The Witchfinders: Rank - 298

     The Witchfinders

(Season 11, Dr 13 Graham Ryan and Yaz, 25/11/2018, producer/showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writer: Joy Wilkinson, director: Sallie Aprahamian)

Rank: 298

‘If she floats she’s a witch. Either that or she’s a Silurian, a Sea Devil, a Mentor, a Vampire Fish or a Fish person in an underwater ballet’. 

It is the year of our Lord 2018 Dr Whoth vifited the year of our Lord 1612 and found figns of the Devil. Which, thif being Dr Who, turned out to be an alien made out of mud. ‘The Witchfinders’ is one of those stories where no one could quite decide what they wanted it to be. It starts off as a typical historical exploration, turns into a tragedy when The Doctor is just too late to save a dying woman ducked at a witch-hunt (who really does drown with unseemly haste), turns into a comedy when the foppish vain King James I turns up, goes into political allegory mode towards the end and winds up as yet another Dr Who story about an alien race hiding as something natural from Britain’s past (Pendle Hill). Alas only one of these is a story worth telling and it’s rather undone by all the badly thought out nonsense that comes before it – the speed at which lies can travel when people are scared and authority figures hold all the power. Had the political commentary been made the main part of the story then this would have been one worth telling, but it’s as if a curse has befallen this story and made its jokes unfunny and its serious historical setting inaccurate (a surprise given that, by and large, this era of the show tends to do historicals better than anything else).

Let’s start with the setting and oh look, it’s the first Dr Who story to be set in my adopted home of Lancashire (after an aborted trip to Blackpool that never was in the abandoned season twenty-three) and oh look, it’s really gloomy and constantly raining (so that part at least is accurate, even if they actually filmed it at Gosport. If you’re British and remember the fuss about the ‘Beast from the East’ storm this story was shot right in the middle of it, so everyone looks extra cold and miserable). And oh look, it’s a story about flipping witches, like everything made in Lancashire. Well, it was going to be either that or gingerbread men I suppose, which would have been funnier but even less historically accurate (we did do other things too y’know!) In a way this story is the most inevitable ever: it’s extraordinary that in fifty-five years the closest Dr Who has come to doing witches are the Carrionites ‘woken up’ by Shakespeare (in ‘The Shakespeare Code’ if you hadn’t guessed), while Chibnall was a local lad, brought up a few miles over the border into Merseyside, so he like me would have lived surrounded by reminders of Lancashire’s witchy past everywhere. We also know that he brought Joy Wilkinson on board partly to boost Dr Who’s admittedly appalling track record of female writers (Four ish? The ish being Paula Moore credited with writing ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ but with a suspicious amount of links to the script editor) and that she was encouraged to do a story from the ‘eyes’ of a female Doctor, so witchcraft seemed a safe bet there too. Wilkinson was up to the task in that respect too: this is the only story in the entire 13^th Doctor run where it actually matters that she’s a female Doctor and can’t simply do what she always does, because she’s currently a woman. She’s in a lot more danger than if she’d been a man (it’s easy to imagine this as a 4^th Doctor story, as he breezily offers King James I jelly babies and plays passive-aggressively with Lady Savage while Romana gets captured. Not least because, albeit set in the future on an alien planet, that’s virtually what happens in ‘Androids Of Tara’. And again in a Big Finish set more or less at the same time and location). But having The Doctor a woman, and thus be accused of being a witch (not least when she waves her sonic screwdriver around, naturally mistaken for a ’wand’) puts her in extra danger. After all, seen in one way this is a story about men controlling women and telling them what they can and can’t do (which makes it doubly weird that they make the main baddy a woman); men could be tried as wizards but it tended to be women (as they were more likely to be living with ‘witch’s familiars’ like cats, generally lived longer than their husbands with rumours that they’d killed them and by and large seemed to know more about potions and herbs than men, the irony to modern viewers being that Willa’s Granny died for knowing that certain herbs worked as medicines and this being more scientific and less superstitious than anyone else we meet in this story).   

Unfortunately what danger that is is never really defined. Forget the mud monsters for now, who don’t really come into this story anyway until the half hour mark: the threat in this world is everyone. Literally everyone. Yes Lady Savage is the one wielding the power (and hiding a secret of her own, as we later find out) but your real threat in Lancashire in 1612 is a baying mob of everyone, including your loved ones and people who rubbed shoulders with every day. Existence in the 17^th century was precarious at best and there was next to no understanding of science (everything that was known pretty much came from the Ancient Greeks who seemed very nearly as long ago then as they do now, only a few centuries in it). Your life revolved around the Church which you attended weekly without fail, you said your prayers multiple times a day and you knew your Bible by heart – almost certainly, unless your family had at some stage been rich, it was the only book you knew because you were illiterate and uneducated. Your life depended on the crops you grew and the fact you didn’t cause trouble for the gentry who owned the land you worked on. Life felt random without science (let’s face it, it still feels random today even with science and explanations for half of what happens). So when something went wrong people didn’t look into the skies and go ‘ah well, the meteorological climate is poor this year, it’ll be better next year’ or go ‘well Uncle Bill dropped death of a heart attack but he’d been showing the signs for years poor thing’, they blamed the Devil. In this era you were totally convinced The Devil walked the Earth looking for people to exploit and interfere with and if your crops failed or someone in your family died suddenly (both fairly normal things but without apparent explanation) because it wasn’t just you who believed it, everyone believed it and it was an idea re-iterated at Church every Sunday. Everyone had to be pious and if you weren’t things could go wrong and if they weren’t wrong then they weren’t just hurting you, they were hurting the whole town who might starve because of your stupidity and poor behaviour. That’s what poor Willa is fighting against when her Granny is put to death: absolutely everyone around her, even if they liked her, wanted her relative dead because if a witch was allowed to live then they might die. That’s a great crux for a Dr Who story: The Doctor and science, taking on the mob, fighting centuries of oppression and religious superstition armed with nothing more than a sonic screwdriver that could get her killed if she’s seen using it.

Alas none of that period detail comes over or at least not as well as it does in ‘Rosa’ ‘Villa Diodati’ or even ‘Nikolai Tesla’ and ‘Demons Of The Punjab’ (which get the period detail right, for all that many of the period details are wrong in both). Instead we get a story that largely goes ‘ha ha ha, they still believe in witches’ without any real attempt to show why, seen through the eyes of a 21^st century that’s going to be just as culpable for some societal faux pas in generations to come. Lady Savage is a boo-hiss villain, enjoying the power she holds over the locals. She’s not a misguided religious zealot brainwashed into thinking she was doing God’s work (as most Witchfinders were and it’s deeply unusual that one would be female anyway). She’s also joined by King James I, who isn’t at all like he is in the history books: apart from the fact that Alan Cumming looks nothing at all like him, this is an era when the King’s rule is law and his decisions are final, that he’s put here by the Divine Right of Kings which means that for his lifetime he is God (with plenty of speculation that a sudden death in a monarch meant they’d fallen under the spell of the Devil too). The King wasn’t a comedy superstitious buffoon but someone who genuinely thought they were going God’s work and that they made their country a safer place with every witch they burned. And few monarchs were quite a religious as James I, who went out of his way to pass the word of God to his kingdom (helping print the first ever book that the general public could take home: an edition of The Bible with his name on it which is still sued today). He totally should be a threat in this story but because of his fervour and his belief he’s doing the right thing, not because he’s an egotistical misogynist idiot as he is here. Indeed, given the time he lived in and what his relatives were like James was both humble and modern-thinking, spending his reign more than a little in awe of his cousins Mary Queen Of Scots and Elizabeth I (both much louder and feistier than him). One thing they do get right is the fact that he was probably gay (given that James complained about his duty to provide the throne with heirs with sex an ‘unpleasant business’ even while he had multiple male ‘favourites’ at court), but in this day and age you never ever spoke of it under pain of death. Even if you were a monarch (after all, there are enough rivals looking for an excuse to take the throne from you, like Guy Fawkes for one). No way in a quadzillion years would James openly flirt with Ryan the way The King does here. Not least because he’s black (not impossible in this era - Britain’s always been a melting pot of different cultures, far more so than most countries – but unusual enough for everyone to have commented on it and/or assumed Ryan and Yaz are slaves. Something handled well in the other two historicals this year but completely ignored here). Oh and there’s no way a King would dare ever travelling alone with that many people out for his life (there’s no way a Royal could do anything undercover in those days, with a court full of people relying on his welfare who would demand to know where he is if he spent too long on the loo). Alan Cumming tries his best (he’s excellent in ‘Lux’) but this part is written in such a manner that the only way to play it is to go over the top, as part of a ‘good cop bad cop’ routine with Siobhan Finneran’s one-dimensional Lady Savage and the two just aren’t frightening enough, leaving him chewing the scenery so hard it’s a wonder he didn’t have to have time off for indigestion. I fully expected the King to turn out to be an android or a Zygon clone given how ‘wrong’ he is in so many ways. Or, alternatively, maybe they were rtreying too hard to make you think of somebody else from the modern day when you were watching it: they look nothing alike (would that our modern equivalent had the same dress sense as his predecessor) but in 2018 the joke about a cowardly ruler who claims to be working for God and plastering his face on Bibles but who is really in league with ‘The Devil’ (or at least an alien equivalent) who enjoys talking about ’witch-hunts’ is actually a lot closer to a Donald Trump parody than the Trump-like character in ‘Arachnids In The UK’, given the King is an egotistical idiot who really does think God was on his side (although what with the divine right of Kinds at least everyone else thought it in 1612). Like every other metaphor in this story, though, I wish they’d been brave enough t go further (this is a story about the courage of your convictions even when everyone else thinks you’re wrong, after all).

So ‘The Witchfinders’ fails as both a tragedy and historical because it never feels ‘real’. It also fails as a comedy. For all that the story tries to lighten the mood by having Graham wear a succession of funny hats and his and Ryan’s comedy banter as they desperately try to distract the King in the most pathetic way possible, the jokes don’t belong here. The best Dr Who stories always manage to find a way of sticking dark humour in even the saddest of stories but this one has too many moments of pure slapstick, such as the ‘he’s behind you!’ moment when the mud Morlox rise out of the water and The Doctor hasn’t noticed. Even The Doctor’s ‘trial’ as a witch, potentially a source of real danger and drama, her friends left helplessly watching and unable to intervene while their friend and only way out of this planet and time period, is sent to her certain death, just becomes the punchline for yet another joke about The Doctor knowing Houdini (every regeneration seems to have met him in the spin-off works: I looked into adding them to my prequel sequel section, but honestly it would nearly be quicker to name the spin-off works that didn’t feature him). The mud monsters really are pathetic too: all the companions do to evade them is hide from them in near-enough plain sight, in what is clearly meant to a funny scene that ends up just silly. There are two decent gags though in a story that spits them out like confetti: the moment the companions are discussing their absolute certainty in The Doctor’s ability to stop the with trials (little knowing that it’s really her on trial!) and when the psychic paper tells everyone the Tardis crew are ‘Witch-finder inspectors’ and Graham talks about putting this town in ‘special measures’ but really none of it comes off. Graham does look good in the witch-finder’s hat (I would like a hat like that). Mostly though the jokes don’t land, because this is not a world where there’s anything to laugh at: that’s part of the problem, everyone is too afraid and pious to joke (despite the amount of gags Jesus makes in The Bible).   

The alien aspect too is undercooked for the most part, with The Morax a forgettable baddy without a proper back story (as The Doctor says ‘it’s always irritating when they’re silent!’, although they do moments later when Joy realises she has to have the baddies tell their plan somehow, taking over dead bodies in much the same weay the Gelth did in ‘The Unquiet Dead’). The sad fact is they turn up too late and are poorly designed, with the effect where they rise out of the water far worse than the similar one they managed for The Marshmen in ‘Full Circle’ a full thirty-seven years earlier. However the story is partly salvaged by the inspiration of making Pendle Hill itself the site of a prison, where they’ve been trapped for millions of years (although who put them there is a mystery given only cavemen were kicking about back then. Odds are it’s The Racnoss, the Fendahl, the Eternals or maybe even the Timelords themselves). Only Becca cut down the tree on top of the hill out of vanity that it was ‘spoiling her view’ , turning the wood into a ducking stool and accidentally unleashing the mudmen into England. The hint is that its them that’s been behind the whole witchcraft craze that swept the nation around this era (and that The Doctor stopping them is whate ends it; in reality it was more that King James had a crisis of confidence over whether he was doing the right thing after all when so many witches protested their innocence to the grave rather than be spared as he’s assumed; the Dr Who explanation works too but it’s a shame there isn’t a tag scene explaining that it stopped rather than assuming you know all this). The fact that the Morax also have a King, casting judgement over what women do also re-enforces the story’s imagery (are all of this warrior race male? We never find out). Oh and it’s also a joke: that’s mud in the eye for the baddies!

It’s also a great metaphor for the real-world explanation of what really went on during the witch-hunt’s: fear. Nobody puts a stop to this because they’re stick-in-the-muds, people who want to maintain the status quo at all costs, afraid of new ideas like medicine and science. Had we listened to them, had we not had people as brave as Willa’s Granny, we might still be living the same way now (and you would be reading this on a papyrus, reviewing Dr Who as a stage show where The Doctor is actually The Witchfinder seeking out Devils in our midst). The fact is everyone in this story is afraid, even The King who would appear to have all the power. And that’s where ‘The Witchfinders’ finally comes into its own, with about ten minutes to go, as the three baddies let down their guard and tell us what is really going on. There’s a really strong scene where Becka reveals that she was ‘touched’ by the mudmen and has been ‘pointing the finger’ so that everyone thinks she’s pious rather than touched by ‘The Devil’. It’s a timeless tactic that people still do now, the biggest cowards turning into the biggest bullies because they aren’t strong enough to admit their vulnerability and guilt in public. This is a theme at the heart of many a Dr Who story but rarely done as plainly here: Becka kills others so that they don’t kill her. James, too, has one great scene when he’s tying The Doctor up and she gets him talking, knowing everything about his background as she does (though I don’t know why he’s quite so surprised she knows: the lives of the monarchs were all common knowledge in the days when they were the only ‘celebrities’ around). James was indeed abandoned as a child – though what they don’t say in the story is that his mum Wilhamena was fleeing for her life after the Scottish throne was overturned (an even better and more thrilling Who historical one day would be how James ended up not just on the back of that one within a generation but King of England too, just when all hope seemed lost. Although his ale cousin dying young and his female cousins not having heirs, admittedly, is the largest part of it). At last, belatedly, James comes across as not a buffoon but a pitiable character, one who has spent his life searching for security and love and never finding it, his life marked by constant attempts on his life (Guy Fawkes and his boss Robert Catesby came closer than most but they weren’t the only ones). Im glad because, witch=hunts aside, James was actually a good King and one of the few who didn’t deserve to be blown up, who genuinely cared for his people: the witch-hunts were a deluded misguided part of doing that too. The Morax, too, are really afraid of being imprisoned again (though why they should hang around the planet, tormenting the locals who would have been monkeys the last time they were around, rather than fleeing is another matter). The second best line here is Lady Becka saying that ‘the good have nothing to fear’ ten minutes before she reveals that she’s ‘bad’ (or at least marked by the alien menace too) and that the whole thing is a charade, a classic case of misdirection to look elsewhere: actually the good have everything to fear when everyone else thinks the way to be good is to be bad (she’s totally the sort of person who spends 24/7 trolling on social media to make her feel better about her own sad lonely life rather than taking the effort to do something to improve it). The very best though is when The Doctor launches herself at The King, telling him – with what appears to be her dying breath – that ‘you wear your Godliness like a hero, even though you’re killing and scape-goating and stirring up hate and you wonder why the darkness comes to you’ (an exquisite line heads and shoulders above everything else here. Not least because it applies to so many situations in 2018 as much as it does to 1612).

This aspect is Dr Who at its finest, a story where the only thing to fear is fear itself. After all the whole story would have been solved the minute the Tardis landed had the Morax and Lady Savage gone to The Doctor for help and asked for kindness and mercy rather than stirring up hate. It’s also the angle of this historical that connects most with the modern viewer. We live (and 2018 isn’t that long ago) at a time when people seem more afraid than ever and take it out on other people. The banking crisis, a collapsing climate, wars illegal and legal, power-hungry dictators on the move, terrorists, genocide: sometimes it feels as if Dr Who was fated to come back in the 21^st century because we needed a moral kind hero to put things right more than ever.  Sometimes our society feels like a tinderbox, with so many people so desperate to burn it down for so many reasons and against so many people that life is all about seeing fire break out somewhere. But here’s the thing: dig right down to it and everyone is afraid. They might not seriously think that people are witches anymore but the few people with money are afraid of losing it and the people without it are afraid of other people getting it ahead of them. That ‘us and them’ thinking is the root cause of everything. So people take their fear out on people they think are ‘different’ in just the same way, be it people of colour, immigrants, people from different towns, even women still sometimes. There’s an unhealthy assumption that you’ll only thrive when you’re surrounded by people who look like you. It’s something we saw recently with the riots in Southport (itself very close to Pendle Hill – perhaps the Morax got out again?), a riot that saw immigrant Muslims attacked, all because a Welsh born Christian who was mentally ill attacked young girls at a dance class (and no that doesn’t make sense to me either – surely if anyone should be attacked it’s the right for cutting mental health services? – but then that’s baying mobs for you, they don’t stop to use logic or check facts). Fear begets fears until suddenly everyone’s afraid and throwing stones at people they don’t like, blaming them for all their own problems. The strength of ‘The Witchfinders’ is showing how stupid that is.

I just wish they’d got there earlier and shown the true power of what a mob can do when it gets out of control. After all, for once there are enough extras milling around the location shoot: had everyone been chanting in Willa’s Granny’s face it would have made for a far stronger episode without too much tweaking and made the threat a much harder one for The Doctor to solve. For how does she solve it in the end? The Doctor uses part of the remaining wood to save the King and return the prison back to how it used to be, while The King decrees that from now on nobody shall ever mention the (fictional) town of Bilehurst Cragg. That seems dangerously like a copout: the Morax are meant to be a huge threat and will surely just escape again (far better, surely, to send them back to their home planet?) Becca gets to live despite murdering thirty-six people (she should have been hung drawn and quartered at the very least). And James, though repentant, does so for all the ‘wrong’ reasons – because The Doctor saved his life, not because he was shown to be at fault. It’s unsatisfying. It’s all too much of a coincidence matters come to a head and The King arrives out the blue a few minutes after the Tardis too, even for this series, while The Doctor herself claims that ‘I can buy that this is the biggest ever witch-hunt in England or buy that this is an alien mud invasion but both on the same day?’ They’re connected of course, but only loosely and it’s a powder keg waiting to go off any day for years, not just this particular one. Also, I get that The Doctor can’t re-write history and stop the witch-hunts altogether (although it’s typical Dr Who that she barks to her companions ‘do not interfere with the fundamental fabric of history’ mere minutes before she’s attempting to rescue someone from drowning!) but she could at least nip back in time and stop the Morax from getting out. She doesn’t even make James promise never to kill anymore and to pass this down to his children (for someone who found sex distasteful he didn’t half do ‘it’ enough times, having seven children including the doomed Charles I). They could also have gone in the other direction and made this another ‘Daemons’, a tale of science v superstition, something the rather clumsy insertion of an Arthur C Clarke quote (‘any advanced alien race would be insufficiently distinguishable from magic’) hints at, but they don’t really go there either. The ending promises to be a massive upsetting bloodbath but instead takes another route and becomes a disappointing mudbath instead. Oh and also The Doctor is mighty quick to dismiss ‘The Devil’ for not being real when she’s met two of them (see Azal in ‘The Daemons’ and The Devil himself as given away by the title of the second in the two parter,  ‘The Impossible Planet/Satan’s Pit’).An hour of re-writes, that’s all this story needed to properly soar and be the hard-hitting story it tried to be for five minutes before the end there.

Then again, there are some curious tone-deaf decisions throughout. The Doctor’s companions are next to useless: Yaz has a nice scene befriending Willa but does nothing else of any consequence while Graham and Ryan are actively in the way. There’s a scene where The King asks Ryan what he does and he blinks and stares – yeah, we were beginning to wonder that too (there’s also no way a dyspraxic would be able to walk that far along uneven muddy ground without falling over and/or getting mud all over himself. Take this from someone who knows!) This is a shame because what we need, more than ever this story, is someone to be our representative. It’s all very well for The Doctor – she’s used to different times having different values, but this is still new to the others. Yaz, as a policewoman, ought to be more horrified than she is and more aware of the danger a baying mob can do. Graham, as someone still in mourning from losing Grace, should show more empathy to Willa. And Ryan ought to be one heck of a lot more creeped out by The King’s flirting and compliments than he appears to be. Worst of all though is The Doctor (again). For all of her feminist rant that women have it bad in this era (‘If we’re not being drowned we’re being patronised to death!’) she doesn’t exactly strike a blow for feminine greatness either. She’s slow to react to everything across this story (she could have stopped the frowning if she’d been quicker) and while the lure of having her tried for being a witch was too good a point to miss, any earlier Doctor would have been smart enough to realise which way the wind was blowing and ran away/flattered the baddy/talked their way out of it. Once again she stands around while the baddies emote without actually doing anything to stop it. Jodie Whittaker spends half the story dripping wet from being in the water and alas ‘wet’ sums her Doctor up quite well. Willa, too, isn’t what she could have been: she’s lost her only living relative, her livelihood, seen her friends turn on her, at risk of going against the King (which is treason) and at risk of being dunked as a witch herself. But, a few tears later, she’s fine. How much stronger the story might have been if we’d seen how she and her Granny were actually more pious than either of their accusers, that she was doing good with her little life. After all, she’s ‘us’ had four hundred years of revolution not happened, alive at the whim of a corrupt regime that cares nothing for her bar the work she does on the land. Instead Willa’s just a cipher, there to pass on exposition rather than a character in her own right. Oh and Willa would have been a truly unusual, nay unique name in this period of English history (though there were a few in Germany. That would have been an even better story in fact: a family of foreigners tried for being witches because they aren’t English, by a King who happens to be Scottish). Alas there is no back story whatsoever. In short, nobody seems to be taking this story seriously, which affects how we treat it too.  

In other words, this story is  a very silly take on what could have been a very intense and serious subject, a mud-dled, swamp-ed with difficulties that didn’t really need to be there. It is perhaps the most tone-deaf of all Who historicals, judging people against modern eyes rather than taking them at face value on their own, something that would have given original script editor David Whittaker and show creator Sydney Newman kittens (and I say that having seen a story about a costume ball with an estranged deformed brother in the loft and Hitler being put in a cupboard and attacked by Teselecta robots). This is not one of those ‘original’ historicals where everyone talks in proper period dialogue and you don’t quite know where you stand – this is a story where everyone bellows at each other and declaims in a very 21^st century way. Equally, it was a good idea to make a feminist statement by a feminist writer and directed by a feminist director with a feminist Doctor using witches, but they don’t have lay it on with a trowel compared to, say. ‘Survival’ (which told a far more feminine story far more subtly). One day Dr Who may yet do a great story about witches and how even people who think they’re doing the ‘right’ thing can take it too far, of how superstition and lies can blow fear out of proportion. Maybe there’ll even be another female Doctor in the role to do it properly? Alas the one we get is a case of nice idea, poor execution: the ideas are there but the characterisation is non-existent, the jokes are poor, the plot is feeble and the serious important point that should have been front and centre gets pushed to the end when few people are paying attention anyway. To be fair it looks amazing, like many a historical in the modern era made with far more care than the present day of futuristic stories with a nice use of costumes and props, while the period buildings (filmed at the 17^th century museum in Little Woodham) are really good. If there is any realism in this story at all it comes from the background, not what’s happening in the foreground, It’s just a shame that similar effort hadn’t gone into the script to make 17^th century England a ‘real’ but suddenly very alien place (the way they did with 1950s America in ‘Rosa’ or the India-Pakistan border in ‘Punjab’). It’s not a truly terrible story this one, like ‘Tsuranga’ or ‘Orphan 55’ are (stories that were always going to be poor, no matter how well made), but it is a badly assembled waste of a story that could have been really good and by the end you feel dunked with so much exposition, historical inaccuracy and lifelessness that it’s a struggle to rise to the surface and acknowledge the good bits.  

A footnote: this became the third Who story that Americans saw before the UK viewers, following the special cases of ‘The Five Doctors’ and ‘The TV Movie’ (which they did, after all, make). However this was by accident, when Amazon prime accidentally uploaded the episodes out of order, swapping this story with ‘Kerblam!’ The viewing figures for this episode back home are down partly because so many Americans fans basically said not to bother. The papers had fun saying it was King James decree, but if anything it seems more like a comment on the ‘Kerblam!’ incompetency of Amazon from the previous week’s episode!  

POSITIVES + Segun Akinola continues to impress with his musical scores, this one a fine blend of hammer horror and costume drama. It’s subtle though, at least compared to what Murray Gold would have done, with just a few musical flourishes that allows this story to breathe.

NEGATIVES - Just when it seems we're finally going to get a historical without any scifi business it turns out scifi mud is behind all the witchery pokery. Which, for everything I’ve written about metaphors above, still one of the truly dumbest monsters Dr Who has ever had. I mean sentient mud, how scary can that be? How much stronger this episode might have been if it had turned out that the witch-trials really had been a colossal misunderstanding stoked by fear, paranoia, bad luck and mass hysteria - that would have made for some great parallels with modern times.

BEST QUOTE: Becka: ‘As King James has written in his new Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’. Dr: ‘In the Old Testament. There's a twist in the sequel: ‘Love thy neighbour’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Plotters’ (1996) is Gareth Roberts’ masterpiece, a ‘Missing Adventure’ novel that’s oh so spot-on recreation of the feel of the 1^st Doctor era but one that takes full advantage of the range’s promise to be ‘deeper than the small screen’ and head to places that could never be shown on TV in the 1960s. James I is once again the token baddie, but rather than it being simply ‘because he’s bad’ Roberts takes the time to show why: The King is gay (often rumoured but never confirmed by historians) and is more than a little afraid of the strong women at court. He’s desperate for a quiet life and hates the thought of being expected to produce heirs. Ironically he takes a shine to Vicki, in disguise as ‘Victor’ (much like she was in ‘The Romans’) when she turns up with The Doctor on their way to see the first Bible being printed, little knowing that she’s really a girl. That’s the great thing about this book: everyone is flawed and a victim of their impulses, even The Doctor whose curiosity gets everyone in trouble again, in a tale full of misunderstandings and double-crossings, the real motivation coming not from the usual Dr Who motivations of greed or power but survival and the need to keep secrets. It’s a sign of how good the book is that, rather like ‘The Massacre’, by the end you’re not sure if you side with the Catholics or the Protestants, whether you’re with the flawed but well-meaning King or the Gunpowder plotters themselves who are all sensitively drawn, from the troubled boss Robert Catesby to Guy Fawkes himself (whose really just the patsy in the whole affair): would their ideas for the throne, of imposing their will on the people, be any better or fairer than a Scottish King on an English throne? For my money no writer has captured Hartnell’s Doctor on the page better, his bluster tetchiness and moral outrage covering up a big heart that cares for everyone he meets and Roberts even includes the ‘Hartnell fluffs’ (something most other books lack), while Ian Barbara and Vicki are all character-perfect as well. Best of all, though, is the worldbuilding: you really feel as if you’ve stepped through a time portal to 1605 where society was so different to our own and yet the underlying theme of the book is how people are all the same everywhere and everywhen you go, they just dress up in different clothes. Highly recommended, although it makes ‘The Witchfinders’ seem ever more flimsy by comparison.    

Twenty years before ‘The Witch Finders’ came ‘The Witch Hunters’ (1998), a 1^st Doctor ‘Missing Adventures’ novel by Steve Lyons with a similar theme and a similar dating (thirty years or so earlier but that’s nothing in a timeless universe) though set halfway around the world. If you ever wanted to buy the perfect Dr Who book for Halloween then this is it: The Tardis happens to break down in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 stranding Dr 1, Ian, Barbara and Susan there for days. What they desperately need to do in such an uncertain time is keep a low profile and blend in with the local population without arousing suspicion, but The Doctor and Susan couldn’t do that in 1963 and the quartet have no chance of doing that here either. You know exactly where this historical is going to go – towards our heroes being burned at the stake – but it’s all done with panache and the atmosphere of the early black-and-white stories where the past is a scary place that doesn’t play by the rules and our friends might be stranded in a world impossibly alien and strange. A particularly strong book for Susan, who is appalled at teenage girls as young and indeed as weird as herself being condemned to death and the savagery of the human race; she’s never more resourceful or brave than here and yet it all feels like a natural part of her character too (especially her latent telepathy, a character trait abandoned after ‘The Sensorites’ but handled well here).

Finally, ‘The Devil’s Armada’ (2014) is part of Big Finish’s ‘Phillip Hinchcliffe Presents’ series, the producer returning to work with Tom Baker for the first time in forty years! The 4^th Doctor is, much like the 13^th, investigating the ‘real’ cause of sudden disappearances and deaths in the English countryside which the local superstitious peasants assume is the work of witchcraft. No prizes for guessing that it turns out to be aliens again: the Vituperon, a Devil-like creature that, like many an ancient God with super powers in Dr Who, talks the talk with some great threats and voice-work directed towards The Doctor but never walks the walk, not even on his cloven hooves, and never actually does much except shout. Still, this is a great story for Leela who doesn’t quite know what to make of this era which is as primitive as hers in many ways and in others more so: like a witch she lives by her instincts and sources of power she can’t understand and the injustice against innocent women angers her more than The Doctor. By comparison he’s more like the comic relief in this story, with a quip for every occasion. Another so-so Big Finish story, worth hearing and a lot better than ‘The Witchfinders’ at telling basically the same plot, but not exactly a classic either.

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