Power of Kroll [3]

The first episode of Power of Kroll repeats the format of Androids of Tara. Romana takes charge of the Story Arc: the Doctor is uninterested in it. He doesn't actually go fishing this time; but he does sit in a boat, pluck a hollow reed, and idly play a tune on an improvised flute. Romana walks purposefully around the swamp, pointing the Tracer at things. That's her function, both as a character and a plot device: she's a Doctor who wants to follow the plot, to counter balance the Doctor who wants to ignore it. Romana by herself would grab the Key and leave; the Doctor by himself would forget about it altogether.

As in Androids of Tara, the two of them get separated, and become independently involved with the two opposing factions. The Doctor is mistaken for Rhom-Dutt, the gun-runner, stunned, and taken to the refinery. Romana encounters Rhom-Dutt himself and is assumed to be a spy: she's handed over to the Swampies and sentenced to be sacrificed to Kroll...

...whereupon the episode turns, quite consciously and explicitly, into a pastiche of King Kong. Quite a good pastiche. The Swampies do a ritual dance, which looks unfortunately as if they are jogging on the spot. They chant "Kroll! Kroll! Kroll!" very much as the Skull Islanders chanted the name of their pet monkey. There is a gigantic wall with a gigantic gate and gigantic steps leading to a gigantic altar.

King Kong lived on a peninsula which jutted out of Skull Island. (Don't tell Dr Sigmund Freud.) If your peninsula is infested with dinosaurs and giant gorillas, it makes sense to construct a gorilla-proof wall. Anti-squid walls make a lot less sense. Robert Holmes thinks it would be fun if Kroll were a bit like Kong -- which it is -- so he presents the Swampies as King Kong Kosplayers. A Kong Kargo Kult.

But this generates a serious rift in the story. Holmes has constructed a light-touch allegory about colonialism and the mistreatment of native peoples. (Old Doctor Who was never woke.) But he has patterned it after a black and white monster movie which takes it for granted that dark-skinned people are bloodthirsty, superstitious savages.

We know, because we have been told, that the writer of Talons of Weng-Chiang didn't have a racist bone in his body. But the Swampies are a tribe of aboriginal, non-technological supporting characters with green skin: and their first reaction to meeting a white woman is to sacrifice her to their queer pagan ju-ju spirit. We should be relieved that they didn't put her in a cooking pot. (This was before Ewoks.)

Romana is incredibly patronising towards them; although in fairness, Romana is incredibly patronising towards everyone. The racism is baked into the genre. You can't do Kong without saying that people from Abroad who don't wear as many clothes as English people do have a quality about them called "savageness". Thawn is a bigot; he's a bigger monster than the refinery-eating squid. But the narrative structure sees the Swampies from his point of view.

In Androids of Tara, Romana was mistaken for an android and nearly had her head cut off by an engineer. This time, she is forced to join the Fay Wray tribute act. And she tries: she really tries. When Rhom-Dutt threatens her, she retorts with academic psychobabble, just like Romana would have done. ("Emotional insulation is usually indicative of psychofugal trauma.") When Ranquin leads her to the stake: she is sarcastic to him, as Romana would have been. ("I suppose your are enjoying this.") Inches from death, she gives herself a lecture ("It's all nonsense; primitive spirit worship".) She tries her hardest to be the girl-Doctor. She tries her hardest to be Romana. But in the end she can't be. The format won't let her.

Terrance Dicks said that you can only bend the formula so much: however much the writers might have wanted Sarah-Jane to be a modern independent career-woman, she still ends up strapped to a conveyer belt three inches from a circular saw. Romana is the White Guardian's surrogate; cleverer in some ways, than the Doctor himself. But she is also the dolly-bird assistant, something for the Dads, the Doctor Who girl. And the Format wins the day. After seventeen episodes, she finally screams.

It is the night before the night before Christmas in the year after Star Wars. A thirteen year old boy is watching TV. The swampies are jumping up and down, shouting the name of their squid. The priest raises his arms in front of the gate. The gate closes; the priest genuflects towards the altar. It's all rather well composed. The point of view changes. The priest looks into the camera, out of the TV, and chants "Kroll rises from the depths!" with an impressively straight face. Two claws attack Romana. She screams.

Look into the head of that thirteen year old boy; and imagine what went through it.

a: "Romana is in danger: will the Doctor rescue her?"

b: "Claws! A monster!"

c: "Those claws look a bit fake, but that's okay, because Doctor Who is my favourite programme, even though I know that it no longer has the Elusive Magic."

d: "Oh gosh, that monster looks ridiculous, everyone is going to take the piss out of me for liking Doctor Who on Monday morning."

e: "Ha! It was meant to look ridiculous, because it's only one of the Swampies in a monster suit. I win! Ha!"

You have to be a very good singer to make a joke about people who can't sing. Am-Dram groups have got to be very careful with A Midsummer Night's Dream: only very good actors can act acting so badly it's funny. Next week, we are going to see Kroll, and Kroll is going to be one of the least convincing monsters in a long history of unconvincing monsters. So a double feint involving a deliberately unconvincing squid is quite a risk to be taking. And it isn't even convincingly unconvincing. There have been serious Doctor Who monsters which look considerably dafter: the mushroom men in the Chase, the giant prawn in the Invisible Enemy and the Pantomime Horse in Warriors of the Deep, to name but several.

If the man-in-the-squid-suit had been the actual monster I would have known how to mount a defence. "Obvious theatrical iconography is better than failed realism" I would have said. "Doctor Who is much more like a quite good stage play than a very bad movie" I would have added. " As a costume, it isn't at all bad; and like Shakespeare told us, we should eke out their imperfections with our minds." None of which I could say with conviction about the giant split screen marionette. It's a decent model: but like Camelot, it's obviously only a model. The man-in-the-squid-suit could have stood as a symbol.

Perhaps that is Robert Holmes' point. Perhaps he is telling Graham Williams that "physically largest monster of all time" was a silly and impossible brief and they'd have been better off with tried and tested men in rubber suits. Just possibly, this was what Kroll had been originally envisaged to look like. It's quite an elaborate costume for half a minute of screen time.

Ranquin, the Swampie priest, says that "when the servants of Kroll assume his guise, they are part of him". That's not a terrible take on ritual magic. Your Frazers and your Campbells are full of examples of religious systems where "God" is whoever is dressed up as God this week. Human sacrifice isn't only about feeding pretty girls to carnivorous deities; it's also about an acolyte taking on the role of the God-King, sacramentally re-enacting his annual death to make sure that his annual resurrection happens next year. But that point would been better made if the costume had been more obviously symbolic; a tragic Athenian mask or a Hopi Kachina figure.

The Book of Exposition conveniently fills in the gaps in the back-story. It seems that Kroll became ginormous because he swallowed a "sacred relic" belonging to one of the previous High Priests. If the Doctor and Romana connect this with the Key to Time, they don't say so.

Douglas Adams' pitch document proposed various ways in which the Key might have made the Doctor's life difficult. And it is easy to see how the key swallowing squid could have caused the Doctor problems. The premise would be "What if the natives' deity drew its power from the key?" That would create a clear and interesting dilemma "How does the Doctor remove the key without depriving the natives of their perfectly harmless god?"

But this is distinctly not the direction the story goes in. The Doctor doesn't even say "The monster has swallowed the key: we'll have to stay here until we get it back." The Doctor and Romana stay on Delta Magna because they are the Doctor and Romana . The Key's only function is to act as the monster's achilles heel: in the final instalment, the Doctor uses the Tracer to reclaim the Key, reducing Kroll to normal squid size. Once again, the story seems to have gone to some effort to ensure that the Key doesn't make any difference whatsoever.

Power of Kroll was shown in the last weeks of 1978. King Kong was released in the spring of 1933. We are almost exactly as close in time to Power of Kroll as Power of Kroll was to King Kong.

Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara 

Available to Patreons  -- The Power of Kroll 

Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor

Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.

 

The Power of Kroll [2]

So: what is right with Power of Kroll?

It's a Robert Holmes story. It's well constructed. It's based on some solid world-building; with even a little smidgeon of political messaging in the background. (This was before wokeness.)

Take a look at Episode Four. We're in a high-tech installation on an alien planet. Human colonists are refining methane, possibly as a food source for their home world. The refinery is being menaced by that ridiculously gigantic squid. The commander of the refinery announces that he is going to nuke the squid from orbit, because that's the only way to be sure. But blowing up Kroll will also wipe out the swampies. 

There are a whole lot of wrinkles. The refinery crew come from Delta Magna: the action takes place on one of the planet's moons. But Delta Magna is itself an earth colony: Kroll and the swampies were displaced to the moon when the earth people arrived, some hundreds of years ago. Plans are underway to expand the refining operation, which would have destroyed the swampies' way of life in any case. 

A nasty gun-runner with what could be a South African accent is supplying the swampies with weapons to use against the colonisers. He's only in it for the money; the guns don't work. And it turns out that he's being paid, not by liberals on the home-world, but by Thawn, the Nasty Commander, to provide him with a pretext to massacre the natives. 

The methane that the colonists are refining is largely being generated by Kroll. (Did I mention that he is really a very large squid indeed?) So the thing which is threatening to destroy the refinery is the very thing which is keeping it going. How ironic! Or, put another way if Thawn destroys Kroll, he will put himself out of business. 

The swampies worship Kroll as a deity. Their leader, Ranquin, is either a religious fanatic or else a cynical politician using superstition to maintain his grip on the population. Or, possibly both. But Kroll is indifferent to the swampies. He's just a squid. (This was before Call of Cthulhu; although it was a long time after Call of Cthulhu.)

This is decent, interesting world-building. I was tempted to type "a complex scenario": it does indeed feel like the sort of thing I would have come up with in my Dungeons & Dragons days. Create a multi-sided conflict in which some sides are nastier than others. Draw a map, with areas marked "the swamp", "the refinery", "the underground passage" and "the temple". Drop the player characters into the middle of it, in such a way that they can't help but disrupt the equilibrium. See if they can navigate it without becoming squid-food. 

So. Thawn fires the nuclear missile at Kroll. But one of the crew, Duggen, reveals his hand. He is a liberal: a member of the Sons of Earth, a cult or pressure group which believes that all life is sacred because it began on Mother Earth. The idea, of "Earth" having a quasi-religious significance for the humans of a diaspora was previously touched on in the Sontaran Experiment. I don't think this implies that the two stories share a universe; merely that Robert Holmes re-used ideas.

Swamps are impassable to robots, so Duggen is played by voice-of-K9, John Leeson. The voice is not particularly recognisable; but something in his mannerisms kept putting me in mind of a children's TV presenter. I had, of course, forgotten that before Leeson was K-9, he had been Bungle the Bear. 

Thawn also reveals his hand: he is an out and out racist and doesn't regard the swampies lives as being of any value whatsoever. Thawn knocks Duggen out and proceeds with the launch. It is a well established fact in the Doctor Who universe that a single blow to the head instantly immobilises a person, but that the person "comes round" in a few minutes with no after-effects. Presumably, no-one involved has ever seen a boxing match. Duggen recovers; presses the Big Red Abort button; and is shot by Thawn. A third crew member, Fenner, accuses Thawn of murder, but reluctantly remains at his post. 

The whole of the story rotates around this scene. It's much more interesting than the human sacrifices, giant monsters and torture devices, because it's about characters doing things because they are the things those characters would do. Duggen and Thawn and Fenner have got points of view and beliefs. The Doctor is only peripherally involved: he has risked his life to disable the bomb; which ironically means that the Big Red Abort button had no effect and Duggen sacrificed himself for nothing. 

"Touch that button and I swear I will kill you" says Thawn. 

"Then kill me" says Duggen, "But you won't kill the others."

"That was cold blooded murder" says Fenner.

It's all terribly dramatic, albeit with a strong emphasis on the "melo". The elements of a decently constructed imaginary history intersect on a single choice by a single character. The Big Red Button is the same kind of thing as the Thermal Exhaust Port or the Golden Snitch. And the situation has some interesting, if not particularly subtle, parallels with the real world. An indigenous population have been displaced from their own land; and are about to be displaced a second time because their colonisers have found valuable minerals in their new home. The Doctor actually refers to the swampies as living in a reservation. And Thawn describes his missile attack as the final solution. (Did I mention that Doctor Who only became woke in 2017?) 

Robert Holmes is a very good writer. And one of the things he is very good at is silly, fiddly, playful dialogue. Think of Hade endlessly calling his boss "your amplification" and "your voluminousness" in Sun Makers. Think of the fussy aliens in Carnival of Monsters complaining that "if you give a functionary a hygiene chamber they will store fossil fuel in it" . Think of that line in Weng-Chiang about South East Asians marching toward Iceland. 

Maybe he was in a hurry. Maybe Graeme McDonald had told Graham Williams to tell Holmes that he wasn't allowed to do jokes. But there are no embellishments: no witty moments or memorable one-liners. There is some characterisation: Duggen nearly loses his temper when called back from his break, but just keeps himself under control and starts doing his job. Garron and Unstoffe (in Ribos Operation) are funny and likeable and well-acted: we'd happily have spent more time with them regardless of what they were doing in the story. Litefoot and Jago (in Talons of Weng-Chiang) were so amusing that they eventually got their own spin-off series. Thawn, Duggen and Fenner are simply the nasty-one, the nice-one and the in-between-just-doing-my-duty-one. They play their role in the story and nothing else. 

Dull stories are often saved by Tom Baker's personal magnetism; but this time, his improv seems to be kept on a tight leash. When the Doctor conveniently discovers a book which narrates the history of the Swampie tribe, Romana asks if it is "holy writ". "It's atrociously writ" replies the Doctor. This is just about as funny as it gets. When Romana and the Doctor were required to explain the plot of Pirate Planet, Douglas Adams made some attempt to make it funny. Holmes presents us with unpolished exposition:

--That shows them being evicted from Delta Magna

--Where they originally came from.

-- That's right. They were given this moon as a sort of reservation. 

and

--If a thing that size takes a nap every couple of centuries, its feeding processes must continue independently, probably through its tentacles.

 -- And Thawn's men vanished while they were taking methane samples, drilling into the sediment.

--Like prodding a sleeping tiger.

---The refinery's heat exchangers must have raised the lake temperature by several degrees already... 

David Fisher presented Tara as a fait accompli and proceeded to have fun with it -- poisonings and sword fights and ambushes and rescues. He never shows us how Tara came to be or how it works, because it obviously doesn't. Robert Holmes is interested in the set-up on Delta Magna: indeed, that's pretty much all he is interested in. The narrative development consists of gradual unveiling of the back story, and very little else. What action there is feels like padding.

Bad story? Bad Doctor Who story? Bad TV? It turns out that Plot, simply served up as Plot without any trimmings or flavourings, is really not very appetising.

In 1996, one Daniel Hooper was involved in a direct-action campaign to prevent a new road being built in an environmentally sensitive area. He would have been six years old when this story was transmitted.

Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara 

Available to Patreons  -- The Power of Kroll 

Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor

Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.

 

The Power of Kroll [1]

The Power of Kroll is not very good. 

The Power of Kroll, is, in fact, pretty bad.

The Power of Kroll is a pretty bad bit of TV, and it's a very bad Doctor Who story.

But what do we mean by "a bad Doctor Who story?" Do we mean that it is a Doctor Who story done badly -- a poor implementation of the kind of story which Doctor Who exists to tell? Do we mean that it is bad at being a Doctor Who story -- that it fails to understand the rules and doesn't do the kinds of things that Doctor Who is supposed to do?

Or do we mean that it is just outright bad -- that stories about superstitious natives sacrificing pretty ladies to monsters are inherently silly and not worth telling? Which comes perilously close to saying "Power of Kroll is bad because it is a Doctor Who story." Power of Kroll is bad because Doctor Who is bad.

What's wrong with Power of Kroll?

The monster, the giant squid, Kroll himself, is plainly ridiculous. But Power of Kroll is hardly the only Doctor Who story to be spoiled by a ridiculous monster. And Kroll isn't catastrophically misconceived, like the Nucleus of the Swarm or the Murker. And he isn't as jarringly terrible as the Weng-Chiang rat or the Kinda snake. He's just not particularly well done.

Classic monster movies like King Kong and Godzilla sometimes struggled to convince us that their model monsters and their human actors were part of the same world. Back projection used to inadvertently create an impression that there was an invisible glass wall separating Carl Denhem from the Stegosaurus. The Power of Kroll is not even that sophisticated: it uses a horizontal split screen; with a squid puppet waving its tentacles in the top half of the picture, and terrified extras running around the bottom half. No-one tries to convince us that the two elements are part of a single picture. Someone unfamiliar with 1970s TV could easily think that the producer was juxtaposing two different pieces of action for dramatic effect, like Ang Lee's art-house Hulk movie.

ITV used to use a split-screen to show us the two teams on University Challenge: some of us used to imagine that Trinity College Cambridge had climbed up a bunk-bed ladder to get into their kiosks. 

Then there are the Swampies. Alien humanoids, coded as "primitive" and "savage" (and not even particularly noble), they have green skins, and green braided hair attached to green shower caps. They look as if they might run a lucrative side-hassle selling tinned sweetcorn.

Green-face is not black-face. Having subjected us to Talons of Weng-Chiang two seasons ago, Robert Holmes resists any temptation to populate an entire planet with obvious racial stereotypes. But green make-up doesn't give the impression of someone with green skin. It gives the impression of someone who is wearing green make up. Tongues and mouths and eyes remain obstinately pink. It is perfectly clear what the green skin is a euphemism for; and even if you can get past that, it still looks ridiculous. 

It is said that the special soap which was supposed to clean the make-up off didn't work, and the actors had to deal with green bed linen and a sickly complexion for weeks afterwards. That sounds altogether too much like something out of a Jeeves and Wooster story. One that is generally omitted from modern collections, I understand. 

But both these issues could be trivially fixed. Imagine a version of the Power of Kroll from a world where the BBC had a higher budget and a bit more time on their hands. A little foliage and some model huts could have smoothed the join between the top of the screen and the bottom of the screen. It wouldn't have made Kroll look "real" but it would have helped us to suspend our disbelief. A more expensive make-up team could have done a better job on the swampies' faces. I imagine that in 1978 there were ways and means of making white skinned people look like green-skinned people, as opposed to people who have had an accident with a paint pot. 

They don't even necessarily have to be green. I don't think their colour is a plot point. There could have been some other signifier of not-humanness. They could have had pointy ears or ridges on their noses like every single alien in Star Trek. You could even have cast racially similar non-white actors in the roles. That would either have made the whole thing less racist; or else make the racism more obvious.

As long as we are playing mind-games, let's go further. Let's get rid of Tony Harding's marionette squid altogether, and replace it with a modern computer generated special effect. Doubtless CGI and green screen is just as artificial as stop-motion and back projection. The End of the World is already starting to look a little clunky and dated. So is Toy Story, sadly. But it's kind of what we expect Doctor Who monsters to look like nowadays; it wouldn't scream "look at me I'm a terrible special effect" in quite the same way. While you're at it, fire the entire swampie cast and replace them with green-face computer smurfs, like the Na'Vi in Avatar.

There are a couple of other issues, but they can all be fixed. The electrical storm looks like the opening credits of Thunderbirds; the alien methane refinery looks like an Airfix oil rig and we keep seeing tentacles which are pretty obviously not to scale with the rest of the monster. All of that can be fixed, in our heads, if not in an actual Special Edition. Ian Levine is probably working on an AI version as we speak. 

So: in our heads, we have ironed out all the flaws. We can now sit back and enjoy the Power of Kroll as the classic classic Doctor Who tale it so clearly is.  

James Burke voice: "Or can we?"

Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara 

Available to Patreons  -- The Power of Kroll 

Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor

Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.

 

Androids of Tara [3]

There is a moment in the Fawlty Towers episode 'The Kipper and the Corpse' when Polly refuses to be part of one of Basil Fawlty's face-saving schemes. "If you want to be a Marx Brothers movie, that's up to you..." she tells him. She is thinking of Love Happy which did, among other things involve the concealment of a dead body. It also, entirely irrelevantly, featured an early walk-on by a so-credited Norma-Jean Monroe.

It's a curious moment of lucidity. Polly is the one naturalistic character in a world of extremes and grotesques; she anchors the sit-com in reality. But at this one moment, she seems to see what is happening: she understands that she is the straight woman in a farce, and she tries to run away from it. If she had actually been in a Marx Brothers movie, she wouldn't have known. The boys were at their best when they brought their mayhem to melodramatic storylines which were played relatively straight: surrounded by politicians, opera impresarios and police officers who don't know that a Marx Brothers movie was what they were in. Margaret Dupont based a career on never seeing the joke. (As a matter of fact, she saw it very well.)

Tom Baker, with his grin and his hair and his pockets and his props, is often compared with Harpo Marx. The duel with Grendel in Episode Four of Androids of Tara strongly recalls Harpo's duel with "Kurt" in Night at Casablanca, particularly in the early scenes where he is nonchalantly fending off the sword-master's attacks. The BBC have borrowed a nice castle for the actors to run around, but it can't afford enough cameras or editors or stunt-men to stage a really impressive cinematic sword-fight. So, pretty sensibly, they make it about character: the villain is villainous while the hero won't take the villain seriously.

If you want to press the point, you could say that the Doctor's repartee and one-liners come out of Groucho's play-book -- although without Julius Marx's quick wit, they tend slightly more to cynicism. And I suppose Chico was often portrayed as a good-natured hobo, drifting from job to job and generally coming to the aid of some innocent party. Which may make Romana Zeppo.

The Doctor goes fishing. He goes fishing on Prince Reynart's land. The novelisation says that he doesn't have a licence. Zadek the sword-master zaps him with his electric lightsabre and tries to physically restrain him.

 

"Do you mind not standing on my chest?" says the Doctor "My hat's on fire."

Did that line come from David Fisher, the skilled TV script writer? Was it an addition by script editor Anthony Read who we suspect approves of silliness and is functioning as a proto-Douglas? Or did it arise from Tom Baker's disruptive, Marxist foolery? Is the actor not taking his role seriously? The script editor not taking the script seriously? Or was the script not very serious to begin with?

I was once lucky enough to watch Tom recording an audio episode (Hornets Nest). On the day I was in the studio, he was convinced that the line "Benton, lend me your handkerchief!" would be hugely improved if he was allowed to change it to "Benton, lend me your trousers!" ("What's wrong with trousers? Go to the BBC and you'll find it's full of people wearing trousers!") He was entirely professional and allowed himself to be overruled by the producer and the script writer, and of course, audio allows for a lot more improv than TV. But it is clear that the Fourth Doctor is sometimes created in the moment by Tom Baker.

The Doctor wants to be a Marx Brothers movie. He's the anarchic, farcical element erupting into a TV show and a universe which takes itself far too seriously. Next season he will be cut lose. The season after that, a new producer will ask him politely if he wouldn't mind sticking to the script. And the whole show will unravel.

William Hartnell put his back out and missed Episode Four of the Dalek Invasion of Earth. (Also Episode Three of The Tenth Planet, and nearly the whole of Celestial Toymaker.) Frazer Hines caught chicken pox and was temporarily recast during the Mind Robber. William Russell ceded a whole episode of Sir Lancelot to Brian the squire; Bud Collyer spent a whole week locked in a box with a lump of Kryptonite. So perhaps, in the world of counterfactuals, the Doctor really did just go fishing and Romana really did carry the whole of Androids of Tara by herself. She went into the adventure full of confidence; gradually got into more and more trouble; escaped by the skin of her teeth; realised that being the Doctor was not nearly as easy as it looked; but still reported back to the TARDIS saying how straightforward it had all been.

But in our universe, that is not what happened. What happens is that Romana goes for a pleasant stroll. Androids of Tara is filmed on location in the grounds of Leeds Castle; so we have to swallow an alien planet which looks like an English Heritage site. But at least it looks consistently like an English Heritage site: there is no jumping between BBC sets and location shots, no juxtaposing of interiors and exteriors. In those innocent days when no-one could flip the channel or look down at their phones, the director is allowed to linger on the visuals, and there is a picture postcard loveliness to many of the scenes. Romana in silhouette trips through the woods and over some stepping stones. One almost thinks of Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin.

She comes upon a statue. St George and the Dragon, or St Michael and Satan, or the Taran equivalent thereof. The dragon part of the statue if the Fourth Segment. Romana changes it to the puzzle-piece, and picks it up. And there you have it: all done and dusted in eight minutes.

"Romana locates the fourth segment of the key to time with ease" says the Radio Times.

And again, skip through the path we did not take and through the door we never opened. Romana takes Segment Four back to the Doctor. She joins him on his picnic. There were episodes of Z-Cars and Hill Street Blues in which the protagonists sat around waiting for a 999 call that never came. Whole dramas have been based on that kind of premise. A layabout sanitation engineer and a hard light hologram, sitting under a tree, filling the time waiting for someone they know will never arrive. The Doctor and Romana's dialogue would have been funny enough to fill an episode. The BBC has never gone in for clip-shows; but maybe the Doctor and Romana could have traded flash-backs about past adventures?

Of course, this isn't what happened. Probably no-one watching even noticed that the premise of Doctor Who was being mucked around with. No-one expects post-modernism in the gap between Larry Grayson and Basil Brush.

What if they gave a Doctor Who story and no-one came? What if the Doctor and Romana simply opted out of the plot? Romana is attacked by literally the worst monster ever to appear on Doctor Who. To call it a Muppet would be overgenerous: it looks as if it is going to demand a bowl of Sugar Puffs. And suddenly a caricature knight, with a helmet and a literally flashing blade pops up and scares it away. The Doctor has told Romana to be the hero of this week's story; but she falls straight back into the role of damsel in distress. Count Grendel (for it is he) literally lifts her up in his arms and carries her back to his castle of evilness. Before long, she is tied up and his android engineer is about to cut her head off with a buzz-saw. (She draws a dotted line on her neck to make it easier.) Romana, to her credit again, doesn't scream; she is as disdainful of the proceedings as the Doctor would have been under the circumstances.

Meanwhile, the Doctor falls in with Reynart's people. They are definitely nicer than Grendel's team; but the Doctor is uninterested in the power struggles on Tara. He keeps trying to leave; but Reynart's faction refuse to let him go.

What would happen if the Doctor and Romana opted out of the plot? Then the plot would have to come and grab them. Just as it has every Saturday for the last fifteen years.

In Episode 4, the Doctor, passing through Grendel's android laboratory, picks up something and puts it in his pocket. As they are about to leave, Romana suddenly admits that she has forgotten the Key to Time: exactly what she accused the Doctor doing in Episode 1. After a brief panic, it turns out that the key was what the Doctor picked up in the lab. Fisher, like Adams, is an honourable scriptwriter who believes in fair-play foreshadowing.

The message could hardly be less subtle. The Umbrella Theme was a terrible idea. No-one cares about the meta-plot. The last thing Doctor Who ever needed was a McGuffin.

A guard with a crossbow walks across a castle wall on a moonlit night. A man paddles a boat across the moat. Two double doors swing open; a man in a red uniform holding a helmet strides through and addresses a hunch-back.

"There must be no hitches"

"No master."

We could absolutely be watching a BBC 1 teatime historical serial. Except for one thing. The man in the boat has a silly scarf. And a robot dog.

Androids of Tara is not a Doctor Who story. But at this point in the show's trajectory, the word "story" hardly applies. The story -- personified by the Guardian -- is the adversary; the thing which the Baker-Doctor rejects and refuses to take seriously. The plot is a boundary for the Doctor to push against; the universe is his straight man. Not exactly self parody. Not exactly camp. Joyful, mad, incongruous absurdity. Anthony Hope with Robots.

One of these things is not like the other one.

"Could you move your foot; my hats on fire."  The BBC did Prisoner of Zenda straight in 1984: I bet it was no where near this much fun.

Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara 

Available to Patreons  -- The Power of Kroll 

Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor

Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.

 

Androids of Tara [2]

As the curtain rises on Episode One, the Doctor is playing chess. Not deep in concentration across a table, but lolling on the floor of the TARDIS, one end of his scarf wrapped around K-9.

There is no reason for the scarf to be wrapped around the dog: the Doctor has done it pointlessly, like a teenager wearing his school tie as a headband. He's being more than usually petulant. He makes a rude face at K-9 after making what he thinks is a clever move. He patronises K-9 when the robot makes what he considers to be a terrible one. When, inevitably, the Doctor loses, he unsportingly claims that chess is predictable and uninteresting.

We saw the same dynamic at the beginning of the Sunmakers. K-9 is good at chess and the Doctor is a bad loser. We're on K-9 and Romana's side: it's funny when the show-off Doctor is hoisted on his own multi-coloured petard. But one can't help thinking that the format is undermining the hero.

Why chess? Is this week's story going to be about whether it is better to follow textbook tactics or think outside the box? Is it going to be about the limits of artificial intelligence -- about whether organic life-forms can out-think artificial ones? Will we see the people of the universe reduced to pawns in a game between the Black Guardian and the White?

None of the above. In fact, the chess game has no relevance to the rest of the action. It's filler; there to represent down-time. George Lucas also showed an alien playing chess with a machine in order to indicate a transition between two adventures. Chewbacca, like the Doctor, is a terrible loser.

It's also there to indicate the Doctor's mood. The Doctor is signalling to Romana -- and to the White Guardian, if he is watching -- that he is bored with the quest and wants to opt out of it. And David Fisher is making very much the same point to us viewers; and very possibly to Graham Williams as well. The Key to Time theme has been an abject failure; and we're all heartily sick of it. Androids of Tara is about what happens when the hero (and the writer) opt out of the meta-plot. The Doctor is playing chess at Romana. One thinks of Marvin phoning up Zaphod in order to wash his head at him.

*

In Stones of Blood, the voice of the White Guardian popped up in the TARDIS to remind us that Season 16 was all about the Key To Time. In Androids of Tara, it falls to Romana to do so. And she uses some very interesting language:

"Aren't you forgetting something."

"I don't think so."

"What about our task. The Key to Time, remember?"

"Oh that old thing."

"Yes, that old thing. The Guardian did stress the need for urgency." 

The idea of the Doctor forgetting -- or pretending to forget -- his mission is distinctly odd. I suppose Sir Galahad might conceivably have said "My task is to find the Holy Grail" and Princess Leia might possibly have said  "My task is to deliver the secret plans". But it is strange for the Doctor to describe the quest for the Key to Time as a "task" -- as if saving the universe from eternal chaos is a chore; a bit of busy-work that he can't quite be bothered to get around to. He calls the most powerful artefact in the universe "that old thing". Arthur Dent used the same words to describe the eponymous Guide.

In previous seasons, the Doctor has been motivated by his innate sense of right and wrong; and his innate wish to find things out. But he doesn't have "missions" or "tasks": he wanders the universe quixotically getting involved in whatever is happening. When he is given a mission, by the Time Lords or the Brigadier, he resists it and complains about it. Going around the universe collecting plot coupons -- however valuable -- is a chore.

And it's a chore for the writers too. We can see Mr Fisher and Mr Holmes reluctantly working the Key into their stories, before getting on with the tale they would have told in any case. Only Douglas Adams seemed interested in finding ways to use the Key as a jumping off point for a narrative that wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been there.

So. The Doctor goes on strike. He opts out of the story. He delegates the job of finding the Fourth Segment to Romana. She has been acting as a kind of stand-in Doctor for the past twelve weeks in any case. He announces that he is going to go fishing and leave her to it.

Romana doesn't know what fishing is. Are there no fish on Gallifrey? Not even singing ones, in pools of liquid gold? Or are Time Lords vegetarians -- or opposed to even the mildest of bloodsports? (Romana has also never heard of horses.) The Doctor claims to have learned about fishing from Isaac Walton -- of course -- so maybe the sport is unique to earth. For once, he doesn't say that he taught Walton all he knew, so perhaps this particular name-drop is even true. On the other hand, Romana appears to be a pretty advanced chess player, able to spot checkmate a dozen moves ahead by glancing at the board. Is she so brilliant -- is chess so simple? -- that she can play like a master after observing a single game? Or is chess another of the things that humans learned from Gallifrey?

Romana goes to a wardrobe and selects a new dress. The Doctor goes to a cupboard and selects a fishing rod. Romana's cupboard contains a selection of clothes, in alphabetical order; the Doctor's, naturally, is full of junk. 

Why do we need to see where the Doctor got his fishing rod, or indeed, where Romana got her frock? Last week, the Doctor produced a lawyer's wig out of thin air: if he had just emerged from the TARDIS with a fishing rod in his hand, we wouldn't have questioned it. When we first met Romana, she was wearing an elegant but impractical white gown. We didn't particularly wonder where she got the more sensible pink dress she was wearing in the Pirate Planet. But David Fisher apparently did wonder, because he dropped a tiny "Romana gets changed" sequence into Stones of Blood. She asks the Doctor if he likes her natty peach trouser-suit: the Doctor, of course, ignores her. So in this story, we actually see her choosing her dress.

I remember a bit of ephemera: a strip in a Countdown or TV Comic Summer Special in which the Third Doctor asks Jo Grant to change her clothes before travelling to the Olden Days. "My own clothes are suitable for any time period" he explained. Which makes sense. The Fourth Doctor's get-up is presumably equally inappropriate wherever he goes in the universe. 

It lampshades a problem that has never occurred to us before. very like Sarah-Jane suddenly wondering how she understands renaissance Italian. Maybe the same Time Lord Gift ensures that travellers always blend in with their surroundings. Or maybe it's a mechanism of the TARDIS: the Tomorrow People used to have Chameleon Circuits fitted into their spacesuits, I seem to remember. Back in the day, we tackled the question of "what does the Doctor eat" -- the TARDIS has a futuristic replicator which produces food-flavoured tablets. Much later, we learned that the TARDIS had a bathroom; although not, of course, a bathroom. The TARDIS was never just a travelling device: it is clear in Unearthly Child that the Doctor and Susan regard it as their home.

So: there could have been a futuristic Clothes Replicator which materialised genre-appropriate costumes at the push of a button. It could have been called the Loom. And I expect that canon-conscious fans would say that it does. The TARDIS can be what it likes, inside and outside, and it just so happens that, this week, the Time Lord Clothing Loom Interface has been configured to look like an old fashioned wardrobe. The console room in New New New Who seems to reconfigure itself on a season-by-season basis. 

But to me, that spoils the moment. Old Who is at its most sensible when it least makes sense. The TARDIS is a magic box, but it's also a rickety old machine that doesn't quite work. It's a piece of fabulously advanced Galifreyan technology; but it's also a sprawling, Hogwartian Gormenghast.

It certainly does have a wardrobe: Sarah-Jane once found one of Victoria's old dresses there. She also found a whole room full of wellington boots. The very first time we saw the interior, there were antique chairs, hatstands, and what looked like a wooden peacock positioned around the ultra-tech console. The TARDIS is very big, and the Doctor has been travelling for a very long time so of course he has acquired a lot of stuff. We first met him in a junk yard.

The final episodes of Invasion of Time weren't a one-off aberration. That's now what the TARDIS looks like. It's not a spaceship or a machine; it's where the Doctor and Romana go when they are not in a story. There is a sense that we are peeling away a backdrop, looking at a shabby bag-stage reality. Chess, fishing, clothes, bickering. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they are killing time until the writer thinks up something for them to do.

It's silly. It will get sillier. It could validly be seen as undermining or parodying the premise of the show. Up until Ribos Operation there was a viewpoint character, a human in the TARDIS. Now there is the Doctor and the lady Doctor. So if we get to glimpse their off-stage existence, it has to be weird, surreal, ridiculous. Soon enough, things will swing the other way and Peter Davison will reduce the TARDIS to a time travelling Premier Inn. 

There was a popular children's TV series about a little man who tried on historical costumes; and found himself transported back in time to the period of the clothes: the Wild West if he was trying on a cowboy suit; Ancient Rome if he was trying on a toga.

"Romana gets changed." At the beginning of the next series, we will see Romana emerging from a changing room in a series of different bodies.

Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara 

Available to Patreons  -- The Power of Kroll 

Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor

Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.

Androids of Tara [I]

No corridors. No invasions. No space ships. There is one more than usually ridiculous monster -- which gets only thirty seconds of screen time and could just as well have been a wolf or a boar. No ray-guns. There are swords which zap people with electricity, but it isn't clear why: everything would have come out the same if they had just been swords. But there are Androids. So we know we are watching science fiction and not, say, an affectionate parody of a famous swashbuckling novel.

We're on the planet Tara. The technology is clearly early-modern: crossbows and horses and fireplaces and castle gates which operate on winch systems. But there are also super-advanced robots which are indistinguishable from humans. One waits in vain for the big reveal: has the Key to Time gifted Tara with super-tech? Have they somehow salvaged robots and zap-swords from the remnant of a previous civilisation? Are we, perchance, inside a Westworld simulation of an Errol Flynn movie?

There are hints. We're told that only peasants know how to build and repair androids; and the Evil Count's chief android-wrangler has strange markings on her face. That could be a hint that she's an alien. We are very briefly told that Tara started to use androids to replace people after a plague. But where did the technology come from? Did the peasants develop advanced science while the nobles cos-played court politics? The Evil Count claims not to know how horses "work" ("I'm a knight, not a farrier") which makes us think for a moment that the planet's livestock are going to turn out to be robots as well. The novel suggests that the Very Silly Monster is a robot.

The Doctor says at one point that androids dislike people as much as people dislike androids. Later on he says that the robot duplicate of the Good Prince is cleverer than the actual Prince. But there is no sign of the androids having sentience or agency. These aren't the art-deco serving caste on the Sandminer; they are more like the Kraal's artificial human duplicates. Or perhaps even like the Nestene's shop-window dummies. Certainly, the Doctor has no moral compunctions about destroying or dismantling them.

The story is not interested in why there are androids. The story is not even interested in the fact that there are androids. The androids are there only to be decoys, doppelgängers and doubles. To be plot devices in a Wurwitanian Womance.

*

If you asked a hundred and seventy six Doctor Who fans what they thought of Androids of Tara, then a hundred and fifty eight of them would say "Well, it's a fun story, but it's not really a Doctor Who story."
To which the only response is to stroke one's beard, tap one's pipe and say thoughtfully "Well, it depends what you mean by 'a Doctor Who story'..."

What do we mean by a Doctor Who story? When we think of Doctor Who, we probably think of a story in which a flamboyantly dotty science boffin and some English squaddies fend off an alien invasion in front of some famous London landmarks. Or else we think of a story in which a wild Bohemian man-child strides along a fake corridor pursued by homicidal muppets. Which is to say: we think of a Season 8 story (Jon Pertwee, Jo Grant, and the Brigadier) or a Season 17 story (Tom Baker, Romana II and K-9.) And if that is what we mean by a Doctor Who story, then Androids of Tara quite definitely isn't one.

But Doctor Who didn't start with the Invasion or the Silurians or Nightmare of Eden. It started with the Tribe of Gum and Marco Polo and the Reign of Terror. Terrance Dicks used to say that Auntie Beeb invented Doctor Who to entice the kiddies into paying attention to their history lessons. Seduce the little'uns with giant insects and flying saucers, but feed them Aztecs and Crusaders. And yes, indeed, olden days BBC had a mandate to Educate as well as to Inform and Entertain. Blue Peter used to interview boy-band heart-throbs on their way through to Top of the Pops, and segue straight to a picture story about Florence Nightingale or the Tolpuddle Martyrs. Pausing only to step in some elephant mess. ("And now, over to Val.") But the idea that Doctor Who was invented specifically in order to teach the kids history seems to be an urban myth.

Still: twelve out of the first thirty stories were set in the past. And all but one of those stories was purely historical: there was no science fiction element apart from the presence of time travellers from the future. (The exception, the Time Meddler, involved a second Time Lord buggering around with Earth history.)

Subsequently, "historical" adventures came to mean stories about alien invasions and time travelling war criminals that happened to be set in the past rather than the present or the future. And they became rarer and rarer. Doctor Jon visited the Olden Days once, fighting Sontarans in the Dark Ages. Doctor Tom only had one story, Masque of Mandragora, in the properly olden days, although he did do Victorian times once and Edwardian times twice. In the final years, there was generally one historical story per season: John Nathan-Turner was quite proud of the fact that Black Orchid was a period whodunnit with no science fiction element, although it did use the TARDIS extensively as a plot device. The last purely historical story, the Highlanders, was transmitted in 1968, well within living fan-memory when Androids of Tara came out.

I've argued that Stones of Blood is a parody of a Doctor Who story: a sequence of tropes with very little coherent narrative stringing them together. Which makes it very tempting to say that David Fisher, a decent enough script-writer but no Whovian, was given Androids of Tara as a consolation prize. He shunted the Doctor and Romana sideways into an entirely different genre -- one that he was much more comfortable with.

But that doesn't quite work. Because the "entirely different genre" is quite clearly historical fiction (with the merest fig leaf of science fictional gloss) and historical fiction is where Doctor Who started. Stones of Blood may have been a parody; but Doctor Who had been teetering on the edge of self parody for three seasons, parrots and space marines and Time Lord newscasters and all. So an anti-Doctor-Who story arguably takes us back to something much more like what Doctor Who originally was. Intrigue and betrayal. Sword fights on the battlements. An historical costume drama in all but name. A return to the infinitely remote monochrome world of very nearly ten years ago when Doctor Who still retained its Elusive Magic.

*

So: we have Prince Reynart, the good guy, impossibly handsome and prone to say things like "How dare you lay hands on a lady!" We have Count Grendel, the bad guy, impossibly evil and prone to say things like "I will have you flogged and don't imagine that I won't!"

Baddies always seem to be Counts in this sort of thing, don't they? I suppose that's because no such rank exists in the English aristocratic system. Bram Stoker has a good deal to answer for. Peter Jefferey's Grendel doesn't look entirely unlike Christopher Guests's Count Rugens. Neville Jason doesn't look entirely unlike Cary Elwes, come to that. (This was before the Princess Bride.)

Prince Reynart is due to be crowned King; and Grendel is planning to murder him on the way to the coronation. But the good guys have a robot duplicate of Reynart, which they plan to use as a decoy to foil the assassination attempt. The bad guys have an android which looks exactly like Princess Strella, who is second in line to the throne. Grendel is planning to forcibly marry the android. Or force the prince to marry it. Something dastardly, at any rate. Due to a huge and unexplored coincidence, the Princess Strella, and the android Princess Strella, both look exactly like Romana. Mary Tamm only gets one credit, though. [1]

In Episode Four one of Reynart's merry men describes the castle where the coronation will take place as "Tara itself". I suppose there is no particular reason why you shouldn't name a castle after a planet. Equally, there is no reason you might not name a planet after a castle. The British Galactic Empire might decide that Planet Earth is henceforth to be known as Planet Buckingham Palace. Elon Musk might build an opulent dwelling on his space colony and name it Mars Mansion.

But in point of fact, this remark is part of the fossilised remains of an earlier script, in which the Prince was going to have travelled from his home planet to a totally different planet in order to get crowned. The planet he travelled to, Tara, was possibly going to have overtones of Irish Folklore.

Had this plan gone forward, the Prince's original planet would have been called Zend. Or possibly even Zenda. "The Androids of Zenda" was even a working title for the story.  Anthony Hope only died in 1933, so from a copyright point of view, this would have been rather courageous. But no-one has the slightest interest in concealing the tale's source material. When the Doctor hears of the scheme to substitute the robot prince for the original, he says sagely "Well, it's been done before."

*

So: Romana is captured by Count Grendel, the baddie. The Doctor is the unwilling ally of Prince Reynart, the goodie. He is persuaded to repair the Prince's android double, which has been malfunctioning. The plan seems foolproof: all seems ready for the coronation. So everyone (including the Doctor) drinks a toast. There is just that little bit too much emphasis on the quality of the wine.

Sinister music plays. The Prince looks at his wine. He falls unconscious across the table. The Prince's swordsman, Farrah, draws his weapon, and collapses. Swordsman Zadek is clearly not so good at taking theatrical falls, so he slumps unconscious onto a chair. You half expect Percy and Baldrick to run in shouting "Don't drink the wine". (This was before Black Adder.) The Doctor looks very mildly surprised, and cracks a weak joke. ("Potent stuff".)

And then we see Grendel standing in the doorway.

I was about to type "This is genuinely dramatic" or "This is a good twist", but neither of those things would be quite true. It's cheesy, melodramatic, and predictable. But we've swiftly moved from laughing at the theatricality of the poisoning -- and smugly nodding along with the Doctor when he takes the rise out of it -- to laughing with the scene: because the arrival of Grendel is so obviously and exactly the precise thing that we would expect to happen at this point in a story of this kind. On one level, his arrival has derailed the plot, as all good cliffhangers should. The question is no longer "How do the goodies get the Prince to his coronation in safety?" It is now "How do the goodies stage a coronation with no Prince?" But on another, it has directed the plot in precisely the direction it was always bound to go in. Reynart is now the The Prisoner of Tara; and the good guys are going to try and get his double crowned king.

[1] Of all the planets in all the universe, the fourth segment just happened to be hidden on the one which had an exact likeness of Romana living on it. Perhaps Romana was recruited for precisely that reason? Interestingly, at the beginning of next season, Romana is going to casually regenerate into the form of another Princess, Princess Astra of Atrios. Did the White Guardian, in fact, ask her to wear Strella's body for the duration of the mission, and allow her to choose another one when it was over?

Available to Patreons -- The Androids of Tara 

Available to Patreons  -- The Power of Kroll 

Available to Patreons -- The Armageddon Factor

Or read my compleat Key To Time essays in PDF booklet.

Deadpool vs Wolverine

First X-Men movie; first modern superhero movie; first summer of the second millennium. Our mutated heroes go into action in smart shiny leather uniforms. Logan the cool tough one with claws demurs; and Cyclops, the strait laced one says "Would you prefer yellow spandex?"

Wind forward a quarter of a century. 

My life flashes before me like Huge Ackman's showreel over the closing credits. Seven years old: Grandad brought me a Spider-Man comic and no-one in the world knew who Spider-Man was. Eleven years old: Nicholas Hammond is on the TV and Don McClean and Peter Glaze are making jokes about the Incredible Hulk. Twenty three years old: Watchmen and Dark Knight: zap kapow comics aren't just for kids any more. Early middle age: SIR Patrick Stewart and SIR Ian McKellen are openly treating mutants as a metaphor for Dr Martin Luther King. Samuel L Jackson pops up at the end of a Hulk movie and births the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The Guardian's actual proper grown up movie critic compares Avengers: Endgame with Sophocles. And suddenly I'm sitting in a movie house full of old people watching a movie entirely made up of comic book in-jokes. Comic book in-jokes and jokes about wanking and blow jobs. Comic book in-jokes, jokes about wanking and blow jobs and incredibly over the top violence. And Wolverine actually is wearing yellow Spandex.

How could you do this? How could you take a story which is of such very deep importance to millions and millions of people and use it as a vehicle for fifth rate undergraduate humour?

No, I'm sorry. That was Malcolm Muggeridge talking about Life of Brian.

Think of it: through the golden years of Marvel Comics, the whole Stan and Steve and Jack era -- there was no such character as Wolverine. Wolverine is from a historical perspective a johnny-come (fnarr-fnarr) lately. But if there had been no Wolverine there would have been no Chris Claremont, and if there had been no Chris Claremont the Marvel universe would have trundled to an end before the 80s were out and the Marvel Cinematic Universe would never have existed.

"This movie acknowledges Len Wein, for the significant contribution he made to the X-Men ."

Well, quite.

I'm truthfully not sure that I can remember who Deadpool originally was. I think I saw the first movie, though not the second one. I think he started life as a perfectly serious second tier X-Men bad guy? (But then Wolverine started life as a perfectly serious second tier Hulk bad guy.) He pretty rapidly became a meta fourth-wall breaking har-har stop it you're killing me spoof character. The most recent graphic novel has him invading the cover of a Classics Illustrated edition of Tom Sawyer.

Yeah, meta-textuality and deconstruction. Grant Morrison did it very well in Animal Man. Chuck Jones did it in Daffy Duck. John Byrne's She Hulk knew she was in a comic, could comment on the cliches of the genre, an on one occasion, escaped from the baddies by tearing through the page and running across a spread of adverts. She does a similar trick in the TV show, getting out of the episode and running through the Disney+ menu screen. Deadpool's whole existence is a commentary on Deadpool. No scene passes without him pointing out that someone is doing exposition or that such-and-such an object is a McGuffin and that the people being killed are only extras. When he does, finally, fight Wolverine, he not only tells us that this is the scene we bought our tickets to see, but that "nerds will be getting out their special sock".

Did you get that, guys? You bought a ticket for the movie and the main character just called you a wanker. Except, obviously, he meant present company accepted: it's everyone else in the cinema apart from you who is going to enjoy the big fight scene in exactly the wrong way.

A lot of Radio 4 sketch comedy writers have a fallback gag in which characters in some TV show comment explicitly on the conventions of the genre that they are in. You know the kind of thing. "I'm going to drink half a bottle of whisky before the big match, because this is a sports movie and I'm the one with inner demons." It can be perfectly funny. I am fond of John Finnemore's cynical hard bitten won't play by the rules store detective trying to work out who stole the jaffa cakes from the biscuit aisle. The famous Mitchell and Webb "are we the baddies?" skit is a smarter take on the same joke. But it's a bit obvious. Even a bit cynical.

Deadpool vs Wolverine is just an incredibly cynical piece of film making. Which is not to say that it isn't funny: it is funny, very funny indeed in places. And I'm not saying that it isn't entertaining: it's lively and inventive and I was never bored, although, like many superhero movies, a certain desperation sets in when the last plot thread is tied off and you realise there is still forty minutes to go. The action sequences in serious action movies have become so unreal and  so over the top that parodying them or exaggerating them seems gratuitous; but the fight scenes in Deadpool vs Wolverine (and there is hardly anything but fight scenes) are kinetic and exhilarating and ludicrous and very, very, very, violent. Deadpool and Wolverine are both indestructible, and spend much of the movie sticking claws and katanas into each others face, arse, and groin with very little ill-effect. It's graphic enough to merit a 15 cert but honestly feels more like a Road Runner cartoon than a video nasty. I remember when you couldn't legally buy the Lone Wolf and Cub movie in this country because of all the tomato ketchup.

I kept thinking of Kick Ass, in which the violence made you wince and an eight year old girl said "cunt" and which still ended up feeling like a joyous love-letter to comic books.

The meta-in-jokes are very meta, very in-, very clever and very, very funny. We get a forced perspective Huge Ackman, because at one point Wolverine was said to be very short; we get a drunk Wolverine going by the name of Patch, because in the 1980s mini-series he used that identity; we get a Wolverine standing in front of a graffiti strewn post-apocalyptic wall because Days of Future Past. (We get jokes about Huge Ackman's singing career.)  After about ten minutes it all becomes a bit relentless and over-whelming and exhausting. Like being beaten not unpleasurably over the head with the Complete Handbook to the Marvel Universe.

In the 50s and 60s there was an academic thing called New Criticism which said that you had to look at the actual texts of poems and plays, and talk about the actual words on the page and damn what the author might have meant by them. Damn, indeed, the whole concept of the author and the whole concept of a world outside the book. I have often thought that modern science fiction franchises could provide a test case for this kind of thinking. Is Ahsoka intelligible if you have never seen a Star Wars cartoon? Is the Acolyte intelligible if you didn't know there was such a thing as Star Wars? It is probably feasible to watch a cowboys in space TV show and tacitly say things like "This is obviously a good guy, who has presumably had previous adventures which I don't know about; and the guy with the black cloak is obviously a bad guy who she's encountered in the past." You probably don't miss too much watching in that spirit. You might miss some nuances if you didn't know who Anakin was. But I must admit that I have sometimes been put off watching new episodes of Marvel TV shows (I am looking at you, Secret Invasion) because I have lost track of who everyone is and don't have time to put in the necessary homework. 

Do you need to know who Gambit is to understand the scene with Gambit in it? Probably not: he's introduced as a French superhero with magic playing cards, and  that's really the only thing you need to know about him. For the purposes of the scene she appears in, Elektra is a tough martial arts lady with not enough clothes on; you don't specially need to know that she's Daredevil's lover and a key player in ninja politics and once recovered from her death. Although for those of us who were traumatised by Daredevil #181, the reduction of Elektra to a tough martial arts lady seems a bit of a shame. A bald telepathic lady bad guy turns out to be related to a bald telepathic male good guy. Probably the scene loses some of its sting if you're reaction is "Who is this Charles Xavier of which you speak?" But you can deduce from internal evidence that Wolverine had a very close relationship with the baddies brother and feels he let him down, which is strictly speaking all you need to know. (Did Prof X have an evil twin in any of the comics? I know he had an evil step-brother who smashes through walls a lot. It may not matter.) A huge punch line depends on the fact that we, and therefore Deadpool, assume that a certain famous actor is cameoing in a particular role which he is very strongly associated with; but turns out to be playing a different role he is associated with much less strongly. If you don't know, you don't know. But then if you don't know you probably don't know you don't know. He swears a lot and dies in a particularly horrible way.

I don't know how comfortable I am with the idea of a cool psychotic mercenary with a soft interior, and I absolutely grant that that's the whole point of the movie. It's not like "charming bastard" is a particularly new idea. James Bond was a charming bastard; so was Han Solo. So is Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy and so is the Chris Pine character in the much-better-than-it-ought-to-have-been Dungeons & Dragons movie. (Peter Quill's name literally and intentionally means "prick".) I preferred D&D: it is quite clear that Edgin is a good guy pretending to be a cynic; where there is a suspicion that we are supposed to think Star Lord is cool because he is an immoral psychopath. Deadpool is vulgar and psychotic and cynical but he likes kids and puppies and sacrifices himself to save the universe. (SPOILER: He gets better.) But he kills a lot of people a long the way. A lot. I bet there is a trivia page where someone has worked out the body-count.

The movie insulates itself against criticism. It's in terrible, offensively poor taste: but it's supposed to be. It's cynical and amoral and undercuts the whole genre it's celebrating -- but it's supposed to be. To complain about it is to reveal yourself as a humourless old such-and-such. The opening scene -- in which Deadpool overtly asks if the film is going to respect the memory of Logan and proceeds to desecrate his corpse, comprehensively, literally, and in slow motion, is a masterpiece of terrible taste.

Fuck the whole idea of the multiverse. No, that isn't nearly vulgar enough for a Deadpool review. "Give the multi-verse a blow-job up the arse while suffering from an incurable sexually transmitted disease." The many worlds hypothesis has some narrative uses: of course it does. It's fun to jump timelines to universes where Hitler won the war; where all the mutants have been exterminated; or where Superman landed in Weston Super-Mare as opposed to Smallville. And yes, the multiverse has been a convenient way to iron out inconsistencies, to say that those comic books over there are set in Universe A where these comic books over here are set in Universe B and that's why Hyperman's underpants are three different colours. Into the Spider-Verse is the most interesting thing that anyone has ever done with Spider-Man, or indeed, with superheroes more generally. I didn't even hate the Flash, though everyone else seems to have done. 

But oh, how wearisome the thought that all the different versions of Wolverine there have been over the years must of necessity be actually-existing-Wolverines-in-different worlds. How wearyingly obvious the idea of a Time Police patrolling the time lines for inconsistencies as a sort of metaphor for comic book continuity. I know the original thought was "It would be cool if all three cinematic Spiders Man were real, but in different dimensions" but the overall result is remind us that nothing we are currently watching matters, that every death is temporary and can be easily undone. 

And underneath it all, there is an actually quite good superhero yarn; which kind of manages to take itself seriously despite it all. Huge Ackman has the micky extensively taken out of him; but he never takes it out of himself. Wolverine diminishes and goes into a different continuity but remains Wolverine. Some of his Big Character Moments  -- about how this version of the character failed to prevent the deaths of the X-Men, and how he wants to live up to the faith that Prof X put in him -- are actually well done and quite effective. And the climax, in which, for good an adeqaute reasons, our heroes have to mutually sacrifice themselves, has a bonkers epic morality that reminds us why, in a peculiar way, superhero movies still matter. 

A serious epic wrapped in a violent, smutty action movie wrapped in an infinitely prolonged meta-joke? I don't know whether the Marvel Cinematic Universe can ever recover from this. It probably doesn't matter very much if it can't. I actually enjoyed Deadpool vs Wolverine  quite a lot. But oh dear oh dear. If the Dungeons & Dragons community is allowed an Old School Revival, can those of us who still enjoy the funny books hope for a Silver Age Revival? A line of superhero comics and superhero movies that actually, you know, told stories about superheroes? I propose calling ourselves the "Pre Watchmanite Brotherhood."

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