of power. Six aliens representing an invasion force. A corpus of ineffectual rebels with floppy blond hair. 

I think that Williams, Adams and even Baker realised that, after Nightmare of Eden, the game was up. Doctor Who was done for: The Horns of Nimon was the Last Chance Saloon. Why not go out in a blaze of dreadfulness? Since whatever we do, you will accuse us of cardboard sets and overacting bad-guys, we will damn well build the set out of cardboard and tell the bad-guy to overact. 

I admit that this defence has been overused. If a movie is derivative, someone will always claim it as a loving homage; if a movie is dreadful, some apologist will say it is an affectionate parody. Even Plan Nine From Outer Space has its advocates. 

But after all, it was December. No-one complains that the village hall production of Jack and the Beanstalk failed to treat the Brothers Grimm with due reverence. No-one treats the Star Wars Holiday Special as a peculiarly inept attempt to make the Empire Strikes Back. 

The Horns of Nimon is a perfectly dreadful Doctor Who story and an all but unwatchable piece of television.

But you can’t blame it for that. It was clearly supposed to be. 

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The Horns of Nimon

Doctor Who is littered with hypotheticals. What if Geoffrey Bayldon had succeeded Willian Hartnell? What if Mr Pastry had succeeded Patrick Troughton? What if Verity Lambert’s pitch for the 1996 TV special had succeeded? What if Christopher Eccleston had participated in the fiftieth anniversary?  

Paths we didn’t take: doors we never opened. 

And “Doctor Who does Greek Mythology” was a perfectly decent premise for a story. A perfectly decent premise that had been done twice before; but the show has never particularly cared about repeating itself. We all know that there are three Atlantises and two Loch Ness monsters.

The best thing would have been to focus firmly on the myth of Theseus. To have the randomiser whisk the Doctor back to the Bronze Age where he could have discovered that the legendary man-bull was a mutant or a genetically engineered bovine. Or an alien or a robot. Or a malicious rumour. Or perhaps the story would have begun further back; with the Doctor persuaded to design a prison to house the terrible creature, and then, to construct a primitive flying machine for the young prince…

It is more likely that the story would have revisited Underworld and proposed a Whoniverse driven by eternal recurrence, events in the distant future sending echoes back to the remote past. And that would have been fine too. We would have accepted, indeed, welcomed, a world of ray-guns and space-ships lightly dusted with Greek architecture and Greek costumes. There must have been a fair few togas lying around gathering dust since Up Pompeii! finished. 

One hopes, at any rate, it would have given us a break from the Doctor-Who-by-numbers format that the series was spiralling into. A mythology themed story could have avoided the chases through endless corridors (which all look exactly the same). And there would have been no need for the kind of BBC model spacecrafts that had become an even bigger embarrassment since Star Wars hit the big screen. And perhaps they could even have found actors prepared to deliver science fictional lines with a reasonably straight face? 

Perhaps the script would have given Romana a chance to shine; perhaps it would have allowed K9 to be K9. The previous stories had reduced the tin dog to a piece of hardware: a get-out-of-jail-free card and an exposition upload device. If K9 was going to justify his continued existence, it would have to have been as a character: as part of a double act with the Doctor. (It is not clear who would have been the straight man and who would have been the comic turn.) Tom Baker never had quite the rapport with David Brierly that he did with John Leeson, but we would still have enjoyed seeing them in extended two-hand sequences. 

Wishful thinking: all wishful thinking. Plenty of promising Doctor Who stories have foundered in the production. Graham Crowden, who would have played Soldeed, the major bad guy, had very nearly been cast as the Fourth Doctor. (He was literally offered the part in 1976 but couldn’t commit to it for the required three years: the role went instead to an out of work actor someone discovered on a building site.) Perhaps Crowden would have demonstrated that he could have been as Shakespearean and brooding and charismatic as Tom Baker ever was. But I fear there would have been an overwhelming temptation to simply out Baker Baker in the overacting department.

It seems so silly to us now. But tea-breaks and even toilet-breaks had been hard-won by the Trades Unions. They rightly believed that to concede a tiny point was to risk undoing the major strides that had been achieved in the first half of the twentieth century. A management / workers agreement stated that only the Standing Union of Domestic Staff could serve refreshments to performers. In a break during the first day of filming, Tom Baker absent-mindedly reached for a teapot. Lalla Ward gently put her hand on his wrist. 

But it was too late. 

The ensuing row between Equity and SUDS closed down the Doctor Who studio for the rest of the season. The Horns of Nimon was destined to sit forever alongside Song of the Space Whale and the Masters of Luxor as one of the great un-made stories in the Whovian canon. 

We will never know how good it might have been. If you enjoy my writing about Doctor Who, please consider joining my Patreon.

The Horns of Nimon

The Leisure Hive was something of a revelation. 

Certainly, the John Nathan-Turner era ended up in the mire. But when the story broke onto our screens, with minimal fanfare, towards the end of 1980, it felt like a phoenix had emerged from the ashes. There was a new title sequence, and a rejigged theme tune. The Doctor had a new, stylish costume. Tom Baker’s excesses were reined in: he was again the brooding Shakespearean figure I had fallen in love with in Miss Beale’s class. 

And the actual pictures on the TV looked different. Deeper; darker; more professional, more somehow present. People often called them “glossy”. Possibly they were using more cine film and less video tape. Possibly they had got better at cleaning up footage in post production. Perhaps they were doing clever things with the lighting. John Nathan-Turner had been a Production Unit manager throughout Season 17, and probably had a head for matters technical. The budget had not significantly increased, but he may have been more canny than his predecessors about how he spent what little money he had. 

It would not be quite fair to describe Season 17 as the “don’t care” era. Graham Williams and Douglas Adams clearly cared, a great deal, about setting up funny jokes and surprising scenes and generally keeping seven million people entertained on a Saturday night. But John Nathan-Turner, I think, was more conscious of carrying two decades of TV history on his shoulders. With becoming producer of Doctor Who there must also come great responsibility. From Season 18 onwards, Doctor Who seemed to know that it was Doctor Who.

Whether this was a good thing or a bad thing in the long term is a matter of opinion: but back then, fandom breathed a collective sigh of relief. 

Yes, the change from “clothes” to “costume” or even “uniform” was a mistake, and the question mark motifs were a vulgar meta-joke. 

Yes, the over-staffing of the TARDIS with not-very experienced actors harmed the series in the long run. 

Yes, Matthew Waterhouse. 

Yes, in retrospect, Ian Levine.

A decade — a third of the show’s original run! — was certainly too long for one man to stay in charge.

The DWAS President, who had not been entirely wrong about Deadly Assassin, was not entirely wrong about Season 18: the gloss was arguably superficial. 

But in September 1980, none of this mattered. 

What mattered was that Doctor Who was no longer something we had to feel embarrassed about watching. 

“My god!” we all thought “It looks just like a real TV show.”

The only thing which mattered in 1980 was that the Leisure Hive was not The Horns of Nimon.  If you enjoy my writing about Doctor Who please consider supporting my Patreon.

Horns of Nimon

The last part of my retrospective on the 17th and worst season of classic Who is currently available to my Patreons and will be appearing here shortly. 

https://www.patreon.com/posts/horns-of-nimon-160327054

Nightmare of Eden (4)

 

Creature From the Pit was a costume drama with some mock-gothic horror and a quite imaginatively stencilled in alien world. That’s the kind of thing that Doctor Who does, and the kind of thing that Doctor Who does pretty well. But Nightmare of Eden, with its corridors, monsters, ray-guns, space-ships, and gobbledegook, is much closer to the Doctor Who which resides in the popular imagination. The BBC was never very good at this kind of thing, and Star Wars had raised the bar considerably. When Michael Grade wanted to cancel Doctor Who, it was things like Nightmare of Eden that he pointed at. 

Creature of the Pit was very silly. But it owned its silliness. Rightly or wrongly, it adopted an arch, pantomime tone, and ran with it. I didn’t much care for the Doctor teaching himself mountaineering from a book while dangling over the edge of a precipice: but it is reasonably funny and reasonably in keeping with the character we understand Tom Baker’s Doctor to be. Nightmare of Eden has some aspirations to be a science fiction story. It deals with a very serious subject. But comedy keeps inveigling itself into a basically serious script. Not light relief; but baked-in silliness which tells us that this is not the kind of story about genocide and drug-abuse that we ought to be taking seriously. 

Lewis Flander was hardly a big name: but he was an experienced and presumably competent actor. (His CV includes Henry Higgins, Pier Gynt, Shylock and Mr Darcy.) His character, if you take it at all literally, is as evil as anyone who the Doctor has come up against. He’s talking in terms of kidnapping whole species and using their desiccated remains to hook whole planets on civilisation-destroying drugs. And yet someone — possibly Tom Baker himself — must have taken him to one side and said “Lewis, Lewis, we think it would be absolutely marvellous if you played Prof Tryst as Peter Sellers playing Doctor Strangelove. We’ll even get make-up to find some evil glasses for you.”

What is going on? Is this a seasoned actor forced to play a script he doesn’t think a great deal of, and deciding a silly accent is the only way to make it bearable? Or has someone higher up made a decision that if we are going to make a kids TV show involving a genocidal drug-pusher, he had better be a comedic, parodic genocidal drug-pusher? 

In Episode Four, we see the ship’s security guards and the horrible customs men drive the mandrels  along the corridors, using their ray guns as cattle prods. From time to time one of the mandrels gets out of line and gets a jolly good zap. (This is another scene that would be more comfortable if the aliens had been more beast-like and less humanoid.) One of the guards cries out  “the guns are failing” and the mandrels turn around and start to attack them. Just in the nick of time the Doctor appears, and gently takes control of the aliens using his K9 dog whistle. It isn’t clear if he is trying to be a sheep-dog or a school-crossing-patrol officer or the Pied Piper: but he ushers the mandrels through the screen and back into their own world. 

As we watch the Screen on the Screen, we see the Doctor disappear out of frame, pursued by the mandrels , which attack him, out of shot. We don’t see the attack, or the fight: but we hear the Doctor’s reactions. He says “oo” and “ouch” and “aargh”, rather as if he was stepping into a bathtub that was slightly too hot. Lumps of foliage are thrown from the wings onto the stage. The Doctor says, and I promise I am not making this up “Oh my arms! My legs! My everything!” before reappearing with his jacket in tatters (but otherwise, so far as we can see, uninjured.)

This is pure pantomime. More specifically, it is the kind of thing that would happen in a Carry On movie or Crackerjack skit. You don’t show the fight: you show the hero exiting and re-entering in a dishevelled state. It’s the equivalent of making Andy Capp and Flo disappear into a whirlwind when they are having a domestic fight. 

Why would you do this? Is it Tom Baker’s own input? One can imagine him refusing to play the gobbledegook straight, and improvising a slap-stick routine of his own. Is it conceivably a conscious post-modern conceit? The CED looks like a movie screen or a proscenium arch; so perhaps characters crossing the threshold ought to start obeying theatrical or pantomime conventions? Or is it simply a  signal to not take any of this nonsense seriously  — to soften a script which is both conceptually heavy and intellectually demanding? 

And then we have the aliens. 

You would have to have a heart of stone to see the climax of Episode One, when a mandrel appears through a hole in the spaceship wall, without laughing. The chase through the corridors in Episode Four regularly showed up in  “wasn’t Doctor Who terrible in the olden days” clip-shows. 

But let’s be clear: there is nothing inept about the actual construction of the creatures. No wires or actorly Y-fronts come accidentally into shot. The performers seem to be able to move around without bumping into each other; they even try their hardest to mime, a bit. The costumes are not obviously made of bubble-wrap and they studiously avoid resembling giant cocks. 

I theorised that the unfortunate monster in Invisible Enemy was the result of a simple transcription error: someone ordered a Nucleus of the Swarm and received a Nucleus of the Prawn. I have no immediate explanation for the mandrels. I can only assume that they were  intended to look like this. Someone read the script, and said “This calls for some frightening, but slightly tragic aliens, who the bad-guy is going to melt down and turn into cocaine. Let’s do them as Muppets.” 

We know that there was disquiet, among the production team and some of the actors, about the thematic content of Nightmare of Eden. Maybe children’s TV shouldn’t be dealing with drugs at all; and if it is, it definitely shouldn’t glamourise them in any way. So is it impossible that the script was intentionally sabotaged to hold the difficult subject matter at arms length? The idea of turning a sentient life form into a recreational chemical is pretty horrible: so perhaps Graham Williams  adopted the sensible strategy of depicting the mandrel as obviously cartoon creatures that you couldn’t possibly feel sorry for? 

My only other conjecture is that Tryst is so obviously evil; and the results of the Vraxoin so extreme; and the customs men so ludicrously over-zealous that Bob Baker intended the story as a satire against unrealistic and paranoid “just say no” propaganda. But I can’t construct a consistent reading based on that premise. 

 To the extent that I have worked out what is meant to be going on, I now think Nightmare of Eden contains the embryo of a perfectly good episode of Star Trek or Blakes 7, even if it isn’t quite the kind of thing Doctor Who does best. It is a pity that in 1979, the BBC still thought that “doing Star Wars badly” was a viable direction for their venerable franchise. Almost no-one loves the Fourth Doctor more than I do, but in these episodes he comes across as petulant and annoying and rather bored. (“Nothing is inexplicable” “Then explain it” “Its inexplicable.”) 

And I am approaching the story from the point of view of a fan and scholar, who is prepared to freeze-frame I-Player and switch on the subtitles when it is not at all clear who has been killed by what in the interface between the ships. The original target audience didn’t have that option.

Nightmare of Eden is quite a good Doctor Who story. But it is an absolutely terrible piece of television. 

Nightmare of Eden (3)

 

Who remembers the Banana Splits? 

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.