I know it is a bit late, but I thought it was about time I reviewed the new Doctor's second season.

13.1 "Terror of the Zygons"

Beginnings 

Literally the first line of the story is: "Can you no send a couple of haggises over? The chef disnay ken anything aboot food..." The cast convene in a pub; the Brigadier is wearing a kilt; the landlord won't stop playing the bagpipes. Tom Baker comes on wearing a tartan scarf and a tam-o-shanter. Harry and Sarah are, rather charmingly, wearing his normal scarf and hat.  

The story was, of course, filmed in Sussex. 

If one wanted to defend certain other stories of this era -- stories, for the sake of argument, which make fun of Chinese people -- then this is the context in which to put them. No-one is trying to make a point about Scotland or whip up hatred against the Celts. But we are in a world where TV is made out of stock situations and stock characters. If this is Scotland, then there must be moors, haggis, pipes, mist, lairds and kilts. And Lochs. 

An oil rig is mysteriously destroyed. The local Laird doesn't hold with the idea of drilling for oil, d'ye'ken? The bag-piping landlord holds forth about how naught but bad luck comes to those who venture onto the Moors. A survivor from the oil rig is washed ashore; he is about to tell Harry that the rig was destroyed by a... by a... when he is shot by a man named Caber. In full highland dress. 

Set up, set up, set up: not all of it will pay off as the story proceeds. But this is part of a game we play; every year at this time, when the nights start to draw in. There are first episodes, and there are middle episodes, and there are last episodes. Each has its own unique pleasures.

We think of Doctor Who as being entry-level sci-fi, in direct competition with Space: 1999. But this has more in common with the spooky, "hauntalogical" children's shows of the era; Children of the Stones and Tom's Midnight Garden. Pubs and moors and dark mutterings about the environment and pointed conversations between grown-ups in pubs. No-one drinks. In Children of the Stones, everyone drinks, all the time. It's the language of gothic horror. It starts with a scene from a disaster movie. But it's really about Aliens. It's always really about Aliens. 

Sarah-Jane is interviewing the landlord who talks about his clan chief and not going out on ye moors after dark...and we cut away, and there is a rubbery reptilian claw, and we are watching from the viewpoint of something orange and rubbery with scary eyes. The orange rubbery thing is spying on Sarah and Angus. Through the eyes of the stags-head mounted on the pub wall. 

Was Doctor Who always this weird? Could we tell how silly it was, or were we willfully not looking? When Terror of the Zygons was shown in Australia, a baffled broadcaster dubbed in laugh tracks.

The script is still not really being written with Tom Baker in mind. He is still mostly a Boffin, pouring plaster of paris into the wreckage of the oil rig to establish that it was destroyed by something with giant teeth. The characterization still comes mainly from Baker's facial expressions and from his physical presence. In the offices of the energy company in glowers against a wall; looking incongruous and sinister; like the cover of an annual or a BBC icon. He lies on his back and pretends to be asleep while the Brigadier briefs him about the attacks on the oil rigs. Only when the Brig talks about men being killed does he take the hat away from his face and grin. "When do we start?" 

He's only playing at being a cynic and the Brigadier knows he's only playing. But then Angus is only playing at being Scottish and the Aliens are only playing at being Aliens. Doctor Who, almost for the last time, is a great big silly game. 

Middles

There are Aliens. The Aliens want to conquer the earth. The Aliens have bred a gigantic lizard which lives on the moors and eats oil rigs. And the Aliens can shape shift into exact facsimiles of any human captive. This is why the sinister Laird is so sinister.

They are proper Aliens. They find human beings disgusting. They look like giant rubber sea horses with suckers. Their space ship interior is as globuley and rubbery and organic as they are, although the doors are literally made of tin foil. They talk English among themselves and measure distances in earth miles. (This is 1975 and earth miles are increasingly being replaced by earth kilometers.) You might think that the idea of organic technology would be developed in the story; but the designer and the writer don't seem to have talked to each other. The outside of the space ship is just a spaceship. 

Still; the writer cares enough to put in some hand-waves. The giant lizard was transported to earth in embryonic form; the Aliens feed off its "lactic fluid". So: milk eating aliens who's ultimate weapon is a giant reptilian cow. Harry expresses surprise that they are mammals -- one wonders if that was a late ad lib to lampshade an obvious absurdity in the script. It doesn't matter. The Aliens are the point. 

There are cliffhangers. Gas -- Scotch mist, very possibly -- seeps under the doors of the tavern and knocks everyone out. The Doctor and Sarah-Jane are stuck in a decompression chamber while the evil nurse sucks their air away. Sarah-Jane is menaced by an Alien in Harry's form, wielding a pitchfork in a barn. The solutions are uniformly weak. Everyone just kind of wakes up after the nerve gas attack. The Doctor hypnotizes Sarah-Jane so she doesn't need to breathe. Harry somehow breaks his connection with the Alien, which turns back into its original form. And melts. It doesn't matter: the cliffhangers are the point.

By the end of episode 2 a stunt man in a Tom Baker costume is tripping gaily through the heather, pursued by a giant lactating alien lizard. He runs through the moor. He jumps, rather dramatically, off a bank. He stumbles. And we cut away to the monster; part dragon, part dinosaur, part, admittedly, glove puppet. 

The actual physical monster isn't quite as bad as you may have heard. The design is okay; the animation entirely absent. The director avoids putting the model and the actor in a single shot; so we see Tom running away from an unseen monster; and we cut away to close-ups of a giant reptilian head. Last episode was mock Gothic. This episode, while not remotely scary, manages to feel quite nightmarish. A nurse who is not a nurse. A friend trying to kill you with a pitchfork. Running headlong away from a monster you can't see. 

And so we see the point of the Caledonian setting. The Aliens' spaceship is at the bottom of a lake. The glove puppet embryonic milk secreting plesiosaur is the Loch Ness Monster. The aliens have been marooned on earth for hundreds of years. Their own planet has been destroyed. More of them are on the way. That is why they want to conquer the earth. Their giant lizard has been around for hundreds of years too. That is why legends about the monster of Loch Ness go back to medieval times. At least someone cares enough to wave their hands a bit.

There could very well have been a Doctor Who story about the Loch Ness monster. A science team is studying the Loch in an old boat; the boat is attacked by a monster; the monster is chased back to its lair; the lair turns out to be a crashed flying saucer, and then -- surprise reveal -- it's an alien beastie who was brought to earth to give the invading forces a source of dairy produce. And that may, in fact, have been the jumping off point for Terror of the Zygons. But it isn't the story we ended up with. The story we have is not about the Loch Ness Monster. It's a story about some shape-shifting Aliens and their ultimate weapon. Loch Ness is just some tartan window dressing. 

Endings

If the BBC was doing, say, the Mayor of Casterbridge or Pride and Prejudice, you kind of needed to see every episode in order for it to make sense. There were no videos or DVDs although admittedly Austen and Hardy's novelizations were pretty good. So there were usually two chances to see each episode: a prime time showing on BBC 1 and a late night repeat on BBC 2. And each week an announcer read out a summary of last week's episode in a posh voice. Doctor Who had no repeats and no "previously..." voice-over. The best you could hope for was a ten word listing in the Radio Times. ("The Doctor is a Zygon captive. Can he avert the terrible threat that faces London?") 

So the episodes have to stand alone: and on the whole they do. 

EPISODE 1: Mysterious Scottish stuff happening in Scotland. Final shot provides solution to mystery: it's aliens!

EPISODE 2: There are Aliens in Scotland! Aliens chase and are chased by the Brigadier around Scottish town. People are captured, fall into death traps, and escape.

EPISODE 3: There are still Aliens in Scotland! Aliens continue to chase and be chased by the Brigadier around Scottish town. People continue to be captured, fall into death traps, and escape. 

EPISODE 4: Big science fiction climax, explosions, soldiers. Alien plot to destroy London. Alien plot to destroy London thwarted. 

They certainly hoped that if you watched the Doctor being chased by a glove puppet in Episode 2, you'd want to come back for Episode 3 and find out how he escaped. (Harry gets out of his cell on the Alien spaceship and switches off the glove puppet by remote control.) But if you missed it and came back a week later, you could pick up the thread perfectly well. The Aliens are still being Alien but now the Doctor is their hostage. The vagueness and the perfunctoriness of the Aliens' plan is less a bug than a feature. What is the solution to the mysteries in episode 1? Aliens. Why are the aliens swimming up the Thames towards London? To conquer the world. Why do they want to conquer the world? Because they are Aliens. If you've ever seen Doctor Who before, you don't need a catch-up.

And the Alien plan is really very vague and very perfunctory indeed. They are destroying oil rigs because the employees of the energy company might see the Monster crossing the moor. No, wait a minute, they are actually destroying the oil rigs as a dry run for conquering the world, and as a show of strength. The real plan is to use the Monster to destroy an energy conference in London. Once the Monster destroys the conference than everyone will hand control of the Earth over to the Aliens, and the Aliens will terraform the Earth to suit their requirements. Using humans as slave labour. Obviously. 

The final episode is a 1950s flying saucer B movie run at double speed. Spaceships blow up; soldiers run backwards and forwards and bark urgent messages into field telephones. Bystanders scream; police sirens whine; giant dinosaurs rampage unconvincingly around the city. The Doctor and the chief Alien fight, quite dramatically, in a cellar: the Doctor gets hold of the doohickey which controls the Nessie and she swims peaceably back to Inverness. 

Cleverer people than me have argued that this is an anti-Who story; a repudiation of what has gone before; affectionately putting an end to alien invasions and noble UNIT soldier boys once and for all. I don't believe this for one second. This is just what Doctor Who was like. Tom Baker's hints at self-deprecation don't amount to a full-on deconstruction of the series.

But it is true that Terror of the Zygons is almost the last traditional Doctor Who story. You could have imagined Jon Pertwee or Patrick Troughton or at a pinch William Hartnell playing Invasion of the Body Snatchers in a wee Scotch glen. But next week the Hinchcliff Era will begin in earnest. Doctor Who will start to turn into a new thing; a different thing. Younger fans will scarcely believe the sense of betrayal that the old guard felt at the time; the extent to which Robert Holmes became every fan's bogeyman. But in a sense they were not wrong. This is where the series they grew up with ended. This is where the series most of us grew up with began.

I'm Andrew. I like God, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Wagner, folk-music and Spider-Man, not necessarily in that order. I have no hardly any political opinions of any kind.

If you are enjoying my essays, please consider supporting me on Patreon (by pledging $1 for each essay)

I wouldn't join any political party which would accept me as a member

If I asked arkela why she wants to keep the Cubs going, she would say "Because it gets kids away from the TV and playing in the open air. Because Baden Powell's ideas are still relevant in the modern world. Because the boys who still come seem to enjoy it."

If I ask the vicar why he wants to save the Church, he would say "Because the word of God is still the word of God whether we are getting congregations of six or six hundred."

If you asked me "Why do you want to save the Labour Party" I would reply "Because I still believe in socialism, because I think socialism is the fairest way of running the country, because I want someone to put the case for socialism at every election."

And you would reply "You are part of the problem, not part of the solution." And you would not be wrong.

I gather there are two main contenders in the current round of displacement activity: a leftie one, who is popular with the people who prefer leftie ones, and a centrist one, who is popular with the people who prefer centrist ones. I understand the centrist one looks more male and white and therefore electable; but that he used to be a human rights lawyer, which is a bomb waiting to go off in the popular press. I understand they are both Zionists; I don't know if anyone has asked them if they are Catholic Jewish Atheists or Protestant Jewish Atheists.

Any talk about which of them is potential prime ministerial material is about as meaningful as discussing who will host the victory party when Bristol Rovers win the F.A Cup. The next Labour leader is never going to be prime minister; nor is the one after that. The next Labour leader with a shot at becoming P.M. is currently revising for his politics GCSE.

The purpose of the Labour Party is to form a Labour government. The purpose of forming a Labour Government is that if there are no Labour government then the Labour Party has no purpose. All talk of socialism and ideals and principles is meaningless flim flam if you aren't in government. Tony Blair has made that very clear: the question is not "is it right to support the rights of trans people"; the question is "will supporting the rights of trans people help or hinder the long march to a Labour Government." And he is not wrong.

If people think your fizzy drink is too sweet; then you have two options. Either you make it less sweet; or you fill the airwaves with subliminal advertising for sweet things; and advertising spots that say that sweet things are what the cool kids drink; and blind taste tests to show that people prefer sweet soda when they actually try it.

If people think your newspaper is too hard to read, then you have two options. Either you dumb it down, or you have an advertising campaign that tells people that all the girls prefer smart guys; and that in this day and age you need to read a serious paper to be informed; and that influences and opinion-formers prefer broadsheets over tabloids.

If people won't vote for your party, then you must either change and become the sort of party people will vote for; or else stay the same and persuade people that they ought to want to vote for the kind of party you already are.

But trying to persuade people to vote for your party is patronizing and insulting and suggests that you think you know better than them. It is tantamount to saying "If the people voted for the wrong Prime Minister then we should elect a new people." It is that kind of thinking that leads to walls along the Mexico boarder and sea bridges over ammunition dumps. In the real world, you have to find out what kind of political party people want to elect; and become that kind of political party.

We know the kind of political party people want to elect. They told us that very, very clearly in December. They want to elect right-wing, racist, nationalist, populist party, led by a rich, posh, white male. In order to form a government in 2029, Labour needs a posh, white, populist, racist leader: ideally someone even posher, even whiter, even more populist and even more racist than Boris Johnson.

Some people will not find such a leader to their personal taste: but there is an easy answer to that. Would you rather have a leader who you personally find congenial; or would you rather win an election?

So: whether the Leftist One or the Centrist One ends up as leader of the opposition, they will have only one job. They will need to do what Kinnock did and indeed what Momentum tried to do from the other direction. They need to rebuild the party machinery to ensure that they are succeeded by the kind of person that the people would vote for. An electable leader. A Labour Johnson or even a Labour Trump.

They will need, at all costs, to keep people like me  out of the party.  This could be achieved by a series of internal purges and loyalty oaths; or simply by becoming the kind of party that people like me would never, ever join. They need to change the rules so that party members are never again allowed to choose the party leader. They need to make a great big symbolic gesture to show the world that this is no longer Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, or even Red Ed's. Tony Blair famously tore up clause 4. Enthusiastically supporting the "Yes" side in Priti Patel's 2022 referendum to restore capital punishment would go a very long way to drive undesirables out of the party, while speaking to the legitimate concerns of ordinary working class voters in constituencies where there hasn't been a murder in decades. Of course, there would need to be a few sops so that old fashioned reformists can persuade themselves that a Labour populist racist is better than a Tory populist racist. Nursery school places often hit the spot, I am told.

"But why would you want to save the Labour party on those terms?"

Peace, child. You don't understand.

I'm Andrew. I like God, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Wagner, folk-music and Spider-Man, not necessarily in that order. I have no hardly any political opinions of any kind.

If you are enjoying my essays, please consider supporting me on Patreon (by pledging $1 for each essay)

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