On my Patreon Page -- Rings of Power Episode 2, and matters arising.
Friday, September 20, 2024
Rings of Power (2)
The Armageddon Factor [IV]
1 September 1979 [1 minute 41 seconds]
"You can't go around wearing copies of bodies."
Tom Baker has acquired an annoying tick whereby he says the same thing over and over again.
“It was a pleasure, Romana, Romana wasn't it a pleasure?”
“We're very proud of it, Sir, aren't we Romana, proud of it."
He is discovered tinkering with K-9.
“Laryngitis? Laryngitis? How can a robot get laryngitis? What does he need it for? Romana, the dog's got laryngitis.”
We first met K-9 in a story about a microscopic virus; there was an implication that the Nucleus of the Swarm might have invaded K-9s robotic mind. But the idea of a robot with a sore throat is obviously absurd. The term “computer virus” wasn't yet current.
K-9 doesn't have a larynx. How does he speak? Terrible.
We last saw K-9, some six months ago, in the Armageddon Factor. He isn't in Destiny of the Daleks. He won't be in City of Death. In the remaining stories of Season Seventeen, John Leeson will be on a break and K-9's voice will be provided by one David Brierly. That’s a ten month gap. It's a safe bet no-one would have noticed that the robot's voice was slightly different.
Romana emerges from a side-room, off the TARDIS control room. She looks like Princess Astra. The Doctor thinks she is Princess Astra.
"What are you doing?”
"Regenerating".
The Doctor isn't surprised, or even very interested. He carries on tinkering with his robot. His only concern is that Romana is “going around wearing other people's bodies”. Romana doesn't dispute the clothes analogy: she says that “it looked very nice on the princess.”
She proceeds to appear in a series of incarnations: a very short figure in a Buck Rogers sci-fi suit; a Valkyrie; a very tall Greek figure. The Doctor—who has pointedly never taken the slightest interest in Romana's wardrobe—continues to talk about the bodies as if he was talking about clothes. “You could try lengthening it.” “What you need is something with a bit more style which will wear well.”
Finally, she emerges as Astra again—wearing an exact replica of the Doctor's costume. He says it’s ridiculous: the only time he has noticed her clothes. So she changes into a feminine pastiche of the Doctor's outfit: a pink jacket, with big lapels, and a long white scarf.
Maybe the scene is intended to recall the one in Robot, where the Fourth Doctor tried on lots of different clothes (a Viking, the King of Hearts, a clown) before settling on the long coat and scarf. Maybe it is meant to make us think of the scene in War Games when the Time Lords let the Doctor chose his new face. ("Too old; too fat; too thing; too young; too old.") And maybe that in turn recalled Patrick Troughton's behind the scenes casting call when he first became the Doctor. He wasn't going to impersonate William Hartnell; but it wasn't clear what he was going to do. He dressed up as Jaffar in the Thief of Baghdad, he dressed up as a Victorian sea-captain, he blacked-up as Captain Nemo; before Sydney Newman had a brainwave and they went for the tramp look.
Imagine that the Destiny of the Daleks had begun at the five minute mark: with the Doctor and Romana arriving on they mysterious planet and wondering where they could possibly be. That would have been a perfectly good place to begin the story. It may very well have been where Terry Nation's original script began, before Douglas Adams got to tinkering with it. The audience clearly would have noticed that Romana had been recast: that the severe, elegant, supercilious woman from Season Sixteen was now a bubbly, girlish figure, with an infectious rapport with the Doctor. The wardrobe scene signals to the audience that Mary Tamm has been replaced with Lalla Ward; and the “laryngitis” gag signals to the audience that John Leeson has been replaced with David Brierly.
Signals: but doesn't explain. Romana is played by a different actor because Romana is being played by a different actor. K-9's voice has changed because K-9's voice has changed.
Remember when the Doctor un-boxed K-9 Mark II to signal that the effects department had created a more streamlined prop? Remember when Leela's eyes got zapped because Louise Jameson was tired of her tinted contacts? Remember, come to that, the days when retiring Blue Peter presenters were sent off to do documentaries about Venice but invited back to open their Christmas presents? Or when Dougal and Florence walked around the Magic Garden trying to work out what looked different about it? (The series had just gone to colour.)
When Katy Manning quit the show and Elizabeth Sladen joined, there was a story: the story about Jo Grant and the Welsh hippy scientist who seemed like a younger Doctor and how the Doctor felt sad and jealous and also maggots. When Jon Pertwee quit and Tom Baker came along there was a story; the story about the Blue Crystal and the Doctor's hubris and how the script editor had become a Buddhist.
There is no story about Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward. There could have been. Romana could have gone home to Gallifrey, and snooty aristocrat Princess Astra could have stowed away on board the TARDIS. Rocks could have fallen on Old Romana, and the Doctor could have struggled to take her back to the TARDIS and she could have regenerated and spent the story suffering from regeneration fever. A big white zombie could have hung around at the margins making sure that the moment had been prepared for.
The TARGET books stated clearly that the First Doctor's physical appearance was “transformed” when he discarded his worn out body in favour of a new one; and that the Second Doctor's “physical appearance was altered by the Time Lord when they exiled him to earth in the twentieth century.” Doctor Who Weekly always insisted that Hartnell>Troughton was a rejuvenation and Troughton>Pertwee was a change in appearance and Pertwee> Baker was properly the first regeneration. Certainly, Planet of the Spiders was the first time we heard that periodic changes of form were a natural part of being a Time Lord. “When a Time Lord's body wears out, he regenerates, becomes new". The term is taken for granted in Deadly Assassin and Underworld (although not, surprisingly, in Logopolis.)
Regeneration is a very big deal. The death, in way, of a beloved character; the exit of a beloved actor. But Douglas Adams has made it trivial: the Doctor hardly looks up from his construction project. I suppose that's part of the Doctor's character. Making light of big things and treating trivial things as if they are of the utmost significance.
It will be recalled that fans (#notallfans) were offended by the Deadly Assassin. The Time Lords had been a central pillar of the Doctor Who mythos for, er, six and a bit years, and in that story Robert Holmes failed to treat them with due reverence. And fans (#notallfans) were similarly offended by the TARDIS interior scenes in Invasion of Time. The TARDIS is another central pillar of Doctor Who; and Williams and Read were again treating it irreverently. The President of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society said in an editorial that it represented the shattering of part of the Doctor Who legend.
“It seems that over the years there has been an attempt to [sic] brainwashing us into thinking the TARDIS is useless and no good” he wrote. The magic of Doctor who was being eroded.
Familiarity breeds contempt. When Ian stumbled into the TARDIS in 1963, he was awestruck: by 1979 “bigger on the inside” was the punch line of a joke. When William Hartnell turned into Patrick Troughton, Ben and Polly's minds were boggled, and the audience wondered if the show had gone a step too far. By the time of Deadly Assassin and Underworld, regeneration had become a plot device. And now it's a gag, a gag about women who can't decide what to wear.
Of course Douglas Adams and Graham Williams weren't brainwashing fans. But neither were they subtly “revealing” hitherto obscure facts about the Time Lord life cycle. They were just acknowledging a fact about a TV show as slickly and as entertainingly as they could.
“I'm being played by a new actor now. New actors are cool".
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.
Thursday, September 19, 2024
The Armageddon Factor [III]
1 September 1979 [5 minutes]
“Not the most inviting planet.”
Romana isn't impressed by the quarry.
They step out of the TARDIS. The Doctor and Romana: he dressed as the Doctor, she dressed in a pink jacket with a long white scarf, hanging in exactly the same way that the Doctor's does. Both of them in matching maroon thigh boots. It's a good visual gag; the physical design falls into step with what was obvious last season: Romana is not a companion; she's a female analogue to the Doctor.
When Sue Lawley stood in for Sir Robin Day on Question Time, the costume department gave her a very feminine bow tie.
The boy Doctor starts to talk in TV clichés. “I've a feeling I've been here before. A pervading sense... An air of....”
The girl Doctor is for leaving. But the boy Doctor is driven on by curiosity. Pot luck brought him here, but now he is here he wants to know where “here” is. If he didn't find out, he would always be wondering. He would “never sleep again.”
Never sleep again. That's an interesting way of putting it. Does the Doctor sleep? When did he wake up?
What the Doctors are experiencing is painful dose of dramatic irony. They have no idea where they are. But we know. We know because it says Destiny Of The Daleks at the end of the title sequence. We know because we have read the Radio Times. We know because the Earth Dalek warned us. And the Doctor should know too.
At the end of the episode, there will formally be a surprise. A very beaten up Dalek prop will push through a paper wall and say “do not move” seven times and “you are our prisoner” twice. We won't be surprised. And the Doctor shouldn't be surprised, either.
He has been forewarned.
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.
Wednesday, September 18, 2024
The Armageddon Factor [II]
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
The Armageddon Factor [I]
8 September 1979 [23 minutes]
“So that’s what the Daleks have been looking for...Davros, the evil genius who created them.”
It’s an awesome moment. Four years since we last saw Davros on TV. Centuries since Davros died. His body covered in cobwebs; like a forgotten object in an old lady’s attic. The Doctor turns away. Davros hand begins to twitch. We see it but the Doctor doesn’t. The light on his head comes back on.
We knew it was coming. The Earth Dalek warned us in advance. But it’s still one of the great episode endings.
There are three more Dalek stories to come after this one. The revived Davros on trial. The revived Davros turning dead humans into Daleks. The revived Davros and his new Daleks at war with the original Daleks. Dalek schisms and Imperial Daleks and Dalek Civil Wars. Unlimited rice pudding. The Daleks as a former power: post-colonial pepper-pots.
Actors don’t like acting to props; and writers don’t like writing staccato robot dialogue. That’s why K-9 and Orac are both sarcastic robots. The invention of Davros gave the Daleks a face and a voice. But the facelessness and the roboticness of the Daleks is the very thing which made us love them so much.
A pivotal moment. From now on, there will be no more Dalek stories. Only stories about Davros and his mechanical minions.
Once before, the Doctor was sent here, unwillingly, by the Time Lords, at the exact moment of the Dalek's creation. But this time he has arrived at exactly the right place at exactly the right time....according to the principle of pot luck.
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.
Monday, September 16, 2024
Power of Kroll [5]
Sunday, September 15, 2024
Power of Kroll [4]
We got right through Androids of Tara without anyone being sentenced to death: but we make up for it in Power of Kroll. Not only is Romana sacrificed to the man in a squid suit; but in Episode Three, Ranquin decrees that the Doctor, Romana and Rhom-Dutt should die by "the seventh Holy ritual".
In Ribos Operation, we saw that "the caves below the palace" functioned as a physical analogue to the Plot -- a space in which someone could get lost, encounter monsters, meet new supporting characters, and discover new resources. Similarly, in Stones of Blood a literal cliff acted as a concrete stand-in for the idea of cliff-hangers. When the Doctor and Romana needed to be in peril, they happened to find themselves on the edge of it. In this story, Ranquin is a living, breathing plot-device. Ostensibly, he kills people to propitiate Kroll and for political expediency. But it is clear that he really kills them to save Robert Holmes the trouble of thinking up more organic perils and cliffhangers. Ranquin doesn't kill his enemies when he has the chance: he ties them to stakes and straps them into complicated torture machines. And then goes away. He does this because he's cruel; he does this because the holy rituals tell him to; but mostly, he does it so they have a chance to escape.
It's hard for a writer to create a peril which arises naturally and organically from the situation the hero finds himself in. It's even harder for the hero to come up with a plausible way of escaping from an organic peril. So writers in a hurry create villains who create physical cliffhangers and drop our heroes into them. Good whodunnit writers come up with murders that seem baffling but have perfectly logical explanations. Lazy ones come up with mad serial killers who deliberately set difficult problems for detectives to solve.
So: the three of them are strapped to a medieval torture rack, which is attached to some vines, the idea being that when the sun dries the vines the rack will break our heroes' spines, very slowly. It's the kind of puzzle box that Penelope Pitstop and Batman regularly had to escape from: an over-elaborate death-machine with a deliberate weakness. Three good-guys, chained up alongside each other, three-in-a-bed style, while the Doctor banters and tries to take their minds off the situation: it feels like something out of Carry On, Don't Lose Your Head, or come to that, Crackerjack.
The closest analogy may actually be the Mikado, in which white people with yellow make-up talk very casually about extreme cruelty. ("Something I fancy with burning oil...burning lead or burning oil.") But the Mikado was a black comedy for adults: possibly even a satire against capital punishment. Taking the trouble to dream up a system of breaking someone's spine slowly seems to have an element of ghoulishness to it. A ghoulishness which probably appealed to the target audience; the sort of ghoulishness which kept the London Dungeon and the Chamber of Horrors in business.
Mrs Whitehouse complained when Holmes showed us the Master trying to drown the Doctor, pretty graphically. As a result, the violence was "toned down." I am not sure that treating nastiness as a joke, while focussing on pain and the modus operandiI is necessarily much of an improvement. The Princess Bride treated nasty torture as nasty torture, while retaining a PG rating. Westley does a very good job of appearing scared but trying to be brave.
Batman got out of traps by discovering appropriate gimmicks in his utility belt. Superman would suddenly remember a Kryptonian ability he had never previously mentioned. Mr Spock's magic Vulcan eyelids lasted for precisely one story. The Doctor spends some time talking about swampie architecture: there is a small window in the death-chamber, and what we have seen of the swampies makes it fairly unlikely that they would be able to smelt glass. Fair play to Robert Holmes for taking the trouble to set this up, even if he could have done a better job rubbing out the construction lines. But the solution to the death trap -- that the Doctor suddenly remembers that he can sing a really high note and shatter the glass feels like a cheat; like suddenly remembering the shark-repellant bat-spray. And worse, it feels silly; unDoctorish. Despite references to dame Nellie Melba, he doesn't appear to be singing: so much as emitting a high-pitched whine.
There have been other moments in Season 16 which have seemed very silly; but this is the first time I have felt that the programme was indefensibly taking the piss.
During the torture scene, the Doctor begins to say "Did I ever tell you about the time when I was a child..." Was he about to tell Romana the story about the Gallfreyan guru and the daisyest daisy which he told Jo when they were imprisoned in Atlantis?
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.
Friday, September 13, 2024
I am famous, again, apparently
The wikipedia page on "The Round World Dilemma" has a chart citing "Bratman's analysis, after Rilstone".
David Bratman apparently referenced my review of The Nature of Middle Earth in an academic paper (at Mythcon, I think).
I said:
There is no single, finished thing called Middle-earth to talk about the nature of; only three differently unfinished works in progress.
There is, if you will, Middle-earth I, the setting of the Book of Lost Tales, back when Beren was an Elf, Sauron was a cat and minstrels had names like Tinfang Warble.
There is Middle-earth II, the world of Lord of the Rings and the published Silmarillion, when Hobbits, Dwarves and the sunken island of Numenor had inveigled themselves into the long-standing Elf-mythology.
And there is the projected Middle-earth III which would have made the world of Lord of the Rings more consistent with real-world geography, real-world astronomy and real-world theology. It would have ret-conned out the flat-earth, the sky done, and the literal sun-chariot, and made Eru and Morgoth theologically consistent analogues for the Catholic God and the Catholic Satan.
Maybe Numenor-Atlantis never sunk beneath the waves, muses Tolkien at one point. Maybe it just had all the magic sucked out of it and turned into America.
Mr Bratman says:
Critic Andrew Rilstone, an intelligent Tolkienist though not a scholar, has postulated “three differently unfinished works in progress.” First, the purely mythological Elder Days, the “setting of the Book of Lost Tales, back when Beren was an Elf, Sauron was a cat and minstrels had names like Tinfang Warble.” Then, the mixed mythological-historical one we’re most familiar with, “the world of Lord of the Rings and the published Silmarillion, when Hobbits, Dwarves and the sunken island of Númenor had inveigled themselves into the longstanding Elf-mythology.” The stylistic difference between these two stages is primarily a growth in majesty 6 and seriousness: Tevildo and Tinfang disappear; the fey Tinwelent becomes the towering Thingol. And then the only partially sketched third purely historical and scientific work, “which would have made the world of Lord of the Rings more consistent with real-world geography, real-world astronomy and real-world theology. It would have ret-conned out the flat-earth, the sky dome, and the literal sun-chariot, and made Eru and Morgoth theologically consistent analogues for the Catholic God and the Catholic Satan.” Rilstone’s division makes sense to me, but though specific aspects of this have been discussed in formal scholarship, so far as I know, no scholar has really investigated the overall pattern of these alterations of the fundamentals of the legendarium over time.
Not sure if it is actually the cleverest insight I have ever had, but nice to know someone is paying attention.
Not a scholar, indeed.
Power of Kroll [3]
Thursday, September 12, 2024
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.