Nikola Tesla's Night Of Terror
(Season 12, Dr 13 with Graham Ryan and Yaz, 19/1/2020, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Nina Metvier, director: Nida Manzoor)
Rank: 292
For sale: used electric car. One careful owner (until it got sat on by a Silkrith), 1903 vintage, registration number 00000000000000001. Apply: Nikolai Tesla. Willing to throw in an aerial mast too , on condition you keep me posted of any aliens who might use it to get in contact. Rich capitalist investors need not apply (this means you Edison!!!)
Well it was a night of terror for someone alright, but something tells me I had a worse time of it than ol’ Tesla did (he doesn’t so much as look scared throughout). You see, this should be exactly the sort of story I love. It’s a historical, which tends to be the sort of thing the 13th Doctor stories do extra well for some reason, maybe because it’s a time that we know seems ‘real’ and which takes less ‘worldbuilding’ to make the situation believable (something the Chibnall stories really struggle with). What’s more it’s a real story that already had a bunch of scifi overtones and where recorded history is ambiguous enough to fly a Tardis right into, as Tesla really did send most of his adult life convinced he was talking with aliens from another planet (even if it doesn’t quite turn out the way it did in real life it’s pretty close – closer than, say, letting Mandragora helix run around in the Renaissance, Shakespeare get his inspiration from real alien witches or getting Da Vinci to paint an attic full of Mona Lisas). It’s a story that features real science, which automatically makes it more plausible and makes the stakes higher than the other more purely ‘fantasy’ related era stories. There are no overall story arcs to worry about like Billy no-mates Cybermen or Timeless Toddlers (this is the last story we can say that about if you’re watching these stories in order in fact). By this era’s standards newcomer Nina Metvier’s script positively sparkles with intelligence and ideas and although there’s the usual lag in the middle when everyone stands around for ten minutes discussing the plot this is, along with ‘Spyfall’, the best paced of the Chibnall era stories so there with enough incident to fill up 45 minutes and no garbled rushed endings or longeur beginnings. The characterisation is better than usual too, with the 13th Doctor basically turned into a gushing Peter Cushing as she allies herself with the mad lone inventor in the attic cobbling the most important machine that ever existed (because it saves the Earth from destruction) out of odds and ends she finds lying around – this is so obviously the way for this Doctor to go, as she manically talks to herself while running round a laboratory, that it’s a wonder all stories from hereon in don’t follow suit (the closest is ‘Village Of The Angels’ where she gets to do this all over again, even better).
So why don’t I love
Nikola Tesla? Well, there’s an alien in the machine. Actually two. To start
with the literal one: what the heck are the Skithra? They must be the most
poorly defined Dr Who monster race of them all, a ‘Queen of shreds and patches’
(unusual to hear this Doctor quoting from Gilbert and Sullivan no matter how
many of her predecessors did). We never learn if all her race are like this or
if this is just one lone bad ‘un that let Royalty go to her head a la the
family Slitheen (I like to think there are friendly scorpions knitting Tesla
some ear-warmers to say thankyou for his gift of electricity, which he never
got in his lifetime because they live so many light years away). They have no
back story, no motivation, no plans to do anything with the Earth and have no
reason to be bothering Tesla at all (except for the fact they got the radio
signals he’d been sending out into space – which could have been received by
anybody). They are, apparently, a sort of alien scorpion when we see them
running and more of a sort of giant spider when we see them close up (with
makeup so similar to the Racnoss from ‘The Runaway Bride’ it screams recycling;
at least have the decency to paint them a different colour other than bright
red). It’s so great to have Anjil Mohindra making her debut in the main series
after launching her career as the Sarah Jane-style brave and curious journalist
for the 21st century in ‘The Sarah Jane Adventures’ and in many ways
she’s Dr Who’s biggest success story: a complete unknown who’d done absolutely
no television before who is now a regular part of our screens, established as
one of her generation’s greatest British actresses (and unlike some other
success stories that are down to having a decent agent or being in the right
place at the right time you have to say that she deserves it –my only quibble
is that her co-star Daniel Anthony hasn’t become just as big). It’s fun, too to
have her shaking off her good girl image and being a full-on baddy while
Bradley Walsh plays the goody-good companion (a complete reversal of the last
time they met when he was in the Sarah Jane Adventures story ‘The Day Of the
Clown’ as a creepy Harlequin style monster; Anjil had got on well and went up
to say hi the first day ion set in full makeup and was shocked to find her
co-star didn’t recognise her at all!) But it’s also a waste: Anjil is an
actress with the rare ability to offer layers of meaning to a character and
there just aren’t any here; The Skilthra have no skill except the ability to
get radio messages, have no specific threat, no special weapon, they don’t even
make things themselves – they just threaten over species and bully them into
working for them (which is what they want to do to us now. Thanks Tesla!) Sure
they’re bright red and fill up a room but in every other respect they’re small
fry, just another shouty loser baddy from outer space any past Doctor would
have defeated in ten minutes with a yoyo, a bit of string and some jelly
babies. At no time do you ever feel that the world is under threat (and just
contrast that with the ‘Clown’ story: a similarly unlikely one-layered threat
that somehow manages to be scary and creepy and feels like a threat precisely
because you don’t know what’s coming next, a sign of how far Who has fallen
that this better story from series twelve can’t match one of the lesser stories
from the spin-off series of a decade earlier). This feels like one of the
easiest foes The Doctor has ever defeated and seems odd that she makes such a
meal of, given that she has two of the greatest scientific brains of the 20th
century working with her across much of the story. As for the ‘flame monsters’ the Queen creates
out of thin air they’re rubbish, The Silence (from ‘Day
Of The Moon’) crossed with The Whispermen (from ‘Name
Of The Doctor’) who make absolutely nonimpact whatsoever. You wonder why
they bothered: I mean isn’t a hundred foot tall alien scorpion enough?
The bigger problem though
is what’s been done to history: it’s wrong. I can’t think of a single Dr Who
historical that takes this much creative license with the truth and distorted
the facts so readily.There are stories from the past I like to believe really
happened this way, with writers keen to show the accuracy of world events and
the people behind them, to the extent that they even show you people as they
probably were, away from the most famous collective sources (which is why
Kublai Khan is a nice old man playing backgammon despite his fierce reputation
in ‘Marco Polo’ and why Saladin is more ‘British’ in his moral code and values
than Richard The Lionheart in ‘The crusades’). Admittedly it all goes a bit
wrong when aliens turn up and start giving the natives electric toasters
(looking at you ‘The Time Meddler’) but by and large there’s a pact between
writers to be as fair as possible to all sides, to tell a story as it really
was. At no time watching previous Dr Who historicals do you think ‘well, that’s
biased’. ‘Tesla’ though is political point scoring and a distortion or at least a single interpretation of the
truth. They say that the biggest victory of any war is that you get to write
the history books, to make yourself out to be the obvious hero for the rest of
recorded time and your rivals out to be the complete and utter villains, with
no room for nuance or misunderstandings or the fact that the truth is usually
on a sliding spectrum somewhere towards the middle, with recognisable
grievances on both sides (maybe not WW2, which was purely Hitler’s ego trip,
but most of the rest). The same goes for smaller scale wars, like the great
inventions war of New York in the early 1900s, when Nikolai Tesla and Thomas
Edison were both working on their new inventions; Edison in a whacking great
laboratory with lots of buddies; Tesla with a single assistant in a back room,
in a rivalry that turned fierce and bitter. Dr Who could have made them both
out to be geniuses, spent the story in awe that two such different yet equally
brilliant minds walked across the same tiny cobbled streets at the same time or
tut-tutted about how the world would have been the better if both of them had
managed to put aside their differences and found a way of working together.
Instead it’s a story that doesn’t just ask us to pick a side but picks one for
us. And, to me at least it picks the wrong one.
For years the history
books recorded Thomas Edison as a ‘winner’ and Nikolai Tesla as a ‘loser’,
given that one died as a millionaire and the other grossly in debt. Had you
asked anyone who wasn’t big on science about both men at any time up to the
1980s they’d have raved on about Edison’s inventions like the phonograph and
the lightbulb while vaguely knowing some folk story about how Tesla went mad
and started building aerial masts to talk to aliens. Edison’s part in history
seemed assured; Tesla’s less so. But
time and reputations both can be wibbly wobbly timey wimey and something
strange happened around the invention of the ‘Tesla’ electric car and the wifi
internet service: suddenly he became the hero of a generation who discovered
the man’s technology and saw him as the hero. Tesla’s inventions seemed so far
ahead of their time to us in the 21st century, in an age when Elon
Musk had named his electric cars ‘Teslas’ and we used the internet everyday,
that he suddenly seemed a visionary, someone who had seen past all the problems
that Edison’s inventions had inadvertently caused. People began to wonder what
might have happened if Tesla’s inventions harnessing the power of electricity
and invisible alternative currents had come to pass a hundred years ago. ‘Night
Of Terror’ feels as if the entire story was set to re-dress that balance, to
make Tesla even more of a household name and align him with all of the Doctor’s
values: open-mindedness, bravery, curiosity and a sheer refusal to give up even
when odds were against you. The fact that Tesla believed in aliens, something
that many people used to trash his reputation over the years, makes him a
shoo-in for rehabilitation as a good bloke when seen through the eyes of the
series.
Which is fair enough, except that it’s only half the story. The story goes out of its way to play up a ‘feud’ between the two inventors, where Edison refused to work with Tesla and used his power and influence to ruin his career. There’s a moment in the story where there’s a baying mob outside Tesla’s factory, with the locals blaming him for a local earthquake, the hint being that Edison had turned them all against his rival. He didn’t. Edison recognised Tesla’s brilliance. He went out of the way to give his eccentric rival a job – which yes was working on an Edison invention at first but the hand of freindship had been offered; Tesla would have had space and time and resources to complete his own inventions under the Edison banner. Had Tesla then found his feet and earned enough money there’s nothing to say Edison would have done anything to stop him setting up his own company in the future. At a time when money and resources were tight it was a genuine recognition from Edison that his rival had abilities that he didn’t have, with the hope that they could work together for the benefit of both of them. It was far from the patronising offer the story makes it out to be. It was quite a risk too: Tesla was his own worst enemy in so many ways and lost contacts, support, sponsorship and allies by being rude and obnoxious. Edison, by contrast, was charming and made sure to look after the people who looked after him which is the main reason why his contact book became so large. Only after Tesla turned him down and started trash-talking him in public did Edison start doing the same in return. Nowhere in the story is there even the slightest mention of that. Instead Edison is portrayed as being pompous and arrogant, certain in his own abilities and only interested in Earthly material gains while his visionary rival looked out at the stars with bigger things on his mind; this is complete nonsense too. Tesla was such a hard-nosed businessmen that he damaged his ties with his investors with inventions he assumed they wouldn’t be able to understand while, in their eyes at least, wasting it on huge aerial masts that brought in no financial returns on their money whatsoever; his high turnover of staff was also because he tried to penny-pinch where he could. Much of the change in reputation, too, comes from the fact that Edison’s inventions caused so many of the problems we have with our planet now, encouraging the use of fossil fuels that we now know is unsustainable compared to Tesla’s inventions. But that’s unfair too: Edison’s inventions were part of a genuine crusade to make life easier for everyone not simply to make money. The many patents Edison claimed weren’t to outfox his rivals and to stop them using his ideas, as the story suggests, so much as a way of explaining to any inventor who bought his patents just how they were done, so they could build on those ideas too; he recognised, unlike Tesla, that inventions weren’t made in isolation but inspired other inventors; Tesla hoarded his papers and wouldn’t let anyone else know what he was working on, including his assistants sometimes, who’d have been kept in the dark if he hadn’t have invented his own sort of lightbulb. He prided himself on making his inventions affordable and in many ways the first mass distributor of products, making them so that the working classes could afford them too. There was no way Edison would ever have known of the damage his inventions would cause longer term: how could he? It took decades before anyone noticed the gradual build-up of temperatures as, in Edison’s lifetime, most of his inventions remained the soul use of people in North America and Europe. Even The Doctor never seemed that fussed before, even though he must know how Earth turns out (Bessie at fast speed must gobble up one heck of a lot of petrol, never mind The Whomobile and even if other Doctors never drove anything like as much they’ve never said anything against fossil fuels pre-2005. Heck it was only stories ago in ‘Spyfall’ we were in a plane. And electricity and battery-powered cars use fossil fuels too hen they’re being plugged into a socket, albeit to a lesser degree). He was more interested in helping people make their lives easier and more enjoyable. One other thing this story skirts over: Tesla was backwards in so many ways, a chauvinist through and though, like so many of his day, who thought women could never be scientists with complaints of ‘weight-shaming’ by one of his staff who worked for him; Edison by contrast helped many female workers and gave away lots of his earnings to the suffragette movement. But you don’t get that impression from this story, where Edison is downright rude to the Doctor and other women and Tesla is borderline flirty (which is just so so wrong on so many levels, not least because a lot of historians now assume Tesla was gay as he never married; I don’t for the record – it was his brashness and lack of money that put off any prospective female suitors). One last thing that should make The Doctor side with Edison over Tesla: he abhorred violence and hated guns and banned everyone who worked for him from using them, at a time in America when carrying them as common as possessing a mobile phone today. Honestly Edison was far more forward thinking than he’s ever given credit for and seen as almost as much of a weirdo as Tesla in his day for holding such beliefs that now seem to us completely normal.
Not that Edison was an angel and Tesla a
villain, far from it; both men were geniuses in their way, genius scientists
who were also flawed human beings. If The Doctor has a problem with Edison then
it should really be for his use of experimentation on animals (something Tesla
never did) and the fact that his inventions played a big part in the electric
chair (something not mentioned here weirdly), even though the author clearly
has beef with him). There’s no doubting too that Edison certainly liked and
enjoyed his money. Is that necessarily a bad thing though? I mean, there were
very much poor people living in 1903 while Edison was dripping in wealth but he
was quite a philanthropist on the quiet too donating to many charities long
before that sort of thing was considered ‘normal’ or ‘good for your image’ (if
anything it harmed Edison’s reputation as a hard-nosed businessman). There’s a
case to be made that being a lone inventor in a shed is more ‘honourable’ than
being a capitalist millionaire who makes money off the ideas of your employees
(Dr Who is often against oppressive capitalism after all, just see ‘The Sunmakers’).
But by trying to redress the balance of a century or so of slander Dr Who goes
too far. History likes having its heroes and villains to compare and Tesla was
a villain in the Edison story for far too long, the eccentric inventor who
tried to steal his thunder. But equally Edison’s success wasn’t luck or
manipulation the way this story tries to tell it but due to his ability to get
on with people in a way Tesla naturally never could. As much as the socially
awkward 13th Doctor no doubt identifies with this aspect of Tesla
it’s hard to imagine any earlier Doctor siding with the lone weirdo over the
man who does his best to keep hold of his friends. What’s more we have little
proof in any of Tesla’s inventions being ‘real’ once he loses his investors and drops out the
public eye: sure he talked about antigravity machines, perpetual motion
machines and death rays (not very Doctory that bit either so they don’t mention
it) but nobody ever saw them working, nor is there any proof that they could.
Everyone could see what Edison did because he mass-produced it; Tesla was just
a lone eccentric sitting in his shed that, given many accounts of people who
knew him, was more than happy to make stuff up. Does that make Edison the hero
and Tesla the villain? No, but it makes both men far more nuanced than they’re
ever given a chance to be on television and even given that all fiction takes
artistic license and no one expects Dr Who to be historically accurate to the
letter this is wrong because having both men as different, yet on an equal
footing, with different strengths and weaknesses, would not only have made for
a fairer story but a better story. ‘Night of Terror' only tells half the story
and gets most of that wrong. Few real human beings have ever been as ‘wronged’
on this show as Edison was. Dr Who is the series that made me such a keen
historian, but the keen historian in me knows how easily facts can be distorted
and the importance of fairness and seeing things from a neutral perspective,
and that part of me hates this story’s guts.
I kept waiting for this
story to do the usual Dr Who thing in the end, of helping two sides who seem to
have irreconcilable differences patch them up by coming together against a
common thereat by making the most of their very different skillsets. The story
sort of skirts with doing that, but insists on making Edison the dunce
slowcoach bitching and whining at Tesla’s heels while disbelieving the evidence
of the existence of aliens all around him. That’s wrong too: Edison too is on
record as saying that ‘I cannot believe for a moment that life originated on
this insignificant little ball which we call The Earth’. He was as open-minded
and as big a believer in the possibility of alien life as Tesla; he just didn’t
erect giant costly aerial masts that put his backers in debt and which were
going to get him in trouble with the locals. If anything it would be the more
in character that Edison would be the one going ‘told you so’ while Tesla tries
telling the aliens that he was the one that brought them there and they should
obey him a la Tobias Vaughan in ‘The Invasion’. The very final ending goes out
of its way to say that they learn nothing from their experience, that Edison
goes back to being Edison and Tesla dies penniless despite saving the world and
isn’t it awful? Surely the only decent ending is to have them both save the
world and acknowledge each other’s brilliance, before having their minds wiped
(because history has to be respected and Tesla still has to die penniless), but
only after The Doctor comes back as a ‘dream’ showing Tesla how much love and
joy people get from his inventions and that he’ll become a household
name…eventually (a la ‘Vincent and The Doctor’). I kept waiting, too, for the
sub-plot of the ‘orb of Thassa’ spreading information to be turned into a
sub-plot, about how gaining knowledge and curiosity is good for you as long as
you learn to share and not with-hold it for yourself, while knowledge in the
wrong hands can be a weapon, something that inspires Tesla and Edison to pool
ideas and resources; nope, not a bit of it The orbs are forgotten early on,
shelved away in this plot’s list of things that don’t quite work while the
villain never gets told off, in a Doctory lecture, about how they could be
using their skills for good rather than evil. This story ought to be rooting
for Edison and Tesla’s unlikely partnership, showing how people can come
together when bigger things than a business feud are at stake, but instead
gives all the attention to the man in the title and makes Edison an also-ran
who doesn’t ‘get’ it. Rather than a beginning stressing that the Doctor just
does one of her usual story-ending lectures to the camera about isn’t it awful
how unfair history is sometimes? Only when you make stuff up, doc!
There’s something else
deeply worrying at the back of all this too. Tesla might have the moustache we
know from history books but in every other respect he’s nothing like the ‘real’
Tesla. Instead he seems more like somebody more modern, someone who went
against the status quo and stood on people’s heads to create ‘great strides’ in
history, with talk of looking into the future while everyone else couldn’t see
past their nose. Yes that’s right, I’m convinced that Tesla is being combined
with the man who helped rehabilitate his reputation and named a car after him
(one Graham mentions just to make sure we get the link), Elon Musk. I don’t
know what it is about programmes in the 2010s that seemed to love him so but
there seems a concerted effort to make Elon the hero of the age (just have a
look at the single worst episode of ‘The Simpsons’ ‘The Musk Who Fell To Earth’
from 2015 where Lisa of all characters is all over him and sees him as an
ecological do-gooder here to save us all, which is sickening in its
sycophancy). Why? Was everyone really that excited that he promised to bring
space to the masses in a number of poorly designed and even more poorly
educated space trips that went wrong? Did they really believe his p.r.? Did
they all turn a blind eye to the fact his politics, which he spouted daily to
his followers even before he bought up Twitter and reduced a world of Dr
Who-ish connection to a single consonant, were somewhere right of Davros? Did
they miss the part in his history where this self-made billionaire started off
a millionaire already thanks to his family ties? Did everyone think he was
going to give them funding if he was nice to them? Why did everyone think he
was doing good when he was so obviously causing us harm? I just don’t get it:
like Tesla I just don’t understand the appeal of anyone who burned that many
bridges with that many good people and knifed them in the back. Just look at
the way they show this aspect of the story with Tesla, that he battled against
the odds, of everyone who said no and tried to stop him, that he pushed on
because he was a pioneer. Given the horror stories of Musk’s friends and
co-workers (especially the ones at twitter) sometimes when people tell you no
and that something will be harmful you maybe ought to stop and listen, not
least to the fact that he’s a bit of a chancer who failed to pay back his
creditors (something Tesla also did regularly). Those are the usual sorts of
values Dr Who encourages after all, people who can lift people up and heal, not
create wars over nothing and throw tantrums when they don’t get their own way. Musk
is clearly the villain of our age, trying to divide us rather than unite us and
while that’s more apparent in 2023, now he has his own platform to exaggerate
his views and spread his disinformation, that was apparent enough in 2020 to make this story seem…uncomfortable when
it first went out. I fully expected to see the showrunner driving around in his
brand new gift of a Tesla when this episode went out.
As you might see, I have
more than my fair share of problems with this episode. Which is a shame because
in every other respect it’s a really good one. The idea of basing this story
around the Wardenclyffe Tower mast on Long Island is inspired; it might not
have officially brought any results but it was the first time anyone on planet
Earth had tried to contact outer space. The fact that Tesla went bust before he
received any messages (and that we now know that, in the real world at least,
the planet he was pointing it at – Mars – was dead) shouldn’t get in the way of
what a brilliantly Dr Whoy plotline this is. The mad inventor who came in peace
actually got a reply – only it turned out to be an alien of war! The
re-creation of the tower is bang on to the last detail and the scenes we get of
1903 are as full of the loving period detail as you’d expect from this series
(it’s a time period I wish we’d see more of in the series, a very Dr Whoytime
when everything is in flux and changing, with a decade-long optimism for the
new century with new inventions turning up every year until that hope gets
crushed by WW1). For all that I have issues with the general thrust of Nina
Metvier’s script I can’t fault her pacing or her dynamics. There’s something
happening almost every scene, there are strong witty lines (‘If I’d known we
were going to get a Royal visit I’d have put the kettle on!’, Graham asking the
very reasonable question – that amazingly no one in a Who historical ever has
before – what famous landmarks have been built yet and which haven’t so they
can go sightsee) and bits of characterisation throughout, the plot actually
makes sense (if you ignore the inaccuracies) and you do get wrapped up in what
happens. There are some really love scenes sprinkled throughout, from Tesla’s
walk inside the Tardis doors when he recognises so many of the ideas he’s had
coming true to Tesla’s regretful yet angry stand against the baying mob out for
his blood, pleading with them to let him keep up his work because one day they
might appreciate it. The acting too is top notch throughout: Alex Kingston’s
old sparring partner from her ER days, Goran Visnjic, is remarkably accurate as
Tesla in all but the things he says, looking just like the photographs and
sharing near-enough the same ancestry and accent (Goran had Croatian parents,
Tesla Serbian ones); Robert Glenister too is excellent as Edison in all but the
things he says, really getting to grips with a part so very different to the
last time he was in Dr Who a full thirty-seven years earlier (as the
goggle-eyed Salateen in ‘The Caves Of Androzani’;
I actually had money on this character turning out to be an android, too, given
how unlike the real Edison he was). The companions don’t get as much to do as
in other stories but all are true to their normal selves across this story
(Nina is the one actor the entire two years who gets Ryan’s dyspraxia right,
having him hesitate before leaping from a train then sprawling head over heels
inaccurately compared to the others, but not letting it stop him or make it an
excuse), while the 13th Doctor is rarely better than when she’s
talking to herself at top speed round a laboratory mixing up potions, the two
greatest minds of their age suddenly turned into her lab assistants without
complaint. The music is exceptional, Segun Akionala’s score capturing the
flavour of the time period and the sciencey elements with a bit of horror movie
thrown in too during the tense bits (especially the psychedelic cacophony that
greets the alien’s arrival that comes out of a really sweet melodic phrase like
punk rockers have been sent back in time to the summer of love); as critical as
I am about almost everything in this era I have to say I’d take Segun’s average
score over Murray Gold’s average score anyday; maybe Dudley Simpson’s too.
Even so there are a few
other things this story gets wrong that it doesn’t need to, or at any rate
obvious tricks that it fails to use. Electricity is such an amazing, alien-like
invention that we take for granted: it’s out there, in the ether invisible and
yet our world would crumble without it. I could totally believe it was an
‘alien’ gift (especially from an alien that wanted to smarten us up for its own
ends, like the Fendahl or the Sklithra’s close cousin The Racnoss) and yet Dr
Who never goes down that route. They should have set it, not in 1903, but in
1899 when Tesla recorded a still-unexplained regular pulsing that he, at least,
thought came from out of space (the Skitlhra?) We know for a fact that when
Tesla died the government seized up all his intentions and papers to hoard them
fro themselves: that’s a clear entry point for an X-Files style story about
shadowy conspiracy theorists and proof that Tesla was onto something and the
government knew about it; this part of history isn’t mentioned. The Skilthra
clearly doesn’t work, not just because it’s ill-defined but because they never
explain how it picks up radio signals that are being broadcast directly at
Mars. We already have a great Martian monster (actually we’ve got two but it
would have been hard to have the sentient water ‘The Flood’ from ‘Waters Of
Mars answer the call): why isn’t this an Ice Warrior story? We’ve never had a
‘first contact’ story that bridges the gap between a lone one being defrosted
in ‘The Ice Warriors’ and Mars joining earth in the intergalactic federation by
the time of ‘Curse Of Peladon’. It would be an obvious story to tell: two
aliens that have grown up in complete ignorance of each other’s close proximity
suddenly discovering each other thanks to the invention of a lone inventor, one
that encourages the Ice Warrior to come and take a look and then acting in
exactly the same ‘survival of the fittest’ way Edison does here. Tesla could
have been ‘lost’ to history, his masts torn down, because of his fear of what
he’s unleashed and his panic at how he’s made the earth vulnerable to our
reptilian green neighbours, even while Edison tries to sell them phonograph
records and lightbulbs, only for Tesla’s inventions to be used to keep the
Earth save from invasion in some sort of invisible forcefield (after all I’ve
never understood, if the Ice Warriors are such a gung-ho military race, why
they have never just invaded us outright when we were weak and vulnerable; they
must have known we were there before ‘The Seeds Of Death’ ). Tesla could then
be like so many other supporting characters in the Chibnall era of Who; the
most important man in the universe, who saved us all, but who could never speak
about it. That would have been a much kinder and more accurate way of safe
guarding Tesla’s reputation than have him as a victim of capitalism in general
and Tesla in particular. There are other lost opportunities along the way too:
it’s common to modern Dr Who historicals to have somebody blurt out about some
great invention by accident: how funnier would it be for ‘this’ Edison if all
his greatest ideas were ones Graham, Ryan and Yaz had blurted out by accident?
It would be in keeping with the general anti-Edison mood of the piece. Talking
of which another big one: this story is so anti-Edison the whole story seems to have been shot in
the dark, as if they’ve all reused to use lightbulbs on the set in principle.
Perhaps above everything else they promise that this will be a scary story from
the title alone, a ‘Night of Terror’ but at no point is this scary in anyway:
this story lacks any real sense of jeopardy at all (in common with most from
this era, it has to be said; at least we’ve got a sense of urgency this time
though, which is more than most of the stories around it). Nina got this story
as a ‘reward’ after working so hard in the unenviable position as script editor
across series eleven (a job with a very different feel to it in the 21st
century compared to the 20th, when the showrunners called all the
shots and was really reduced to ensuring continuity and teasing out
contradictions and typos); ironically she’s great at the inventive and
imaginative side of building a script from scratch that not all writers,
especially script editors, have; it’s the script editing this story needs.
The big one, though, is still the way this story handles its two main characters. No other Dr Who story is this unfair to real people, fundamentally misunderstanding their two characters and overplaying the feud between them. This story will, I suspect confuse the heck out of fans in another few decades when the public mood has shifted after one too many driverless electric car accidents and a general sense of nostalgia and longing for the good old days when men were men, fuels were fuels and we actually owned stuff rather than risking having it only on some ethereal technological ‘cloud’ that keeps going wrong and losing out stuff. I’ve started to see the trends already, what with the unexpected growth of vinyl and the panic after various viruses and cyber-attacks that have hacked into people’s records in all sorts of companies. Not that Tesla ever invented wifi as we know it now, never mind electric cars, but its part of a general movement that’s seen Tesla turned into a saint and Edison into a devil, both of which is clearly untrue. Both were great genius scientists who were both flawed men; the bottom line is that if ‘Night of Terror’ had given us that story rather than the one we got it would have been so much more interesting so much more interesting, so much more believable, so much more accurate. Coming on the back of ‘Orphan 55’, an atrociously acted and written story where anything that could go wrong did go wrong, most fans greeted this story with relief: at least it looks and sounds good and nothing obvious goes wrong. But in a way this story’s crime is worse: at least that story was set in an imaginative made-up future where anything could happen; this story is set in a totally imaginative made-up past. Remember when The 1st Doctor said he could never change history ‘not one line’? Well, I wish the production team of the 13th Doctor had paid attention.
POSITIVES + There's a
great scene between Ryan and Tesla's secretary Dorothy reflecting on how they
chose to leave their dull safe world behind to follow brilliant people despite
the dangers and the drawbacks. They’re both talking about different things and
different people and Ryan can’t exactly talk openly (at this point) anyway
about who The Doctor really is, but it’s a really sweet moment as we know who
he’s talking about in his replies. Both are lone impossible people who buck the
trend of what’s possible and make you believe that ther world is special in
their own different ways; through these eyes no wonder The Doctor seems to
think of Tesla as her soul brother on earth. It’s a nice bit of character for
Ryan too, a lad whose always longed for adventure but been too laidback to do
anything about it before it dropped out of thin air on his plate. Yet it’s also
the start of him beginning to have doubts about whether he’s up to the dangers
of this new world he’s never really thought about much till now, something that
will lead, more neatly than most stories in series 12, to his final exit. It's
the closest Ryan will ever come to feeling like a 'real' person and its interesting that the writer chose him
for this bit of detail, not Graham (who most writers like to give the serious
bits in contrast to his being the comedy relief) or Yaz (whose already making
goo-goo eyes at The Doctor).
Previous ‘Orphan 55’ next ‘Fugitive Of The Judoon’
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