Paul M. Cray

Atomic Razor and atomicrazorfeed

pmcray — Mon, 29 Dec 2014 16:40:25 GMT

Although it would be good to be able to be automatically repost Atomic Razor posts to my LJ, in the meantime the workaround is to friend atomicrazorfeed.

Self-Consistent Timelines

pmcray — Sun, 28 Dec 2014 17:18:30 GMT

Over the last year, I have been blogging heavily at Atomic Razor with 280 posts since 31 December 2013. There is an RSS feed. It would be good to have some way of automagically posting the Razor entries to my LJ without having to cut and paste. If anyone has ideas, please let me know. As a taster of what is on the Razor, below the cut is today's entry on Self-Coinsistent Timelines.

So, "Last Christmas" is about dreams within dreams. At the end, none of the participants waking "finally" from the dream show any physical ill effects. But, of course, it is a dream and the dream crabs might simply be a figment of the nightmare. But whose nightmare? Clara's? The Doctor's? But we have "dreamy-weamy" in Moffat before in the series 8 finale and in "The Dream Lord". If Santa is still "real" at the end of the episode are we still in a dream? Will this turn out to be significant in series 9 or will it never be mentioned again (until it suits Moffat)?

But this is playing on themes from series 8 and, indeed, earlier ideas of Moffat's. I seem recall him saying a few years back around the time that he became show-runner thatDoctor Who is a fairy tale. So Santa Claus makes the point that the Doctor is no different him. But a similar point was made in "Robot of Sherwood". And, of course, is the Moon "really" an egg and was the world "really" turned into a forest overnight in order to protect the planet from a solar flare?

As the Weasel suggests, a reasonable deduction based on the evidence of the end of "Last Christmas" is that whole is the dream/fantasy of Tommy Westphall. I did do a little research (as did the Weasel) and we both found the Tommy Westphall Wiki. Which does indeed mention DW. The wiki doesn't really make the logic of the connection very clear, but from other sources (Ned Beauman's Guardian article), but it goes something like this according to Ned:

St Elsewhere's Dr Turner, for example, was investigated for murder by Detectives Pembleton and Bayliss from Homicide: Life on the Street. Their colleague Detective Munch once questioned The Lone Gunmen from The X-Files. The Cigarette Smoking Man from The X-Files smokes Morleys, the same fictional brand as Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy spun off Angel, in which one of the clients of the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart is Weyland-Yutani. A Weyland-Yutani spaceship was spotted in a hangar bay in Red Dwarf, and so was the Tardis. All these shows seem to take place in the same fictional universe - so if St Elsewherewas all a dream, then so is Doctor Who.

Colour me slightly unconvinced by that rather tenuous skein of connections. As I said, I want something a little more direct. How do we know, for instance, that Weyland-Yutanin in the Red Dwarfiverse is not named as a homage to the firm in Angel? In Ben Aaronovitch's The Also People, the People are Banks's Culture with the serial numbers filed off. But the Culture is an explicitly pre-Singularity civilisation. Whereas the defining characteristic of the Time Lords (there's a clue in the name) is that they are time-active. As far as I know the Culture/People are not time-active in which case we might wonder why the Time Lords would want to sign a non-aggression treaty with them? The FoAK puts the Time Lords at Kardashev scale Type IV. There are, of course, Type V societies in the Whoniverse (the Eternals, the Immortals and probably others). Nevertheless, the Time Lords are surely a post-Singularity civilisation (the Singularity is characteristic of Type I civilisation according to the FoAK, which, of course, does make sense, and a post-Singularity society might jump to Type III or IV or even V and beyond straightaway, at least in principle) and there are definite suggestions that the Time Lords have the capability to undertake metaphysical engineering (ontological engineering is a real thing, but not what we are after here). There's a lot of Gallifrey/Time Lord stuff in Classic Who, the novels and the audios, out there. How much of it was canonised by "The Night of the Doctor"? It is, of course, too much of a coincidence to believe that Miles's Time War and Davies's Time War are not the same event (in some deep ontological sense, perhaps). In which case, yes, we do get the Faction Paradox as canon, of course, and surely that's there whole point. As Clarke might say (who has said this?), any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology. Voodoo Tardises, for instance. Can't say the Goth vibe in Alien Bodies did it for me, but I need to read more FP. The Book of the War indeed.

(Of course, episode X9.1 is called "The Magician's Apprentice", which were told at the end of "Last Christmas", James Bond-style. The Doctor was referred to at least once as a magician in that episode. There are two types of magician, the stage illusionist, which presumably is what the references to his clothing were alluding to, and the wizard practitioner of Ritual Magick. Which describes the Doctor in Clarkean sense certainly. But, who is the magician of the title? The Doctor or someone else? And who is the apprentice? Clara? Shona? We know that Ace became a Time Lord. Shona is more Ace-like than the Doctor-like Clara. Could Shona be destined to become a Time Lord like Ace?)

Humans are story-telling machines. (Story, not plot!) So, the mind takes in the evidence from its modalities and creates as far as it can a self-consistent story of what is going on. Of course, the more self-consistent the better from a Darwinian point of view. But it only has to be good enough. This much is C19th/C20th psychology (the Unconscious, the Subconscious) and cognitive science. With natural language, we use stories to make sense of the human and natural worlds. Thus for computers to be fully conscious in the human sense, they must be story-telling machines.

Fantasy (or perhaps Fantastika) is intrinsic to story. Consider the earliest stories. The Doctor is an archetype and the Whoniverse is a giant collection of myths that the BBC has ben pumping into the collective consciousness of the world over the last five decades. It no longer belongs to the BBC. How could it? To fic is human. We can tell many tales about our heroes. We don't have to demand that they respect continuity between tales (necessarily) and there is plenty of leeway to use sleight of the tale-teller's hand with tales. Story logic and all that. It wouldn't happen in real life like that. But this isn't reallife. We can invoke the narrative conventions. It's more real than real. But, of course, like Tolkien, we are today the products of the age of the railway timetable. Self-consistency with the very much overlapping magisteria. We can try. We have to try. Surely there is a canon of some kind. Because if there isn't why do we care (when someone dies). Gun might demand the foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of little minds and Frock might know what is really important, but reality that is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. Perhaps we need to 100% Gun and 100% Frock. Dead people stay dead.

Just this once, nobody dies. Perhaps we do get reconciled with our dead relatives in heaven or at the Omega Point. But if there is a representation of Danny in the Matrix somewhere, is that representation really Danny? And if Danny does come back to life (heck, the Brig did as a Cyberman), is that cheating the viewers. Don't Katrina and Sarah Kingdom and Adric have to stay dead for it to matter.

I have just started by watch of Torchwood as part of my Who marathon (five years now!). I have seen little TW before. It didn't generate much of a reputation in the UK. But, of course, it did have its fans and gained traction in the US before Moffat's Who trumped it. Terrance Dicks was right all those years ago. If you set your low-budget show in Cardiff, the only storyline you have is shape-shifting monster possessing people in Cardiff. The actors like to do possession. And Chibnall must be front-runner to be DW show-runner. But has Moffat actually said he is going? Anyway, TW is explicitly (indeed!) set in the same continuity as DW. "The Christmas Invasion" and "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday" are referenced in "Everything Changes". But, of course, a world that had really experienced such events who be utterly transformed. It's story logic again. People explain away things they can't understand and thus the significance of the alien invasion fades against the mundane contingencies of people's lives, True enough. There's a story there about that. But I think real Dalek/Cyberman invasions would leave a long shadow.

But the real problem here is Torchwood itself. In series 2, Torchwood is so incompetent it has never managed to arrest the Doctor despite the fact that he spent several years embedded with the British Army. But then the UNIT timeline can't be the timeline ofTorchwood or NuWho. There is no mid-century British interplanetary crewed space programme in NuWho. Mid-ranking police officers in 1953 are aware of Torchwood and by the late 2000s, Torchwood 3 in Cardiff seems to be familiar to all security personnel around the city. Is this the same Torchwood? What's clear is that the original (Canary Wharf) Torchwood only exists during Eleven's personal timeline. This explains why Three, Four, etc., didn't encounter them. They didn't exist in the Doctor's timeline at that point.

In "Inferno", the Doctor seems surprised by the existence of parallel worlds. By 2006, Micky has a genre-savvy media watcher is thoroughly familiar with the concept in "Rise of the Cybermen". The Doctor lies. There might be other Doctors in other universes, but we are concerned only with the timeline of one instantiation. The Doctor and the Tardis are constantly consciously and subconsciously messing with the timelines in order to ensure that his timeline is always self-consistent. What do you think they spent all those years learning at the Academy? As we saw in "Father's Day", bad things happen when the Doctor's local self-consistency starts breaking down. So, Katrina/Sarah/Adric/Danny stay dead because if the Doctor tried to bring them back it would disrupt his timeline. The Doctor can reboot the universe and shift constantly into other timelines, but he must always respect causality in his time cone. Or else! Of course, causality means something different to a Type IV metaphysical engineer embedded in Story than it does within quantum relativity paradigm of modern physics, but you would expect that. And the Doctor is not the only time-active actor now or in the past. There's plenty of chronotech that's been left on Earth over the years and also the Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, the Enemy (the Daleks? The Doctor?) and many other groups have all been messing around with causality at different levels.

The Doctor and Tommy Westphall and Santa Claus and other mythic figures then are elements of the recursive, self-reflexive, self-generating cybernetic metaphysical system of which our reality is merely one membrane of existance. As Lance Parkin said in The Gallifrey Chronicles "One of the things you'll learn is that it's all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip." But if everything is true and everything is connected to everything again, why does anything matter? Because of the Directed Acyclic Graphs of which the Doctor and other actors are part that generate locally self-consistent causality and continuity. Forget about the global, we can only see the stuff bear to us. Stick close to the Doctor if you can or if you dare. "It won't be quiet, it won't be safe, and it won't be calm. But I'll tell you what it will be: the trip of a lifetime!"

The Zeroth Doctor

pmcray — Sun, 10 Nov 2013 11:48:48 GMT

Who is Hurt!Doctor? The generally accepted theory is that he is the regeneration between the 8th and the 9th Doctors who was responsible for the destruction of Gallifrey in the Time War. There are three problems with that theory: (a) Nine and Ten spent a great deal of time mopping around and being all angsty about the terrible things the Doctor did in the Time War; (b) would the average casual viewer actually remember/care anything about the Time War from several seasons ago now (and in Davies's tenure)? (c) it would be very boring. There are a few other possibilities: a future Doctor, but that's been done (the Valyard), a 2.5 Doctor, but that's incredibly obscure, some kind of alternative Doctor, but again that's been done (the Dream Lord amongst others).

My preferred theory, and naturally I am not the first to come up with the idea, is Hurt!Doctor is the Zeroth Doctor. The title of the episode "The Day of the Doctor" suggests that the story will be about how the Doctor got his name. This is the 50th anniversary special. One would expect it to be about the beginnings of Doctor Who in some way. The Doctor's pre-"An Unearthly Child" is essentially totally unexplored (and there are those such as Dr Sandifer who would wish it to stay that way) and thus is replete with unused potential unlike the Time War (how would a 8.5 Doctor fit in with the continuity of the novels and audios?). A Zeroth Doctor would ft better with what we see of Clara helping One steal the TARDIS. Finally giving the Doctor an origin story would set the programme up for the next fifty years. As an added bonus, if there were a Zeorth Doctor, Eleven has thus used up all his regenerations and Twelve can start again with a whole new set after various travails that can drive the Christmas special. (I remember talking to my brother about the regeneration limit after "The Deadly Assassin" back in 1976 and him reassuring me that they would come up with something when the time arrived.)

Yes, you're right, Hurt!Doctor will probably turn out to be 8.5 Doctor. If that happens, colour me disappointed. A Zeroth Doctor seems much more interesting and much more Moffat to me. Of course, with a bit of timey-wimey, Hurt!Doctor might turn out to be Zeroth, 2.5, 8.5, future and alternative Doctor. We'll know in two weeks.

Worlds Apart

pmcray — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 09:09:20 GMT

I was in Liverpool on Friday and I had just walked past the Adelphi on my way back to Lime Street when I spotted what looked like a comics shop and "sci-fi" collectables shop and I thought "I don't remember that being there from the Liverpool Eastercons. Should I go in? I don't know when the next train back to Preston is. I might miss it. Oh, what the heck, if life gives you a comics shop, go in it." There were a lot of comics in the shop, although no non-comic-related books that I could find. I suspect there must have been some somewhere surely. The main thing that struck me was the shop was full of schoolchildren. OK, about half a dozen mid-teenagers, boys and girls, in school uniforms. And I thought that was me thirty years. OK, there was no comics shop in Preston and I was more interested in RPGs and written sf, but the very fact that there are still 15-year olds doing what I did/would have done at 15 gave me hope for humanity. And to think that if you were a 15 year-old male sf fan you might able to meet girls who were interested in sf!

I bought a copy of the new-style Interzone as I felt I ought to buy something and it was by far the most plausible thing that I could find aligned to my own current interests. But I got something much valuable from the shop: a renewed faith in the future. And I didn't miss my train.

Summa Technologiae

pmcray — Sat, 25 May 2013 10:27:13 GMT

The most exciting news of the week was the discovery, via the KurzweilAI.net daily newsletter, that Stanisław Lem's Summa Technologiae is finally available in English translation. This is a book that I have wanted to read for years. It sounds absolutely amazing, although whether it can possibly live up to my expectations is another matter. Still, I now don't have to learn Polish in order to read it in the original. Unfortunately, there is no Kindle edition available yet, but I have ordered the hardback and can hardly wait for its arrival (early June, I hope).

Doctor Who: "The Chase"

pmcray — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 22:17:29 GMT

Terry's back to the portmanteau style of "The Keys of Marinus". I wonder whether people noticed or minded at the time. And here he gets to incorporate plenty of comic relief into the mix. Well. he did begin his writing career as a sketch writer for the likes of Tony Hancock. And I wonder what people made of that. The Daleks were at the height of their popularity and Hugh Weldon for one was keen on seeing them back in the show as soon as possible. Nation clearly struggled to come up with plots that could sustain a story for much more than an episode or two ("The Daleks" is basically a three-parter welded on to a four-parter.). Amongst Who writers he wasn't alone in that, but those other writers made the effort to plough on for four or six episodes of a halfway coherent story as, indeed, Nation himself managed to do in his five 1970s stories (exactly how much help he got from the script editors then is a very interesting question). So what we get here is an episode of the TARDIS crew mostly messing around with the Spacetime Visualiser, some business on a desert planet inhabited by amphibians, comic scenes, for certain values of "comic", at the top of the Empire State Building (Peter Purves playing Morton Dill, a stereotypical Southern hick: oh, how they must have laughed), and on board the Mary Celeste, an episode set in haunted house that is not all it seems and a finale involving a Dalek replicant of the Doctor (it wasn't an especially good idea then and it wasn't be a good idea now - I'm looking at you Stephen Moffat) and another attempt to create the new Daleks on a jungle planet.

Just three adventures with them in and already the Daleks are already declaring that the Doctor is their greatest enemy. That seems fast going even for the Doctor who didn't even seem to have heard of the Daleks less than two years ago in "The Daleks". Of course, the Daleks in "The Chase" might be Daleks from the future that have met and been defeated by many incarnations of the Doctor. I don't think that was what Nation was thinking, but then today we can't help from wondering why the Doctor conceals his knowledge of the Daleks from his companions in "The Daleks". Phil Sandifer in his rather wonderful TARDIS Eruditorium is keen on the idea that the Doctor's pre-"An Unearthly Child" career is brief. I'm not so sure. The Doctor lies. And he's a manipulative bastard, One every bit as much as Seven or Eleven. I find it more plausible that the Doctor lies about how much he knows about the Daleks than in his name-dropping from history. I don't see why he shouldn't have coached the Mountain Mauler of Montana. Three was keen on his martial arts, so why not One in his younger days? I'd much rather have a Doctor who is telling the truth about that kind of thing, even if he is not letting on everything he knows about a good many other things to his companions.

To the audience in 1965, there is no reason not to take everything they are presented with at face value: the Doctor has met and defeated the Daleks twice already, and that's enough within the narrative logic of Saturday evening teatime telly Today, with 47 years of continuity to wrestle with, we can't help speculating about untelevised adventures with he Daleks, both pre- and post-AUC. We might, for instance, wonder what kinds of things Susan was learning at the Academy, but perhaps the Time Lord education system works more on the principle of the gradual revelation of hermetically concealed truths. A bit like the Masons or the Mormons or the Scientologists. Or the British education system. How much does Romana know about Daleks in "Destiny of the Daleks"? But then she is a fresh graduate of the Academy whereas Susan has dropped out relatively early on when she absconds with her grandfather. Perhaps she never got to courses on the Daleks. It'll be years though before we start hearing about the Academy, much pondering what Susan might have doing there. For most viewers of the day, the Doctor had already done plenty enough to earn the Daleks' ire.

As for the comic Daleks, we had Daleks on Skaro who turned out to be one of the scariest things ever followed by scary Daleks in an occupied Britain. So perhaps, in Nation's mind, doing funny Daleks was the logical way to go. No doubt there were plenty of Dalek jokes around then in the era of Dalekmania as now, so running with the gags might have made sense. It's noteworthy that the next Dalek story was co-written with Dennis Spooner and also has something of a portmanteau format and that when Nation comes back to the Daleks in 1973, it will be with a retread of "The Daleks" Nation only had so many ideas and it will be David Whittaker to take the Daleks to new heights. It's a pity that only one of his thirteen Dalek episodes survives.

But, of course, it's not comic Daleks that are the real milestone in "The Chase", but the return to 1960s Earth and departure of Ian and Barbara. The scenes of the couple (and surely they are) joyfully cavorting through are one of the highlights of the Hartnell era. They were shot (they are still photographs) by Douglas Camfield as part of the production of the next story. Ah, the simple pleasures of a trip by Routemaster through the streets of the C20th metropolis after sojourns on Skaro, the Sense-Sphere and Mechanus! This is one of the points at which Who could have ended. Ian and Barbara are the show's original heroes with the Doctor more as an antihero to start with. But that didn't last as the Doctor turned out to be not quite what he might at first have been. The Doctor will prefer to keep some young male muscle around for a while (if you include UNIT, until Season 13), but it's been clear for a while now exactly who is top dog in the TARDIS. The Doctor doesn't need Barbara and Ian any more, even if he hasn't quite realised that to himself yet, and neither does the show. Ian and Barbara are so good that's a shame they do leave, but it probably makes sense for this story arc to be completed in a way that is true to the goals of the characters. They might have a bit of explaining to do though about exactly where they have been for the last couple of years.

Supposedly, had there been a third Who/Dalek film, it would have been have based (naturally enough) on "The Chase". It's a pity that it wasn't made and it would have slotted in well enough with the British sub-genre of portmanteau horror films and the forests of Mechanus and the Mechonoid city would have been quite something in garish colour. Who knows what US audiences would have made of it, no doubt even less than of the two films that did get made, but it would have livened up rainy afternoon in the mid-70s in the UK perhaps even more than the other two Cushing films did. Certainly out of its context within the unfolding text, it would, had the script anything like fidelity to the television version, have been a genuine curio.I wonder whether they would have played the comedy up or down. They could have got Jim Dale to play the Ian character and Barbara Windsor the Barbara character or, perhaps, a young relative of Doctor Who. And if Peter Cushing were unavailable to reprise his role, possibly they could have drafted in a comedy actor to had made such an impact as Doctor Fettle in Carry On Screaming...

Now Write On...

Barbara and Ian crop up a fair amount in various deuterocanonical texts. We might reasonably hope that William Russell will get to be in the series proper again during its 50th anniversary year. They could do something really touching and invoke the memory of Jacqueline Hill.

There is probably much that could be done with the Space-Time Visualiser. For instance, why has the Doctor not got it out again? And there is something of a body of work about the Mechonoids (or, indeed, Mechanoids). With modern special effects including CGI, we could enjoy vast hordes of the terraforming dodecahedrons as they raise cities of the jungle, desert and tundra of planets through the galaxy in preparation for the arrival of the human colonists. Things might get interesting when the colonists do eventually arrive. Perhaps even a descendant of Morton Dill.

Doctor Who: "The Space Museum"

pmcray — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 23:07:29 GMT

"The Space Museum" is arguably the first ordinary Doctor Who story: the first sf four-parter. Now you might say that "Planet of Giants" was originally supposed to be a four-parter and, indeed, will be again soon after a fashion. But "Planet of Giants" is technically a sideways story, whereas "The Space Museum" is a futuristic adventure of the kind that would not feel very out of place in the Williams or Nathan-Turner period. We are going to be seeing a lot of this kind of stuff in the years. Unfortunately, "The Space Museum" is also not very good. We've seen some of that already and we are going to be seeing a lot of it in the future. But then as Lawrence Miles said recently, the fact that most Doctor Who is not very good doesn't matter. There is much more to Doctor Who than whether or not most of it is actually any good.

But, then again, "The Space Museum" is also in some ways a sideways story. The TARDIS has skipped a time-track and the crew discover that they have been shot, stuffed and mounted in the Space Museum on the planet Xeros. That's not a bad idea (how could it happen?), a bit of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey quantum gravity stuff that Moffat or RTD might have come up with. The classic series didn't do very much with time paradoxes or alternative worlds, so it is interesting to see an very early example of this, not that it is done well, but that it is done at all. (And, see also, "The Time Meddler" in two stories' time, so perhaps there was something in the air in 1965.) We get decadent imperialists with South African accidents, feeble student revolutionaries in turtlenecks, that old trick with yarn for when you're stuck in a labyrinth and the Doctor hiding inside a Dalek shell. It all sounds a lot more fun that it actually is. It certainly sounded more fun in the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary Special. A lot of stories did. Glyn Jones is still alive and still writing. Perhaps they could ask him back. As with so much much Who, the real problems here are the actors, the director and the script editing (in that good script editor can always do something with a script - if they have the time). In different circumstances, this might have been at least somewhat even livelier if never quite "Carnival of Monsters", another sideways story in a politically unstable society. Perhaps Robert Holmes was watching.

Now Write On...
We see another space museum, the largest in the universe, in "The Time of Angels". And Moffat throws it away in a couple of minutes. Of course, the Doctor could go back. Apparently he goes there regularly to keep score. And Moffat threw away a library the size of a planet. How could he not do something interesting with that. I had that idea years ago and now it's ruined, at least for Who. I could reclaim it as a trope for That leaves feeble revolutionaries - there's probably some mileage in that - or the TARDIS skipping a time-track. And that will never get old. (Do Nye/Moffat explicitly nod to this story in "Amy's Choice"?) The TARDIS crew turn up somewhere to discover not only that not only are they already huge celebrities, but in some way that's surprising and troubling to the crew. Perhaps they are gladiators in a society in which political power comes from the arena. So the crew have to discover how they ended up in such an unexpected situation and work out how to deal with the fact that their other selves appear to be starting to rather enjoy themselves.

And we should have someone hiding in a Dalek shell again.

Grandfather of Assassins

pmcray — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 12:44:48 GMT

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of Grandfather of Assassins. I recall from my AD&D days that the title of fifteenth level assassin was Grandfather and discovering from the Encyclopaedia Britannica that the Grandfather of Assassins was another title for the Old Man of the Mountain, the ruler of the fortress of Alamut and the head of the cult of assassins based there. Now we know that the Doctor is a grandfather (or, after the Time War, was), but we know every little about the Doctor's family. We don't know how many children he had (or indeed exactly what being a father or grandfather might mean to a Time Lord - looms and Jenny and all that), much less how many grandchildren. How much do we really know about the House of Lungbarrow and the Pyrdonian Chapter and the lengthy training of the Doctor and other Time Lords at the Academy? He know that the Time Lords in general and the Doctor himself don't seem that ninja-like. But, for the usual reasons of plausible deniability, the CIA or other Time Lord bodies might choose to have the training of assassins outsourced. The Assassins of Alamut would be the perfect organisation to outsource it to.

It would thus be perfectly natural for Susan to want to visit her siblings or cousins at Alamut. She might well be unaware of the exact nature of what it is that they are being trained to be and might well feel moral qualms when offered a chance to join them. It is entirely plausible that the First Doctor would know exactly what was going on Alamut and that it was not necessarily a librarian internship. A problem is that the First Doctor doesn't control the TARDIS's destination and Alamut might be a bit too much like the settings for "Marco Polo" and ""The Crusade" to be different enough for Barbara and Ian. Of course, we could make this a pre-"An Unearthly Child" story and perhaps even explain what the First Doctor was doing on Earth in the first place. When did the Doctor make his first televised controlled journey in the TARDIS? Perhaps the Doctor is sent there by the Time Lords. Zoe was a librarian, so one could imagine Two, Jamie and her ending up at Alamut and Two not wanting to reveal to his companions that he suspects that they might be on a CIA mission (foreshadowing of Season 6B?). Alamut seems like somewhere that Leela would have plenty to do and the novel could also be a homage to "The Robots of Death". Romana I would be good. There could be a Key to Time wild goose chase, setting up a clue for a televised story, and the Guardians of Time could make an appearance. Seven and Ace might be a good pairing as it would be quite different to any of their televised adventures. Going against the grain, Five, Adric, Nyssa and Tegan. Now that would be a real writer's challenge to do something interesting with that crew. I am sure Alamut would offer plenty of possibilities to breath a bit of life into those three. I almost thinking on the basis of casting against type that that is going to be our stimulating choice. Where might a suitable gap be to fit this story in?.

Doctor Who: "The Crusade"

pmcray — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 22:20:50 GMT

There are only two missing episodes from Season Two (it is the shortest season of early Who at 39 episodes, but not really that much shorter than the other Hartnell/Troughton seasons), and if there were to be two missing episodes from this season, we would rather they were from "The Space Museum" or "The Chase". "The Crusade" is a very solid historical and the audio tracks for episodes 2 and 4 unfortunately don't allow us to imagine what is going on as easily as is the case for the missing episodes of the more straightforward Base under Siege story of "The Moonbase". With the "The Reign of Terror" shortly to be released with its two missing episodes, we can hope that "The Crusade" might be revisited. I could certainly do with revisiting it myself. It's a over two years since I saw it and there are a great many potentially ticklish obstacles to be navigated here by the production, although I think on the whole I think there are navigated successfully, although it is a pity that the BBC resorted to blackface. This is very far from the debacle it might have been in less sensitive hands, but I think a second "viewing" is in order with an eye to determine just how orientalist the story is.

I recall a duplicated sheet from second year history with a cartoon of Richard the Lionheart and Saladin shaking hand and a caption declaring that the Third Crusade was a draw. Saladin was "our" kind of "Turk" in popular imagination (mostly it seems owing to Sir Walter Scott), which helps to make the whole production less freighted than it might have been - or might be today. As with "The Aztecs", we get some cod-Shakespearean dialogue, but, with actors as skilled and well-cast as Julian Glover, it works in context and the audience of the time probably would have expected it, being more familiar with that kind of thing than today's. Bill Russell gets to do much the kind of thing that we got to do in The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and Barbara has a meaty subplot. I'd need to see it again to determine just how similar Barbara's predicament here is at one point to her predicament at one point in "The Keys of Marinus".

"The Crusade" has a special place in Doctor Who lore as one of the three DW novels were published in the 1960s. It was Whittaker's most substantial script up to that point so it is perhaps little wonder that he chose it as the one to novelise. I remember my eldest brother returning excitedly from Hewitt's, our local newsagent, to announce that three DW novels were now available. The copy of Doctor Who and the Crusaders, with its wonderful Chris Achilleos cover, might still be in the house in Preston somewhere, along with the other two and some other DW novels I got later. I remember considering it a curious object as a child - pure historicals were something that belonged to a remote age. Sadly I don't think I have ever read it; certainly, if I did, I don't recall anything of it other than its mere existence, but there must be lots of fans (my brother amongst them?) who did need read. Indeed, there must have a number of fans who during the interregnum between 1966 and 1973 came across it in libraries and jumble sales and the bookshelves of their elder siblings. I wonder what they made of it and I wonder how it stands up now.

Now Write On...
I can't see the BBC doing the Levant in the studio these days. But, heck, they could go there on location. What about something set in C9th Baghdad or C12th Alamut? The Doctor and co. turn up at Alamut to consult a rare manuscript in the library The Doctor finds himself investigating a series of murders - in a fortress of assassins. This could be a homage to The Name of the Rose as well as to the richness of Islamic culture. The shadow of orientalism lies heavy, but a writer of sensitivity with knowledge of the period could do something very interesting here I think without falling into those traps.

Doctor Who: "The Sensorites"

pmcray — Sat, 26 May 2012 17:49:03 GMT

"The Sensorites" is not very good. In fact - whisper it quietly - it is probably worse than "The Keys of Marinus". At least, that had a portmanteau format and, if you didn't like one setting there, there would be another along in a minute. Here we get six episodes in which almost nothing seems to happen, certainly nothing of any real interest. The Sensorites themselves, leaving those pesky feet, do actually look surprisingly good, in spite of the zips, although the idea that are all identical is clearly absurd, They must be the most timorous race in the universe. This is not a promising premise. They are afraid of everything it seems (bright lights, loud noises, making decisions) even if they do possess some pretty advanced technology (see later) and apparently don't need vacuum suits (perhaps there is a pressurised walkway around the spaceship). If this were a story of the Sensorites overcoming their timorousness with the Doctor's help, there might be something to get our teeth into, but the humans are as bad as the Sensorites. Lorne Cossette did not so much phone in his performance as radio it in by Morse from the Southern Ocean, but at least Stephen Dartnell is trying. A bit too hard. It's not until we get to meet the Commander that things liven up. We can see what the story should have been about and this fits with the theme of Newman's Yesterday's Enemy. A problem was commissioning a writer who clearly had little feel for sf. For all his many flaws, Terry Nation at least had some. "The Sensorites" needs a lot more shaping from Whittaker and Lambert, but it probably looked better on the page and much of the blame has to be placed at the hands of the directors and, to a lesser degree, the actors. "The Sensorites" could probably have been saved by cutting it down to four episodes and increasing the amount of screentime of the Commander and the survivors of the original Earth expedition. As it is, this is probably the weakest story to date and had things gone on like this, it's hard to imagine that the programme would have long survived. Luckily, every story is a reboot for Who. Things can get better.

The best thing on the DVD is Toby Hadoke documentary "Looking for Peter". Peter R. Newman's short life and scant career are a tragedy of unfilled potential. He suffered writer's block and worked as a porter at the Tare Gallery. He died after a fall at the gallery in 1975, aged just 48. He never got to have the consolation though "The Sensorites" isn't very good, he and it aren't and won't be forgotten.

Now Write On...

It is as much, if not more, than the Sensorites could hope for that the RTD created the Ood as an homage to them. The Sensorites are able to remove the TARDIS lock and thus prevent the Doctor and co. getting back in. No other race manage to do that, which suggests either that the Sensorites are a lot more advanced than they look or that the have access to Time Lord(-level) technology that few if any other races in the Whoniverse do. There's a hook there: someone removes the TARDIS lock and the Doctor has to find out where they got the the technology to be able to do that from. It turns out to be the Sensorites. Of course, that just raises another question... I also think there might be some mileage, if handled delicately enough, in the idea of a group all the members of which appear identical to members of the group, but which are clearly differentiable to other people.

Doctor Who: "The Web Planet"

pmcray — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:09:33 GMT

It's a pity that the "The Web Planet" isn't actually very good and, indeed, at times doesn't merely verge on the ludicrous, but smashes right through the ludicrosity barrier and just keeps on going. It is an attempt to do something different with Doctor Who and the lore has it the failure of the story is the reason why we've been pretty much stuck for the last 47 years with either aliens who look exactly like humans or aliens who look exactly like humans in rubber suits. In fact, in "The Web Planet" we aliens who look exactly like aliens in rubber suits (butterfly-humans and weevil-humans), but at least they were making an effort and the Zarbi at do look like giants ants rather than ant-humans (OK, OK, giant ants with human legs). As for the venom grubs, well, I think we have to remember that all of this probably made a whole lot much more sense to the average viewer in 1965 than it does today. The heyday of the cosy duopoly was an era when ITV could show opera in primetime and "The Web Planet" is best thought as a piece of experimental ballet-theatre (indeed the Menoptera were choreographed by a choreographer from the Royal Ballet). In many ways, NuWho - modern television in general - is much more sophisticated than Classic Who. But most viewers in 1965 with access to at the very most three channels and would have had a much more varied and richer televisual diet than many viewers today, Sky Atlantic and boxed sets of The Wire notwithstanding. Today the notion of spending six weeks doing experimental ballet-theatre on kids' sf show in primetime seems unimaginable, but in the mid-60s people would have seen it as another part of the televisual tapestry and thought little more of it. Whether they liked it or not is another matter and certainly this kind of thing wasn't tried too often again (but see, for instance, "The Underwater Menace", of which we now have a whole extra episode to look forward to), but "The Web Planet" definitely made some kind of impact at the time. Doctor Who and the Zarbi was one of the three DW novels published in the 1960s and the first DW annual is full of the Zarbi and the Menoptera, including, of course, feature them in living colour on the cover. OK, they didn't have the rights to the Daleks and I think the Voord are in there somewhere too. If only "The Web Planet" had had a more engaging story and they had somehow managed to transcend the limitation of the budget and the available technical resources, we might have enjoyed a much more varied range of aliens over the last decades. Or at least we'd have more period curios to look back at and ponder upon.

Now Write On...
Just imagine a sequel to this with modern effects. And a half decent plot. OK, OK. That's never going to happen. There was saying current in the Moorcock New Worlds era that the only truly alien planet is Earth. I recall Steve Gallagher opining that all aliens are really humans in rubber suits. But the one thing that an actual alien wouldn't be is a human in a rubber suit. Pace Wittgenstein, if an alien could talk, we would not understand ver (see, for instance, "The Creature from the Pit"). And it's pretty clear from the last couple of decades of planetological research that there are some really wacky worlds out there (not that plenty of writers haven't come up with those without recourse to the latest scientific thinking). So someone should take half a leave out of Hal Clement's books, but add in psychology that is a product of the aliens' evolutionary history. Imagine a story set on a hot Titan orbiting a gas giant around a red dwarf. Gravity would be so low that flight would be easy in the thick atmosphere. And just pick an interestingly different (to humans) reproductive strategy and imagine the consequences extended to a technological civilisation. I am sure we can do better than "The Power of Kroll"

Red Rose on a Shirt, Trophy Still Gleaming, 77 Years of Hurt, Never Stopped Us Dreaming

pmcray — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 23:13:04 GMT

Well, this was a day I never expected to see. The first Wisden I owned was the 1977 edition and Lancashire finished 16th in 1976 in the County Championship (Andrew Kennedy bizarrely Young Cricketer of the Year) compared to 4th in 1975 (there was a 1976 Wisden in the reference library at Fulwood library). That was the beginning of a miserable run in first class cricket for Lancashire and the cause of much soul-searching on my part. How my ten year old self would have loved today! Of course, Lancashire have had two good runs in one-day cricket, but it's not quite the same and they came second by one point to Nottinghamshire in 1987, but it is the championship that all true fans have been demanding all these years. To be fair, Lancashire have finished second five times since 1998, but not since 2006. And it nearly didn't happen today. If it hadn't been for a deeply improbable rearguard action by bottom of the table Hampshire following on against Warwickshire, it would all have been for nothing. But after struggling slightly to scuttle Somerset for as small a sum as we would have liked, Lancashire were set an eminently defendable 211 in quick time. Somerset must have fancied their chances, certainly of a draw. But, amazingly, they polished off runs for the loss of just two wickets to win by eight wickets and bring the county championship trophy back to where it belongs after 77 years. Luckily, I didn't actually burst into tears at work on hearing the commentary of the winning runs. This was an amazing effort by a team that blended youth and experience. Kerrigan for England surely. And now all they have to do is an establish a dynasty. There is a precedent for that in Trafford, I understand. Essex won their first county championship in 1979 and proceded to five more over the next thirteen seasons. That would be all right, but why not go better and make it eight in a row to put the legendary Surrey team of the 1960s in the shade? Come on, Lancy!

Confused? It is

pmcray — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 20:43:24 GMT

Practically every second advert on UK TV seems to be for an insurance price-comparison website - or an insurance company telling us that we won't find them on insurance price-comparison websites. This is notable contrast to the US. They did have some annoying adverts for particular firms, but nothing like the saturation level bombardment we have here. Do they even have insurance price-comparison websites in the US? There are 50 different insurance markets (plus DC, Puerto Rico...), but some of those markets are quite large (California, say). Can you market across state lines or is there some obscure inter-state commerce regulation that prohibits this? Would it even be possible to have a state-based site or to do various regulatory issues or a lack of effective competition prevent such things?

Anyway, getting back to the UK. Confused.com launched a new campaign a new months ago. Of course, if you know it's for confused.com, you'll be fairly safe ground. The banner being towed by the animated plane at the end of the spot seems to be promoting loveconfused.com. This is just a place-holder site. Quite why confused.com haven't acquired it is a mystery; presumably the owner is demanding too much money. Although why confused.com are encouraging us, presumably to love confused.com, when it is a ruddy insurance price-comparison website and has nothing to do with small furry animals with East European accents I am not sure. I keep expecting the advert to drop the "love" bit, but it hasn't after several months (interestingly, a new spot in the same animated style makes no reference to "love"). But it is one of the great enigmas: why did no-one at the agency, client or focus groups spot the potential for the consumer to be "confused"?

Vanity of Vanities

pmcray — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:01:40 GMT

On the strength of the blurbs, it is hardly to wondered at that Sir Stuart had to set up his own press to see his books in print. I suppose even MPs should be allowed their recreations, and, of course, self-publishing will prove an increasingly popular and valuable channel in the future.

Also, in terms of cover design, Sir Stuart could have learnt something from Berthold Wolpe.

Who Will Save Us From This Nightmare Future of Adequate Housing and Nutrition?

pmcray — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 16:26:18 GMT

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19946-housing-9-billion-people-wont-take-technomagic.html

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19947-we-can-feed-9-billion-people-in-2050.html

Play for Today

pmcray — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 23:54:33 GMT

Talking of no-brainer commissions for TV executives: Play for Today. Reading about the kinds of things that were broadcast makes me weak with desire. The depth, breadth, seriousness (with the opportunity for comedy) and sheer ambition of what was produced is quite extraordinary. The past is another country and at least in so far as these kinds of things were broadcast a better one. To think, this is what was provided for primetime audiences. And ITV used to show opera.

And what he need isn't a single short series of one-off plays on BBC4 or even BBC2, but the proper thing: a five year commitment from the BBC to produce 26 new original plays to be shown at 9:00 on BBC1. The project would allow new writers, directors and actors to learn their trades through a BBC repertory company. Perhaps a new Mike Leigh or Dennis Potter might emerge. Imagine the places we'd go! Of course, there was much that by the numbers, plain dull or simply.nugatory. But at least people were given the chance to do something interesting and see something interesting - and very often it worked magnificently.

I know, I know. Television in the UK in 2011 just doesn't work like that. and the world is a poorer place for it.

See also http://www.britishtelevisiondrama.org.uk/?page_id=858.

A Fiver or Two

pmcray — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:40:27 GMT

I got two fivers among the cash I got out of a Barclays cash machine in Chiswick the other day. It is years since I can remember getting a fiver out of a cash machine. I can only hope that this "trend" continues in 2011. (Well, it won't technically be a trend until I have got fivers from two other cash machines, preferably non-Barclays ones.)

Doctor Who: "The Rescue"

pmcray — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:06:23 GMT

I quite liked "The Rescue". At only two episodes, it's the length of a NuWho episode and it is very easy to imagine it being remade as one. The Doctor has been to the planet Dido before, but things are very different now to when he first visited. This is a situation that will reoccur through the series as a way of deepening the mystery by shifting it from "Where are we?" to "What's gone wrong?"

Who did the Doctor visit the planet with? Susan? He is clearly missing her, which is hardly surprising given her unceremonious dismissal from the TARDIS. Luckily there is an al-purpose Susan replacement to be found on the planet. It is noteworthy that Susan is replaced by an almost identical character. Why did Carole Ann Ford leave the series? And why wasn't she replaced by XXX from "The Dalek Invasion of the Earth"? Susan was presumably supposed to be 15-16 in "An Unearthly Child", although, of course, we now know that she is a Time Lord and thus we might not feel quite as bad about the Doctor abandoning her with a virtual stranger at the supposed age of 16-17. How old is Vicki? (Maureen O'Brien was 21 to Jackie Lane's 24.) Vicki is is the audience-identification character for the young segment of the viewership. It'll be a while before it is realised that one isn't actually needed (indded, right at the end of the Hartnell era with "The War Machines"/"The Smugglers"). But they could have rung the changes by making the character from contemporary Earth (too much like Barbara and Ian) or from the past (we'll certainly see that) or alien (with the exceptions of Susan and Romana, who don't really count being a Time Lords like the Doctor, I don't think we have had that) or a boy (Adric!). We might be concerned that someone in the production team either has a bit of a Lolita complex or perhaps even more disconcertingly believes that a section of the audience has something of as Lolita complex (see in particular "The Space Museum" and possibly "City of Death").

Now Write On...

Given that the Doctor has been there twice, a third visit to is perhaps overdue. Just how have the Dido people got on since the destruction of Koquillion? And the Robinsonade is a sub-genre that appeals so directly to elemental components of the human psyche is never going to get old (survival in a hostile environment and the imposition of order on chaos). What about the Doctor encountering Robinson Crusoe himself (after all he has met Gulliver)? Who indeed did leave that footprint? Or the Doctor could encounter Crusoe's real-life prototype, Alexander Selkirk. Lots of opportunities for a C17th romp there. Or what about the Doctor being stranded sans TARDIS on some alien world? (Of course, in "Inferno", the Doctor describes himself as" a shipwrecked mariner" with the non-functioning TARDIS on Earth.) This gets us back to the notion of time in "Doctor Who". The notion of unseen adventures has always been there. See "The Romans". And there is no reason why the ellipsis could not be 10 years rather than a few weeks. In fact, this kind of timey-wimey stuff quite appeals to Moffat. See for instance "The Girl in the Fireplace" and "The Eleventh Hour" as well as Rory waiting for Amy in "The Big Bang" (see also "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", but then that was based on a novel, where it is easier to get away with this sort of thing, and "The Girl Who Waited"). It would be easy to imagine the Doctor being stuck somewhere remote and having to do something interesting for a few years. Another Shakespeare crossover suggests itself, this time with the Doctor as Prospero. And, of course, that would get us the double whammy of Forbidden Planet too.

Think Strategically, Vote Tactically

pmcray — Thu, 06 May 2010 08:57:05 GMT

The one certain winner from the today's election is the Atlanticist neoliberal economic elite and their lackeys in the political class. But such is politics. The thing is does matter how is in power, even if it doesn't ever matter as much as it should. Consider the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, the poster-child of the Conservative Party and the test-bed for the kinds of policies and politics that a Cameron administration will put in place. Then imagine that multiplied by 200 across the country and amplified by a factor of 5 or 10 or 50 because of the Tory government in Westminster: it is the central government that pays for and thus gets to decide most of what actually happens to people around the nation.

Strategically, the goal is clear: a Tory government will not be as bad we imagine, it will be worse. Our vote is a tool and we must use it operationally to bring about the least worst result or, if you prefer, to avoid the worst result. So the question to ask when one enters the polling booth is this: how can I cast my vote to maximise the chance that a Conservative MP will not be elected in this constituency. If that means voting LibDem, so be it. I have voted LibDem myself many times in the past year even though they are not my team. If that means, as I will have to do this evening, voting for an odious party hack, so be it. She is better, far better, than the alternative of the even more odious Tory rent-a-candidate. I suppose it would even mean voting Green if one lived in Brighton Pavilion, although frankly the last thing this country needs right now is self-righteous, swivelled-eyed loons in parliament. But better a non-Tory one. Because that is the ultimate issue: we vote for a MP, but get a government and we must do what we can to try and ensure that the next government is the one of the complexion that will spend less time, even if only slightly less time, stamping on the face of humanity.

Doctor Who: "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"

pmcray — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:17:44 GMT

I actually think this is better than "The Daleks", which I know goes against both the critical consensus and my own criteria for what makes a good DW story. But although TIoE is set on Earth, it is set in the C22nd (albeit one that looks a heck of a lot like 1964 London) and the invasion has already been successful. The title is thus something of a misnomer: it should be "The Dalek Occupation of the Earth". What we had here is no lame attempted invasion of a contemporary Earth by half a dozen ineffectual aliens. The Daleks have reduced the Earth's population to a state of servitude, which means that, for once, they must have done some things right - even if before the story begins. But the sight of the Dalek emerging from the Thames at Queen's Wharf by Hammersmith Bridge (sadly not Kew Railway Bridge, much less Kew Bridge itself as I have seen claimed) must have been quite something. And frankly there is something scary about Daleks on the streets of London, even if 1964 they probably couldn't have got up the Albert Memorial steps.

The ending is surely one of the saddest scenes ever to appear in the series. The Doctor locks Susan out of the TARDIS and makes a speech at her. No wonder she and David can't look one another in the eye. Of course, Time Lord "years" are different to human ones and so Susan isn't quite 16 going on 17 in the way that she might seem, but it's hard to believe that their relationship will be happy (or even a long one). Susan may also know things about the Time Lord reproductive system that may be news to David (of course, that might not necessarily be a problem).

Obviously the plot doesn't make any sense. But the sense of a city and a country under occupation is effectively invoked. We have the resistance, but we also have the black marketer and we also have the ordinary, decent folk - who will report Barbara and Jenny to the occupiers in return for a some scraps of food. Given human nature that's a scene that few of us can watch with complete equanimity. In 1964, the memory of the threat of occupation was only 20 years old (and the fear that next year it could easily be the Red Army on the streets of a nuclear-devastated capital).

Ian though at least manages to keep his suit and key on throughout. This is 1964 and perhaps Bill Russell might have thought himself unlucky not to have been in the running for the role of James Bond; he certainly offers a decent simulacra of the part. Still it is terribly incongruous to have him dressed like all the time. But, of course, it was a more elegant age.

And the Robomen are clearly there because children will be able to imitate them in the playground. Which seems an oddly Steven Moffat kind of thing to put in.

I suppose the notion of that the transport museum might contain a 1930s lorry in working order isn't that silly. It's the kind of thing that they have in museums after all. Interesting though that the Daleks are clearly allowing some kind of ongoing maintenance of the exhibits, but I suppose that is part of British "Keep Calm and Carry On" pragmatism even in the C22th that the museum volunteer would to keep everything in order: they might not have much else to do. Where Barbara got her HGV training is another matter: she's surely too young to have been in Wrens or some such. But perhaps there's a missing adventure.

Now Write On...

This one has a sequel built in. The Doctor says he will come back to visit Susan. He didn't say when or which incarnation of himself it would be. Assuming that humans still have more or less the same longevity as today in the C22nd/C23rd, Susan is going, sooner or later, to find herself a widow. And before that she may have a lot of explaining to do as she ages so much more slowly than her husband. Assuming that some crisis in newly liberated Earth doesn't lead to her overnight changing into someone else. There is plenty her grandfather could help out with.

The problem is that there aren't any Time Lords left now except for the Doctor. So we can't and visit Susan because she presumably was rubbed out of history in the Time War. And she only exists in the memory (recall the Doctor's conversation with Victoria in "The Tomb of the Cybermen"). The more I think about it the more I realise that getting rid of the Time Lords was the Worst. Idea. Ever. Because it traps the Doctor as the lonely god. We can only hope that the Moff will bring the Time Lords back again. Permanently.

Other possibilities include scenarios set in occupied areas: the resistance in WWII Europe or, in an alternative universe, an occupied Britain. Another possibility is a successful invasion. Given that the Earth is invaded unsuccessfully so often and given that the Daleks did manage to do it properly once, perhaps some species might come with a plan more cunning than even the Doctor can counter.

Doctor Who: "The Aztecs"

pmcray — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:31:23 GMT

Another John Lucarotti script. It is a pity that we only have one of his three stories in the archive because he was certainly one of the two strongest of the early Who writers (the other being Dennis Spooner). OK, it's cod Shakespeare, but it's cod Shakespeare in C15th Mexico (cf. The Royal Hunt of the Sun,which involves the Inca and does have Conquistadors; although the story was commissioned before the producers could likely have seen the play, it is possible that Lucarotti saw it when he was writing the story: it would be interesting to see a Compare and Contrast). We are in a completely alien society: this is pre-Columbus and there are no Conquistadors for us to provide some kind of reference point with the Aztecs. I wonder if a modern version of the story would have the self-belief to do the story straight (leaving aside the fact that there is always an SF element in Who pseudo-historicals).

We have to, according to the Doctor, take the Aztecs on their own terms, human sacrifices and all. Barbara gets to the prophesied goddess and the Doctor manages to have a rather sweet romance and get accidentally betrothed thanks to a cup of cocoa. Interesting to contrast One here with RTD/Moffat's Doctors. Of course, in 1964, DW still wasn't quite the children's programme it would soon become, but then there was no reason why a widower (as we would assume) shouldn't have a chaste romance even in a children's programme. Hard to imagine this kind of autumnal dalliance in many modern shows. Ian gets to be in pretty good fights. So everyone has plenty to do except for Susan who gets sent off to a ladies' seminary. There could have been some interesting possibilities for a sub-plot there, but it's not developed in the way that might hope. It would be interesting to read a post-colonial analysis of "The Aztecs". We are inevitably skirting the boundary of exoticism here.

But still what we have here is something much closer to DW as we know it than was the case a few weeks ago. In particular, the Doctor is now recognisably the Doctor (it's possible that he is in "The Keys of Marinus": it's just that the whole thing is such a mess that once can't really tell). The Doctor projects avuncular charm and authority. He can still do spiky, but he is no longer the sinister, potentially malevolent figure that he came across in the first couple of stories and the viewer is no longer worried about what Babs might stumble across in the TARDIS broom cupboard (to be fair, very few viewers probably expected that at Saturday teatime in 1964; we are still a look way off a world in which Dexter or even Ashes to Ashes could exist). It would be interesting to know how much of this is the scripts and how much to the Hartnell and the rest of the team gelling together. By this point, DW is a very palpable hit and one especially among children. That's going to constraint what the show is and where it can. For the next 46 years.

If perhaps not that surprising that "The Aztecs" was the first One DVD the BBC released. In a sense, what came before was the prologue; now we begin the series proper.

Now Write On...

The obvious NWO settings are the Maya (Mel Gibson) or the Incas. I recall a mid-70s ITV children's series about the Inca (I think it was the Inca) from the days when they made children's programmes for teenagers (I'd have been about 9). Other interesting possibilities would be Cahokia or Chaco Canyon. Several of these would work as ecological fables. But in the case of Inca, we could do a very interesting comparative critique of the Inca and Spanish societies (to what extent is this done in The Royal Hunt of the Sun?).

Doctor Who: "The Keys of Marinus"

pmcray — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:59:16 GMT

"The Keys of Marinus" is utter tosh. Supposedly, the story was late replacement with Nation being brought to crank out the scripts quickly as he had demonstrated the ability to do this on "The Daleks". The idea of the portmanteau story with the different settings was allegedly to save money, although how that can have been thought to be the case, I am at a complete loss. Perhaps Nation found it easier to do a series of vignettes than a longer story (see "The Chase"). George Coulouris, who had been in Pathfinders, another lost sf series from the 1960s, gives a bizarrely stilted performance as Arbitan, and most of the other actors seem to take their cue from him. It's obvious that most of the cast have realised that, on the evidence of the script and the budget, this seems to be a kid's show and there isn't really much point trying very hard.

We get a model shot of the TARDIS dematerialising followed by some footage of the island, which actually isn't that bad and reminded before of Stingray before the wobbly sets are rolled on and everything goes down hill rapidly. Arbitan, Keeper of the Conscience of Marinus (don't ask) sends the travellers off to try and reclaim the eponymous keys, which have been scattered across the planet, and gives them teleport bracelets preprogrammed with the locations of the keys. I know, I know. But this was the early 1960s and Nation was not a hard sf writer. So we get to visit four different locales on Marinus.

First, "Oz", an apparent utopia that is actually a decaying dystopia whose inhabitants are ruled over by BRAINS IN VATS, who use drugs to induce a state of reverie in the inhabitants. Interestingly, it is Barbara on whom the spell fails to take and who smashes the VATS (well, perhaps just a VAT).

Second, "The House in the Jungle". Intelligent plants. We'll see that again with Nation.

Third, "The Frozen Tundra". Actually, Vasor is an interesting character and, trapped in a hut in the middle of the sub-polar snowfields, there is a genuine sense of menace for the companions (the Doctor is on holiday) This episode might almost have worked where it not for the ice soldiers, who come over look like something out of Monty Python. I could also have done without the implied nature of the particular threat to Barbara.

Fourth, "Rumpole of the TARDIS". The Doctor gets to play Perry Mason and Ian the innocent accused. Contains some of the most ludicrously risible courtroom scenes in television history.

And then it is back to the island and the Voord, who are only in the first and last episodes. They are wearing flippers and one of the actors manages to trip over his own pair. I can't imagine that anyone really thought they were going to be the next Daleks. Yartek, the leader of the Voord is killed when he inserts a fake key into the Conscience of Marinus. Unlike W&M, I don't see how it could have been intended as an "I'll Be Back!" death.

Hardly any of TKoM makes the slightest bit of sense. Of course, that is true of most Who, but here there is so little less going on that you'd have chance to ignore the fact that it doesn't make sense. If things had gone on like this, I don't think DW would have lasted the year. Luckily, they didn't. And at least we know where the teleport bracelets in Blake's 7 come from.

Now Write On...

I think TKoM is an object lesson in what not to do. For instance, no "Collect the Plot Tokens" storylines - unless there is something intrinsically interesting about the plot tokens (by extension, this means no MacGuffins) or at least something intrinsically interesting in whatever it is that happens when you bring the plot tokens together (and a good reason why they are scattered in the first place). Of course, it also helps to have a coherent plot, scenery that doesn't wobble, monsters who aren't wearing flippers and actors who aren't phoning in their performances.

As Del pointed out many years ago, there is no such thing as a desert planet or a jungle planet and it is always good to see a planet that has different cultural and geographical zones. I think there is stuff that could be done with that. I also quite liked the idea of the Doctor as advocate. He certainly ends up on trial himself enough times in years to come. Given the popularity of courtroom dramas, the Doctor could surely roll out his Rumpole/Perry Mason routine again to defend a companion. Has this not been done? I think there is definite mileage in a Boston Legal crossover (surely they could get Shatner to do a cameo).

And BRAINS IN VATS. You can never have enough BRAINS IN VATS.

Doctor Who: "Marco Polo"

pmcray — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 23:23:59 GMT

The first lost story. Which is a great pity as it is supposed to be good. Why was it not part of the 1973 sale to Algeria? I have only seen the 30 minute recap that comes with Beginnings DVDs. Certainly from the production stills it seems to be have been sumptuously mounted. This is the first proper historical and represents both a prototype for much early Who as well as something of another road in terms of its framing device (Marco Polo as narrator and an animated map to show where the progress of the characters on their journey) and the in-story time span (several months). On the strength of "The Aztecs", John Lucarotti's next story, and what we see and hear in the recap, I suspect "Marco Polo" was pretty good with plenty of opportunity for Ian to dress up and play the (historical) action hero (he had done that before and he would do it again) and for Susan to do something other than scream. And the characters start referring to the TARDIS as the TARDIS again. I probably ought to source that CD.

It is interesting that Marco Polo was the choice for the first historical and indeed it is until the end of Season Two with "The Time Meddler" that we get an historical set in Britain and that's C11th Northumbria, not the most obvious setting. Which I think tells us something about the scope of the series and the assumed level of sophistication of the audience. Contrast with NuWho seasons 1, 2 and 5, which give us first historicals in Victorian Cardiff, Victorian Scotland and WWII London respectively. I think we lost something when we lost Newman's educational remit. We certainly lost something when the producers forgot that there is a whole world with a lot of history out there. Only two NuWho historicals has been set in the non-English speaking past (one by the Moff) and only one before the modern era. The contrast with the Hartnell era is telling.

Now Write On...

Historical drama is supposed to be something that the BBC is good at (of course, we are mostly talking corset operas, but I think we'll come back to that). A pure historical, especially one mounted on a grand scale, would probably seem an affectation today, but there is still of inspiration to be found here (and there is no such thing as a pure historical: the mere presence of the Doctor and his companions, whatever they do, ensures that). Marco Polo was the subject of one of the Ladybird history books. Who else was in that series? The Pilgrim Fathers, Captain Cook, Alexander the Great. I quite like the idea of Vasco da Gama or Magellan (don't think they were Ladybirded).

The notion of a story spread over months offers enormous potential to a writer like Moffat (and consider "The Girl in the Fireplace"). It would allow the characters to act strategically, not just tactically. This is arguably something that drama is not very good at, or, rather, individual episodes are not very good at. If a film or a episode is a short story, then a series can be a novel, thus, proverbially, The Wire, The Sopranos, Battlestar Galactica, Deadwood and any number of other American series going back into the 1990s, and indeed we have the story arcs of recent seasons for what they are worth (very little; as the Weasel has consistently pointed out, irksome foreshadowing is no substitute for actual plot) and the unfolding text of the show over 46 years, but still it is to the shame of British television that it has completely failed to match the US series in terms of ambition and achievement, it barely even seems to have tried, which is very odd considering that television executives are presumably watching the boxed sets of the American shows every night over their Taste the Difference moussaka and glass of Carignan. Clearly DW is a very different beast to Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5, much less Mad Men. But it will be interesting to see what Moffat does with the arc (so far, not so good; I'm just hoping that Amy's amnesia is something interesting). But, of course, what DW can do and has done is play with form, structure, theme and content, hence the unfolding text (to what extent do Coronation Street or EastEnders or --- it has been going for 37 years, and Tat Wood thinks it's funny these days --- Last of the Summer Wine have an unfolding text? Clearly the characters in EastEnders can never spend several weeks trekking across the Gobi Desert or working as schoolmaster/housemaid in "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood". A few years here or there makes no difference to the Doctor, but could impact interestingly on the companions (the difficulty being that sort of thing might be considered to break the implicit contract with the audience, but see a certain story in Season Two).

Two in "The Tomb of Cybermen" states he is 450; Ten is 906, so that's 456 years somewhere, mostly not on screen. But that seems right. Nine seems to travel only with Rose (has he just regenerated?), but we know that he had a more substantial career (probably several decades). Clearly in the current season, there is something wrong with time (the Doctor is constantly late) and we have already had a two year jump - for Amy, but who knows how long for the Doctor. We know we are getting some kind of flashforward for Amy. It would be fun to have a story spread over a century, although it would be easier to do that with a non-contemporary human companion (and we need another one of those soon; Cap'n Jack, of course).

Doctor Who: "The Edge of Destruction"

pmcray — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:33:33 GMT

The thing about "The Edge of Destruction" is that is probably makes more sense now than it did at the zenith of Old Who in the late 1970s. It's a two parter, which makes it the length of a NuWho episode and it's a bottle episode with which we are also familiar from the new series. Here we just have the four regulars, in the TARDIS, going (more than) slightly mad. In 1964, everyone would have been familiar with television drama involving a small group of people trapped in some kind of restricted and claustrophobic environment. This was an age when Sartre's Huis Clos could be on primetime television and many of the plays that filled up the schedules would have demonstrated the influence of Beckett, Ionesco and the Theatre of the Absurd. If we imagine that the ideal viewer of Doctor Who as a 17-year old Galoise-puffing A-level French student who enjoys discussing Camus and the roman nouveau in the local espresso bar over a milky coffee served in those rather natty glass cups (when will we those back in fashion?), we get some notion of how this story is expected to work for the audience.

Of course, another way TEoD made more sense then was that it could be seen as a sideways story - we've had a time story and a space story, so now was the turn of the third kind of adventure that the series was intended to feature. Melted clockfaces are the kinds of things that turn up in dreams (apparently one of telling whether you are in a dream is to look at your watch, look away and then look at it again - the time will be different) and Daliesque surrealist paintings. The characters are in some kind of fugue state and we can expect the unexpected.

So we get Susan stabbing a couch a pair of rather nasty looking scissors. The kind of thing we might have expected in a post-watershed play, but pretty strong stuff for Saturday teatime even in 1964. We won't see the likes of that again and we can imagine the kinds of interpretation that would have been put on it by our proto-Lacanians in the sixth form common room on Monday morning.

Interestingly, it is only the third story and the idea that the TARDIS is both somehow alive and sentient, and able to communicate telepathically with the crew has been established. There'll be more of that in the decades to come. Of course, today the notion that TARDIS rearranges the interior of the TARDIS to suit the exigencies of the plot seems second nature (how physical is the interior of the TARDIS? - it seems to get a pretty good trashing at the end of "The End of Time", and regenerates in "The Eleventh Hour" - I believe this is treated in the late 1970s).

It turns out that the ship hasn't been invaded, but that the fast return switch has become stuck (the name of the switch is written in felt-tip next to it), which causes the TARDIS to constantly go back in time and ultimately reach the fiery birth of a planetary system (possibly the Solar System, although given Whittaker's grasp of astronomy, he might have meant a galaxy or the universe) when the ship will be destroyed. The fugue state is the TARDIS's way of telling the crew that something is wrong. A flashing indicator "WARNING: FAST RETURN SWITCH ON" might have been more useful or perhaps an automatic override. But this was the 1960s. This was an age when things did go wrong because a button had become stuck in a particular position. It was also an age when the vehicle bus wasn't the single most expensive component in a car. People just didn't expect multiply redundant command and control systems in those days (I wonder to what extent they existed in aircraft in the early 1960s).

Now Write On...

"The Ghosts of the TARDIS": the Doctor or a companion alone in the TARDIS. A companion would have more reason to do some exploring - and go through that door that the Doctor has explicitly told her never, ever, to even think about opening. Of course, the Doctor is more likely to be alone in the TARDIS (the companion could have gone to visit her mother or aunt). And for him, the TARDIS is full of ghosts. We might never even see the "ghosts". It could all be done with lightning and sound. Has the TARDIS been invaded by something? Is the fast return switch stuck on again? Is something that has been living and evolving somewhere in the TARDIS for centuries? The Doctor thinks he is going mad as he tries to use logic and intuition to deduce what is going on. The Doctor eventually realises that the something has been growing in a single room and is now using the internal phone and servant bell system to try to escape. The Doctor realises that the infection will soon overwhelm the TARDIS. He somehow draws it out and then uses the TARDIS interdimensional pneumatic telegraph system that connects each of the infinite number of rooms in the TARDIS to split the "ghost" into an infinite number of pieces, which are then distributed to each of an prime-numbered rooms. There are still an infinite amount of rooms left to use in the TARDIS hotel and each "ghost" is merely an infinitesimal fragment of the infection and will take an infinite amount of time to grow back to its former size (perhaps).

This could be a very economical episode. Given the new TARDIS set and the Moff's recent statement that he considers the TARDIS to be infinite (a very Borgesian notion and one in full concordance with my own idea of the TARDIS), we might need a couple of rooms we haven't seen before (in addition to the swimming pool and the library), but this would allow the actor playing the Doctor to some real acting. We don't see many one person shows on primetime TV these days, but the Doctor does talk to himself a great deal, so he doesn't have to have anything but the various ghostly phenomena to play off. I think (I hope) we are going to see a lot more of the TARDIS under the Moff (despite his comment that we want want Narnia, not the wardrobe, but the TARDIS is no wardrobe), so this could be a real possibility for a (literal, almost) capsule episode for the new dispensation.

Doctor Who: "The Daleks"

pmcray — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:31:41 GMT

Everything changes again at the end of episode one with the sight of Barbara being menaced by a plunger. Just imagine if "The Sensorites" or some counter-Earth story had been the second story. I don't think we'd be talking about DW today. As I have said before, Daleks are bloody scary (I do want to get one). They shouldn't be really: they shouldn't be any scarier than a miniature tank. We know there is something alive inside a Dalek, that they aren't jut robots, but a Dalek as a Dalek seems organic in a way that, say, moving car with a person inside it doesn't. They don't have legs, they don't have faces, they don't look organic, and yet they are definitely alive. It's a classic arachnid reaction. Odd then that the production team didn't learn the lesson. I long for a monster that isn't a person in a suit, although at least DW has generally made more of an effort than Star Trek.

The Daleks here (there's seems to be only about six of them plus some cardboard cutouts) are pretty wimpy compared to later Daleks, but people just hadn't seen anything like them before. They were as fresh as The Beatles and they caused a sensation (I will discuss further when we get to the later stories).

The TARDIS has a faulty fluid link. Well, the Doctor says it does so that he can get to go and explore the Dalek city in search of mercury. The Dalek city has storerooms, just like a university department on Earth and the storerooms conveniently contain bottles of mercury. It is unclear what the Daleks might use it for, or why it would be in the kinds of bottles found on Earth. It seems odd today that Ian even suggests looking for in the city (or perhaps that he has any reasonable hop of finding it). Presumably the atmosphere of Coal Hill School was thick with the vapour from spilt mercury. Perhaps it had got him. I recall they had some mercury at Longridge High School in 1992; I don't suppose though they would now. Of course, mercury suggests the alchemists and Hermes Trismegistus. Whether that was David Whittaker really had in mind for the Doctor at this stage is debatable (see T&M).

The thing is that it is hard to imagine today that the TARDIS does not have a universal replicator/nanofactory aboard, or at least the kind of workshop facilities that a large or - small - warship would have. Of course, people didn't realise how big the TARDIS was in those days. If does have a food machine, which, of course, is presumably some form of specialised personal nanofactory. There is a problem here: to us, it is clear that the Doctor must know more than he is saying about the Daleks, for instance, and about the capabilities of the TARDIS. But thinking in this way seems dishonest both to the original creators and to the audience of the time. No-one in 1963 knew that the Daleks were going to the Doctor's greatest enemy (again see later stories though) and no-one knew about personal nanofactories. We've got to take the text as far as we can as it is presented to us.

We get the classic DW story structure again of the Doctor and companions becoming involved in a conflict between two antagonist groups. In "An Unearthly Child", we just get Kal, but here we get the Thals. Unfortunately, they are far more obviously refugees from the John Gielgud school of acting than the more kitchen sink cavepeople. The anti-pacifist message does perhaps leave a slightly bitter taste. It occurs me that if Ian is same age as William Russell then it wouldn't have been Malaya that Ian learnt his fighting skills, but Burma (I don't know what Russell himself did during the war).

We get to see what is inside a Dalek, well, a hand. We also get the old get inside a Dalek and pretend to be a Dalek gag. In the first Dalek story. Given what we know of Daleks now, it's hard to believe that Ian could do that, but 1964 was a simpler age (although, of course, double declutching). The Daleks do use CCTV, although not effectively as they might, but at least it is there. There is a great deal of fairly tedious being captured and escaping, but eventually they get back to the TARDIS at the end of episode 4, although to discover - D'oh! - that they left the fluid link back in the Dalek city. So, effectively this is a story of two halves with the second recapitulating the first. Nation is no master of dramatic structure (again see later). So, the Thals have to risk their lives to help get the fluid link back, but at least they get to discover manly aggression and do defeat the (few, remaining) Daleks. Barbara has a bit of thing going on with Ganatus, who gives her some cloth to make a dress. There is quite a bit of this kind of thing in early Who and I will, again, discuss it in more detail later.

Overall, it would have worked better as a four episode story. The Doctor is still a sinister old man, whose quite happy to risk the lives of his companions and complete to slake his curiosity. The Daleks are like nothing on Earth and it is easy to forgive a creeky and dull story a great deal for them. And it would have been much easier still in 1964 (see the ratings).

Now Write On...

We might like to see some more of those Daleks. Oh. yes... We get back to Skaro and see the Thals again in the years to come. Of course, they are blond and blue-eyed. There are things we might want to do with that (I shall see to what extent they were done). We might like to find out what happened to Ganatus - and that dress. But this is the Daleks' story. And we aren't going to run out of Dalek stories.