12: 6 Praxeus

THE ARC IN SPACE

Babylon 5 was not, in fact, the first TV series to have a pre-planned five season narrative structure. Some American cop shop I never watched had done it years before. But certainly, the TV shows I grew up with — Star Trek and Thunderbirds and the Incredible Hulk had very little episode-to-episode continuity. You could shuffle the stories and show them in any order and it made little difference. Even in the eighties, Star Trek: Next Generation had little or no over-all structure. But events in one episode were allowed to affect events in subsequent episodes. Tasha Yar died, frequently. Worf lost his honour and remembered where he had left it. The Klingons either were or weren’t at war with each other.

 J. Michael Straczynski cites Cerebus the Aadvark as a major influence on Babylon 5. Not that Dave Sim was the first comic book writer to employ tight, well constructed storylines that developed over dozens of issues, of course. Chris Claremont had spent five years on what became known as the Dark Phoenix saga. But Sim was the first writer with the chutzpah to claim that he was writing one big story that would unfold over 300 issues — and to more or less pull it off.

But Babylon 5 definitely popularised the term “story arc” . I suppose the word “arc” suggests a plot with an overall shape. But for fans “arc” rapidly came to mean “the main storyline; the continuity”. An “arc story” was one which advanced the narrative about the different alien races and the evil Psi Corps. A “non arc story” was one in which some characters encountered a new problem and tried to solve it. On this definition, Classic Era Star Trek had been made up entirely of non-arc stories.

The rise of DVD, Netflix and boxed sets has made the concept of story arcs rather dated. Picard, and Good Omens, and Star Trek: Discovery and Jessica Jones and Game of Thrones don’t have arc episodes and non-arc episodes They are twelve hour movies broke down into hour long chunks.

And meanwhile, on BBC 1, on plods Doctor Who, trying to wrap up world threatening crises in 45 minutes. Yes, there is a Chibnall masterplan afoot, involving the Master, a logically impossible Doctor, and the destruction of the planet Gallifrey. But we have forgotten about that as quickly as we forgot about Adric. This week, we are all off another adventure. Fugitive of the Judoon had a spurious urgency because we knew it was an arc story. It is very hard to summons up much enthusiasm for Praxeus because we know it isn’t.

*

Jake is store detective. He used to be a policeman. His boyfriend Adam is an astronaut. But their relationship is on the rocks. Jake doesn’t think he is good enough for Adam; so he thinks that Adam must be being dishonest when he says that he loves him. So Jake deliberately lets down Adam and avoids intimacy in order to punish him.

“Oh mate” says Graham, who has regenerated into a gifted, intuitive relationship counsellor since last week. “I don’t think it is him you are punishing.”

This kind of thing might possibly work in one of those long, American, mid-century plays in which families make Freudian revelations after five gin soaked acts. A psychoanalyst might just possibly make a patient understand that he is subconsciously punishing his partner in order to punish himself. It isn’t something which someone would be consciously aware of and explain to a total stranger. And dramatically, it isn’t something you can introduce and resolve in a five minute scene.

I must admit that when Adam and Jake identified themselves as a married couple, my first thought was “Is there any particular reason for them to be gay?” My second thought was  “Is there any particular reason why they shouldn’t be?”My third thought was “having a couple of gay characters in a story which is not remotely about gayness will annoy the sorts of people who call this sort of thing ‘woke’”. My last thought was “Annoying those kinds of people is a very good reason for doing it.”

So, I finally know what “woke” means. Putting the kind of thing which annoys the kind of people who call the kind of thing which annoys them “woke” in order to annoy those kinds of people. The Left Hand Of Darkness, would certainly annoy the kinds of people who call things woke, but it isn’t woke, because it was never written with a view to annoying them. Praxeus was, so it is.

I don’t go as far as C.S Lewis, or indeed Isaac Asimov, in saying that science fiction is not permitted to contain any human interest subplot whatsoever. I see the argument: there is no point in setting a spy story on Alpha Centurai if it could equally have been set in Moscow: if a story of forbidden love between a Martian and a human could just have well been about forbidden love between a Muslim and Jew, then it should have been. But there are far too many exceptions for this to work as rule. Red Dwarf is arguably a character based sit com set in space which is not really about the fact that it is set in space. Lewis and Asimov were understandably pushing back against the tendency of hack writers to turn in the same kind of cowboy story they had always written but substitute six shooters for ray guns and martians for Indians.

But I do think that it is a very good rule that there should be nothing in a story which doesn’t have something to do with the story; and that the shorter the story, the more the extraneous material needs to be cut out. It is relevant to the story that Adam and Jake are a couple in order that ordinary, unheroic Jake is motivated to risk is life to save famous, heroic Adam when he is a infected with a space plague. The fact that they are an estranged couple pushes the emotional jeopardy up a jot. Cod-Freudian bullshit about self-punishment — not so much.

*

One of the characters in the old sketch comedy series The Fast Show was a northern teenager full of boundless energy who would perform a weekly monologue beginning “Ain’t gravity brilliant!” or “Ain’t holidays brilliant!” I was forcibly reminded of this character during the Doctor’s opening and closing monologues this week. Ain’t humans brilliant? There are so many of them! And yet some of them have something to do with each other! Some of the them are different and some of them are the same!

Some time ago there was a TV series called Heroes that quite caught the public imagination at the time, but which no one could be bothered to watch the second series of. It had an unusually large cast of characters, all following separate story lines, but over the course of 13 episodes, the different story lines converged, in quite a complicated way. Someone said it was the first TV series of the Facebook generation: it was ostensibly about superheroes but it was really about social networks.

The idea of a Doctor Who story about Heroes style human interconnectedness is not at all bad, but this wasn’t it. The only “surprising” connection is that the store detective in England turns out to be connected with the astronaut flying back from the International Space Station, and once you know they are in a relationship, that’s actually not all that surprising. What you actually have is several completely unconnected groups of people—two scientists, two bloggers and the crew of a submarine—who are connected only in so far as if they have all been infected by the new alien-virus-of-the-week.

Using the TARDIS to tell a story which is taking place simultaneously in London, Peru, Hong Kong, Madagascar and the Bottom of the Sea is quite a good idea. It makes use of Doctor Who’s USP to tell a story that you couldn’t have told in any other format. It’s the same kind of thing as having Spyfall unfold in the present day, in Victorian times and in the Second World War. And it has the same problem. Things would have panned out very similarly if the three people possessed by alien plastic virus monsters had been in Covent Garden, Leicester Square and Mornington Crescent. The exotic locations were just there as scenery. Very pretty scenery, I must admit.

*

Go back to the half way point, just before they all go the alien base at the bottom of the sea. Just before they find out who Suki really is.

Now suppose that nice Suki had turned out to be yet another new incarnation of the Master. Does anything in the first 35 minutes of the episode prevent that from being the resolution.

Okay: now suppose that nice Suki turns out to be yet another logically impossible new incarnation of the Doctor. Again, does anything that has been foreshadowed up to this point prevent that from being the twist?

We have not started from the (not uninteresting under the present circumstances) idea that Evil Aliens have been using the earth as a petri dish to find a cure for the alien virus plastic that is destroying their civilisation. We have started with some random scenes — dead submariner exploding off the coast of Madagascar, dead blogger exploding in Peru, poorly astronaut suffering from the same greyscale that the explodey people were suffering from in Hong Kong — and then, very late in the story, trying to find something which desperately ties then together.

The big twist and the big revelation is arbitrary. It come from nowhere. Aha! You never realised but in fact I am PROFESSOR MORIARTY

Note that Suki has travelled across three galaxies to come to earth. Seven hundred and fifty billion star systems, and we are the only planet with a pollution problem.

*

There was a celebrated political cartoon in the Guardian which cast Michael Grove as the Jeff Goldblum character in independence day: begging for the chance to pilot a flying saucer against the aliens even though he had no prior experience in flying. (The implication was that Gove was doing political jobs he had no expertise in).

For the climax of this story to work, we have to believe that Ryan, who has never heard of Mary Queen of Scots or pathogens, remembers enough school biology to perform an autopsy on a dead pigeon. That the controls of an alien spaceship are sufficiently straightforward (“up, down, left, right”) that Jake, the ex-policemen, can save the world by flying the thing into orbit. That Graham is able to fit a cannula and a medical drip because he was once a chemotherapy patient.

I can believe in plastic eating alien parasites that make humans explode: but some of this stuff is too far fetched even for me.

*

When Jake first encounters Yaz and Graham in Hong Kong he asks who they are. “We are the people with the big set of skeleton keys” replies Yaz.

Later, Yaz and Gabriella (the travel blogger) decide to teleport to what they expect to be an alien planet even though the Doctor has told them not to. “Where is the worst place we could end up?” asks Gabriella. “Long list. You don’t want to know” replies Yaz. And on the other side of the teleport. “It’s not an active volcano. Result!”

So. Is the idea that Yaz has been with the Doctor for so long that she is starting to sound like the Doctor. Is this a very broad hint that she is yet another previously unmentioned and logically impossible incarnation of the Doctor? Or is it just that Chibnall can only write one kind of dialogue?

*

Yes, as a matter of fact, I am finding it hard to actually write a review of this episode. But not nearly as hard as I found watching it. I fell asleep on the first two attempts and eventually got to the end of it by pressing “pause” every ten minutes and going off to tidy the kitchen.

The Android Invasion

Happy Day

A van pulls up near a war memorial by a pub. It contains a dozen English villagers out of central casting: ladies with neat headscarves, red faced sons of toil, a vicar in a hat. They are completely silent and motionless; they walk like zombies into the village pub, take their positions and stand still and silent. A clock chimes, and they all start talking as if nothing has happened.

People of a certain age were collectively traumatized by the super-intelligent brain-washed inhabitants of Avebury in Children of the Stones. Devasham, the ostensible setting of Android Invasion, is obviously in the vicinity of Avebury: an English village which is not an English village.

The first episode of the story -- like the first episode of Terror of the Zygons -- is all about setting up a mystery. Sarah and the Doctor explore: wherever they turn, something strange is happening. The very first shot is of a UNIT soldier, staggering robotically towards the camera. He falls off a cliff, breaks his neck, and is subsequently seen in the pub as if nothing had happened. Figures in white protection suits have guns concealed in their forefingers. ("Is that finger loaded?" Tom Baker can't resist the temptation to say.) There is a UNIT run "space defense station" nearby, but the Brigadier's office is occupied by a "senior defense astronaut" called Crayford. We know he is a wrong'un because he has an eye-patch. He says things like "I'm asking the questions" and "I can very easily get the truth from you." Sarah has visited the village once before. She came here as a journalist before she knew the Doctor -- investigating Crayford's death... 

Twist and Shout

If one wanted to be cruel, one would say that the solution to the mystery is given away in the title of the story. Robotic soldiers; white suited creatures with guns in their fingers; mesmerized villagers; soldiers who die and come back to life. What could possibly explain this kind of thing? Could they conceivably be androids? Could they possibly be planning some kind of invasion?

But Terry Nation is cleverer than that. When we see the staggering soldier in the opening shot, of course we know he is an android. When the villagers act like zombies, we know they are androids too. But Nation still manages to spring a surprise on us in the final frame. Crayford locks the Doctor up in a cell. Sarah has come to rescue him. And we catch the briefest possible glimpse of a monstrous alien face looking in through the cell window.

We thought we had the story figured out. Doctor Who does Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Androids replacing the population of an English village. But just when we are not expecting it, Nation springs an actual alien on us. 

The story, like the village, is not what it seemS to be at first glance.

Let's Twist Again

There is another twist at the end of the second installment. It's a bit obvious. But this is a kid's show and it's better than the Knights and Knaves puzzle in Pyramids of Mars.

When the Doctor and Sarah were being chased by evil android soldiers with sniffer dogs, the Doctor took Sarah's scarf and used it to draw the dogs off. Sarah herself hides up a tree. Later in the episode, Sarah, having been captured by and escaped from the aliens, arranges to meet the Doctor in the village store.

In the first minute of episode 1 the Doctor had offered her a swig of ginger beer and she remarked, very much in passing, that she couldn't stand the stuff.

So when a still scarf-wearing Sarah-Jane tells the Doctor that his ginger ale is delicious we all immediately know that this is not the real Sarah. The Aliens have made an android in her image, but their technology is imperfect. The Doctor sees immediately what is going on.

The Doctor knocks Fake Sarah to the ground. Sarah's face falls off, revealing Android circuitry underneath. The special effect is very well done. Clearly, some quick editing has replaced Elizabeth Sladen with a dummy, and then allowed the face mask to fall off the dummy. But the cut is so quick we don't spot the substitution: it looks for all the world as if Lis Sladen's face has dropped off. Less a visual effect, more a piece of misdirection: a conjuring trick. A good example of the magic of Doctor Who.

So: the Aliens have created a fake, android Sarah to go with the fake, android soldiers and the fake, android landlord. But that isn't the twist. The twist is that everything is fake. The Aliens haven't taken over an English village with androids: they have made a replica of an English village on their own planet and populated it with androids. For some reason.

" This isn't Earth. This isn't real wood. It's some kind of artificial material like plastic. These are not real trees. And you're not the real Sarah."

We should allow ourselves to experience, rather than merely analyze, these old stories. Mary Whitehouse was right in one respect: if you were watching Doctor Who in the 1970s, each cliffhanger stayed with us for a whole week. So let's pause and enjoy the weirdness of the first two installments; let's enjoy the shock of the second cliffhanger. Once we have done that, we can move on and see if the remaining two episodes can makes sense of what just happened.  (SPOILER: No.)

Acting, Darling 

Many people have spotted that the key to Tom Baker's characterization is that he says very serious things as if they were quite trivial, and very trivial things as if they were of earth shattering importance. But I don't think it has often been noticed that Elisabeth Sladen does a very similar trick.

At the beginning of the episode, when Sarah finds the Doctor in a cell, there is a very brief exchange:

"What are you doing?"

"Rescuing you, actually. For a change."

Elisabeth Sladen delivers this as a double pronged attack: the word "actually" is a put down, a reproach to the Doctor for being ungrateful. "For a change" is an afterthought: Sarah knows her role as the Assistant is mostly to be a damsel in distress and is pleased that the boot is on the other foot.

While they are running away, the Doctor says "So far so good..." and Sarah adds "...as the man said when he fell from the skyscraper." Sladen delivers it with menace; even horror. She uses her weak, scripted joke to express how scared Sarah really is. And a bit later, as every girl sidekick is contractually obliged to do in a chase, she stumbles and twists her ankle. "Are you all right?" says the Doctor. She elongates the word "yes" to turn it into an accusation, as if she were really saying "no of course I'm not, you silly man." 

For Mash Get Smash!

The Aliens who have been giving Crayford his orders are Kraals. They have silly masks, wear spray-painted bovver boots and one of them sounds like Zippy from Rainbow. They serve essentially the same function that the Zygons did in Terror of the. There is a quite good mysterious spooky adventure going on: curses on ye Moors in the former; pod-people taking over an English village in the latter. We enjoy the idea of punters being delivered to a pub like milk bottles. The monosyllabic landlord whose phone doesn't work is straight out of the Village. If this was Sapphire and Steel, things could just carry on being mysterious indefinitely, and no-one would expect an explanation. But this is Doctor Who, and the explanation is always "because Aliens." 

There is a flying saucer. There are Aliens. The Aliens want to conquer the earth because they are Aliens. And the mysterious village is somehow part of this plot. We are not supposed to be interested in the Kraal invasion plan, which is just as well. They are just a bit of plot machinery to give the spooky stuff a reason to exist. 

It Wasn't The Earth All Along...!

In "The Chimes of Big Ben" Number 6 believes that he has found his way back to London -- but suddenly realizes that he never really left The Village. In "V for Vendetta", V allows Evey to believe that she is going to be executed, and suddenly reveals that the concentration camp is a stage set and the guards are all waxworks. 

Moments like this, when you are not where you thought you were and everything you thought you knew is wrong are pretty hard to pull off. Terry Nation has a good go. We thought that we were in an English village and that the inhabitants had mysteriously been replaced by Android replicas. We discover that the entire village is a replica; that we are still on the Kraal's home planet. The whole set up of the first two episodes dissolves into air, thin air leaving not a rack behind. The Androids are even now being loaded into a space ship, and the invasion of earth is only now about to start.

It All Makes Sense Now!

Episode 3 of Android Invasion drifts away from the first two episodes spooky-kids-show aesthetic and becomes a very generic piece of Who. The Kraal seem to know that they are walking cliches, delivering lines like "RESISTANCE IS...inadvisable" and "I imagine it will be a most ...DISAGREEABLE...death". One should never forget that Terry Nation started life as a comedy writer; Blake's Seven was driven by its dialogue and its wit. It makes sense that the creator of the Daleks would create a different set of generic evil aliens and gently take the mickey out of them. 

The Doctor is strapped to a table while the Kraal try to extract his memories—which makes us think of Davros and mind probes. He is tied to a war memorial with indestructible ivy—which makes us think of Daemons and Maypoles. Sarah cleverly uses her rations to electrocute a guard, which makes us think of every story in which the Doctor has been held captive from the Dead Planet onwards. Sarah remembers she has a limp when she escapes from the Kraal base but has forgotten it by the time she gets back to the Doctor. There are androids in the form of Benton and Harry, but this doesn't effect the plot in any way: it would be just the same if they had been generic guards. The Doctor and Sarah sneak on to the space ship just before it takes off—they are travelling back to earth along with the android invasion force... Maybe they will still be able to save the day. The space ship's launch is represented by stock footage of Apollo XI, even though the model is a completely different shape.

How enjoyable you find any of this depends on how little attention you are prepared to pay. It's jolly good fun. There's a bomb countdown, a rocket launch, a mind probe, two if not three daring escapes: all told it is much less boring than Planet of Evil. Ridiculous aliens in silly masks are planning to invade the earth using a rocket full of androids. What more to you need to know?  

It's only when you try to work out what is going on that it all starts to look decidedly dicey. Why have the aliens made an exact replica of an earth village on their planet? It's a lot of trouble to go to to practice a dry-run at conquering the world. Is it remotely believable that they can create a replica human which is perfect in every detail, and then foul up over trivial things like Sarah Jane's scarf and her taste in soft drinks? And isn't it a bit of a stretch that the Doctor, who has been failing to get back to UNIT base for three stories now, should happen to land on an alien planet which happens to be making robot replicas of two very close friends of his?

"It all makes sense now!" says Sarah, when she realizes that she is not on earth but on the planet Kraal. But it doesn't.

Such power would set me up above the gods!

In Terry Nations previous Doctor Who story, the Doctor presented Davros with a classic thought experiment. If you had created a virus that was capable of wiping out all life, would you allow it to be released? (Davros says that it would be worth destroying all life in order to prove that he could.)

Genesis of the Daleks episode four was first transmitted on March 29, 1975. Two weeks later, April 16, the BBC transmitted the first episode of a new Terry Nation series. Survivors depicted a contemporary earth in which Davros' thought-experiment had occurred in reality. The opening credits distinctly show a scientist dropping a phial and releasing a virus which wipes out nearly all human life. And six months after that (December 6 1975) we reached episode three of Android Invasion and found out what the Kraals's plan actually was.

"That phial contains a death sentence for the entire human race. Be careful! " explains Steggron. "The phial contains a virus so lethal the Earth will be rid of it's human population within three weeks" Exactly why they were fannying around building replicas of sweet shops when their biological warfare was so advanced isn't quite clear. What is clear is that Terry Nation has used the same metaphor three times in one year. In Genesis, the phial is merely a philosophical conjecture. Survivors is about its aftermath and consequences. And Android Invasion gives the Doctor the opportunity to thwart the catastrophe before it occurs.

Boom! Boom!

I do not think that sufficient attention is paid to the fact that Doctor Who was generally paired with Basil Brush in the BBC's Saturday evening schedules.

For anyone not fortunate enough to have been 12 years old during the 1970s: Basil was a British incarnation of Groucho Marx and W.C Fields—an endless fount of wise-crack and repartee. His stock in trade was corny, contrived puns; but his persona was full of sarcasm and self-deprecation and answering back. He said the kinds of things you'd get slapped for if you said them at school; but he got away with it, because he was posh and clever and charming. And a glove puppet.

Tom Baker's Doctor has some similar traits. That is why he appealed so much to a certain sort of priggish, self-opinionated proto-geek. He was witty and charming but he would have been insufferable in real life. His wit starts from the assumption that he is much cleverer than anyone else in the room. He is always, by definition, punching down. (When he meets an equal like Davros or Sutekh, he drops the one liners.) Of course he can't warn a functionary that there might be a dangerous robot double on the loose. He has to say " Now, if you do see me again today, I want you to report it to me immediately". Sounding clever is more important than actually letting the poor guy know what is going on. When Crayford orders him to be taken away to interrogation, he says "If you're calling the butler, I'm very partial to tea and muffins." We've all thought of saying that kind of thing to petty officials. Most of us will spend most of our lives being the petty official people want to say that to.

Look at the first five minutes of Android Invasion episode 4. The lives of the Doctor and Sarah, and the lives of everyone else on earth, are in real and immediate danger. And so they banter: of course they do. But Sarah is honestly scared; and somehow the Doctor is acting as if it's all good fun. You want to punch him; except you don't, because you know he would sacrifice his life to save Sarah's in a heartbeat.

"So, providing we don't burn up on re-entry, and aren't suffocated on the way down, we'll probably be smashed to a pulp when we land" says Sarah: and she sounds properly scared, as if she thinks her number has finally come up

"Exactly. Sarah" says the Doctor "You've put your finger on the one tiny flaw in our plan." Tom Baker is all smiles, coming across the room and sitting by Sarah, like an academic who is pleased that his pupil is finally understanding things.

"Our plan? It's your plan." Now Sarah is outraged, angry—how dare the Doctor blame her for the situation?

"Well, I'm open to suggestions if you've got a better idea." The Doctor is matter-of-fact: facing Sarah with the reality of the situation. 

And Sarah immediately accepts it—accepts that she is probably going to die. "How long before we start?"

The script is quite witty. But the principals pour a deep understanding of the two characters into their reading of the lines. 

Not by HAVOC

In Pyramids of Mars, we saw the Doctor as a god among the gods, confronting and cursing and outwitting a being who he says had once taken the name Satan. There is none of that today. He is openly contemptuous of Steggron and the Kraals ("the best laid plans of mice and Kraals gang oft aglay") and fires off weak jokes when he is being put in a death trap. ("Don't go. Stay, just for a few minutes. Then we can all go together.") And he takes on the role of an action man; jumping through second floor plate glass windows; physically attacking and fighting and throwing bad guys -- none of that namby-pamby Venusian karate. Last time he was a god, this time he is a super hero. Tom Baker saw him always and simply as the benevolent alien.

Unit Dating Problem 

In Pyramids of Mars, Sarah claimed to come from 1980. In Android Invasion she says that, two years before she met the Doctor she investigated a story about the death of Crawford the one eyed astronaut who is running the base. Crawford was supposedly killed on a mission into "deep space" testing out the XK-5 space freighter.

This would be consistent with the older UNIT stories in which England has its own space program and is sending manned missions to Mars. So Sarah's time must be quite a bit later than the 1980s: there is hardly time between 1975 and 1978 for Britain to develop a programme of hauling freight in space. Perhaps "I'm from 1980" means "I was born in 1980"; which would allow Crayford's expedition to be as late as 2010.

To Be Continued...

Very disappointingly, the top brass officer at the base is not the Brigadier, but the Colonel. He says things like "confounded cheek!" and makes us all realize just how good Nicholas Courtney always was. Perhaps the Brig's absence explains why we don't to get to see the Doc saying goodbye to UNIT, for what will turn out to be the very last time. We get to see the real Harry and the real Benton alongside their robot doubles, but nothing very much follows from it. The Doctor fairs rather better: Tom Baker obviously enjoys being an evil copy of himself and relishes some of the confusion that two Doctors cause. The BBC make-up department evidently can't source the stunt man a wig that looks even remotely like Tom Baker's own hair. The day is saved through quite interesting tricks: turning the radio telescope back on itself to jam the robots; and reprogramming the Android doctor to attack Stegron. The Davros-phial is smashed, but it does nothing bad apart from dissolving Stegron. Is the idea that the virus is contained inside the rocket? At any rate the human race is not wiped out. Everyone lives happily ever after.

Lashings...

Ginger beer is a fizzy drink—a soda. It is possible to make it at home using yeast and sugar and root ginger, although I suppose the stuff you can buy in bottles and cans is flavoured and carbonated. People who are "on the wagon" sometimes drink it because the ginger gives it a bit of a kick. People who are not on the wagon add rum to make a Dark and Stormy. But it's mostly a children's drink. The kind of thing you'd have as a bit of a treat at a birthday party. The Famous Five take bottles of the stuff on their picnics, although the phrase "lashings of ginger beer!" is apocryphal.

In episode two, the Doctor is waiting for Sarah in an empty pub, and has to order a drink. It's an interesting moment: what does the Doctor drink? Most English pubs would supply a cup of tea, but that would be a bit obvious. Instead he asks for "a pint". A landlord would automatically take this to mean a pint of beer bitter in the south, mild in the north. At the end of the Daemons, the Brigadier and Benton went for "a pint" in preference to watching the Morris Dancing. But this landlord isn't going to let the Doctor—or the writer—off the hook. "A pint of what?". So the Doctor orders a children's drink: ginger pop. ("Pop" is definitely a children's word; slightly more in use in Northern England than in the South.) And the Doctor isn't joking, either: he was drinking ginger beer from a small earthenware bottle at the beginning of episode one. The landlord pours two ordinary glass bottles into a beer glass.

Patrick Troughton occasionally offered his companions sherbet lemons or gobstoppers. Tom Baker has twice proffered a bag of jelly babies. Jelly babies, sherbet lemons, gob stoppers and ginger beer are all signifiers of the olden days -- Victorian and Edwardian summers and school tuck-shops. And they also represent a type of harmless schoolboy childishness. Over the next season or so, "jelly babies" will just become a marker of conscious silliness: an accouterments of the Doctor, like the sonic screwdriver and the scarf. But today "ginger beer" marks the Doctor out as a child-man from a vanishing, but not quite vanished, world.

He meets the fake Sarah in a sweet shop, with adverts for British Cheese and Lyons Made Ice Lollies clearly visible. He consumes five bottles of ginger beer during the story. That's a lot of sugar and something like 1,000 calories.

Pop Goes The Weasel

To recap. At the beginning of episode, Sarah says that she doesn't like ginger pop. At the end of part 2, she finds it delicious. This is one of the things which clues us into the fact that Sarah has been replaced by an Android.

This small point could not reasonably have been picked up on by someone watching the story at the rate of one episode a week. This suggests that Terry Nation thinks of Android Invasion as a single, 100 minute movie.

But as a single, 100 minute movie, Android Invasion makes no sense at all. It actually feels like three different stories that have crashed together: a spooky two part horror show about androids taking over a pretty English village; a rather generic single part Doctor Who story about people being captured by aliens and escaping; and a James Bondish denouement about aliens taking over a government base, with much leaping through windows and jujitsu. 

We can entirely accept a Doctor Who story in which a space ship full of androids is coming to earth to infect everyone with a deadly virus. It is quite a cool idea. But the space-ship full of androids completely fails to follow on from the English village. 

It has been said that the ginger beer proves that Nation "wrote for the novelization". But everything else in the story suggests that he really didn't care if the eventual novelization or compilation made sense. All he wanted was for cool stuff to happen on a Saturday night. And those of us who remember the seventies can't quite bring ourselves to say that he was wrong.

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12.5 Fugitive of the Judoon

The Two Doctors

I enjoyed Fugitive of the Judoon in a straightforward, uncomplicated way. It was the first episode of this season—the first episode in Doctor Thirteen's run—which I might have enjoyed if it had been part of a brand new TV show that I didn't have any investment in. It was the first episode in I don't know how long—since Matt Smith's first season, perhaps—that made me think: "Well, that was fun."

It's easy enough to see why it worked. It followed a perfectly standard structure of escalating tension. Introduce the main plot; escalate to crisis; cut away to subplot; escalate to crisis; repeat for tertiary plot. Then return to first plot; escalate crisis to a higher pitch and cut back to second plot: continue until all plots converge in one massive crisis. 

It has a central mystery: and each time part of the mystery is solved it reveals a deeper mystery beneath it. There is something a bit mysterious about Lee. The Judoon have come to earth looking for some fugitive. The fugitive is seems to be Lee: but what is he running from. The Judoon are interested in a box in Lee's possession, but why? The Judoon were hired by Gat, who has a former connection with Lee, but what? Gat kills Lee: it wasn't him she wanted, after all, it was his wife Ruth. But why?

And so on, until the great big question mark on which the episode ends, which I very much hope will never be resolved. (I am writing this review straight after watching the episode, and definitely have no idea what will happen in the Season Finale, oh no.) 

And the stuff which happens while the tension is being ramped up and the Russian dolls are being unpacked is great fun. We immediately like Ruth as a character. We care that no-one comes on her walking tour and Lee hasn't ordered her a birthday cake. (Is there really only one cake shop and one coffee bar in the whole of Gloucester?) We enjoy the scenes on the Judoon spaceship, with military music and marching boots and silly chants and figures in spacesuits silhouetted against bulkheads. They made me think of 1970s TV adverts for space-toys you were never actually going to be able to afford. Everyone falls in step with that sense of slightly retro generic skiffy, referring to the Judoon as "space-rhinos". The Judoon were created as a rather weak place-holder for the Sontarans: but they are silly enough to be fun and menacing enough to be exciting. A rhinoceros is an intrinsically silly beast. Rhinoceri in spacesuits are joyous. 

When I like a Chris Chibnall episode I often say that it felt like an episode of the Sarah-Jane Adventures. But then I frequently said that Sarah-Jane was more like Doctor Who than Doctor Who was at the time. It retained a sense of fun and playfulness and story and was not overwhelmed by Numan Interest. (But on I cared much more about what happened to Clyde and Luke than I ever have about Yaz and Ryan.) Doctor Who has BBC Children's Television in its DNA: there is something endearingly childish about Fugitive of the Judoon which puts us off guard for the big dramatic serious ending. 

So, Andrew, you might as well leave it there. "It was a good story. I liked it. I wish there were more stories like this." What else is there to say?

Before Fugitive of the Judoon was released, the BBC put out a short teaser trailer which made it clear that the big revelation that O was the Master in Spyfall was only the beginning: this weeks episode was going to contain an even bigger revelation. And that trailer totally changed how we experience the episode. Every plot twist—every red herring—makes us think "Is this the big revelation? I wonder what the big revelation will be? When will the big revelation come?" Telling us that there is a big surprise but not telling us what it is is almost as much a spoiler as if it the episode had been entitled "Day of Tour Guide Who Turns Out To  Be The Doctor." 

The guy in the coffee shop has been compiling a dossier on Lee. Is that the revelation? Is the revelation to do with Lee's identity?

It turns out that the Judoon have come to arrest Ruth—who seems to be completely innocuous— rather than Lee—who is obviously hiding something. "So" we can't help thinking "That must be the big revelation. The big revelation must be something to do with Ruth. What can Ruth's big secret be?" 

This is why John Bloody Barrowman is in the episode. The dreadful Torchwood turned Captain Jack into an annoying, camp Action Man, but I have to admit that this episode's digression restores the character to what he was in the Empty Child—a flamboyant polysexual Han Solo. He really shouldn't exist in the story, and he gets to comment on the narrative from the outside, rather as Missy did in World Enough and Time: 

"Listen, kid, working with some low-rent equipment here." 

"Why doesn't that surprise me?" 

"Oh, she likes them mouthy, then, huh?" 

"Yeah, one up from cheesy." 

"Okay, he's my favourite."

It's like two eras of the show are being allowed to comment on each other. Jack assume that Graham is the Doctor: and one suspects that in Jack's era, he would have been. 

Jack has nothing to do with the story: he is only here to deliver a message: "Beware the lone Cyberman"—presumably a set up for the season finale which I definitely haven't watched yet. It is quite fun that a flying saucer pops up in the middle of an already quite complicated narrative and quite convenient that Graham, Yaz and Ryan get beamed out of the story just at the point when the Doctor and Ruth need time for some quality exposition. 

But the main point of Captain Jack is to be a red herring. We have been told that there is going to be a really big revelation. A major, major character who we haven't seen in a decade pops up. Here comes the revelation, we think: Jack is going to tell us the big secret. But it turns out that his message has nothing to do with the revelation, or to do with anything else in the story. Which is kind of cool.

A heavily trailed revelation was always going to be about the format; about the mythos about, as we now have to say, the lore. "Yaz is pregnant", "Ryan becomes a Muslim" or "Graham's cancer comes back" would count as major revelations in a soap opera or drama, but in Doctor Who they would barely register as sub-plots. The twist has to be a twist about Doctor Who itself. Ruth as a secret. And within the rules of Doctor Who, there are really only three things it can be: 

1: Ruth is the Master

2: Ruth is some other Time Lord—the Rani or the Corsair or the Monk or Omega or Rassilon. 

3: Ruth has some family connection with the Doctor: she is her child, or her former wife, or her mother. 

We do not see "Ruth is the Doctor herself" coming. And how could we? We were looking for a twist within the rules of Doctor Who. But the twist is that the rules of Doctor Who have been broken. Ruth can't be the Doctor. But she is.

I have used this illustration before. Children's riddles and cracker-jokes depend on a question being understood in a non-obvious way, or there being an equivocation about the meaning of a word. Why did the man throw his watch out of the window? In order to see time fly. What gets wetter the more it dries? A towel. So "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side" is funny because it breaks the rules of joke telling. The joke is that it requires a perfectly ordinary answer: the joke is that it is not a joke. Many, many children's riddles are anti-jokes of this kind. What is white and can't climb trees? What is green and pear-shaped? Where would you find a tortoise with no legs? 

Ruth can't be the Doctor, because there is no Doctor for her to be. If she had simply been the fourteenth (or, depending on how you count, sixteenth) Doctor, it would have been quite surprising but not a major twist. "I am your next incarnation, but not for a couple of seasons yet". I have thought for a long time that it would be cool if the BBC could somehow spring a regeneration on us without the traditional eighteen month build up. But Doctor Ruth is not from the future (she doesn't remember having been Doctor Thirteen) nor is she from the past (Thirteen definitely doesn't remember being her). And there is nowhere else for her to be from.

It could all be sorted out very easily by saying that she is the Doctor from a parallel universe; or by saying that our Doctor had pre-Hartnellian lives but is for some reason suffering from amnesia. Neither solution would be nearly as interesting as the mystery. "There is another Doctor in the universe who logically can't exist" is quite an appealing addition to the mythos: particularly if the Doctor and the Other Doctor can be contrived to be at loggerheads. 

I can't help thinking — and I definitely, definitely haven't watched the season finale yet—that "logically impossible Doctor" is what Chibnall is driving at. Doctor Ruth very pointedly does not know what a sonic screwdriver is, which puts her pre-Troughton: but her TARDIS is already shaped like a London Police Box, which puts her post-Unearthly Child.

We see the Time Lords casting the Doctor out in the War Games; and we see the Doctor arriving on earth in Spearhead From Space: many fans have theorized that there could be any number of untold adventures in between. (The theory is well established enough that if you refer to "Season 6 B" Who fans generally know what you are talking about.) But there is really no scope for a Season 3 B in between the last William Hartnell story and the first Patrick Troughton one. Moffat's Twice Upon a Time rather ruled that out. 

Vinay Patel, who is credited with Chibnall as co-writer of the story, also wrote last year's Demons of the Punjab, as story which was greatly admired by people other than me. It is interesting that there are two writers; because it sometimes feels as if Fugitive of the Judoon is two different stories.

Is Patel a Doctor Who geek? Did he go to Chibnall and say "I've had a cool idea for a story in which there is an extra, impossible Doctor, in between Hartnell and Troughton?" Or did Chibnall go to Patel and say "Since we liked your very political historical story last season so much, we think you are the idea person to write a mythos heavy narrative which sets up a puzzle about Doctor Who continuity." Neither scenario is impossible. But I have this nagging feeling that maybe Patel pitched a clever character piece in which an ordinary lady and an ordinary man living ordinary lives in Gloucester turn out to be alien war-criminals hunted by the Judoon. And that Chibnall looked at the script and said "That's a cool script. But I want to incorporate it into my masterplan. I want the lady to turn out to be, not an alien war criminal, but a logically impossible Doctor." 

There is one very suspicious thing. In the very good cathedral scene, when the Doctor and Ruth are surrounded by Judoon, Ruth unexpectedly grabs a gun, threatens the Judoon, does Martial Arts and rips off one of their noses. This gives the Doctor the clue that she, Ruth, has a different identity hidden inside her. Ruth doesn't know what has happened; it is like someone else is controlling her. 

Now, if you wanted to give a clue that a Numan Bean is really the Doctor in disguise, is Martial Arts and mutilating bad guys what you would choose? Wouldn't you show that she has a knack for improvising plans, or impresses the Doctor by her understanding of super-advanced science. If in the original script Ruth had been, say, an alien ninja with an activation code; or a renegade space cop who had resigned from the force, the scene would have made a lot more sense. 

The second half of the story is very well done. The juxtaposition of Ruth breaking the glass and starting to "regenerate" and the Doctor finding the TARDIS buried beneath an unmarked grave is very powerful. And the final scene on the Judoon ship, when it transpires that Gat is taking her orders from the Time Lords and that the Doctor—Ruth—has always been her quarry is pleasantly surprising and interesting. There is a bit of chemistry between the two Doctors. And the aftermath, with the Doctor brooding about what has happened and the Famous Three promising to stick by her whatever comes next, is very well done. But I am terribly afraid that we are looking at two different scripts. And when you realize that it, it is not too difficult to see the join.

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12.4 Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror

A Light Bulb Moment

The TARDIS lands in the past. The Doctor gets starstruck by an historical figure and bounces about how wonderful humans are. There are spooky men in cloaks with glowy red eyes. There is a big spaceship populated by Scorpion-Borg hybrids who want to destroy the world. Probably. The Doctor has a cunning plan. Everything is wrapped up in time for tea. 

This week's episode feels like one of those vignettes Stephen Moffat used to insert into his stories, a thirty second snippet of a completely different adventure. I have a general impression that a Doctor Who story just happened; but am not honestly sure I could tell you any of the whys and wherefores .

Nikola Tessla and Thomas Eddison fighting space scorpions in turn of the century New York. Yeah. Okay. Why not? The scorpions themselves are quite well done. I enjoyed the scene where they chased Yaz and Edison through the empty streets, running up the sides of buildings and getting tangled up in the scenery. It made me quite nostalgic for wet Sunday afternoons watching Jason and the Argonauts on BBC 2. Maybe we should have just had a really well done monster story without the historical baggage? I liked the alien space ship too, but the scorpion queen felt altogether too much like the spider from The Runaway Bride.

I must admit that, like the Doctor's moronic companions, I hardly knew who Nikola Tessla was. Olden days science dude: had a rivalry with Edison, particularly over electric currents. Going by this story he was an "inventor" in the pulp science fiction sense: great ideas pop into his mind. He keeps on nearly inventing things which would come true further down the line, but he gives them cool steampunk names, so his idea for radar would have been called an "exploring ray" and his idea for X-Rays would have been called "shadow photography". He even nearly invented the internet, insofar as his Wardenclyff tower would have wirelessly transmitted audio and possibly visual images all round the world. It isn't quite clear if "conceiving a machine which would let anyone in the world access all the knowledge in the world remotely" is the same as "inventing" it. I am not quote sure what it would have meant to "invent the internet" 40 years before the existence of anything which could be called a computer. 

Against this stands wicked Thomas Edison, who actually gets things done. Edison makes things and creates things and markets things, but he doesn't have his own ideas. He creates factories where dozens of scientists conduct experiments, and isn't respectful of other people's intellectual property. 

There is one good exchange between the two men, in which Edison states his point of view very clearly:

"Anyone can have ideas. I make them happen. All those men, all those inventions, I turn them from a sketch into real things people can buy. That's how you change the world. You're too blind to see that my factory is the best idea either one of us ever had. "

"And you are too narrow-minded to grasp the genius of my work, and that is why you will never achieve real greatness. You're not a man of vision, you're a man of... parts."

But the viewer's sympathy, and the Doctor's is with Tesla. It is better to be a dreamer who has singular ideas than a technician who gets things made. 

I suppose we are supposed to see a connection between the scorpion-borgs, who travel around the universe stealing other people's technology, and Edison, who steals other people's ideas. The idea of turning Tesla's wireless electricity transmitter into a giant zap-gun to blast the scorpion-borg out of the solar system is fairly cool; but there is an overwhelming sense that the baddies were conceived of as a hive mind to make this plot-device work.

Scorpions and death rays in Old New York is quite fun; but "quite fun" doesn't carry the day. It feels very much as if there was an envelope somewhere with "aliens steal earth's greatest scientist" written on the back and "twist: in the Olden Days!!" underneath. I've been watching a lot of Old Who, and Old Who is full of hoary old cliches stitched together. But Old Who (for the first eighteen years, at least) was sustained by charismatic front-men who you couldn't take your eyes off. Jodie Whittaker is not Tom Baker. She is barely even Sylvester McCoy.

*

Edison is played by Robert Glenister, who played an officer named Salateen in Caves of Androzani. He was Peter Davison's brother and flatmate in a long-forgotten situation comedy.

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Pyramids of Mars

I can watch Terror of the Zygons and Planet of Evil with fresh eyes. They are old TV shows that I vaguely remember seeing as a kid. Rubbery monsters; fascist space men; artificial forests; bagpipes. Retro-sci-fi with charming performances by Tom and Lis and Nick.

But how do I write about Pyramids of Mars? Pyramids of Mars is a classic. Pyramids of Mars is iconic. Sci-Fi Now's list of Greatest Doctor Who Moments (by a writer I respect and admire) said that Pyramids of Mars Episode 1 had the greatest cliffhanger in Doctor Who's history.

We experience these classics not as 100 minute narratives, but as fragments which have embedded themselves in the collective memories of fandom. A pyramid. Mummies. An old house. "I am the servant of Sutekh. He needs no other." Which of us can remember what happened next?

*

Episode 1

Episode 1 of Pyramids of Mars is relentlessly, self-consciously theatrical. There is a butler. He says "sir" a lot, explains the plot, and gets killed. There is a mysterious foreign gentleman who must not be disturbed under any circumstances. He wears a fez, plays the organ, and gets killed.

The Butler introduces a character called Wollock. He asks the foreign gentleman lots of questions, during which the backstory comes out. The acting and the script scream "Act I of a Victorian Thriller." Quite a good Victorian thriller, being put on by a first rate Am Dram outfit.

The Doctor is on the periphery of the play. He literally stands outside the window and eavesdrops as Ahmed and Wollock work their way through the script. He peeps through the doorway, Scooby-Doo style, at the Very Famous Cliffhanger.

There is lots of plot, and there is no plot. There is a redundant prologue, in which Prof Scarman opens an Egyptian Tomb, full of artifacts. All the artifacts are sent back to England and Ahmed, the Foreign Gentleman takes control of Scarman's estate. By the time the curtain goes up, there are Mummies in the basement and a sarcophagus in the study.

Ahned is clearly coded as "Muslim", but he is actually a worshiper of the ancient Egyptian God Set – Sutekh. There is no particular reason why a professor of Egyptology shouldn't have a church organ in his study. And there is no reason why a turn of the century Egyptian shouldn't have a taste for English organ music and ancient death-gods. But the organ is a meta-textual joke. Gothic horror of this kind often has a melodramatic organ accompaniment so wouldn't it be a wheeze if the baddie was playing the background music himself? (The Goons did the same joke on a weekly basis.)

It is the winter of 1975. The idea that the Gods are really Aliens is in the air. Next summer Marvel Comics would publish Kirby's final masterpiece, the Eternals. Chariots of the Gods came as recently as 1969 and one could trace it backwards to Quatermass and the Pit (1959) Childhood's End (1953) and ultimately to the Cthulhu stories (1920s). Marcus Scarman's steamer-punk radio-telescope, installed on the sideboard of his Holmsian sitting room, is hardly the same thing as Kirby's vast Aztec signalling temple, but they have drunk at the same mythological well. The gods are out there, but its science, not prayers which will call them back.

"Beware Sutekh! Beware Sutekh!"

*

Tom Baker spends most of the episode being solemn and serious; really only cracking a smile when he is mocking and patronizing Marcus. The earth is facing the greatest peril in its history; the forces at work are more powerful than "anything even I have ever encountered". Superlatives became rather a hallmark of the Baker era, and one more reason that Early Fandom got cross with Robert Holmes. But in this case it is an important part of the story. Sutekh is not only a baddie: he is the ultimate baddie. For almost the first time, the Doctor is facing off against someone who scares him.

The Doctor is discovered, head bowed in the TARDIS declaiming to Sarah that he's a Time Lord and walks in eternity and will soon be middle aged. I don't think Robert Holmes thought in terms of story arcs; although every story since Planet of the Spiders had neatly dove-tailed into the next one. But it is hard not to wonder if the Doctor has been changed by his encounter with the anti-matter monster. Forcibly reminded that he is not merely alien, but ontologically apart from the humans he fraternizes with. And yet he is still tying to fulfill his promise to meet the Brigadier in London.

The Brigadier was introduced into Doctor Who as part of the 1970s semi-reboot, when Doctor Who became for a brief time, an odd-couple show about a no-nonsense soldier and an amnesiac alien who fight alien invasions in their different ways. The Doctor officially ceased to be an exile four seasons ago; but "the Doctor is scientific adviser to UNIT" is still an irreducible part of the shows mythos. Planet of Evil and Pyramids of Mars are detours: there is still a Brigadier shaped center of gravity that is pulling them home. Sarah suggests that if he is tired of working for the Brig, the Doctor should resign. He doesn't actually reply: but an apron-string is cut at that moment. The brooding alien Doctor who cries out "but I'm a time lord" can't be the establishment figure who is happy to work with, if not for, the Brigadier. The BBC can't yet admit it to the kids, but the marriage ended a year ago.

*

Episode 2

Sarah and the Doctor hide from the Servant of Sutekh in a priest hole.

"A priest hole" ad libs Tom Baker "In a Victorian mock Gothic folly?"

Indeed. What, after all, is Pyramids of Mars—if it comes to that, what is Doctor Who—but a mock Gothic folly?

*

An English poacher is doing his rounds. He spots an Egyptian Mummy with its leg caught in a trap. It kicks, and frees itself. The poacher runs away, but not before picking up his rabbit.

To the Doctor, Mummies are just dead bodies: of course they can't walk around. ("But this one did", says Sarah.) But to the audience, a Mummy is primarily one of the walking dead. When you say "The Mummy" you instantly think of a zombie wrapped in bandages: probably one terrifying Scooby Doo and Shaggy.

Multiple mythologies are colliding. Poor Ernie has a lineage which goes back at least as far as Robin Hood, the romantic poacher who nobly steals rabbits off rich people's lands. A Mummy comes from Egypt; and more recently, from Hollywood. There is no way a dead Egyptian should be stuck in an English poacher's snare. There is no way that a figure from a 1930s Universal horror flick should be running around the grounds of an English country house. There is no reason that an alien called Sutekh would have robots wrapped in bandages. There is no reason that the Ossirans would design a time tunnel to look like a coffin. The story is about gods and demons and queer alien magic. There is just enough scientific mumbo-jumbo to permit the mythological mumbo-jumbo to manifest in the very early 20th century.

It is supposed to be 1911. The term "robot" will not be coined until 1920; Karloff will not play the Mummy until 1932.

Hidden in a high tech prison somewhere on earth there is an alien criminal. The alien criminal is contained by a force field which is driven by a power source on the planet Mars. A harmless human, mind-controlled by the evil alien, is constructing a bomb which he means to fire at Mars; destroying the power station and freeing the criminal's corporeal form. He is aided in this task by powerful, mindless robots to whom he says things like "Seek and destroy" and "The humans inside the deflection barrier must be eliminated".

There is nothing remotely Gothic or Egyptian about any of this. Very easily the robots could have been Cybermen and the possessed human could have been a crazy industrialist or a mentally challenged scientist. Robots look like mummies; generator loops look like funeral urns; time tunnels look like coffins. Egypt is just window dressing to decorate a bog-standard space-opera.

Contrawise: Egyptian mummies; demon possessed archaeologists and sinister organ-playing foreigners are purposefully walking around an English country house, killing butlers and terrifying poachers. There is some hastily recited science fiction jargon to justify the mystical jargon. What we are clearly looking at is evil Egyptian gods resuming their centuries old battle. Sutekh is not being freed from an alien prison cell. He is breaking free of his ancient bonds.

*

So: Ahmed opens the sarcophagus in the organ room, and a black robed and masked figure floats down a kind of time-space tunnel. It is hard not to read this as a parody of the opening credits of Doctor Who. Each week, Tom Baker floats down a very similar time-tunnel, into our living rooms. We are being very subtly told that Sutekh is the anti-Doctor. 

Everyone knows what happens next. Ahmed greets the figure, using Christian, liturgical language. (" All high, all powerful, most noble Lord, thy humble servant welcomes thee.") He prostrates himself before the figure: "I am a loyal servant of the great Sutekh". And the figure unceremoniously kills him: "I am the Servant of Sutekh: he needs no other." It's a fine, Hitchcockian stunt: the character who has been set up as the major villain is killed-off before the end of episode one.

I had forgotten what follows. The black robed figure morphs into the shape of Lawrence Scarman, (the archaeologist who opened the tomb in the prologue). He spends the rest of the episode ordering Mummies around, building the rocket to destroy the Martian power source to free Sutekh.

We  are never told why Scarman manifests in this form; or why he talks in a scary deep voice on that one occasion. The servant really is Scarman, albeit possessed by the spirit of Sutekh. But Scarman killing Ahmed at the end of episode one would have had no visual impact and might even have confused the viewer. Holmes has created an iconic scene and then retrofitted it into the story. That's the way he works; and it's not a bad way of creating Doctor Who.

*

Tom Baker carries the episode by sheer force of charisma. Look at the scene in the storeroom. He tells Sarah he has no idea what the Mummies are doing; casually remarks to Marcus that a lump of technology is "a resonating tuna" and then gasps and whispers "they must be building a rocket" as the camera slowly closes in on his face.

Look at his boyish grin when Marcus sees the inside of the TARDIS for the first time. ("Are you going to say that it transcends all normal laws of physics?") Before too long, that grin will dominate the Doctor, become his whole personality. Today it is an interruption, a ray of sunshine breaking out from behind sombre clouds.

And look at the astonishing scene where the Doctor shows Sarah what the present day will look like if Sutekh destroys the world in 1911. 

"Well?" he says to Sarah. 

"We've got to go back" says Sarah. 

And a nod, and that quiet grin, and the single word "Yes."

*

"Holy Moses!" exclaims Ernie the Poacher when he runs into an invisible force-field. Well, no, not exactly. But Moses came out of Egypt; and if Egyptian civilization is based on alien war criminals then I suppose Jewish and Christian and Western civilization must ultimately come from the same source.

Episode 3

Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen very much spend this episode being The Doctor and The Doctor's Assistant. They walk around the house and its grounds formulating plans to defeat Scarman and the Mummies, none of which quite come off. The script pretty much depends on finding entertaining ways for Sarah to say "What are you going to do next, Doctor?"

The story is driven by McGuffins and plot coupons; but the characters have to struggle to find them, and the threads are woven admirably tight. Scarman is going to send a missile to Mars to destroy the power source that is keeping Sutekh in prison. The Doctor wants to blow the rocket up. In order to blow the rocket up, he needs gelignite from the ex-poacher's hut. In order to get to the hut, he needs to get through the force-field that Scarman has thrown up around the house. In order to find a door to the force-field, he needs to disable one of Sutekh's force-field generating funeral urns.

Which leads to this kind of thing:

"Door....key."

"As simple as that?"

"No, not really."

"Didn't think it could be."

In music hall, the straight man often commanded a higher fee than the comedian: any clown could be funny if the feed-lines were delivered right. The Doctor is the star of the show, but it's Sarah's understated "didn't think it could be" that gets the laugh. She's been in this game for years. She knows the rules: but there is no undercutting of the material. Sutekh really could destroy the universe. Sarah knows her role; she accepts that she is subordinate to the Doctor; but she stands up to him as well:

"Are you going to help or are you just going to stand there admiring the scenery?"

"I actually wasn't admiring the scenery, I was waiting for you to tell me what to do."

The Doctor gets to be callous and alien because Sarah is sweet and human and knows that he doesn't really mean it. Her finest moment comes when Lawrence Scarman kills his brother Marcus (eliminating the last human supporting character from the narrative.) The Doctor regards it as a minor distraction. Sarah sees that a man has just been murdered 

"Sometimes you don't seem..."

"Human?" suggests the Doctor. 

Jon Pertwee was a posh scientist who we sometimes remembered wasn't really one of us. The alien-ness of Tom Baker is foregrounded in every scene.

Episode 4

"A man was going to Brighton, when he lost his way. He came to a main road. There were no sign posts, but two men were standing there. The trouble was, one of them always lied and one of them always told the truth, but which was which, the traveler didn't know..."

I first came across this puzzle in the Puffin Joke Book, published two years before Pyramids of Mars (in 1974). It is quoted alongside the one about the old man who told his sons to have a camel race: the boy who's camel lost would inherit his land.

As a puzzle, it goes back at least to the 1950s: more complicated versions involve a third guard who alternately tells the truth and lies. The hardest logic puzzle in the world involves guards who lie, guards who tell the truth, guards who randomly lie and tell the truth—and a traveler who doesn't know what the words for "yes" and "no" are in their language.

The usual, elegant solution is to ask "If I asked the other guard the way to Brighton, what would he say?" and then go the opposite way. But "If I asked you which road to take, what would you say?" would do just as well. It's a version of the liar paradox which Captain Kirk used to crash an alien computer in "I, Mudd".

A lot of people say that the final episode of Pyramids of Mars lets down the story: a very atmospheric sci-fi gothic set-up is spoiled by some childish puzzle-solving and a slightly too-easy denouement. The puzzles are indeed a little bit obvious and boring and the idea that Eye of Horus is hidden in a labyrinth surrounded by traps feels a little bit too much like a Dungeons & Dragons scenario. (This was before Dungeons &-- Dragons.) But the Eye of Horus sequence has been allowed to unfairly overshadow the episode.

The Ossirans are mythological gods with the thinnest possible veneer of pseudo-science. The Doctor has flown down a time corridor to confront Sutekh in his prison. So the final episode is clearly a spirit quest: and what is more natural in the realm of the gods than a series of tests?

The tests themselves are not very well done. But they will serve as placeholders. The Eye of Horus is hard to get to; Scarman gets there first and destroys it. Sutekh is free. But having failed the gods' test, the Doctor defeats Sutekh anyway—not with virtue or strength or power but with a tricksy little bit of scientific knowledge. The wrap-up is rushed (Doctor Who wrap-ups are always rushed) but the opening of the episode is one of the best things in the Tom Baker era.

*

At the beginning of the episode, Sarah believes that the Doctor is dead. She leans across his prostrate body and weeps openly. And the Doctor says "You are soaking my shirt" before explaining that he had a special Time Lord get-out-of-jail card (a "respiratory by-pass system"). Were these kinds of remarks on-set ad libs? Or was Tom Baker already amending the scrip during rehearsals? Is it possible that Robert Holmes was playing Eddie Braben, writing routines that reflected the real-life rapport between Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen? Nothing in the Leela or Romana eras ever felt this natural.

The history of the writing of Pyramids of Mars is a bit of a muddle. Someone called Lewis Griefer wrote an earlier version, but Hinchcliff found it unfilmable so it was rewritten from the ground up by Robert Holmes. (Stephen Harris is a made up name.) The title of "show-runner" didn't exist in the 1970s but Holmes writing style permeates Baker's early seasons (just as Douglas Adams' equally distinctive voice would run through the later ones.) Only Holmes could have written something as descriptive and at the same time as meaningless as "they have heads like domes and cerebellum like spiral staircases".

Holmes' attitude to "lore" haunts Doctor Who fandom to this day. It wasn't that he didn't care. He knows that the UNIT stories happened, not in the present, but in the very near future: Sarah says several times that she comes from 1980. When the Doctor is navigating the Ossiran labyrinth, Holmes has Sarah reference the not-dissimilar Exillon city from Death to the Daleks -- something only a small number of wide-awake viewers would be likely to have picked up on. He even has the Doctor mention former companion Victoria, who left the TARDIS in 1969. The problem is not that he ignores established facts. The problem is the gay abandon with which he creates new ones. If it suits the mood, then of course the famously uncontrollable TARDIS can nip forward to 1980 and back to 1911; or ferry the cast to and from Mars with pin point accuracy. If Sutekh wants to use the TARDIS as an escape-vehicle, then of course the Doctor can suddenly announce that the controls are "isomorphic" and that only he can operate them. And of course he has a respiratory bypass system which enables him to recover from his death. The lines are spoken with such conviction that we take it for granted that they are true. Probably we had already heard of Sutekh and the Ossirans and had somehow forgotten. Almost certainly the TARDIS controls have always been isomorphic and we have false memories of Susan operating them. And we have always known that Gallifrey is in the constellation of Kasterburus.

What does constellation mean in this context? What, for that matter, would a staircase shaped head look like? Tom and Robert are weaving a spell made of words, and looking for consistency will break the magic.

*

Davros was insane: but his madness had a rationale. The Daleks had to destroy everything in order to survive. If the Daleks ruled the universe, there would be no more wars. In the end, Davros worships his own ego: he would release the killer virus to set himself up as a god.

Sutekh really is a god: and like Davros, he wants to destroy everything. But there is no rationale; no justification. Like the Scorpion in the fable, he kills because it is his nature.

"You use your powers for evil."

"Evil? Your evil is my good. I am Sutekh the Destroyer. Where I tread I leave nothing but dust and darkness. I find that good."

"Then I curse you, Sutekh, in the name of all nature. You are a twisted abhorrence"

Sutekh's language explicitly mirrors Milton's Devil; indeed, the Doctor has just claimed that Satan is one of Sutekh's names. But the Doctor is also speaking religious language. "I renounced the society of Time Lords long ago". He didn't leave because he was bored. He renounced them. He is not a boffin talking to an alien: he is one mythological being addressing another.

The aforementioned Jack Kirby created Darksied, who worshipped Anti-Life; Marvel Comics countered with Thanos, who was in love with the personification of death. Darksied, Thanos, Sutekh and Davros are the same kind of enemy. This isn't a moral conflict; it's a conflict between death and life; between death and nature.

"What interest have you in humans?"

"All sapient lifeforms are our kith, Sutekh."

"Horus held that view. I refute it."

"Our kith." The Doctor values Sarah Jane, not because she is Sarah Jane, but because she is a living thing. To the Doctor, this is self-evident: to Sutekh, it is merely a point of view. Davros could theoretically have been reasoned with: he tries to defend the Daleks from within the Tao. Sutekh has no code: killing everything in the universe is good because he feels that it is good.

And yet Sutekh is neither a wild beast nor a Mummers play devil. He is pitiful, and this makes him even very slightly attractive. He talks about torturing the Doctor as a diversion; he calls him his plaything. He uses the same word again at the end: he tries to bribe the Doctor by offering him the earth as a plaything. If all life is not your kith, then it can only be your toy.

And yes; the Doctor tricks him and its a silly trick which doesn't have quite the mythical grandeur that the build-up required. It takes radio waves a few minutes to travel from Mars to Earth; so Sutekh's Egyptian prison remains secure for a few minutes after its Martian power source is destroyed. In which time the Doctor can redirect Sutekh's time corridor far, far into the future.

Tom Baker has spent four episodes convincing us that he is scared of Sutekh; that Sutekh really could destroy the world; that Sutekh is the most powerful being the Doctor has ever faced. And when we meet Sutekh we believe this. How clever of Holmes to present the ultimate villain as only potential evil; evil waiting to be released; evil that can't actually do anything and needs humans to fuddle around with Chinese Puzzles. But at the end, Sutekh is just another alien to be defeated with quick wit and a wise crack. And after a quip about the fire of London we are back to the TARDIS and UNIT and another adventure. Business as usual.

On one level, Pyramids of Mars is a good story, but not a great one. The secondary characters are hammy; the story relies too heavily on McGuffins and while it looks great it never quite manages to makes sense. But it is the story in which we most perfectly see Tom Baker's vision of the Doctor. And that makes it quite possibly the greatest Doctor Who story of all.

*

They each jump on the other brother's camel and ride hell for leather to the finish line.

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