Answers To Readers' Questions [5]

 Aristide Twain

One of many problems with the concept of a Doctor Who reboot is that it can't sustain. The temptation to have the New Doctor fall through a space-warp and meet an aging David Tennant in Dimension B is just too strong. Witness what happened to the Star Trek films! One of the post-Leekley, pre-McGann pitches for the 1990s reboot had already begun to plan a season finale where Sylvester McCoy would appear to explain how he had used the Key to Time to reboot the universe before the script for the pilot had even been greenlit. And all of this was before ‘No Way Home’ and the Spider-Verse films broke the bank. (I'm positively surprised that Mara Jade has yet to meet Rey and Poe.) I tell you, any attempt to simplify Dr Who's continuity by starting over would only complicate it further in the long run by simply leaving viewers with two connected timelines to keep track of. It's a foregone conclusion.

People tell new stories about old characters all the time. We all get that Ivanhoe, Robin of Sherwood, and Robin Hood Prince of Thieves are three different stories about the same character. 

I think that “reboot” usefully describes a meta-story: when there is an in-universe narrative reason that James Bond used to be gruff and Scottish and has suddenly become English and posh. 

(Old Doctor Who was curiously worried about providing in-universe explanations for trivial changes: Leela gets zapped in the eye by a laser when Louise Jameson wants to stop wearing contact lenses; the Doctor constructs K9 Mark 2 when the BBC wants a less unwieldy prop, and the robot gets laryngitis when John Leeson is unavailable to do the voice. You could say that the whole idea of regeneration is an in-universe explanation for changes to the production. There could have been a world where the seventeenth elderly, crotchety actor had been recast as the Doctor, and the twenty third actress had taken over the role of “Susan”.)

I think that there have been two fruitful uses of meta-narrative in other media. In both cases, the in-universe explanation was provided after the fact by writers who were not responsible for creating the revamped character. 

The first, obviously, was Flash of Two Worlds. The 1956 version of the Flash was simply a reimagining and updating of the 1940 version: but the 1961 comic established that there were two separate characters, living on, respectively, Earth One and Earth Two. I don’t think that many kids in the 1950s were lying awake at night thinking “But that means that those comics my Dad used to read weren’t really, really true.” But for the next couple of decades, writers had a lot of fun with the two universes: particularly as the existence of Earth Two gave them some leeway to age and kill-off major players without harming the central canon.

It was, however, incredibly confusing and off-putting for the casual reader. “The Huntress, she looks fun….Daughter of… I didn’t know that….WHAT YOU MEAN HE’S DEAD!!!!!”

The second one, equally obviously, was the hardly less convoluted history of Captain America. Stan Lee was under no obligation to say that the Cap of the 1960s was the same fella as the Cap of the 1940s: the natural thing would have been to just start again from scratch; but he chose to imagine the defunct character had been frozen in ice after the end of World War II. I don’t think anyone watching the Captain America: First Avenger movie would have been aware that this was originally a clever splicing of two different characters together: “a World War II hero out of his time” is a very interesting and valid premise. Stan Lee’s revamp failed to take into account, of wilfully ignore, a dozen appearances of Captain America Commie Smasher published between 1946 and 1950; and we could have carried on ignoring them, but in 1972, Steve Englehart established that the 50s character was a: an imposter b: mad and c: still alive. This was clever, because it allowed the different comics to be treated as “true”; but narratively fruitful because it allowed the liberal America of the 1970s to allegorically confront the conservative 1950s America. And because the imposter, William Burnside, grew in the ensuing decades into a sympathetic, tragic villain. 

But as you know, I groaned slightly when someone decided it would be a Good Thing if it turned out that Toby Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland were not different actors playing different directors' different fictional takes on the same fictional character, but literally existing Spiders-Man from different timelines. It wasn’t interesting. Nothing followed from it: it was simply an opportunity to say “gee, the different versions of the character are different in some ways and not so different in others.” 

I felt the same way about the decision to say that the Ultimate Comics were part of an in-universe parallel world, as opposed to a creative take on what the classic Marvel Universe might have looked like if it had been created in the 2000s rather than the 1960s. Yes, Alan Moore very wittily said “this-is-an-imaginary-story-aren’t-they-all”, but my brain goes more easily to  “an alternate world where Uncle Ben survived but Aunt May died” or even “an alternate world where Captain Kirk is a fascist and everyone wears eyepatches” that it does to “a parallel world where everyone is much more realistically drawn.” 

Some people are just really uncomfortable with the idea of “fiction”. We understand that someone is making up the stories but we are not prepared to treat the stories as something which someone has made up. I can kind of see why: once you permit yourself to say “Let’s play a fun game in which we pretend that the Christmas presents are left by an old man in a red suit — you pretend to write to him and I’ll pretend to reply” then you are too old to hang up your stocking. 

How does this relate to the toxicity we have had to deal with recently? If it is an object of faith that fictional works really happened or must be treated as if they really happened then it is very hard to accept a new fictional work based on an existing one. “But Helen of Troy didn’t speak English with a US accent — she just didn’t — and if you think she did you have no right to called you film the Orestia."

I wonder if this relates to an underlying Christian fundamentalism in the culture: a sense that if Moses, as a matter of historical fact, didn't lead two million people though the Red Sea, then the story is entirely worthless. 

And shall I tell you what is really weird? Stan Lee had already introduced a metafictional element into his Marvel Universe: but that meta-fiction involved the Marvel Bullpen, the writers and artists who created the stories. His comics were presented, not as quasi-historical events, but as things that someone had made.

Doctor Who never did that: although it might be argued that when you saw monsters made of bubble wrap and neutron bombs counting down with flap-down digital clocks you couldn't avoid thinking “this is a story being acted out with improvise plots”. But it is very true that almost as soon as Doctor Who became popular, fans wanted to see the man behind the curtain. There were features on Blue Peter and the Radio Times about “how the special effects were done” and, boringly “amusing incidents on the set”. 

And yet: canon. 

It seems to me that if you were re-starting Doctor Who, you would begin with a mysterious figure trekking through space and time, who has always been trekking through space and time, and who has been everywhere once and lots of places twice. And since he is bound to talk about his previous adventures, there is no reason not to say that the previous two TV series’ represent the characters “past”. (If he says “I once met the devil” your would expect some viewers to say “ooo ooo he means the one with the ood / no no he means the one in the village with the white witch”.) It would be a bad move to make that a very important part of the new programme. Doubtless, at some point, he’ll say “Aha, my old foe, the Master, he travels in time and space but unlike me his does harm rather than good.” You would not necessarily say “Aha, the Master, he used to have a female identity called Missy and then revealed that I was the Timeless Child.” 

But I just. Don’t. See. Why any of this needs to be a Plot Point. Someone on the internet proposed that the new Doctor should have amnesia — that he should only find out about previous adventures from, say, a TARDIS diary. I am not saying that an amnesiac Doctor couldn’t be the basis for some good stories. Anything could be the basis for some good stories. But I don’t get why there needs to be an in-universe explanation about why the backstory is on the backburner.

When Doctor Who was a going concern, your Robert Holmes and Terrence Dicks were against multi-Doctor stores, because there was no good way of writing a script with four or five egos all competing for attention. As long as the revival actors are still alive, I suppose there is no way we can avoid a Christopher Eccleston / David Tennant / Whoever The New Person Is crossover. And if you do it, you should do it, with the egos clashing as loudly as you can. 

It is interesting that Star Wars was happy to do one of the most thorough-going reboots without providing the merest whisper of an in-universe explanation: dumping something like three hundred novels and a fairly well developed time line. And I am deeply grateful that there has never been the slightest temptation to say that there are two galaxies both equally long ago and far away; and in one Luke married a lady called Mara and had a son, and in one he stayed celibate and went to live in a monastery. When Dave Filoni wanted to incorporate Admiral Thrawn, the bad guy from the decanonized novels, into Star Wars: Rebels, he didn't make someone run at the speed of light to open a gateway between the universes: he just introduced him as a character. I like that approach. Some would say that Filoni was offering fan service to the kinds of people who felt that their life was ruined when the Expanded Universe was de-canonised. My impressions is that he wanted a big villain and though he would borrow one who already existed.

Dear Person I overheard in Forbidden Planet just after Force Awakens came out:

You said that the reboot means that all the time you spent reading the Expanded Universe was wasted: but if someone said “Hubble bubble hocus pocus make the Expanded Universe take place on an Alternate Time Line” would you get your time back?

Love ARR

But but but: suppose it turned out that New New Who was taking part in a parallel universe, and it turned out that the Very Big and Very Bad villain was actually the Doctor from a different universe, one in which the Doctor had finally, as has so often been predicted, gone bad; wouldn’t the moment where we tear Zagreus' mask off and reveal Ncuti Gatwa underneath be worth the complexity?

It might be. Anything might. Several different fans have at several times proposed a story where Moriarty rather than Holmes survived Reichenbach.

But it would, in a way, be an unearned twist: a twist that was interesting only at a meta-level. If you can make up a story without cannibalising history, maybe you should 

Answers To Readers' Questions [4]

 “But I rather think that ‘I am special because I met the Doctor’ is generally code for ‘We are special because we are Doctor Who fans’: and there are fewer and fewer ‘boomers’ for whom watching Doctor Who was a formative experience.”

Aristide Twain

” There are fewer and fewer for whom Tom Baker was a formative experience, but the people for whom David Tennant or Matt Smith were formative are just about getting old enough to make their own nostalgic television, and won't that be interesting? Christopher Eccleston has explicitly said at conventions that the only circumstance in which he'd consider returning to Doctor Who for a multi-Doctor special would if the new showrunner were someone who'd been a starry-eyed little girl in 2005-6.

The wider one’s range of experience, whether of media or life, the less significance each individual sensation appears to have: because you have so many others to compare it with. 

Doctor Who and Star Wars were very significant in the 1970s because that was all there was. 

Television had a status and importance for the children of the 1960s that it can’t ever have for the 2000 or 2010 cohort. 

I assume. Do people in their 30s talk about In The Night Garden and Octonauts in the way we grown-ups wax lyrical about Bagpuss and Trumpton? Maybe they do. 

Does the wider range of media mean that each individual bubble is less important?

Was children’s TV simply better in the 1970s. 

Or am I just speaking with the voice of nostalgia? 

“The summers seem so much brighter when I was a kid than they do today.”

“That’s not nostalgia. That’s cataracts.”

It does not follow that it would be a good thing if home cooking were bland and unadventurous and preferably rationed, and if the only restaurants in the average town were Beefeater and Wimpy, even if that is the only way of recapturing the transcendent joy we felt on first tasting garlic.

If you first watched Doctor Who when you were 12, and if David Tennant was your first crush then, totally, you would turn on a new series, especially if David Tennant was coming back for a cameo.

There was some talk of remaking Buffy without Sarah Michelle Gellar or indeed Josh Whedon. I am in no doubt that people who were teenagers between 1997 and 2003 would be quite excited about the idea. But I query how many people there are whose adult identity is “person who grew up watching Buffy.” 

Yes, indeed, Harry Potter. 

The Doctor Who of Russel T Davies and Stephen Moffat seemed very much to be a debate with itself about what Doctor Who meant and the significance of Doctor Who and what it was like to be Doctor Who fan. As we’ve argued, this goes back to Moffat’s silly Curse of Fatal Death, which directly made Doctor Who the character a metaphor for Doctor Who the programme. I don’t think a new series would want to do that. 

But maybe it would. The Marvel Universe, both in the movies and in the actual comics continues to regard the years from 1962-1972 as utterly foundational. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is teasing visual homages to classic comic-book covers: and they are all comic book covers which fans of my vintage would recognise. Fantastic Four: First Steps was an absolute love letter to the Fantastic Four as it was in 1968: as if John Byrne and Mark Waid had never happened. 

Or maybe classics are classic. We say that Star Trek reboots are pandering to people in their sixties but we don’t on the whole, say that Pride and Prejudice adaptations are pandering to bicentenarians.

Answers To Readers's Questions [3]

 Aristide Twain

“There has been one (1) successful Doctor Who spin-off, namely, the Sarah-Jane Adventures,” Well, on television. In prose and audio and comics, there have been very good Paradise Towers comics, Faction Paradox short story anthologies, Sontaran audio plays, and so on for many decades. (And naturally a lot of very bad Gallifrey audio plays, Lethbridge-Stewart short story anthologies, etc. etc.) I do not particularly yearn for a world in which such premises were executed as TV shows on Disney+ like the Marvel and Star Wars catalogues, but it is a very easy thing to imagine.

Yes: that is a perfectly valid point. I was thinking of TV Spinoffs — K9 and Company, Australian K9, Sarah-Jane, the Dreadful Torchwood, the recent sea devils thing. But if you include an infinite range of stage plays, novels, comics, audio-stories, RPGs, and computer games, then Doctor Who has had more spin-offs than pretty much anything else. 

In 2005, the holders of the copyright to Zorro commissioned Isabel Allende to write a serious historical novel about the character, largely on the grounds that it was bout the only thing that had never been done. I look forward to Doctor Who - The Opera in due course. 

So: whoever inherits the Doctor Who logo may very well decide to create a franchise of adventurous, slightly retro sci-fi stories, linked together by a nomad who wanders through time and space. One element might be set on a planet that the Nomad once visited; one on a planet which he is going to visit at some point in the future; and one on a planet that he is never going to visit, but which he has once mentioned in passing.

It’s a not unfeasible format: Sandman does it to some extent. 

Has anyone associated John Finnemore’s name with the revamped franchise? (He collaborated with He Who Still Probably Cannot Be Named on the Good Omens sequels, so must have worked with David Tennant.) Several of his comedy shows involve interesting structural hijinks. In one of his radio sketch shows the final item involved a time machine, which proceeded to travel backwards through the previous sketches in the episode, providing the explanation for lines which otherwise made no sense. One could imagine a new version of Who doing that kind of thing.

If your target audience know and care then prequels and sequels are a perfectly valid thing to do. “How did the Kangs get on after the Doctor left Paradise Towers” is as good a jumping off point for a story as any other. And if the story is good enough, it doesn’t matter if the audience know and care. I was a big fan of a US comedy show about a psychiatrist: I later learned that he had previously appeared in a different series set in a bar.

James Blish said that if you had a good idea for a science fiction story, it was better to create your own characters than to present it as Star Trek fan-fic. But I think it is possible to have a good idea for a Star Trek story that won’t go into any other format. 

My only real beef is with the idea that a stand alone series about a group of specialists solving mysteries and space becomes magically interesting when you say “And the computer expert is Zoe!” Although even that could be fun if it were an easter egg and not a premise. 

Answers to Readers's Questions [2]

 Scurra

It will be called Doctor Who and it will be Doctor Who. Just like the 1963 version, the 1996 version and the 2005 version are all Doctor Who. I similarly think that the Target novels, the Virgin novels, the BBC novels, the Titan comics, the Big Finish audios etc etc are all Doctor Who on the same basis. Indeed, if I was going to be fair, I'd also contend that unofficial videos and fanfiction are also all Doctor Who because either there is a line (in which case, it's really hard to draw) or there isn't.

People assume that Doctor Who is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, not subjective viewpoint its more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... Cannon-y-wammony stuff.

I think it was Aristotle who said the reason elephants were large, grey and wrinkled was that if they were small, white and smooth, they would be aspirins. 

Or put another way: if you saw a small elephant, would you say “that is not an elephant” or “that is apparently a dwarf elephant.” Or if you saw a small elephant with small ears “Obviously the Indian dwarf elephant.” A small white elephant with small ears? “Obviously, an albino of the species”. How many attributes can you remove until the elephant stops being an elephant?

I suppose that we, unlike Aristotle, can say, “It is still an elephant as long as it has got elephant DNA.” 

I broadly agree with your point: the original black and white TV version of the Daleks; Russel T Davies’ absurd colourisation of the Daleks, the Doctor Who and the Daleks movie and the Doctor Who In An Exciting Adventure With The Daleks novel all come under the Doctor Who umbrella. And so, therefore, does the TV Century 21 Dalek comic strip and the Daleks Give-a-Show projector. 

Steve Moore wrote a back-up strip for the then Doctor Who weekly called Abslam Daak Dalek Killer. Which I rather liked at the time because it had, you know, Daleks, in it. But even at the time, I could see that this was a 2000AD strip, not a Doctor Who strip, and that you could have substituted the Daleks for pretty much any other alien without it making much difference. (The British Planet of the Apes comic infamously filled some blank pages by, er, taking some issues of Kilraven and drawing apes over the Martians.)

Presumably, the lost 1963 Crackerjack skit about Doctor What and his flying post-box; and even the Private Eye cartoon about Doctor Owen who never knew which party he was going to materialise in next have something to do with Doctor Who, although they are not very good examples of the thing that Doctor Who is.

You could say that Dalek Slayer is part of Doctor Who because you can construct a flow chart that connects it to the wider Doctor Who continuity. The Virgin New Adventures arguably happened to the same man who got shot outside his police box in San Francisco on New Year’s Eve, and that man unquestionably met Absalam Dakk, so it follows…

Interestingly, it would be harder to connect the infamous 1960s comic strip to the grand narrative in quite the same way. There isn’t a point in the fictional life-story of the First Doctor where he could have been living in a junk yard with grandchildren other than Susan. But it is very easy to see what kind of thing those comic strips are trying to be — a story which is a bit like the TV show Doctor Who. Invoke parallel universes if you insist: I think that children in the 1960s had no difficulty at all with the idea that you could tell the same story in several different ways. At the age of very young indeed I could understand that Walt Disney Winnie-the-Pooh was different from book Winnie the Pooh, but that it didn’t matter very much.

Answers To Readers Questions [1]

 This week I am writing intelligent replies to the comments my Fans made about my last Doctor Who article.

"Seven years later Paul McGann appeared in an American thing that had no discernible similarity to Doctor Who. Then there was radio silence until 2005."

METALLICMASK: I can't agree with that. For all the TV movie's flaws, it has a clear similarity to both Spearhead from Space and The Deadly Assassin. It's recognizably a Doctor Who story in a way that the Leakley draft wouldn't have been.

A Catholic would say that what makes the Pope Catholic is the Apostolic Succession. The True Church is the True Church because it stands in an historical relationship to the historical Jesus: it is the inheritor of the sacred flame. The Pope can’t not be Catholic: Catholicism is whatever the successors of Peter say it is. 

A Protestant would say that what makes an Archbishop truly Protestant is his subscribing to the correct set of doctrines. The True Church is the True Church because it believes in the things the historical Jesus taught. A Church stops being truly Protestant, or, indeed truly Christian, when it stops having right beliefs. 

On one view, the Paul McGann film is Doctor Who because of the appearance of Sly McCoy, the Master, the Eye of Harmony, the Daleks, the TARDIS, jelly babies, and because it said “Based on the BBC TV series Doctor Who” in the opening credits. 

On the other, it is not Doctor Who because the Master, the Eye of Harmony and the Daleks departed so radically from established orthodoxy. 

My nuanced view, thirty years later, was that the film contained some Quite Interesting treatments of established Whovian tropes. But it felt as if it had been written by someone who had had the concept of “regeneration” explained to him, but had never seen an actual episode of the Doctor Who. McGann himself, an obviously fine actor, seemed similarly to be dressed in a consensus impression of what a Doctor Who costume ought to look like. Kind of a mad scientist and kind of a superhero but with an incongruous Edwardian aesthetic. 

Think of the jelly babies. I don’t think Americans know what jelly babies are: they have sometimes been translated as “jelly beans” or  “gummy bears”. The writer got the memo that the Doctor liked a particular kind of candy, but he didn’t get the joke that he had a big bag of sweets in his pocket like a schoolboy. So he showed him eating them from a rather ornate dish, with a silver teapot, as if they were a rare delicacy.

And no, canonically, the Doctor eating jelly babies while drinking tea and listening to an old fashioned gramophone doesn’t categorically contradict any establish lore. 

Some of the decisions in the story — that it should be told from the point of view of the companion who should have their own back story and supporting cast, and that kissy-kissy  stuff was no longer off limits — were obviously good ideas and were taken over by the Welsh Series. “I’m half human on my mother’s side” seems to have been a fossilised hangover from a rejected treatment and need never be thought of again. 

This Chinese-whispers impression of what Doctor Who is probably like fell into a bog-standard 1990s action-ish thriller, not un-entertainingly. 

I can see elements of the BBC mythos in this American revamp: but I truthfully can see that the episode or the storyline had much overlap with any episode of Doctor Who — except, I suppose, in so far as Doctor Who has embraced so many kinds of story that almost any kind of story would inevitably resemble some aspect of Doctor Who.

Of course you never play your edgiest card in your pilot episode; and the McGann characterisation was strong enough that I would like to have seen more of it. 

It’s kinda sorta like my relationship with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. It’s certainly not Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but I'd quite liked to have seen Movie Merry, Movie Pippin and Movie Frodo in the sections of the story Jackson cut out. 

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If this is Tuesday, Doctor Who must have just ended

I made my excuses and left after the Doctor hit the TARDIS with the giant hammer: although my heart hasn’t been in it since the stand-in First Doctor threatened to spank Bill Potts. So I probably have no right to an opinion. But you probably want to know what the opinion that I have no right to is. 

I recall the long  death of Doctor Who between 1985 and 1989. It was suspended for eighteen months: the fans made a huge fuss and the BBC caved and said that it would only be suspended for eighteen months. 

It is fair to say that Colin Baker’s first Season wasn’t very well received, but I don’t recall any “fans” gleefully crying “go Baker, meet your maker” or “go Nathan-Turner, get put in the waif and burn her” when the show was put on hold. 

It came back, of course, in 1986 (Trial of a Time Lord) and in 1987, 1988 and 1989 (in a grave yard slot opposite Coronation Street.) And then it somehow, without a fanfare, went on permanent hiatus. The producer, John Nathan-Turner must have known that the writing was on the wall, dropping the lacklustre “come on Ace, we’ve got work to do” epilogue into the final story at the last minute.

We remained in denial. I remember feeling mildly shocked when, three years later, an irreverent compilation of clips (Resistance is Useless) referred to the series in the past tense. 

The final season had been laying the groundwork for a big story arc. Some fans feel we were robbed. Some feel we had a lucky escape. Seven years later Paul McGann appeared in an American thing that had no discernible similarity to Doctor Who. Then there was radio silence until 2005.  

So: where are we now? At the point when Michael Grade can truthfully say “Stop being so hysterical: there is just going to be a slightly longer gap between seasons than usual”? Or at the point where we haven’t quite admitted that the show is dead, even though no-one is actually making it any more? Perhaps in 2033 there will be a 70th anniversary special in which the surviving Doctors run round and round in circles wearing 3-D glasses. 

I do not say that Doctor Who couldn’t form the basis for an enjoyable CBeebies cartoon or puppet show. Neither do I say that if someone pitches an adult, hard-science remake of the Clangers I will refuse to watch it. But we wouldn’t be talking about this if anyone thought the grown-up series had any kind of future. I look forward to arguments about canonicity.

Where are we? In Timeline A, a show called Doctor Who appears on Iplayer in, say, September 2027, following on directly from whatever the hell it was that happened in Ncuti Gatwa's swan-song, with a note in the credits saying that it was outsourced to HBO or Prime rather than to Bad Wolf. In Timeline B an entirely new series premiers on Netfux in 2028 carrying a small print rubric: “based on the BBC series Doctor Who”. It features a tough scientist from the Bronx who travels through space and time preventing homicides before they happen; or a member of the Time Lord Corps who is sent out by the Guardians of the Gallifrey to fix irregularities in the time flow. It begins with a handsome young scientist putting his baby son on board a Time Machine to escape the destruction of his planet. His evil brother the Master survives by being imprisoned in the Matrix when the planet explodes.  

My money is on Timeline C: nothing at all happens until 2040. I hope there will be streaming TV in whatever old folks home Nigel Farage has consigned me to.

I forget who said that Doctor Who fans are much more concerned with linearity than they are with continuity. We accept that the series will woefully contradict itself in every particular, but we insist that everything — everything which appears on TV, at any rate — must follow on sequentially from everything else, so that we can continue to think of Doctor Who as one infinitely long tapestry that is unrolling in front of us. 

Possibly the weirdest decision in the show's history was hiring Sylvester McCoy to appear in the American TV special, simply in order to be written out. I get what it was trying to do. Seven years on, the Doctor that we left behind was still on board the TARDIS. This is still the Doctor, the actual Doctor, the real in-canon Doctor and no-one can gainsay that. The torch, or at any rate the sonic screwdriver, was being passed. 

Russel T Davies was much cleverer; introducing us to the Doctor from the point of view of a human meeting him for the first time; making it clear that he had had previous adventures, but only gradually and tentatively making them part of the narrative. But there was no question that this was the same fellow who used to hang out with K-9 and Romana. Indeed, we eventually got to see, albeit as a “minisode” Doctor Eight (who had enjoyed precisely ninety minutes of screen time) regenerate into the very confusing Doctor Eight and A Bit; and eventually, the Eight and a Bit-th Doctor turning into Christopher Eccleston. 

Will Doctor Who Mark Three be a linear extension of Classic Who and New Who? Or will it be, in the parlance, a reboot: a new cycle of stories about the same fictional character. 

Russel T Davies was being mischievous; and he has every right to be a bit miffed; but he pointedly asked whether the next version of Doctor Who would still have a TARDIS, still have the same theme music, and whether a very obscure monster (the Drashigs) might be revived. He’d previously said that Doctor Who was like Robin Hood, and that even if he disappears for a while, someone will always tell new stories about him in some new form. This doesn’t seem to suggest a great deal of confidence that the saga will simply pick up from where it left off.

I don’t think my advice to any incoming producer or showrunner would be any different to the advice I gave Lorraine Heggessey in 2002. Get the Doctor right. Tell us old fashioned thrilling yarns. Ignore the backstory and the canon, and keep the Time Lords at arms length. Don’t over-use Daleks, Cybermen and Ice-warriors. Get the special effects as good as you can afford, but don’t sell the show on spectacle. 

The next version of Doctor Who can’t afford to be a pastiche, either of the post-RTD revival, or of the old classic show. It can’t assume that the average viewer knows or cares about sixty year old “lore”. Doctor Who has never had “lore” in the way that Star Trek or Star Wars has lore: the most it has ever had is a lucky-dip of iconography. Daleks are inhuman cyborgs that want to take over the universe, whereas the Cybermen are nasty inhuman cyborgs that want to take over the universe. It is quite cool that Daleks don’t have legs and it is quite cool that Cybermen have handlebars on their heads, but this is not the kind of thing you can hang a franchise off. 

James Bond is a great big action franchise, which carries with it a set of assumptions: car chases, gadgets, exotic locations, mildly risqué scenes with glamorous co-stars, a certain charmingly toxic masculinity. All of which, you could perfectly well find in a tin which didn’t say “James Bond” on the label: but you can see why Amazon wants to do something with the brand. If nothing else, the 007 logo signals very clearly to the ticket-buyer what he is going to get for his money. 

But wouldn’t it be more interesting to rethink Bond from the ground up? Maybe this version will be female and liberal, and maybe the next movie will accurately reflect the career of a real MI5 agent: a story primarily about paperwork and forensic investigations and decades long infiltrations.

To which the reply is of course “Much more interesting Miss Bennett; but not nearly so much like a James Bond movie.” 

"But why shouldn’t a future series explore a different or unexpected aspect of the Whoniverse?" Why shouldn’t Doctor Who become a kind of franchise, like the MCU. Space is big: why do we focus entirely on one particular Time Lord knocking about in one particular Time Machine? 

But what could that possibly mean? You could tell a story about a planet which the Doctor hasn’t visited yet; but you’d just be telling a story about a planet. You could tell a story about a period in Earth’s past which the Doctor never visited: but that would just be a piece of historical fiction. You could tell the story Terry Nation wanted to tell, about plucky humans fighting a backs-against-the-wall war against the Daleks, but that would be the same as a story about plucky humans fighting any other kind of heroic last stand. (With, admittedly, the Daleks in it.) Would a story about an alien and her human lover trying to rebuild earth in the wake of an alien invasion automatically become interesting if it said The Susan Foreman and David Cameron Adventures on the title page?

There has been one (1) successful Doctor Who spin-off, namely, the Sarah-Jane Adventures, and that didn’t depend on it’s connection with Doctor Who in the way that, say, Obi Wan depends on its connection with A New Hope. 

I wonder if there is a freemasonry of old folk who are anxiously waiting for the BBC to “bring back” Doctor Finlay’s Casebook after its fifty year hiatus. There may well be. There are certainly nostalgists who think that all changes to broadcasting schedules are the result of malicious conspiracies and that a future messiah will restore On The Buses, Fanny Craddock, the Potters Wheel and especially The Black and White Minstrel Show. But what is it that these Finlayvians want to restore? An exact pastiche of the old show, with artificial intelligence bringing, er, Andrew Cruickshank, back from the dead? A modern take on the same kind of story, with a similar setting, similar supporting characters, and a new arrangement of the theme tune? Or a bold reimagining in which Finlay is a junior doctor on a drug ridden Glasgow estate? Or is it just a religious imperative that there must at all times be a TV show about a medical practitioner with a Scots accent? (When ITV did, in fact, revive Doctor Finlay’s Casebook in the 1990s, they went for “linearity”, imagining the young John Finlay of the 1930s as an experienced medic in post 1945 Scotland.)

A rebooted Doctor Who will certainly consist of stories. But what in particular will make them Doctor Who stories? A Blue Box, some swirly lines, and a retro electronic theme tune?

Almost everyone agrees that the Timeless Child was a stupid idea. Turning inward and delving into the Doctor's origins was not in the spirit of the show: and there is something hubristic about a show-runner thinking that he can retrospectively obliterate established canon with a stroke of the pen. (“In an astonishing twist, it turns out that James Bond was a SMERSH double agent from the beginning.”)

Did people who saw The War Games in 1969 feel that the show they grew up with had been casually overwritten? Or did they say “Well, we have always known that the Doctor is an alien; and now someone has decided that his people are called the Time Lords. Well, that tracks." Changes to mythoi happen: but they happen incrementally and arise naturally from what has gone before.

Chibnall's all-consuming ret-con established that the Doctor could be — and indeed, probably had been — anyone: that there were potentially infinite Doctors knocking around the universe with infinite ethnicities, genders and orientations. And I can see why that might look like a good idea. It was always fun, in the weeks following a Regeneration Story, to explore and speculate what the New Doctor was going to be like; so why not tweak the format so that fun happens more frequently. Stephen Fry isn't going to commit to playing the Doctor for a full seven years, but he might well take on the role for a single episode.

But if absolutely anybody can be the Doctor then the Doctor isn’t anyone at all.

And that seems to be where we are. Any story in the universe can be a Doctor Who story, the Doctor can be any person in the universe.

Doctor Who is hereby defined as "a format in which things happen to someone, but definitely with an Old English Police Phone Box.

Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker’s Doctors were charismatic figures, much loved by their companions; and in some cases, their actions made them legendary figures on the planets they had visited.  But New Who developed a quasi-religious framing in which the Doctor was uniquely amazing, and by virtue of his amazing uniqueness, enabled everyone he comes into contact with to live unique and amazing lives. So perhaps the pitch you would present to HBO would be something like "Doctor Who is the story of a godlike being who transforms the lives of everyone he touches, but who never finds happiness himself.”

Certainly, "the idea of the Doctor" would have to be at the heart of any revamp or reboot. And clearly the Doctors of the classic era were amazing and wonderful. But I rather think that "I am special because I met the Doctor" is generally code for "We are special because we are Doctor Who fans": and there are fewer and fewer "boomers" for whom watching Doctor Who was a formative experience. The original Doctor was not amazing by virtue of some Christ-like glory intrinsic in his being. We loved him for who he was, not for what he was. The Doctor was awesome because Bill Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker and Sylvester McCoy were awesome.

If you want to get me interested in Doctor Who all over again, you'll need to find an actor with the charisma and gravitas of Tom Baker; a Royal Shakespeare Company support actor who isn’t afraid of clowning around. But with this caveat: he can’t be anything like Tom Baker. If you can find a decent actor who can do a fair impression of Tom, he should be utterly debarred from the role.

The fan obsession with linearity often encompasses a desire to wind the show backwards — a desire slightly indulged by RTD when he gave David Tennant a second bite of the cherry. I read someone today saying that Sean Pertwee should be allowed to impersonate his father; I read someone else saying that the older Sly McCoy should wake up in the TARDIS at the end of Survival and say “what a strange dream”. That thinking tacitly acknowledges that Doctor Who is dead or moribund.  

I want to avoid easy labels like trickster or maverick and the Harpo Marx comparison has been done to death. The closest I can come to describing my Doctor is wise clown or clever idiot. One of the many sad what-ifs in the show's history is that Sylvester McCoy had so little time and so few decent scripts: in the brief moments that were allowed to him, he seemed to achieve the perfect synthesis of frivolity and seriousness. Matt Smith is the only actor in the revived series to engage with that literally sophomore persona. I think — I am not sure but I think — that Smith's first two seasons justify the whole revival project.

So is that our pitch? “Doctor Who is a series in which a completely inappropriate hero can be dropped into any storyline”. Or: "Doctor Who is a series in which a comedic, theatrical, cartoon loony  falls into a series of essentially serious science fictional scenarios - and turns out to be the cleverest and wisest person in the room."

I will now tell you what I truly think.

I truly think that Doctor Who is a format from a bygone age. I don't think it was ever really true that the show could go anywhere and do anything. The minuscule budgets made most places and most times technically unvisitable. If you look at the actually-existing episodes, Doctor Who is a format in which all the worst cliches from 1950s science fiction are replayed over and over again with minor variations. Doctor Who as it existed on our screens and not in our heads was about alien invasions, evil computers, mad scientists, perpetually besieged bases, savage inhospitable planets, revived dinosaurs threatening cities, giant rats, carnivorous mushrooms and sentient slime.

It might be argued that the series consumed the science fiction cliches of the day; so that a revived series would have to riff on The Expanse and Hail Mary and The Three Body Problem rather than It Came From Outer Space and the Day The Earth Stood Still: but I am not quite sure. I think that there may still be an “idea of science fiction” which encompasses ray guns, flying saucers and slightly comedic robots, and it is only in that universe that the Doctor makes sense. 

And I think that the Doctor is a character who can only really exist in a BBC studio. He is a creature of the theatre who loses his essential nature when obliged to conform to movie logic. How many of us saw Paul McGann careering through modern day San Francisco on a motorbike and thought "That is simply not the kind of thing that the Doctor does."

I think that actors best embody the Doctor when interacting with other actors and physical special effects, as opposed to lines of computer code and blue screens. I do not say this because I am nostalgic for quarries and corridors; although twenty years after the failed revival, it is astonishing how many people do still think of Doctor Who in terms of quarries and corridors. I say this because the wit and charisma of Troughton and Baker and McCoy is essentially improvisational. They don’t necessarily respect the script: they ad lib and put on silly voices and generally piss about in front of the camera. None of the life-changing magic of Tom Baker could have emerged on a set where he had to hit his mark and where each expensive shot was carefully set up in advance. 

And I really do wonder how much of the Elusive Magic depended on the format. I do not insist on Basil Brush. I do not insist on Larry Grayson. But I do think that the twenty five minute weekly format, with the often pointless cliffhanger and the often unconvincing escape is an irreducible part of what the series was about. 

I have just watched Tom Baker's penultimate season right through. It is not very good. It is much worse than I remembered it. But throughout the rewatching process I had a strong spiritual sense that I was watching Doctor Who; albeit a rather bad iteration of it. And that I couldn’t find the point of crossover with the show that had just been cancelled.

Apart, obviously, from the Blue Box. 

Do I think Doctor Who should be consigned to oblivion? Whatever I write here, I don’t think it will be. If there can be a big screen revival of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, I don’t think a show with a sixty year history is going to moulder in limbo forever. Sooner or later someone will look at the late 20th century TV show, or even the early 21st century sequel, and say “That quaint ol' thing gives me a fine idea for a high budget 3D Imax Saga, see if it doesn't.” 

It might have as much in common with Doctor Who as the Big Finish pastiches; or as little as the Paul McGann spin off. It might be as much fun as Matt Smith or as annoying as Jodie Whittaker. It will be called Doctor Who but it won't be Doctor Who.

And who knows: perhaps I will even be alive to see it.

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The Horns of Nimon

Horns of Nimon has been cited as the worst Who story of all time. It was the end of Tom Baker's sixth season and he's obviously bored to death. He sleepwalks through his scenes and clowns around shamelessly. So no-one else can take the story seriously. When K-9 breaks down, the Doctor tries to give him mouth-to-mouth. When the TARDIS malfunctions, it emits a series of comedy "boings". Graham Crowden (the evil Soldeed) seems to think that he's competing for the Brian Blessed Award For Overacting. And keep your Spotters Guide to Doctor Who Clichés handy: people really do say things like "You meddling fools!" "It's too late for me - I'm done for!" and "All these corridors look the same!"

Andrew Rilstone

Review -- Doctor Who: Myths and Legends Boxed Set DVD - Sci-Fi Now - March 2010

That concludes my retrospective look at the Seventeenth Season of classic Doctor Who. I am sure I will have a look at this final season in due course.  If you want to support me, read outtakes and specials and get early access to my nonsense, then please, please, please, pretty please, I'm not going to get down and beg, but, consider joining my Patreon. 

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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