Doctor Who: Twice Upon a Time

I have done my very best to like the Doctor Who Christmas Special. I truly have. But it won’t do. I’m sorry. It just won’t do.

*

In the 1950s, most children got smacked by their parents. I’m sorry but they did. Canon be damned, the First Doctor is Susan’s grandfather: he has been in loco parentis for a number of years. In the first episode of Dalek Invasion Earth she recklessly causes a bridge to collapse, blocking off the only route back to the TARDIS. You can see why the old boy might be a bit miffed, but we cringe when he threatens to spank her. Of course we do. We would like to believe that the remark was an unscripted interjection by William Hartnell. (All the bad lines in 60s Who were unscripted ad libs by William Hartnell, in the same way that all the bad lines in Shakespeare are interpolations by Middleton.) And it would have been better if Terry Nation had written “clip round the ear” or “thump” rather than “jolly good smacked bottom”. But the Doctor is more or less Susan’s father. When he gets cross with her, he talks like a tetchy, old-fashioned, embarrassing, late-1950s Dad. This was the kind of thing embarrassing Dads said in those days. I’m sorry, but it was.

The scene had a purpose within the overall structure of Dalek Invasion of Earth. Young people today may feel that it is not quite politically correct, or even decent, for stories to have overall narrative structures and for scenes to have points, but in those days everyone thought it was perfectly normal. The First Doctor was quite forgetful. The original series pitch used the word “senile”. He mixes up his companion's names and can’t remember how to operate the TARDIS. So at the beginning of the story, he treats Susan as if she is about twelve, even though she is seventeen. But at the end of the story, he treats her like an adult, even though she is only seventeen. You may think that shutting her out of the TARDIS at the end of the story is just as abusive as threatening to hit her at the beginning. But “How the Doctor came to see that Susan was no longer a little girl” is one of the things Dalek Invasion of Earth was about.

It is impossible to know how the First Doctor would have reacted to swearing. In one sense it's a meaningless question: no-one could possibly have said “bloody” or “arse” on 1960s TV. Mrs Whitehouse thought that even “bum” was crossing a line. But I imagine he would have said something like “Goodness gracious me! You will make me blush! I haven’t heard such words since I was on the lower decks of HMS Victory!”

To which Ian would have replied "Oh Doctor! If you had taught in a London secondary modern school, you would know that it is sometimes politic to go unaccountably deaf for a few seconds…"

And the Doctor would have gone "Hmm, hmm" and everyone would have laughed.

What I am confident that the First Doctor would not have done under those circumstances is threaten to spank a 28 year old stranger.

There is such a thing as fan lore and folk memory. Everyone knows that the Third Doctor used to say “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” a lot, even though in the actual scripts, he didn’t. But he did use a lot of pseudo-science and Jon Pertwee did tell a story about memorizing that particular phrase to the tune of "When I was a lad..." from H.M.S Pinafore. So although it's a myth, it’s a myth that stands in for a truth.

I struggle to think of examples of the First Doctor being particularly sexist. All the original Doctors were somewhat patronising to their companions. I recall the rebels on Dalek controlled earth asking Barbara if she could cook — but that’s not an unreasonable question for a group of male soldiers to ask a middle-aged lady. I recall the Second Doctor telling Polly to go away and make some tea but that was a plot point. I recall one of the UNIT soldiers announcing that Zoe was much prettier than a computer. But the Doctor thinking it was the job of his lady companions to dust the TARDIS? If the TARDIS got dusty I am sure there would have been an auto-cosmic-room-sanitizer-ray.

Why does Moffat wrench an admittedly terrible line out of context and somehow imply that this was the kind of thing the First Doctor said all the time? Weren’t there more interesting contrasts to be drawn between Olden Days Doctor and Current Doctor? Man of Science vs Man of Action is the one that comes immediately to mind. "Oh by the way, did you take three dimensional graph geometry at your school, hmm?"

But let's accept for the sake of argument that the First Doctor is the Sexist Doctor and the Twelfth Doctor is the Less Sexist Doctor. Who lore apart “A fairly liberal guy has to spend time with a previous, more socially conservative version of himself” is a perfectly good starting point for a story. But if that's your premise, for goodness sake, do something with it. Do the obvious thing and have the liberal guy show the conservative guy the error of his ways. Do the very slightly less obvious thing and have them both learn from each other. Ironically reveal that the chap who says “my dear” and “young lady” is deep-down a better feminist than the guy who uses the right-on language. Do something. Do anything. Don’t just point at the two characters and say “har har weren’t the olden days old fashioned."

Why does the First Doctor have such outdated social attitudes anyway? If Doctor Who made any sense -- if you were going to reboot it and start again, knowing everything we know now -- then the earlier versions of the Doctor ought logically to be much more alien and Gallifreyan and ill-at-ease with humans. The later incarnations would progressively take on the attitudes of their adopted home planet. In fact, William Hartnell's Doctor knew nothing of Gallifrey: the Time Lords were a gigantic ret-con, added to the series at the end of Patrick Troughton's tenure. But there is no reason why they couldn't have been a ret-con that made sense: Gallifrey could have been very fusty and old fashioned and patrician; a vast dusty Oxford common room full of old boys in Edwardian suits who say "school master" and "young lady" and threaten to smack people's bottoms. The kind of place where the First Doctor would have fitted right in. In fact, when we first met the Time Lords they were super advanced and godlike. Granted, the Doctor is meant to be a rebel, but how does being a rebel from their point of view equate to being a bit of an old fuddy duddy from our point of view?

This isn't news: we all know that Doctor Who, taken as a whole, makes absolutely no damn sense. But why are we drawing attention to its senselessness in this particular way. There is no in-universe reason for the First Doctor to be old fashioned compared with the Twelfth. There is no reason for the First Doctor’s Police Box to look different from the Twelfth Doctor’s Police Box. We all understand perfectly well that the BBC doesn't use the same prop in 2017 that they used in 1966. But why draw attention to this kind of  thing? You might as well say “Before The Great Time War all spaceships were made out of washing up liquid bottles and propelled through space on the ends of wires”. You might as well have someone shout out "It's only a model" and have done with it.

It is quite possible to imagine an episode of a TV series in which someone says “It’s only a model” in a genuinely striking and creative way. William Shakespeare broke the fourth wall all the time. Steven Moffat is no William Shakespeare.

A character called the Brigadier certainly appeared in about half the stories transmitted between 1970-1975 — in all but one story during Seasons 7 and 8, and a couple of times in each of Seasons 9-12. He made three further appearances between 1975 and the show’s cancellation — once in a special and twice in regular stories. He never appeared in the reboot at all although he did have a cameo in the children’s spin-off The Sarah Jane Adventures. Yet on Christmas Day 2017 a Captain-Darling-style World War One officer (hammed up to perfection by Mycroft Holmes) deliberately withholds his name from the Doctor and Bill Potts specifically so he can announce in the final scene that his name is Archibald Hamish Lethbridge-Stewart.

Your reaction to this I suppose depends on how big a Doctor Who geek you are.

NEVER WATCHED DOCTOR WHO BEFORE:   Who?

NOT AT ALL GEEKY:  Er…Wasn’t there someone in Doctor Who already called Lethbridge-Stewart?

JUST GEEKY ENOUGH: Oh. Okay. The Brigadier's grandpa.

TOO GEEKY: Oh joy! Oh rapture! What a Christmas Present! A Character who last appeared in 1989 has been referenced on screen!

MUCH TOO GEEKY: But…but…but…this means that the Lethbridge-Stewart novels are canonical! This is that very Hamish who slept with his brother’s wife while the latter was away at war and is thus the Grandfather of the Brigadier (although the Brigadier believes him to be his great uncle!)

For most of the Tom Baker era, Doctor Who was engaged in a Pol Pot level denial of its own history. Stories like Deadly Assassin and Destiny of the Daleks pointedly didn’t bother to check up on how the Time Lords or Regeneration had been treated in previous episodes. But every couple of seasons, someone would chuck in a reference to an old story to mollify the fans.

“The Daleks home planet is called Skaro”

“Drool, drool, they still love us, drool drool.”

Then of course John Nathan-Turner took over, there were back references in every episode, and the series went into a self-destructive spiral. New Who has consisted of nothing but internal references. I don’t need reassurance that Steven Moffat knows about Who history. I already know that Steven Moffat knows more about Who history than anyone else on the planet.

We are entitled to say that the Brigadier has greater significance in fan-lore than he ever had in the TV show. He started out as “that annoying soldier who the Doctor is sometimes allied with”; but he ended up as “the Doctor’s best friend”. And “How a Time Traveler met his former best friend’s non-canonical grandfather” is a perfectly good starting place for a story. That kind of thing happens to Time Travelers all the time. The Time Traveler usually inadvertently kills his friend's grandfather when he was supposed to live, or more problematically, saves his life when he was supposed to die. Sometimes he prevents his grandfather meeting his grandmother, becomes implicated in the curse of Fenric, or invents rock n’roll.

So why is Captain Darling Lethbridge-Stewart? So far as I can see, everything in this story, and in fact everything else in the history of the universe, proceeds exactly as it would have done if Mycroft had not been Lethbridge-Stewart but just some guy.

Are we meant to retrospectively think that when Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart turned up in the Second One With the Yeti, Doctor Patrick retrospectively thought “I had better been nice to him, he’s related to that guy I met for 20 minutes at the North Pole just before I regenerated.”

“No Luke. I am the non-canonical illegitimate grandfather of someone you once met.”

“O.K. I guess that’s quite interesting. Did we already know that the guy with the military background had family members in World War I?”

Captain Darling and the First Doctor are momentarily shocked when Bill Potts mentions that she is gay. And, once again, nothing follows. I don’t know what an actual World War I officer would have said if a young lady (a young black lady, at that) openly said that she was a hoh moh sexual. Would he have turned his back and averted his gaze in case he was morally contaminated by the sinner, or would he have said “Oh, I know all about that kind of thing m’gel, I was at Eton too don’t you know”. The First Doctor would I suppose have been Enlightened By the Standards Of His Day: “Hmmm.. Hmmm… well I dare say you are my girl I dare say you are, and it is entirely your own business but we really don’t need to mention it in mixed company, do we, hmmm hmmm?”

In fact we just establish that social attitudes used to be different and move on.

Remind me, why am I watching this thing again?

And then again again; the Christmas Truce.

The Christmas Truce seems to be something which actually happened in history. That is, for one night in 1914 and maybe again in 1915, the British and German armies stopped trying to kill each other. I think that this kind of thing was quite common in pre-modern conflicts: soldiers regarded war as a rather violent game and didn’t think it that odd to meet up in the pavilion at half-time and say “you fought awfully well today, sir.” That was one of the things which the First World War brought to an end. It wasn't an astonishing thing happening for the first time, it was a fairly normal thing happening for the last time.

But just as there is a folk memory of William Hartnell and a folk memory of the Brigadier, so there is a folk memory of the Christmas Truce. I think (like a lot of our memories of World War One) it largely comes from Oh What A Lovely War! It is basically a set of symbols: there are no characters.

Germans singing Stille Nacht! Heil'ge Nacht!

The English soldiers responding with Silent Night. Miraculously, they were all taught the same translation at school.

A few soldiers come out of the trenches, nervously, and shake hands.

More join in.

They show each other pictures of their sweethearts.

Some of them start kicking a football around.

They go back into their trenches.

One of them opens a box of Sainsbury’s Chocolate Biscuits. I may possibly have made that up.

The next morning, they carry on killing each other as if nothing had happened.

The Christmas Truce worked its way into the Christmas Special partly as a plot device: the Brigadier’s Grandfather and a German Officer are about to kill each other, but the Doctor moves them a few days forward in time so Peace breaks out before they can do so. But it’s mostly a detached, free floating image to make the audience feel vaguely warm and Christmassy.

Who was it who said that Dickens' Little Nell isn’t a character — she is simply an onion to make you cry?

It’s a scrap book approach to history. You take some cuttings — soldiers fraternizing in no-man's land, the first Doctor being embarrassingly tetchy at his granddaughter, an affectionately remembered 1970s character — and you hang them on a string like fairy lights. And that is all you do. “Christmas truce” makes you have a Christmassy emotion. “First Doctor says bottom” makes you have a superior emotion. Cameo by Wonderful Clara makes you have a sad emotion. Someone saying the Brigadier’s name makes you have a fan-squee emotion. And then you watch Strictly Come Dancing.

“Oh but Andrew I am sure if you went back and watched old Who you would probably find it had plot holes as well. If you moan every time you find a tiny little plot problem in what is after all basically just a kids show you will have to pull down ever pub in Bristol and pour salt over the ground.” 

Yes, Doctor Who frequently had plot holes. Doctor Who was frequently very silly indeed. It relied very heavily on super villains who did illogical things (hollow out the center of the earth? feed prisoners to an alien mind parasite? release dinosaurs in the middle of London?) for no better reason than it was the kind of thing a super villain would do. It relied very heavily (though not as heavily as the reboot) on heroes who could pull Special Baddie Defeating Devices out of their jolly good bottoms. We long ago admitted that this silliness was a big part of what made Doctor Who Doctor Who. But it always took place in the context of a story.

The Christmas special doesn't have plot holes. The Christmas special is a collection of holes without any plot to go round them.

I could never give up on Doctor Who. It is coded into my DNA more than anything except, I suppose, Spider-Man and Winnie-the-Pooh. (I love Star Wars, of course, but I had lived on this earth for twice seven years before Star Wars came into my life.) It is, as the fellow said, part of my personal mythology.

But I have wasted far, far too much head space searching for content in a series which has none; trying to find the story in a series which is only about surfaces; clutching at straws when it reminds me a little of the programme I used to like so much.

And it is now being handed over to a Peter Davison enthusiast who was show runner on the dreadful Torchwood.

Time for a  break, I think.

There are Big Finish CDs I haven’t listened to and New Adventures I haven’t read and Tom Baker DVDs gathering dust on my shelf.

Maybe I shall binge watch all 30 of Jodie Whittaker’s stories over Christmas 2020 and let you know if things seem any better.

If you have read this far then maybe you could consider becoming a Patron, for as little as $1 a month?

Introduction

Cryptic Epigram

There’s a place
Where I can go
When I feel low
When I feel blue
And it’s my mind
And there’s no time
When I’m alone
     John Lennon

Definition of Fan

To be a fan is to be a fan of your good memories of a book or a film or a TV show. The real thing can’t ever live up to those memories. Fans are by definition the audience least capable of deciding if a reboot of a cherished movie or comic book has succeeded.

Definition of Fan

To be a fan is to be preoccupied with actual texts: it is the general reader who is content with his good memories of those texts. You may warmly remember watching Wacky Races when your were six; but I can tell you who won in which episode and point out that the Compact Pussycat was miscoloured for two frames in episode 12. Because they are closely engaged with actual texts, fans can often appear pedantic and hypercritical, but this is really a way of expressing love for the material. Cherished movies or comic books are invariably rebooted by and for fans, and fans are therefore thr only audience capable of judging if a reboot has succeeded.

Definition of Academic

Academic scholarship by definition excludes “good memories” of texts. Indeed, hardly anyone has “good memories” of Paradise Lost, Beowulf or the Pardoner’s Tale in the  Wacky Races sense: our first encounter with those texts is almost always in a classroom; and it is only the texts which we engage with (even though Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales were originally popular works intended for oral performance).

Some text may be studied by both academics and enjoyed by general readers; and the same individual might be an academic in the week but a general reader at the weekend.

One can well imagine a college student excitedly telling her tutor how she laughed out loud at Pride and Prejudice when she first read it, and explaining what sort of a person she imagines Elizabeth Bennet to be; and being told that at college, we don’t care about the Pride and Prejudice you have built in your head, but only about the one which Jane Austen put on the page. But it would the be the student who had been reading Pride and Prejudice as Jane Austen meant it to be read.

One would hope that a good tutor would say: “Excellent. So what we are here to do is to try and understand what Jane Austen did to make Elzabeth Bennet seem so vivid to you.”

To be discussed another time

Does fan fiction engage with fan memory, or does it seek to extend the text? Is the Captain Kirk who is pictured in a romantic relationship with Mr Spock a consensus Kirk based on what we remember of a 50 year old TV show; or is it the closest approximation we can reach to the role William Shatner was actually paying in 1968?

If someone produced a new chapter of the Hobbit that was so textually perfect that a scholar could mistake it for a genuine lost Tolkien manuscript, would that be “fan fiction” or merely “literary fraud”?

To be discussed another time

Role-playing games are the most purely fannish of any activity because they do not have text. All that can ever exist is each participants private memory of the story. Each player independently creates the adventure in his own head. Attempts to “write up this weeks session” invariably end in tears.

Experiment in Criticism

C.S Lewis argued that the “good reader” is the one who attends to the actual text; who re-reads his favorites books and would notice if a single word had been changed. A “bad reader” is one who skim-reads very general and cliched descriptions and makes them the basis for daydreams he has really made up out of his own head. Lewis calls the former process “receiving” and the latter process “using”. If a book can be received by a good reader, it is probably a good book; if a book is merely used by the bad reader, it is probably a bad book.

So for Lewis, the fan and the scholar who engage in textual pedantry may be good readers;  but the fan who fondly remembers things that weren’t even in the book is almost certainly a bad reader.

Lewis was producing a contrarian argument because he was mad at F.R Leavis

Scripture

Someone who was wrong on the internet once told me that I should think about Jesus — how the little children ran into his arms — before I dared to allege that He sometimes preached about judgment and damnation. When I pointed out that there was not a word in the New Testament about “little children running to Jesus” the Wrong Person said that the text had been changed by Organized Religion, and that if I really knew anything about Jesus it would be obvious to me that little children would have run to him and that he would never have talked about wailing and gnashing of teeth.

At some point, the Wrong Person he had presumably read the Bible; but his memory of it — what he thought ought to be there — had completely overwritten the text.

But religious texts positively demand this kind of emotional and imaginative responses. The person who has stood with the mothers of Jerusalem as they bring their children to Jesus; who has observed the disciple’s stern faces turning them away; and has seen the children’s joy when Jesus overrules them — the person who can tell you what time of year it was and can smell the flowers and the sycamore trees — is unquestionably Doing It Right.

Mark 10:14

If you never danced to All You Need Is Love in 1963 then you can’t possibly understand the point of the Beatles.

If your mother never read The House at Pooh Corner to you when you were a child you can’t ever find your way back to the Hundred Aker Wood.

Only someone who has dumped all the faux nostalgia about the 1960s and the quite disgustingly twee patina that has built up around A.A Milne can be trusted to tell us whether these stories still work as stories and whether these tunes still work as tunes.

They do things exactly the same there

We sometimes like old things just because they are old; if they were new we would think they were rubbish.

When we like an old thing, we are always liking some actual quality in the actual thing: it is impossible to like oldness per se.

Some years ago, Radio 4 transmitted the only surviving episode of Twenty Questions featuring Gilbert Harding. My reaction was “I would love to hear more of this.”

Clearly, what the BBC had transmitted was an antique and a relic: a piece of disposable wireless from a bygone age; and clearly its antiquity and its rarity and its bygone-age-ness were part of the reason I wanted to hear more of it. But I would have liked to have heard more of the thing itself: actual recordings of very posh, very over-educated people, doubtless in evening-wear, un-ironically playing a very silly parlor game. But one of the reasons that I liked the idea of very posh accents and the evening suits and the lack of irony is because they so clearly conjured up a bygone age.

Skip this bit if you have read it before

I quite unironically believe that The Adventures of Superman is the best and most enjoyable version of Superman, and I firmly believe that once the travesty of Man of Steel is forgotten someone will make a film about Superman as he really is is: a 1940s pulp hero.

Part of my enjoyment of the Adventures of Superman comes from the haiku like constraints of the form. It is told entirely in dialog. Each ten minute segment has to resolve a cliff-hanger, advance the plot, and set up a new cliff-hanger. The form emerges for very specific reasons at a very particular moment in the Olden Days: no-one is going to start making radio adventure serials for kids again tomorrow. Part of my enjoyment therefore comes from nostalgia. But I am responding to a nostalgia which is encoded in the texts themselves. The surviving episodes imply, and even depict, the world the were addressed. I was certainly never a child in 1940s America, but I can still respond to the depiction of wholesome family life and wartime spirit which old time radio evokes. I might still respond to it even if “America” and “the 1940s” were entirely fictional creations. (Indeed, I sometimes thing they are.)

Literally the first thing we are told about Star Wars is that we have to watch it through a nostalgic lens.

Some do it with a bitter look, some with a flattering word.

Someone who didn’t much care for detective fiction might still become a Sherlock Holmes fan. They might like the Victorian paraphernalia; but they might also enjoy the process of explaining away contradictions in Conan-Doyle’s text and teasing out new ones — the whole Sherlockian game.

An academic might very well embark on a study of some obscure literary work, not because he liked it, but because it presented a textual problem he wanted to solve. That same academic might very well tell a student “You can enjoy Jane Austen on your own time: what we do here is study it.”

But most people become textually obsessed with fan texts because they do have fond memories of their first encounters with them. We study them now because we loved them then. We fondly remember huddling round our steam powered black and white radios to watch the first season of Torchy the Battery Boy, and we think that closely studying every frame on our multimedia driverless 3D phones will recapture some of that joy.

And of course, it doesn’t. The close study of a text can’t recreate the joy of actually reading the text for the first time; indeed, it may kill whatever joy there ever was.

Fans are very like priests, obsessed with the form of liturgy to make up for the fact that they don’t believe in God any more.

Definition of fan

A fan is someone who is happy for his loved one to live on in his memory, even though he knows that, as the years pass, that memory becomes more and more idealized.

Definition of fan

A fan is someone who is morbidly unable to let go of his loved one, and engages in the endless mummification of the remains; the construction of vast monuments; the preservation of keepsakes and momentos. Which, as the fellow said, only serve to make the dead seem that much more dead.

Optimistic conclusion.

One thing leads to another. You took up Judo when you were 10 because you wanted to play at being a Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtle. You kept it up when you were 30 because you enjoyed the physical and intellectual challenge. If you had seen The Princess Bride you might just as well have taken up fencing.

I can’t, in fact, every be eight years old again. But the first 100 issues of Spider-Man do, in fact, exist and are easily obtainable.

Closing Epigram

Your holy hearsay is not evidence.
Give me the good news in the present tense.
What happened nineteen hundred years ago
May not have happened.
How am I to know?
So shut your Bibles up and show me how
The Christ you talk about
Is living now. 

Sydney Carter

Final Request for Money

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Amazing Spider-Man #23

The Goblin and the Gangsters

Villains: 

The Green Goblin, “Lucky” Lobo

Supporting Cast: 

Aunt May, Betty Brant, J. Jonah Jameson, Frederick Foswell + Mr Merriweather, the Business Executive Club and their butler, and a chorus of gangsters and policemen.

Observations

Liz and Flash do not appear.

Parker is wearing blue trousers (jeans?), a black open top shirt and white jacket throughout this episode rather than his normal blue suit and yellow waistcoat — possibly because the story takes place on a Saturday?

Failure to Communicate: On page 7, Peter Parker returns to Aunt May's house, retrieves his Spider-Man costume, changes clothes and goes into action. But on page 19, he retrieves those same clothes from an alley near the warehouse where the fight with the Green Goblin took place.

For the third consecutive issue, J. Jonah Jameson is represented as a comedy hypocrite who wants to be thought of as a public spirited citizen, but not particularly as a detractor of Spider-Man. Possibly Lee thought the character had become too one-note, or wanted to undo the damage done to him in the Scorpion story?

Spins a web, and size: Uses liquid webbing to block up gangster's guns; puts liquid webbing on gangster's back and throws him against the wall; puts pool of liquid webbing on floor to trap gangsters; puts web net on ceiling so gangsters are trapped as they come into room. No wonder he's run out of the stuff by the end of the episode!

The Green Goblins Bag of Tricks:  The Goblin’s role as “gadgeteer” is played down this issue: he only uses his pumpkin bombs and his finger blaster. (He throws 4 bombs in the fight with Spider-Man, and then claims to have run out.)

Peter Parker’s financial position: He forgets to take photos of the arrest of the gang — maybe because he still has $8,000 in the cookie jar?

p6 “Before his arrest, Foswell was the kingpin of the rackets” The words “king of crime” and “kingpin of crime” are used interchangeably. A kingpin originally meant part of a wheel pivot in a car; but it was in use to mean a Mafia boss by the 1950s. The big bald guy known as The Kingpin won’t appear until issue #50.

p8 “It’s like a scene from The Untouchables” The Untouchables, a TV series about Eliot Ness and Al Capone, finished its run about the same time Amazing Spider-Man started (May 1963). Stan just can't resist lamp-shading this kind of thing.

p9 “We’ll have to close down all our gambling joints.” Up to now organized crime has mostly been interested in stealing stuff.

p14 “That, you green garbed goon, remains to be seen!”  In America, "goon" primarily means “thug” or “henchmen” (derived from the Popeye cartoons). In Britain it retains its older sense of “idiot” or “fool” because of the popularity of the Goon Show on the radio. (Note also that Spider-Man has caught the alliteration bug off Stan Lee.)

A gangster decides that he is going to fill the still-vacant role of “king of crime” in New York. He tries to muscle in on Lucky Lobo, one of the current bosses (who looks disconcertingly and irrelevantly like Jack Kirby). One of Lobo’s henchmen gives him information about his boss’s criminal businesses, and the gangster leaks them to a newspaper. He intends that the police will arrest Lucky Lobo for tax evasion (as sometimes happens to famous gangsters) leaving the gang ripe for a takeover. But the plan works too well: the police don’t just arrest Lobo himself, but also his entire mob, leaving our friend with nothing to take over. The end.

The gangster who gets hoisted on his own petard is the Green Goblin, and the newspaper which breaks the story is the Daily Bugle. It isn’t quite the “cops and robbers” tale Stan Lee promises on page 1 — no-one does any robbing at all — but it’s quite a decent little gangster yarn; the kind of thing which could well have occupied a few pages of Crime Does Not Pay! or Justice Traps The Guilty! The only thing missing, is, er, anything very much for Spider-Man to do. He has a fight with Lobo's mob and ties them up with webbing before the police arrive; he has a big and inconclusive fight with the Green Goblin; but the story would have been very much the same if our hero hadn’t been in it. Was this an intentionally avant garde bit of plot construction — life carries on and Spider-Man isn’t always at the center of it — or yet another example of Lee and Ditko not being able to work out what the hell to do with the post-triptych Spider-Man?

Not only is Spider-Man incidental to the breaking up of Lobo’s mob; but his fight with the Green Goblin ends in an impasse. This is rather well choreographed: the Goblin finds that his bag of tricks is empty and flies away. Spider-Man tries to go after him, but finds that he has run out of web (not surprising, given the amount he has been wasting sticking gangsters to floors and ceilings). He tries to jump after the glider anyway; misses; and has to do a dramatic maneuver to land safely. This is the kind of thing that Stan Lee means when he points to the  comic's realism: there aren’t a lot of other comics which would have left a big fight between hero and villain unresolved. Stan Lee will later backfill this as the Goblin's unique selling point: post-Ditko the Goblin is very much rebranded as “that foe whose battles with Spider-Man were always inconclusive."

The actual fight takes place in some kind of boiler room: quite where, we aren’t told. Spider-Man and the Goblin just crash through a skylight into a room full of pipes and girders. It will be remembered that Spider-Man fought Doctor Octopus and Mysterio in an artist’s studio and and on a movie set, respectively. When Ditko can see that a fight scene is a little pointless, he often drops the antagonists into an unlikely location.

Back in issue #10, the incumbent King of Crime — the Big Man — was revealed to be a Daily Bugle journalist named Frederick Foswell. Having served his time in prison — a whole year! — J.J.J. decides to give him his old job back. In issue #10 Foswell was very specifically a columnist and leader writer, but now he is equally specifically an investigative reporter and a crime specialist.

Issue #10 involved a fairly clever piece of misdirection: everyone, including Peter Parker, thinks that The Big Man is Jameson, but actually he's Foswell. This issue goes out of its way to imply that Foswell is the Green Goblin. On page 6, the Goblin meets a gangster who gives him Lucky’s tax details. The Goblin says that he wants to make the list public, “and knows just the way to do it…”. On the very next page, Foswell rushes into Jameson’s private club with the papers. The hint that Foswell and the Goblin are one and the same could hardly be more explicit; and no other explanation of where Foswell got the papers is proffered.

On page 5, Parker sees Foswell talking to some hoods, but can’t follow them because he doesn't have a costume with him. This could be another example of Stan Lee's realism: he might just have dropped in the idea that Spider-Man has to wash and dry his costume from time to time because as an amusingly naturalistic touch. But in plot terms, the only repercussion of the wet costume is that Parker can’t tail Foswell when he would like to. Quite a lot of narrative effort is expended to make Foswell appear mysterious.

In issue #27, we will find out what Foswell is really up to. But that is not remotely hinted at or foreshadowed here. You will search in vain for a cameo by Patch the Informer in this issue.

Amazing Spider-Man #23: note figure in purple suit. He will not be named as 
Norman Osborn until issue #37

On page 6, for the first time, we seen J.J.J attending the “Midtown Business Executives Club”, hereafter mainly referred to simply as “my club.” Six or seven figures appear in the scene, only one of whom — bald, elderly called Mr Merriweather — gets any dialogue. But standing in the background, very distinctly, is this guy:

Amazing Spider-Man #23, detail.

Ditko makes a lot of use of background characters and extras, whether it is the generic group of boys who hang around with Flash Thompson; Liz Allan’s girlfriends; or the ever-present chorus of Bugle-reading men-and-women in the street. But this isn’t some random face in the crowd: he will pointedly appear again in issue #25 (when Peter highlights him as “someone important”), and again in a club scene in #27. Indeed, one might suspect that the only point of introducing Jonah’s club is so we can be introduced to him.

If you are a spider-fan, you can, instantly identify him as Norman Osborn, although he will not be  given that name until #37. In issue #39 it will be revealed [SPOILER] that Normal Osborn was the Goblin all the time!

So what is going on here? Did Lee and Ditko know all along that the Green Goblin would eventually turn out to be J.J.J’s friend from the club, while laying a false trail that he's Foswell? Or do they at this point intend Foswell to be the Goblin, only to backtrack in a few issues time?

Fan lore states that it was the identity of the Goblin that Ditko and Lee fell out over. I don’t believe this myself. But I think this issue shows just bad their relationship was getting. Ditko foreshadows the Goblin’s unmasking, and sets up a situation where Spider-Man's worst enemy is Jameson’s comrade, and Lee doesn’t bother to write a speech bubble or caption to ramp up the suspense. I am inclined to believe Ditko’s account. He knew Osborn was the Goblin from the off; and is seeding a plot far in advance. But he didn’t bother to tell Stan. Or if he did tell Stan, Stan didn’t care.

How should we see this issue? Maybe Lee and Ditko wrote a deliberately inconsequential issue in order to remind us that the Green Goblin is still around, reintroduce Foswell, and underline Jameson as a public figure. Or maybe Ditko wanted to do a substantial gangster story and found that it got hijacked, as so often in the past, by a super-villain fight scene. We’re going to get a much chunkier tale about the Goblin, Foswell and the Mob in three issues time. (It will also feature an unwearable spider-costume, interestingly enough.) Should we see that as Ditko’s attempted to redo this episode the way he wanted to? Or is this a deliberately slight tale an intentional curtain raiser for the big one?

Listen Bud

A Close Reading of the First Great Graphic Novel in American Literature

by

Andrew Rilstone

Andrew Rilstone is a writer and critic from Bristol, England. This essay forms part of his critical study of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original Spider-Man comic book. 

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Amazing Spider-Man was written and drawn by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and is copyright Marvel Comics. All quotes and illustrations are use for the purpose of criticism under the principle of fair dealing and fair use, and remain the property of the copywriter holder.

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Doctor Who Season 36

10.1 - The One With the Pool ***
10.2 - The One With the Silly Robots **
10.3 - The One With the Fish ****
10.4 - The Scooby Doo One *
10.5 - The Good One *****
10.6 - The One With the Pope *****
10.7 - The Bad One *
10.8 - The Even Worse One * 
10.9 - The One With the Ice Warriors  ***
10.10 - The One With the Romans ***
10.11 - The One With the Cybermen *****
10.12  - The One With the Cybermen, part 2 *****

Thank you for everyone who backed me on Patreon. 

If you enjoy my essays, please become a backer: it just involves pledging to pay me $1 every time I publish one. 

The offer still stands that if we reach $80 I will review the silly "Class" spin off.

10:12 The Doctor Falls

Oh Steven Moffat.

Oh, Steven Moffat.

You were so nearly there. So nearly there.

I watched The Doctor Falls with my Doctor Who watching head on, I promise. Not with my “I have to make smart remarks about this on the blog” head on. But within ten minutes, the little voice inside my head was saying: "This. This is what New Who was meant to have been like. Always."

It was clear from the beginning that I was watching a piece of television that fundamentally took itself seriously. A bit of television in which the actors were were playing characters and no-one had got around to saying “but you can ham it up if you like because it’s only some shit about robots on a spaceship.” If you were one of those hypothetical people who didn’t know what Doctor Who was, you wouldn’t have definitely known your weren’t watching a new Scandinavian police drama, or Daphne Du Maurier adaptation. Not until the robots came on. It was just TV drama, like any other TV drama, telling a story, as well as it could. 

I spotted no smirk; no “don’t worry kids they are only silly robots” moment. 

The episode was fundamentally interested in Bill’s predicament at having been turned into a cyborg; and the Doctor’s need to do the right thing. If you had Never Watched Doctor Who Before then the horror of the human who has been turned into a robot was absolutely clear from context. And you could tell that the old, wise man had really loved the young woman who had been cyborgized, and was trying to let her down gently. 

But no-one has really never watched Doctor Who before; everyone in the world knows that the Doctor and the Cybermen are old enemies, almost as old as television itself. That's one of the bits of raw material that the story has to work with, just like, I don't know "rich people are moving into the lower class areas of London" is one of the bits of raw material that Eastenders has to work with. Jokes and in-references were there for those of who have watched the old episodes, but they were funny in themselves and not (I suppose) confusing or distracting to people who didn’t get them. When the Doctor shouts "Voga", you can tell that he is (like a soldier) shouting the name of a previous battle against the Cybermen. But I happen to know that it's a reference to Revenge of the Cybermen. That's as it should be. 

The resolution of 50 years of continuity angst about whether Cybermen come from Mondas, or Telos or a parallel earth and why the design keeps changing is genuinely clever. Wherever there are humans, they eventually evolve into Cybermen; parallel evolution. 

Of course, there is a problem with treating the Master as a serious character in a serious drama. Fairly obviously, he isn't. We first met him in the days of Adam West and John Steed. The Radio Times explicitly presented him as a comic book villain. Depth is one thing he can't ever have. He believes in a cruel God who made him in his own image: evil for the sake of being evil. John Simm plays it with camp self knowledge but never descends into camp absurdity. (The ludicrousness of Last of the Time Lords is entirely avoided.) I suppose, in a sense, he and Missy are the “comic relief”, the boo-hiss pantomime villain to be set against the existential horror of the Cybermen. But you can really feel the evil. The Evil Capitalist in the One With the Fish says that the Doctor’s speeches would inspire anyone with a shred of human decency. Here, the Doctor makes a genuinely inspirational speech and the Master casually says that he wasn’t listening. It’s the kind of moment where you actually want to punch him. 

I am not sure whether the handling of Bill’s transformation was very brave or very cowardly: I would like to have had more scenes embracing the absurdity of Bill’s lines coming from the Cybermouth. I suppose this was the whole reason that the Hartnell-era Cybermen were brought back: because we can believe that there is some of Bill left under the gauze mask better than we could believe there was some of Bill left under the silver CGI cyber-helmet. The conceit that we see BIll as herself, while everyone else sees her as a Cyberman is not entirely original. I kpet thinking of that episode of Frasier where the attractive young gym teacher he is dating turns into the abusive coach from his childhood. But it works. And it assumes that the audience is intelligent enough to discern what is going on.

Most of us probably thought that Missy had not reformed, but was pretending to be good to fool the Doctor. A few of us may have thought that she had genuinely stopped being evil, and that she was going to be the Doctor's friend or companion for a few seasons — at least until some future producer comes up with “What if Missy turned evil?” as an idea. The actual resolution — Missy kills her previous incarnation, to ensure that she comes into being, but he kills her, because she really has turned good — was not one I had predicted. Comic books have mostly stopped pretending that a this months story is the definitive, final, one-lives-one-dies confrontation between Batman and the Joker or Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus. Readers know that however thoroughly the villain is killed, a few months down the line, the status quo will have to be restored. If Harold Saxon didn’t stay dead after the funeral pyre ending of Last of the Time Lords, she is not going to stay dead after being zapped by her past self. But for the minute I’ll pretend that I believe she's dead and enjoy the elegant finality of the scene. 

The Doctor’s last stand, farewell to Nardole, dozens of exploding Cybermen. I liked absolutely everything about the first fifty three minutes and seven seconds of the episode. 

And then, as exclusively predicted in this channel, someone activates the My Little Pony magic lilac love ray and makes Bill becoming a Cyberman didn’t happen. 

If at the very last moment the Water Nymph had popped up and held Bill’s cyberhand, just for a second, dropping a teeny weeny little hint that Billy Potts body is a rusting in the grave but maybe her soul is going to go dripping on  I wouldn’t have minded. Not that much. But Moffat doesn't know when to stop. He can't leave things alone. Never have one good bye seen if six will do. We had to go through definitely revivified ethereal Bill and a definitely physically present Heather physically moving the Doc back to the TARDIS and floating off round the universe with silly music playing much too loudly in the background and although it only lasted for a few minutes I. Just. Wanted. It. To. Stop. 

The puddle monster absorbed Heather’s physical body; Bill’s physical shape has somehow been extracted from the dead Cyberman and turned into magic lilac pony water — despite that fact that most of her remains have been long-since destroyed. What is the magic puddle meant to have done? (Moffat is a little vague about minds and bodies and hardware and software: we found out in Death and Heaven that it if you upload someone's mind to a computer it becomes possible to retrieve their physical form.) 

I hope that this is the last we see of Bill and that we won’t have to  see her corpse endlessly violated in the way that  Wonderful Clara's was — killed and unkilled on a weekly basis. Clara was never really a character, so it didn’t matter so much, but Bill was enough of a person that I’d like her to be allowed to rest in peace and not be reincarnated as an onion to make us cry over and over again. 

I didn’t properly get the coda about the Doctor. I understood that he was prepared to die to save the Mondasian colonists because it was the right thing to do, but I don’t know where the not wanting to regenerate idea suddenly came from. David Bradley was good enough at doing Hartnell’s lines in the docudrama but I could honestly have missed that fact that the person who shambles on at the end was meant to be the First Doctor. 

Maybe there’s a fabulous idea for a two-Doctor Christmas special with a light touch and witty repartee between the First and Last Doctors, just like there was between the Two Masters. Or maybe Moffat is going to bow out with a terribly ill-judged attempt to overwrite Doctor Who mythology from the ground up. 

“How did you find me?”

“I left you my tears, remember.”

Oh, Steven, Steven, Steven. What were you thinking of?

This series of reviews about Doctor Who happened because my Patreon supporters encouraged me. If you thought it was worthwhile, why not pledge to put $1 in the tip jar each time I write something? 

Alternative, you could buy this book, which contains everything I wrote about the Eccleston, Tennant and Smith eras, 

Controversial Appendix. (Please don't mail bomb me.)

A person on the internet says that it is typical of Stephen Moffat’s gender-politics that, quote, “the boy master has to come back to show the girl master how to master properly.”

Corollary #1: If the next Doctor is a feminine Doctor, we all not be able to do any more multi-Doctor stories, because it will imply that the Thirteenth Doctrix needs a man to help her out. 

Corollary #2: If the next Doctor is a feminine Doctor, all subsequent Doctrices will have to be feminine, because a female-to-male regeneration will be a tacit admission that boys are better than girls.

Corollary #3: If the next Doctor is a feminine Doctor, all discussion about Doctor Who will have to be suspended: anyone who thinks that the Doctrix is a bit Peter Davison and not at all Matt Smith will be assumed to be saying that boys are better than girls and episodes will only be criticize-able in terms of what they reveal about the incoming producers gender politics.

The Doctor can change his physical form: this is a natural part of his life cycle. Each form is very different, but all the forms have irreducible characteristics in common. This wasn’t always the case; but it has been an established part of Doctor Who, and of the person-in-the-street’s perception of Doctor Who since at least 1981. In the new version of the show, the present form perceives regenerating as actual death, but all his memories and experiences are preserved in the new form. 

It doesn’t follow that the Doctor can turn into absolutely everything. There are lots of things he couldn’t be. He couldn’t be cruel or cowardly. He couldn’t be stupid. He couldn’t be a man of action who punches first and asks questions later. He couldn’t really be young. Matt Smith was young, but Matt Smith’s Doctor was very, very old. He can be Northern or Scottish and I assume Welsh, but he can’t cease to be British. This is not a matter of canon. There is no logical reason why a Time Lord should adopt a particular planet and then only be able to regenerate into a form which comes from a particular part of that planet. We’re talking about how the TV series works. 

I think that the Doctor is irreducibly a boffin. I think that being a boffin is slightly different from being a geek or a nerd or a techie. It carries an implication of being old; being unfashionable; and being the guy who can cobble together a computer which very nearly works, as opposed to the guy who makes the great scientific breakthrough. (The TARDIS is very much a boffin’s spaceship. It is fantastically advanced, but it seems a bit jerry-rigged and isn’t quite reliable.) 

Doctor Who can definitely evolve: Tom Baker said in 1977 that the Doctor simply can’t become interested in romance because he simply doesn’t have those kinds of emotions. The first time he flirted, with that heart surgeon in the American one, and with that French lady in the second season, we all freaked out. But then we stopped freaking out and it became the new normal. We also freaked out about the Doctor being half Time-Lord on his father’s side, but we ignored that and it went away.

If the Doctor ceased to be a boffin, would that break the show? Or would it interesting shake things up and become the new normal? Would it really cosmically speaking matter is the guy in the TARDIS was cool and stylish and brave but needed someone else to explain the science to him — provided the brave unscientific time traveler fetched up on interesting locations and had exciting adventures there? 

The question is: is “boffin” a male stereotype? And if boffin is a male stereotype, does it follow that the Doctor has to be male. 

It took me a while to come around to to Missy because I thought her characterization was way over the top. I think that what works about her is her ironical, tricksterish, playful evil — owing something to John Simm, but very little to Roger Delgado. This may surprise you, but I thought that the opening scene where she plays with the term “Doctor Who” worked really well. Not (yawn!) because it means there is some canonical grounds for saying that the main character really is called Doctor Who and that Frankenstein really was the name of the monster, but because it showed Missy transgressing the boundaries of the script, understanding the rules of the show and deliberately breaking them, talking about “assistants” and “companions” and understanding that Bill and Nardole are “exposition and comic relief”. She knows she’s in a TV show. And that’s a very interesting way of playing the Doctor’s ultimate foe. 

The point of Missy is not “what would the Master be like if she was a woman”. The point of Missy is that she’s a very interesting piece of utterly over-the-top characterization. I don’t know if her particular style of camp had to be played by a female, but it is now very hard to imagine it being played by anyone apart from Michelle Gomez.

So, my tentative conclusion is that a female Doctor would be a really, really bad idea, but might still be really, really good for the programme, and even if it was really, really bad for the programme it might still be the right thing to do.

It is not true to say that the Time Lords no longer care about gender and gender stereotypes. Tom Baker would have looked very odd indeed in one of Romana’s frocks.

10.11 World Enough and Time

During the wilderness years, the faithful would sometimes sit round their great log fires and wonder what a 21st century version of Doctor Who might look like. 

“Maybe not 25 minute episodes” we said “Maybe short seasons of 100 minute movies, like Inspector Morse.” 

I think this episode proves that we were right. Pacing has been the ruin of many a good story; this story is superior to pretty much everything else in the season because it gets the pacing right. I don’t think Eastern European Guy (”very fast bottom”) would have worked if we had been trying to gallop to the climax in 45 minutes. I don’t think the idea of the different sections of the ship running at different speeds would have nearly so interesting if we hadn’t had to wait around to find out what was going on. And obviously the cliffhanger ending had to be a cliffhanger ending; it would have been a bit ho-hum as a premise. If I had one thing to say to incoming producer Chris Chibnall, it would be “More two part stories.” 

Even that’s a bit retro, of course. We are now in the era of 10 hours boxed sets and binge watching. 

OK, we’ve seen most of it before. Moffat really does only have a very limited number of ideas, which he shakes up and assembles in different orders. The Doctor and his companion caught in different time streams - check; a spaceship comprising different time-zones - check; characters watching other characters on TV screens - check; giant spaceship with retro city in the hold - check; nasty surgeons turning people into [SPOILERS} Cybermen - check; companion turned into Cyberman - check; Cyberman weeping beneath the mask - check. I think we are beyond saying “We have seen some of this before.” It’s more a case of saying “This is what Doctor Who is now comprised of”. Some TV shows go on for decades with only one or two ideas, in fairness. 

I don’t know if a Black Hole would really behave like it does in the episode. I thought that the point of them was that nothing, not even really really really big spaceships — and this was Doctor Who outdoing Red Dwarf outdoing Star Wars outdoing 2001 big — could escape their gravity well? But it doesn’t matter — a Black Hole is allowed to do whatever the writer says it does, provided it carries on doing it consistently. (”For the present purposes, your honour, a Black Hole is that astronomical phenomenon that can trap, but not consume, a really, really, really big spaceship and which causes time to pass at a faster speed on the lower levels than on the bridge.) I will only start to complain if it turns out that the Black Hole’s gravity can be reversed by the power of love, or is caused my midichlorians, or something. 

I do not think that the Cybermen, in this context, were either fanwankery or pornographic. A person who has seen clunky new Who CGI Cyberman will be able to look at this one and immediately say “Ah — an old fashioned, primitive, retro Cyberman.” That the old fashioned, primitive, retro Cyberman happens to be what the Cybermen looked like in 1966 is a little nod of the hat to the fans, and why not. I don’t know how you reconcile the Cybermen who evolved on Mondas and flew the planet around the universe sucking other planets energy with the Cybermen who were created by the Master on a colony ship on its way to Mondas. I don’t particularly care. I expect there will be a sort of an answer next week. If it is a sufficiently good answer then no-one will ever have watch Attack of the Cybermen again. 

It is a pity that the story was spoiled by, well, spoilers. The episode released the information about what was going on on the colony ship and Razor’s true identity rather subtly: we didn’t definitely know that the patients were being turned into Cybermen until the surgeon shows Bill the headpiece, about 35 minutes into the story. This should have been a really good surprise. Unfortunately, the BBC had been circulating publicity pictures of Peter Capaldi facing off against Hartnell era Cybermen since last year. And John Simm had appeared in two different trailers. The appearance of Missy’s previous incarnation is obviously intended to fall like a bolt from the blue and obviously doesn’t. 

The question about how much to reveal in the trailer or the blurb or the Radio Times listing is not unique to Doctor Who. Some people think that it would not have mattered if a certain 90s suspense movie had gone out under the title of “The One In Which Bruce Willis Turns Out To Have Been Dead All Along”; other people objected to “The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford” because it gave away the ending. Somewhere in between is a sensible middle ground. I am happy not to trust the mysterious count in a movie called “Guest of the Vampire”; but I’d just as soon not know exactly who committed the “Murder at the Vicarage” until the detective works it out. 

It’s a particular problem for Doctor Who, because Doctor Who is so insistently non linear. We see Missy pretending to be the Doctor, and then we see the Doctor explaining to Bill and Nardole his plan to allow Missy to pretend to be him for a while. We see Bill getting killed, and then we see Bill making the Doctor promise not to get her killed. And the very first thing we see in the episode is the Doctor regenerating which we assume must be flashing forward to the end of the story. So Moffat wants us to watch World Enough and Time in the knowledge that it ends with a Regeneration just as much as Thomas Hardy wants use to read “The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge” with a pretty good idea about who won’t make it to the end of the final chapter. But then we get a post-cred trailer that (we assume) zooms forward to the end of the story, and again shows us the Doctor (apparently) regenerating. But the pre-cred is “part of the story” and the post-cred isn’t. And we’ve already once this season been “shown the Doctor regenerating”, only to have both the characters and the cast saying “Ha ha! We fooled you!” 

This can’t possibly be a proper review, because we only have the first half of the story to talk about. I liked nearly everything about it: the ship, the atmosphere, the pseudo-science, the relationship between Bill and Razor and Missy and everyone, the scenes of the dying city. The whole thing. And if these really are the Cybermen and that really is the Master and Bill really has been Cyberized and the Doctor really is going to regenerate — or if none of these things are true and the explanation is more exciting and brilliant and surprising than the set up — then I’ll call this the best story ever. The best Peter Capaldi story ever, at any rate. 

But if the Doctor turns Bill back into a human with magic love rays from his sonic screwdriver, and if these aren’t the real Cybermen at all but just trick Harold Saxon is playing, or if, perchance, none of this has happened and we’re all still in a simulation being run by the meddling Monks — then I reserve the right to call “foul” and give up watching Doctor Who. 

Until Christmas, at any rate.

*

Prediction: 

Moffat is going to pull another War Doctor stunt. The Doctor is indeed regenerating, but the person he is regenerating into isn’t the person who’ll be in the role in 2018, because that is for the incoming producer to decide. We’ll get a very short lived interim Doctor and the Christmas one will have both her and Capaldi in it. 

But there really will be a magical power of friendship reset button which will make Bill didn’t become a Cyberman at all. Because Moffat loves tears, but he really doesn’t like killing off characters, specially not pretty lady ones. 

10.10 Eaters of Light

Eaters of Light was an episode of Doctor Who. It passed the time amiably. There was nothing particularly wrong with it.

10.9 The Empress of Mars

Some Victorians find a crashed flying saucer. In it is a little green man; who says that if they help him, he will fly them back to Mars and let them mine for infinite wealth. He will even build them a mining machine. But he is tricking them; he really wants to defrost the Little Green Queen who is in suspended animation. This leads to a shooting war between the Martians and the Victorians. When it looks like the two groups are going to wipe each other out, one of the soldiers, who was once sentenced to death for desertion, surrenders to the Queen and invites her to kill him. This proves that huh mans are honourable (or something) and she calls the war off and sets about rebuilding her civilization. Almost immediately she gets a message from a far-away star system, saying that a fleet of interstellar space ships are coming to help them.

I wish I had come in in the middle of Empress of Mars. In fact, I wish in fact that I was a Doctor Who fan from the 1980s, coming out of suspended animation at about the half way point. Ice Warriors and Red Coats in a cave, mutually besieging each other’s base; guns going off and indistinguishable men with pith hats and mustaches crying “I am assuming command” at each other, while an Ice Queen rants things like “Sleep no more!” and “Rise my ice warriors.” No idea at all what's going on, but this is what I always hoped Doctor Who would -- just like it was before but ever so much more so. I am sure if I watch the whole episode and catch up with the last 30 years of Ice Warrior continuity it will all make perfect sense. 

But I would be working on a false assumption. I would be assuming that Doctor Who was like other TV: that scenes make sense in context; that scenes, indeed, have a context to make sense in. 

*

Battlestar Galactica created a new thing out of the wreckage of its source material. Star Wars continues to lovingly illuminate the margins of its holy texts. Cinema Star Trek is currently desecrating the corpse of its TV predecessor, but at least it’s doing so consciously and deliberately, out of some perverse parricidal hatred. The Clangers — and I will fight to the death anyone who says that the Clangers isn’t as venerable and worthy of respect as any of the above-named Big Geek Franchises — simply resumed after a pause of 43 years as if nothing had happened. I suppose you could say that it was redundant: you can’t add to perfection. On the other hand, the characters can now blink. 

What, after ten years, is Doctor Who's relationship to the series which from 1963 to 1989? What is Doctor Who for? A dozen years in, I still have no answer. I suppose "Doctor Who is a series set in a magical universe where, each week, someone has to volunteer to commit suicide in order to generate the Peace Rays necessary to defeat the baddies" might do for a definition. But it still seems paralyzed by the anxiety of influence.

I have committed myself to writing something about every week’s episode of Doctor Who, and that means that I have to think of something interesting to say each week. No one would be very pleased if I said “It was another episode of Doctor Who. It passed the time amiably. There was nothing particularly wrong with it.” 

Empress of Mars is a very good piece of Saturday night television: light, fun, stupid, entertaining. If Doctor Who were like this every week, I would be pretty happy with it; although, if Doctor Who were like this, I would probably not bother to write about it, particularly. I was perfectly happy with, say, Merlin, but I didn’t dedicate a whole lot of thinking time to it. Perhaps I am just overthinking Doctor Who. But that raises the question: what is the correct amount of thought to apply to it. Or, put another: what is the right amount of stupor in which to watch it? 

*

Metro Magazine ran a headline “Doctor Who fans delighted by classic cameo in Empress of Mars.” Maybe some of them were. But I would have gone with: "Doctor Who fans bewildered by pointless cameo in Empress of Mars.” 

There are two Patrick Troughton stories, one set in the Very Far Future, in which human scientists accidentally defrost some Ice Warriors during an Ice Age; and another one set in the Much Nearer Future where some Ice Warriors try to turn the Earth’s atmosphere into Martian atmosphere using bubble bath. There is also a Jon Pertwee story in which a group of alien ambassadors have a conference to see if a retro-medieval planet can join the Galactic Free Trade Zone. The latter story pulls off a quite nice little trick: the Doctor assumes that the Ice Warriors are militaristic fascists who have come to the conference in order to disrupt it; in fact, they have long since renounced war and want the conference to succeed. Why they do not call themselves Ice Pacifists is not explored. One of the other alien ambassadors has claws and a single gigantic eye. (It came a close second in the Doctor Who Alien That Looks Most Like A Man's Willy awards.) It is this Alpha Centuri who appears on the communication screen at the end of Empress of Mars to say “welcome to the universe” to the Ice Warriors. The voice was provided by one Ysanne Churchman who provided the voice in the original story nearly 50 years ago. She was also the voice of Grace Archer who was famously burned at the stake as a punishment for inventing commercial television. (Check this - Ed.)  This makes her, at 92, the oldest person ever to appear in Doctor Who. Like you, I said "But what about the lady who had a non-speaking part as the frozen queen in the Pirate Planet but wouldn't take her false teeth out", but she was only 76.

But why? Surely the point of the story is that the nice cowardly guy with the pith helmet has volunteered to stay behind and help the Green Martians rebuild their civilization. If a fleet of highly advanced aliens are going to come along and do it all for them, doesn't that rather takes the point away from his sacrifice? That is to say, if the message had come from Just Some Alien it would have been at best pointless and at worst detrimental to the story. But if the message comes from yer actual Alpha Centuri from Curse of Peladon, then I feel entitled to ask what follows: that the Ice Warriors in Curse of Peladon were a newly defrosted race who had more or less always been pacifists, and whose civilization had been rebuilt by the Galactic Federation? That there was a civilization on Mars, in contact with interstellar races, all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? That the Alpha Centuri of the Pertwee era is at least hundreds of years hold and has a special relationship with the Ice Warriors since their inception?

This is not a continuity gripe. I am quite happy with the invention of new continuity or the contradiction of old continuity. By all means, please, shake up the etch-a-sketch and give us a completely new Ice Warrior continuity. I am not one of those who takes personal offense when it turns out that some beloved old Star Wars comics are no longer “canon”. 

But I do want characters and scenes and alien races to have contexts. I don't think "we thought it would be cool to have three lines spoken by someone from the 1970s" is a good reason for a thing to happen in a story.

Of course, if you doing a reboot of a beloved old franchise, you are going to drop in little tips of the hat to revered previous iterations. Getting Kirk Alyn to do a cameo in the very first Superman movie, say, or wheeling on Leonard Nimoy in the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Star Trek remake. We sometimes call them Easter Eggs, little shiny things you can look for if you want to. 

The whole of this episode feels like one long Easter Egg. 

But perhaps it only feels like that to me. Perhaps this story is intended for people who have never heard of the Ice Warriors or Peladon or Alpha Centuri, or, for that matter Queen Victoria. Perhaps Doctor Who is now entirely opaque to Doctor Who fans, because all we see are allusions and references; it's position within the now ludicrously entangled web of Doctor Who. Perhaps we are supposed to be looking at the story (the story of how the man who somehow survived being hanged volunteered to commit suicide and magically melted the evil Ice Queen's heart) and hardly even noticing the Ice Warriors. You see Green Martians, I see Ice Warriors. You see a random alien whose presence makes no sense, I see Alpha Centuri from a story which went out when I was seven years old. Mark Gatiss said to himself  “Let’s do a reverse alien invasion story — where humans invade Mars. Let’s make the invaders comedy Victorians who say ‘by gum’ and ‘top hole’. And let’s have the Doctor broker some kind of peace.” And then, very much as an after thought said “I wonder if there have ever been warlike Green Martians in Doctor Who before? There have? Well, we might as well re-use those. No point in inventing new monsters for the sake of it."

Because the alternative is much more distressing. The alternative is that everyone is a Doctor Who fan now; and everyone is just excited because there are Ice Warriors and that the lady who voice Alpha Centuri is still alive. Being a Doctor Who fan is not about feeling attached to a character, or a setting, or a style of story, but to a collection of contextless, free floating symbols. 

This is a story folded in on itself; a mobius story; a story made up of allusions to other stories (which were themselves made up of allusions to other stories.) It Tomb of the Cybermen and the Hungry Earth and the Silurians and the Curse of the Mummy and pages and page of Mark Gatiss's doubtless meticulous research into Victorian cockney rhyming slang ("what a load of gammon"). It feels to much like an exercise in lining up all your Green Martian soldiers on one side of the table, and your Victorian toy soldiers on the other side of the table and playing at war, until one of the toy soldiers zaps the queen of Martians with Peace Rays and everyone makes friends. 

I enjoyed it very much indeed.