Revenge Of The Cybermen: Ranking - 222

 Revenge Of The Cybermen

(Season 12, Dr 4 with Sarah Jane and Harry, 19/4/1975-10/5/1975,  producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Gerry Davis with Robert Holmes (uncredited), director: Michael E Briant)

'Now that the cybermen have feelings, what next? Rage of the Cybermen? Grief of the Cybermen? Disgust Of The Cybermen? Boredom of the Cybermen? Smugness of the Cybermen? Shyness of the Cybermen? Love Of The Cybermen?' 

Ranking: 222

If you were to ask the average fan to come up with the perfect DW story...well they wouldn’t agree about anything because there is no such thing as an average DW fan and all episodes, stories, doctors, monsters and plots are loved by somebody and debating this stuff is an endless DW fan past-time. But just say they did, as a common denominator they would probably come up with Tom Baker (most popular Doctor?), Sarah Jane Smith (most popular companion?) up against a popular monsters (say for a second you can’t have Daleks…well that’s the Cybermen right?) with Kevin Stoney in the credits (most popular supporting humanoid?!) Behind the scenes you’d have Philip Hinchcliffe in as producer, Robert Holmes as script editor and maybe even re-use the sets from another really popular story (‘Ark In Space’). In short you’d have ‘Revenge Of The Cybermen’, the story that more than any other (outside possibly ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ from the same season) ticks all the boxes. BBC video certainly thought so, ignoring the advice of most fans and making this the first ever DW video available to buy as far back as 1983 when it cost the equivalent of £100s today, on the understanding that if it was a big slop there might never be another one. So is it worth that money? Gosh no. I’m not entirely sure it’s worth the price I paid for the DVD in the sale to be honest, but then it was a twin-pack with ‘Silver Nemesis’ and that story isn’t anybody’s idea of a perfect DW story. So if all the ingredients were there, what happened? Clearly not the magic that’s there in all the other stories from Tom Baker’s first season, which whether you think it’s the pinnacle of DW or not (and I don’t) clearly have…something special going on for it, a chemistry of the people in front and behind the cameras. Maybe it’s the script, written by Troughton era script editor and co-Cybermen creator Gerry Davis that was considered so out of touch with what DW had regenerated into by 1975 that script editor Bob Holmes re-worked it at speed, with neither of its authors being that fond of it. Maybe it’s the way the Cybermen, one of DW’s most striking and unstoppable creations, suddenly develop lots of lethal weaknesses out of nowhere (had the Doctor known about their allergies to gold when he first met them in 1966 and invited them to, say, a ‘cash my gold’ kiosk their previous encounters would have been one heck of a lot shorter. Plus it’s daft: why would a bunch of cyborg conversions suddenly develop an allergy to gold? They’re not supernatural werewolves). Maybe it’s the end of term silliness, as the acting causes even seasoned professionals who should know what they’re doing to struggle to seem even vaguely believable (this is the only thing Kevin Stoney’s not been magnificent in, but then he does have a whacking great mask on his head for most of the story and the dialogue’s not convincing enough for just his voice to work; then again this was the last story screened – it wasn’t the last in the season to be made). Or maybe it’s the curse of Wooky Holes, the atmospheric caves used for location filming in this story. One day early on the production team heard about how a rock formation was called 'The Witch' by locals and decided to have fun dressing it up with a hat and cloak. During the next few days Elisabeth Sladen nearly drowned filming the boat scene, two crew members became seriously ill out of nowhere and another broke their leg, while the boat used for filming 'disappeared'. Director Michael E Briant even thinks he saw the ghost of a pot-holer who died in the caves during one day’s shooting (a real shame they weren’t doing, say, Ghostlight or Hide or one of those DW scripts heavy on ghosts or we’d be raving about the special effects to this day). Mostly, though, I suspect it’s the fact that even though the ingredients are all there there’s no one great idea beyond that to pull them all together, so that the perfect DW story ends up just being a re-tread of all the ways it was great in the past with nothing that new or distinctive to say. The script takes in a plague that turns out to be a poison, the Doctor thwarting a planned cyber invasion and Sarah Jane being possessed, all elements done many times elsewhere and usually better than here. Oh and how is it solved? Basically the Doctor gets tied up in the part of the cybership where he can communicate their dastardly plan to the planet Voga and the most ruthlessly efficient race in the universe basically neglect to tie him up properly. Oops! Even the cybermen look as bad as they ever will in the 20th century, mostly because they were built to loom out from the shadows of black and white TVs and nobody’s thought how to re-model them for colour yet. The result is far from worthless. You still get all those ingredients working, particularly the 4^th Doctor-Sarah Jane combo at their most instinctive and natural, it’s well acted (even behind masks speaking stilted dialogue this cast are too talented to be bad), the location’s nicely spooky and different (and suitably alien!)  while there’s a lot of action to distract you from the plot too. Certainly other DW stories, even from the same era, mess up individual parts a lot more than ‘Revenge’ ever does, but then that’s because they tried harder – in this story there’s so little here taking risks that its faults seem all the worse somehow.

+ The sets. It was a clever idea to recycle the pricey ones from Ark In Space for the next story in production (with less manpower needed changing the sets over) and to set the action there again but thousands of years earlier and lighting and shooting it so that it looks very different at times. By 1975 standards it really does feel like a fully functioning space station rather than just a set and the 'missing' parts of the corridor with stars chromakeyed in are an extra touch most directors wouldn’t both with that’s really effective at making it look as if we’re in space. Even here, though, it felt as if ‘Ark’ used the same sets better, making them seem more claustrophobic and threatening.

- The title. Cybermen famously don’t have feelings so they’re the one alien race who shouldn’t feel the need for revenge, even against the Doctor. Why not give the ‘revenge’ title to the Daleks? They live for little else! Gerry Davis' working title 'Return of the Cybermen' wasn’t exactly poetic either but for the silver baddies’ first appearance in seven years it would have made more sense (as the inventor of the Cybermen he was apoplectic this title got used, even more than what was done to his scripts. He never worked for the show again, a huge loss to the series).

The Twin Dilemma: Ranking - 223

 The Twin Dilemma

(Season 21, Dr 6 with Peri, 22-30/3/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Anthony Steven, director: Peter Moffat)

'A Peri is a supernatural being of Persian folklore descended from fallen angels and cast out of paradise until atoning for their sins...Or it means a beautiful and graceful girl. Mind you, Tegan means 'darling' or 'loved one', Sarah means 'princess', Barbara means 'exotic' and Dorothea means 'God's gift' so ha, what does the dictionary know? 

Ranking: 223

 

 After the walking plants it seems only right to follow it with the story that gave us talking slugs. Also fittingly, I’ve got a bit of a twin dilemma with this story myself. You see, despite this story’s critical pasting to the point where it’s bottom of many fan lists, over the years I’ve grown quite fond of it and admire it in a way i don’t similar turkeys like ‘Time and the Rani’ ‘Orphan 55’ ‘The Timeless Child’ or ‘The TV Movie’. Those stories are all, for different reasons bad television and bad Dr Who, story ideas that were already flawed before production mishaps piled mistake on top of mistake. It’s hard to envision a version of any of these stories that ‘works’, even if they’d been by my favourite writers, given the perfect place in a series running order (Towards the end but not so much the end it matters if it all goes wrong) and given a budget Hollywood could only dream of. There is, however, a great story in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ somewhere that takes a lot of brave courageous moves but a combination of misdirection over who the new 6^th Doctor should be and getting the end of season short straw means that what does end up of those concepts on screen ends up becoming badly mangled, to the point where this relatively brave and mature story that takes a brave and mature stance on who this incarnation might be ends up looking like bad children’s television. Here there’s one fatal flaw that dominates everything: timing. See this episode out of context it looks a bit cheap, a bit wild and is a bit under par, suffering from the old 1970s problem that the last story of a season tended to be the one that made up the budget shortfall. See it in the order it was meant to go out (following Peter Davison’s heroics in ‘Caves Of Androzani’) and it’s the biggest slide from the sublime to ridiculous within two consecutive stories in the DW run. We needed a darker, edgier Doctor after Davison though and I like Colin Baker’s portrayal a lot: there’s an unpredictability about him that hadn’t been there since Hartnell and you’re never quite sure what this Doctor’s going to do in any given situation: fight, sulk, pontificate or save the universe which after three years of Davison talking about morals to monsters and then more often than not shooting them anyway makes a refreshing change. Finding something distinctive to do with the character after so many people have played them must be daunting, but the idea to seize on the pure theatricality of the Doctor that’s been lurking under the surface for four previous Doctors (and, let’s face it, all of them since) is a good call I think. There’s nothing that wrong with the actual story either I don’t think: the twins are a bit wet but then they are playing mathematical geniuses (and even then not as bad as some say, considering neither had much acting experience) and the Jacondans are a bit Sylvanian Families, but there’s a neat 'Village of the Damned' factor in there somewhere and Maurice Denholm’s Azmael, the Doctor’s old mentor, is a great character we should have seen more of. The dilemma is, though, some really bad mistakes are made along the way with the god ideas. The Doctor’s instability is pushed too far without explaining why. I mean, it makes perfect sense to me that this new incarnation would be snippy to Peri, the person that inadvertently caused his regeneration but we needed one or two scenes of him exploring his frustration, not a dozen scenes including him strangling her for good measure. This maybe wouldn’t matter if the story looked big and epic but the low budget only emphasises the wrong aspects: everyone pulled all the stops (and indeed the budget) out for Androzani, which feels as close to a big movie as you can have on a 1980s BBC budget and which made the 5^th Doctor seem more noble and moral than he ever got to be in the rest of this run. This story makes the new Doctor look like a git floundering around on a planet made out of tinsel full of bright colours and looks just like a pantomime. This is the one time we needed a whole season to get to know the Doctor again, to see how aspects of him that are unlikeable straight away calm down and change over time, but no – producer JNT didn’t want people to wait to see what the new Doctor would be like and so added this story to the end of the season, with a six month gap before anyone got to see sixie acting ‘stable’ (as much as he ever did). The plan was always going to be to soften the character by degrees after starting with a bang that made him unlikeable, but when your ‘hero’ has just been replaced by a big-headed twonk and it’s a wait between seasons so no wonder so many people thought DW wasn’t for them anymore and watched something else. Because of all this Colin Baker has gone down in folklore as the Doctor nobody liked, not least because that’s what the controller of the BBC said and sacked him.  But they’re all wrong: Colin’s great in all his stories, it’s his character that isn’t. Thankfully he’s become a popular Doctor now thanks to his Big Finish audios for many good reasons, several of which are already here in his debut. To appreciate his Doctor though you need to know what comes next including spin-off audios made a quarter of a century later, to not watch this story back to back with ‘Androzani’ and perhaps above all to read the novelisation instead.

+ There are a couple of rather good and impressively different monster designs in this story (and when did we last have two races who weren’t related in the same story?) The Jacondans are a really good 1980s design, very different to anything else the series ever did, velvety and whiskery.  The gastropods meanwhile are pure slugs, like a folk memory of the Optera crossed w the Tractators but much more workable than either. They have one of the best motives of monsters in DW too: instead of power or control or using the the planet’s core as a space shuttle to explore the universe with (?) they’ve run out of food and want some more.

- That costume. I’ve read the reasons behind why they gave Colin Baker such an outfit: this is a Doctor whose all about bad taste, who liked everyone staring at him and why would an alien wear just one thing when they can wear several clashing things at once? These arguments are all nonsense though: yes this Doctor likes making an entrance but through his own brilliance not what he’s wearing. He’s actually got good really good taste in other things and name-drops more theatre, literature and film quotes than the others - he just looks down on everyone else for not being able to match him. Plus no self-respecting alien with all of time and space at their disposal would choose something that so screamed ‘1980s Earth’ as this.

Terror Of The Vervoids: Ranking - 224

 Terror Of The Vervoids

(Season 23, Dr 6 with Mel, 1-22/11/1986, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: John Nathan-Turner (uncredited), writers: Pip 'n' Jane Baker, director: Chris Clough)

'I think we should go back to our 'roots' on this series of Dr Who...Oh that's what you've included in the script eh? Great...wait, walking plants wasn't quite what I meant!'

Ranking: 224

 

 On the day that Trump gets indicted it seems apt to have a story where a brash man with no taste in clothes is put on trial for mass genocide, although I suspect the Doctor’s arguments about false evidence and tampering from the prosecution will stand up in court better than the orange menace’s. Yes, it’s the Trial of a Timelord part three, this time the defence which has been submitted from the Doctor’s future that he hasn’t lived to do yet – and no, I don’t know how that works either (I would suggest if you ever end up in court not relying on the defence ‘I’m going to do better in the future’ because I don’t think it works at all on Earth). Nor can I explain how the Doctor ends up walking off at the end of the trial with the companion he’s never met before this future scenario, Melanie Bush. Nor why the production team thought they could a) get away with that name and b) get Bonnie Langford back in her immediate post-Violet Elizabeth Bott days in to play her. Like the rest of the trial this story doesn’t quite work, but for a whole host of different reasons to the others. This one is another of those occasional doctorwhodunnits featuring dome weird guest stars and some even weirder monsters that are easily the rudest ever seen in DW (just beating Erato, the Crature from the Pit in the final). As carnivorous planets they’re the sort of monsters that would give DW a bad name anyway, with their sudden ‘gas emissions’ and the fact their foliage is wrapped around some leggings and trainers emblazoned with a very Eartj-bound brand, even if you hadn’t seen their heads which resemble male genitalia sticking out of female genitalia. They are, apparently, meant to resemble tulips which they sort of do, but you have to question just how much action anyone in the production team was getting that everyone signed off on this and let it through. Everyone might have gotten away with it had this been one of DW’s darker, edgier, maturer stories but instead it’s one of the more childish, with a whole plot centred round walking plants picking people off. To give them credit, though, this is easily Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker’s best script for the series. They ‘get’ the sixth Doctor and how his ego-trips and desire to be the focal point in every room is really defensive bluster for how unsure he feels and with this story coming from his ‘future’ he’s mellowed a lot since we first met him, Colin Baker nailing the subtle changes in the script. Mel, too, is about as well catered for as she ever is, the same hyperactive optimistic overgrown toddler she always is but also one who cares for and is open-minded to all the aliens she meets and loyal to the Doctor to a fault. She even gets her definitive moment as early as her first episode when she screams at just the right pitch for the musical ‘sting’ at the end of the first cliffhanger and have it seem entirely in character; not many actresses could pull that off.  The guest cast all get distinct identities and something to do as well and there’s a nice sense of tension as the bodies pile up, reducing the suspect list to two (and it’s not the one I was expecting the first time round). Considering how quickly this story was written, at the absolute last minute, it’s highly impressive and professional, give or take the Vervoids. The difficulty is, it’s more Midsummer Murders than Poirot or Sherlock, a cosy one-pipe problem, and if the whole of the Doctor’s trial defence is that he’s relying on how brilliant he is in the future, well, he doesn’t really do a lot does he? The Valeyard picks up instantly on how quickly the Doctor commits genocide by killing off the plants to save a few straggler Humans and compared to other stories that we know he could have used, even if the production team of course didn’t, he really does very little (I mean, saving the world from Davros in ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’, 27 planets in ‘Journey’s End’ and Gallifrey itself in ‘Day Of the Doctor’ seem more obvious candidates). The Doctor’s argument? He got involved because somebody ‘asked’. So that’s alright then. Trump will probably try the same argument (although I suspect he’s more Slitheen than Vervoid). The real problem with going small though is that with a whole season built round a ‘trial’, with the Doctor’s life and possibly the series on the line, it needs to epic and spectacular – and this story would feel small-fry even in an ordinary DW series.  

+ This is the last story Colin Baker filmed in the role of the Doctor for television (this story being broadcast before but made after ‘The Ultimate Foe’) and as with so many of his stories he’s the best thing here by miles. He’s softened his Doctor from mean bully to tetchy and twitchy and he’s always doing something highly watchable that isn’t in the script, be it striding across a room to rolling his eyes to the comedy of pretending to follow Mel’s exercise bike regime to pulling the multiple faces needed in the endlessly repetitive ‘Trial’ cliffhangers. By now the 6^th Doctor feels like a seasoned traveller with all the tough edges knocked off him, a benevolent Uncle with a hatred for injustice rather than an angry young man who loves clashing with others for the sake of it in everything from arguments to that sodding coat. His Doctor works a lot better with Mel’s than the 7^th Dr’s character too I think – she needs a larger than life protective soul to bounce off, not an odd mysterious eccentric playing the spoons.  In other words, while BBC controller Michael Grade was arguably right that some things had to change to make the series better in this era the star was even more arguably the part that was working, at least by the end. Thankfully the Big Finish range of 6^th Doctor series finally makes good on this most maligned of Doctors, returning to this later softer side and adding multiple years, several new companions and a lot more gentleness to his character.    

- We’ve never had sentient plants in DW as such, not even so much as a Triffids, so I can see why the Bakers had a bash at writing them in. Preventing the Vervoids from talking, though probably sensible from a biological point of view, was a blow for the monsters though who never get a chance to put their side across about why they feel the need to destroy humanity. It’s the designers, though, who really dropped the ball: their shuffling gait, the gas pipe placed in a most unfortunate place, the Adidas advertising, the fact they look as if they’ve just wondered in from a Playboy centrefold: the Vervoids rival The Gel Guards, the Ergon, The Fish People, The Myrka, The Bandrils and The Taran Wood Beast as DW’s silliest monster (though I still say The Myrka wins in a close contest).

The Beast Below: Ranking - 225

  The Beast Below

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy, 10/4/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat and Brian Minchin, Pat Mills,  director: Andrew Gunn) 

'Where do you weigh a (space) whale? At a whale-weigh (space) station of course!'

Ranking: 225

In an emoji: 🐳

A whale crossing space, man’s inhumanity to man and a British colony in the 29th century fleeing the mess they’ve made back home on Earth make for the sort of timeless Dr Who story that could honestly have been made in any era (well, any time before the 29th I guess to be pedantic). And it sort of is this story, with ‘The Beast Below’ having what must surely be one of the longest whale-sized gestation periods of any Dr Who script ever. Surprisingly the credits don’t mention it, but a version of this story was first submitted by Pat Mills for the 4th Doctor era as ‘Song Of The Space Whale’, heavily rewritten for Peter Davison’s first year in 1982, rewritten again for his second (when it would have introduced Turlough as a companion and been linked to The Black Guardian), was revived for the 6th Doctor and Peri as part of season 23 that got cancelled (and replaced by ‘Trial Of A Timelord’- you can hear that version as the Big Finish ‘Lost Stories’ audio ‘Song Of The Megaptera’ and very good it is too) then stuck in a drawer and forgotten until being extensively rewritten and finally making it to screen in 2010. With admittedly an ocean full of differences. And while the story is timeless and half of the additions improve it beyond measure to anything we would have had in the 1980s, the other half of the changes, well, don’t, with all the strengths and weaknesses of the Steven Moffat era magnified: fantastic ideas, often glorious one-liners and a script that never stays still long enough to get boring full of such imagination that it makes you ask ‘what were they drinking?!’But also a story that makes less and less sense the more you think about it, with too many promising ideas that are dropped without fulfilling their potential when something more interesting comes along and occasional scenes that make you wonder ‘what were they thinking?!’ 

The good parts first. This is a truly brilliant and oh so Dr Who plot and I can see why so many production teams tried to make it. Especially this one as it touches on so many of the issues Moffat holds dear in his own concepts: there’s a space whale travelling with the remnants of the United Kingdom on its back across the stars to a new home (like many a spaceship in the 29th century in the old series) whose been captured as an ‘engine’ out of greed but (spoilers) came out of love and didn’t need to be locked up. The idea of a space whale being used by the very humans it was trying to save very much suits the Moffat era of a child’s eye view of the universe who don’t understand why adults always have to make everything so dark and complicated when people (and animals) really aren’t that different and tend to do things out of love automatically unless they’re been cowed into reacting to fear first. Adults on first meeting tend to be automatically wary of each other and suspicious of differences until learning to trust and relax, but children tend to be trusting first and wary later if earned. And the space whale might be fully grown but it still acts instinctively like a child and clearly has an affinity with the human children (whom it refuses to eat – presumably on moral grounds, though for all we know maybe they just don’t taste very nice and it’s a bit like humans throwing tiny fish back into the sea?)They can actually make a sort of semi-realistic space whale on screen properly in 2010 too (the main reason why so many production team reluctantly dropped this story) and it really does look amazing. Like many a Moffat story there are no obvious heroes (besides the whale) or out and out villains (even the worst person in this story thinks they have no choice but to carry on the charade or millions of humans will die) and certainly there are no easy solutions and is all too plausible a story of man’s cruelty (if you’re content to believe in a whale that crosses outer space anyway). Like all the best drama (and indeed the best Dr Who stories) you can sympathise with everyone in turn. We can understand the Doctor’s anger that humanity has chosen to look the other way and forget. We can empathise with Amy, the new companion in only her second story, out of her depth and panicking, forced to make the same decision to remember or to forget and finding out that space travel isn’t always as fun as it sounds. We can see why so many of the local population, on learning the horrible truth, have chosen to look the other way rather than the alternative: perishing in space. And most of all we sympathise with the space-whale, who would gladly give humanity a lift on its back for free if only they'd thought to, y’ know, ask in the first place. You can see why so many production teams tried to make this story down the years because it asks so many big questions – and why it finally found a home in this era, which has more answers than most about the importance of trust and kindness, contrasting how the universe ought to be a magical place but humanity keeps getting in its own way. Unfortunately a lot of the Moffat era gets in its own way too, with lots of clunky bits added from elsewhere that don’t always fit that well, comedy scenes and OTT dramatic sections that no writer in the 1980s would have dreamed of putting on telly (and viewers were starting to get a bit sick of in 2010 too). 

 The original is a much more typical Dr Who story without as big a heart, a runaround with the Doctor or companions being arrested and escaping until the big showdown when they learn the truth of what’s going on (something they learn from the voting machines in Moffat’s script, one of his best additions). There’s no rebel Queen, far less politics and no story arc of Amy running away from her problems or the Doctor getting cross at humans (although the 6th Doctor does to gets to shout a bit in ‘his’ version – well, it is the 6th Doctor after all). There is, though, a computer thinking with a brain not a heart (this being 1980s Dr Who, when computers were the biggest scariest change happening to society) which the Doctor solves by infecting with a virus that makes it release its hold on the poor animal. In their place come a deeper sense of this starship as an actual place, with the very wonderful idea that every country fleeing a doomed planet Earth had their own spaceship (and the story’s best gag, perhaps the season’s best gag, that Scotland have their own breakaway shuttle, although I’m sorry that they missed the ‘Wales on the back of a Whale’ pun) with a whole backstory and a government which add a whole dimension and bite lacking in the original(s). There’s also, however, a much more convoluted plot, supporting characters who don’t get to make much of an impact, lots of this year’s big themes overlaid on top where they don’t really fit, a lengthy showdown that seems to go on forever and a lot more camp slapstick so broad they would never have tried even during the original run’s campest and most slapstick era (1987). Worst offenders are the Northern dialect Queen Liz10, Elizabeth’s multiple-grand-child whose black and streetwise, a great one-line gag that gets less funnier every time she re-appears (even if it seems more cutting than they meant it in 2010, given this was the era before Harry started (space)shipping Meghan and Haza’s family started puling faces at the skin tone of their children) and the awful scene where the whale has to, well, poo the Doctor and Amy out of its system (an oddly juvenile gag for such an intelligent plot). 

Perhaps the best thing Moffat does to the original script is turn it into the ‘other’ style of script we used to get in the 1980s – the veiled political subtext. Note the Doctor’s dark and bitter comments about humanity ‘forgetting’ the truth every five years ‘because that’s how democracy works’. The 2010 election was one of the most divided in Britan’s history, so close to the wire that it was only decided by natural enemies the Conservatives and Lib Dems working ‘together’ (although in this context ‘working together’ ended up being like the way The Rani treats The Master in ‘The Mark Of the Rani’ or how Garron treats Unstoffe in ‘The Ribos Operation – Nigel Plaskitt would make a fine Nick Clegg when they come to make the inevitable TV movie about this era). Even though the election wasn’t until the month after this story was transmitted, we all knew this was going to be tight and the political mud flinging had been going on for at least a year and it was a nasty, bitter campaign from both sides: The Conservatives were quick to point out the credit crunch happened on Labour’s watch, conveniently forgetting that it was a worldwide issue (and one Gordon Brown’s policies had cushioned the UK from compared to other countries, until the Coalition’s policies of austerity made it far far worse and last far far longer). For their part Labour were quick to show that the problems all stemmed from Conservative policies in the 1980s and 1990s, conveniently forgetting that they’d had thirteen years to put them right and hadn’t. Both sides were pitched as polar opposites even though their electoral promises were pretty much the same (and both were dangerously close to centre so that there wasn’t all that much difference anyway). David Cameron was a nasty piece of work, so posh it wouldn’t surprise me if he kept his own space whale to torture in his swimming pool in between hopeless out-of-touch comments in the House of Commons and who made even Davros look cuddly. Gordon Brown was, by contrast, a malfunctioning robot who seemed to have problems even speaking like a normal person. They weren’t exactly the most hopeful and uplifting of choices. The phrase I heard a lot at the time was that people couldn’t decide on the lesser of the two evils and were forced to vote against who they felt were the evil of the two lessers. Here, freed of the ties to the rest of Earth as they drift in space, Starship UK’s government have become more deranged and shadowy, forcing people to vote in booths to give them a mandate to rule - but then wiping their memories once they’d made a decision, a plausible extension of what was happening at the time of transmission. Protesting is difficult and dangerous: if you’re brave enough to go through with speaking out then you’re space food (quick thought: how come a space whale eats people? Wouldn’t it prefer, ahem, fish and (space)ships?!?), so no wonder most people choose to ‘forget’ the truth of what’s driving the spaceship instead. So what you have is a society built on a lie that doesn’t really know what’s going on and in a situation like that the change needed to make things run properly can never happen. More than that, though, it feels as if Moffat is trying to make an allegory here that the ‘space whale’ is the working classes – sometimes called the ‘engine room’ of Great Britain - tortured into working hard, their screams muted to the people in power who don’t have to mingle with them and treat them as faceless statistics, convinced the poor are only poor because they’re idle, when left to their own devices most people would work hard to help the people close to them anyway.. I’m not sure if I’m too happy about being compared to a massive mute brute, but it’s the sort of contemporary point in a futuristic setting this show was born for, sly and subtle enough to get away with it in a way dramas that came right out and said this sort of thing would get into trouble for, there if you want to look for it, but part of a story that still works if you don’t. It’s very fitting for a Who story as this show tends to hate whichever government is in power, the closest the 21st century series has come to the occasional political gems of the past, like ‘The Happiness Patrol’ or ‘The Sunmakers’ and I admire the bravery, whatever the execution. 

 The take on Royalty is a bit more…confusing, but then so it Britain’s relationship with its figureheads to begin with. Liz 10 is a direct descendent of our Queen and somehow is still in nominal charge (she’s on the stamps and everything) but she doesn’t actually get to have a ‘real’ say (much like 21st century UK Politics, where the King or Queen officially has to declare laws to have them passed as bills, but don’t have any democratic say as to what those laws are –they just read a bit of paper and would be in trouble if they refused). They’re a much older representative of the establishment than government but are, for some reason I’ve never entirely understood, far more loved by the British at large. They seem exactly the sort of rich out-of-touch dictators the Doctor would overthrow on any other planet, but in this series (as mentioned in this very story) the Doctor has been known to save The Queen when a spaceship was about to crash into Buckingham Palace, sort-of protected her from Nazis and Cybermen (although I’m still not entirely sure which Royal that was supposed to be in ‘Silver Nemesis’) and even snogged the Virgin Queen. People here tend to feel as if they ‘know’ the Royals, even though all they see is the ‘face’ they put on for the media. Here Moffat tells that story in reverse: this is a Queen who is made to be the face of the government but she does genuinely care about her people, using a physical ‘mask’ to go undercover and find out what they really think and how they really live. Only whenever she finds out the truth, every ten years or so, and is faced with the choice of abdicating or forgetting, she too chooses the easier option of having her memory wiped so she starts again. It’s symbolic of every relationship the Royals have had with parliament every since Cromwell lobbed Charles I’s head off in the English (not so) Civil War (and as another aside I’m still anxiously waiting for a Dr Who set in this time period, not least because I’m intrigued who it would ‘side’ with: this is a show that’s always been against authority so it’s not a natural Royalist – but equally it’s not a lover of dictators pretending to be democratic and removing the fun in people’s lives either, so it’s not exactly a natural Roundhead). It’s another neat throwaway idea, the idea of a black Queen with a regional accent, but it’s all a bit odd how its shown on screen: why do the powers that be turn a blind eye to Liz 10’s investigations to the point of giving her a mask to do so and brainwashing her every time she discovers things rather than, say, just bringing in another Royal whose less likely to ask questions? (There is some Prince Andrew DNA in there after all – he could just make out he was at Pizzaus Expressus and never found out anything. *Insert the sort of ambiguous joke that won’t get me locked up in the tower about him having a use for all the lost children the whale didn’t eat here*) They just never do enough with an idea that doesn’t really have legs to last the whole episode. Also, the excruciating scene where Liz 10 declares ‘I’m the bloody Queen mate – I rule’ while posing Lara Croft style, is one of those dumb, clumsy, tone-deaf scenes non-fans like to beat us over the head with from time to time. 

 Or maybe this story is more about authority figures of a different type? Though it’s more of a Russell T Davies thing to do, I do wonder if this story isn’t a little bit about Moffat being in the scary position of running the show he’s loved since childhood and all the guilt and panic that comes from not wanting to let anyone (including his inner seven year old) down – as it was, in all likelihood, one of the first if not the first he sat down to write as ’showrunner’ rather than ‘guest writer’ (with more of an eye for budget and time deadlines and all those sorts of grown-up things). Running any show and working out what you stand for is a hard job: it’s easy to say that, if you ever get the chance, you’ll use your voice for good and break all the rules and attack all the right people who deserve it– but at the same time, if you get into too much trouble your paymasters at the BBC get mad and start interfering, you get annoyed letters from all the people who don’t agree with you, the audience stops watching and you’ve ruined the series for future generations. It’s a difficulty Davies and Chibnall have wrestled with too: how far and how subtly do your push an ‘agenda’ without your audience running off screaming and looking the other way? (While, equally, if you try the opposite how long can a series lie this last if it doesn’t have anything ‘big’ to say and is pure escapism without any teeth to bare?) This is a story that hedges its bets throughout, making a comment without quite coming out and saying it and giving Moffat wriggle room until he works out what he really wants to do with this opportunity. It’s fitting then that it’s a story ‘about’ the battle between speaking the truth and risk having to ‘abdicate’ or vowing to forget the truth and carry on as if you never meant to do anything like that in the first place. In the end Moffat’ll choose the much easier path and forget about this aspect of writing altogether, before it kicks back in during the series 10 that he wasn’t expecting to write and when he didn’t need to risk being sacked (‘Thin Ice’ and ‘The World Enough’ particularly are his two edgiest scripts for the series). 

 It’s not just the script that’s a bit woolly, the acting is to and there are a few duff performances all round that don’t make the most out of this story’s excellent ideas. The cast and crew are still new to this as well, the second story in production under Moffat’s tenure and neither of the regulars has got it quite right yet: Amy is unlikeably haughty and aloof rather than defensive and street-smart or toughness hiding vulnerability as she’ll become. Karen Gillan has a nasty habit, soon reigned in once she sees the rushes and adjusts to the character, of acting very broadly, giving every big revelation a double-take and eye goggle or declaring a lot of her speeches. Matt Smith is worse: he’s too self-conscious and hasn’t got his tongue round the complicated speeches Moffat’s written for him yet, still feeling his way into the bowtie and tweed suit instead of wearing it naturally the way he will by his next story. Smith will always struggle most with doing rage and anger convincingly (something Moffat quickly realises and keeps to a minimum from now on, though it’s the Doctor’s de facto methodology here, closer to the aloof regeneration Peter Capaldi will be) but he’ll get there by the end of his run – here, though, he has to do that shouty thing a lot and it doesn’t suit him very well yet (you can tell, in retrospect, that this was written for other Doctors first who have more natural gravitas, although even the 6th didn’t shout this much in the audio version). Matt’s good at light but struggling to do dark convincingly, Karen’s good at dark but not so hot on the comedy, looking all at sea in a whale’s mouth or forcing the comedy too hard (for now anyway: they learn impressively quick these two). 

You only need to compare this tale to the similar ‘End Of The World’ to see where the problem lies: both tales are second in their run for the new Doctors/showrunners/companions and have the newbie enter the Doctor’s world after a debut where he was in their world and struggling to keep up wit the implications, especially as humanity is in big trouble in both futures. Both stories are presented to us as a kind of ‘date’ (although Amy having the hots for the Doctor is played more as an escape from the responsible life she was expecting to lead) but whereas Rose’s changing thoughts about The Doctor changed subtly, over the course of forty-five minutes, as she realised that just because he came from space didn’t mean he was perfect or that she was his only love, this Doctor and Amy can’t decide if they like each other or not, changing their minds between most scenes until we end up in a shouting match and an all-forgiven finale (although I do like the Doctor’s reactions to Amy’s first sight of an alien planet and garbled questions: a sarcastic ‘Oh no, you’re a cheery one!’ There’s another obvious influence too: Amy wanders round an alien planet, lost, in her nightie while her alien companion is at home at last just like Arthur Dent in one-time Who script editor Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, only he was in a dressing gown). It’s exhausting trying to keep up, as if all the notes of the space whale story are there, but somebody jumbled up the sheet music, so no wonder the performers are a bit lost. Following how breezily note-perfect everyone was in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ as if they’d been doing this sort of thing all their own lives (recorded fourth in the run when everyone did know what they were doing more but even so, it wasn’t recorded that much later) it’s a slight disappointment: you’re not left at the end of this story waiting for next week so you can travel with this pair again the way you did at the end of last week’s. To be fair, though, it’s very early days for both actors – not just their work on Doctor Who but in TV as a whole. In retrospect it’s amazing they found their space-time legs as quickly as they do and a brave decision to have three leads (once Rory gets going) who were all in their early-mid twenties and comparatively inexperienced. I wish they’d done this story later in the run though: this is one of Moffat’s sassiest, smartest scripts and it needs to be delivered perfectly for added punch, while this might be the only story where both lead actors drop the ball (the very first story they recorded ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’ is the other but that one’s a bit easier to fudge, with River Song doing so much of the work). 

 The supporting characters fare worse: Liz 10 is a one-joke character who doesn’t get much of a real personality and she’s a waste of Sophie Okenodo, an actress who was in huge demand back in 2010 (and one of the few Dr Who stars to have a Bafta) but who was impressively loyal to the show she’d helped out when it was off the air, in 2003’s aborted animated comeback ‘Scream Of The Shalka’. The script wastes Terence Hardiman too, the title star of the Sarah Jane Adventures’ biggest influence, Gillian Cross’ glorious series ‘Demon Headmaster’, with a character who doesn’t do much more than skulk about in a dungeon. The child characters too come and go: it feels as if brave protestor Timmy is going to be the main person here, a sort of mini-Doctor whose courageous enough to ask questions, but then we switch to his friend Mandy whose more ordinary, only for the script to sidestep her too for hi-jinks inside a whale’s mouth as Amy comes to the fore. 

 This is early days for Steven Moffat too of course and while he’s used to running other programmes (such as the superb ‘Press Gang’) he’d never been in charge of a programme quite this big. His takeover from Russell was (relatively) last minute too: Russell would have run this show forever if his partner hadn’t got ill and its pretty late on in the day when he finally did make the decision to leave (hence the ‘filler’ year of specials in 2009). Russell always said in the press that Steven’s were the only scripts he never tampered with when they were submitted (if only because he couldn’t always understand what was going on!) but out of all the Moffat scripts this is the one that most needs an editor to make the most of the bits that work and tone down or edit the bits that don’t. By his own admission this is the least favourite of Moffat’s own scripts for Dr Who and he calls them ‘a mess’ in one interview: they’re not that bad by any means but they are muddled, with people’s motivations unclear and tonally its all over the place, like many a Moffat script struggling to juggle what Russell did so effortlessly, the wide spectrum of viewers the show had. Some scenes are pure ‘Torchwood/New Adventures’, oddly adult gags about Amy’s short skirts and wedding night and political digs that small children wouldn’t get. And other scenes are as juvenile as this show ever was (far more so than ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ even at its silliest), the most notorious of which is the Doctor and Amy covered in gunk and goo and slime and sliding down a whale’s mouth. Moffat will get much better at combining the two, but here more than any other script of his the gulf between some of the lines, sometimes in the same scene, is huge. 

 One thing Moffat’s always been strong at though (especially on ‘The Eleventh Hour’) is presenting a child’s eye view of the universe, with stories that often make fun of adults for making a cosmos so alive with wonder and magic so dark and mundane. This one especially does a good job at being childlike without being childish though. We follow children for much of this story and they’re the only people brave enough to speak out about the ‘truth’ without caring about traditions or consequences. The country isn’t big and sprawling and overwhelming but small and compact, like a school with layers, each city coming with its own ‘deck’ as if its made of Lego. Politics is a straight choice between two buttons, without the complexities, nuances and contradictions of running the world. The ’Winders’ are very much an adult’s eye view of adults (especially teachers!) too, who are either happy with you or angry, with no subtleties and faces that keep changing depending how you behave (one of the last things to click into place in a child’s development is the idea that humans can balance two feelings at one, that you can love someone to bits and still be frustrated with them at times without it being contradictory). There’s a cute animal at the heart of the story and massive spaceships that actually look like scifi spaceships, not the dirty realistic smoke-belching rockets of other Dr Who stories, both things with massive children’s appeal. We know that Moffat wanted to grab a whole new audience that would be ‘his’ generation but even so he abandons the pretty quickly after this (Churchill is not a natural kiddie attention grabber, even with Daleks) and this story feels far less cynical than that. So much so that I have to wonder… as this story at least partly written when Steven really was a child himself? (Perhaps after watching ‘The Ark In Space’, a 4th Doctor story also set in the 29th century spaceship breakout following ‘solar flares’ and which itself is a sort of fan homage to ‘The Ark’).We know that Russell T Davies was sat at home during his childhood writing his own Dr Who comics and that bits of those stories ended up in his scripts for the show as an adult (the scene of the Tardis travelling down a motorway in ‘The Runaway Bride’ for one). Is this story Moffat’s equivalent that he’d been carrying round with him for decades, just on the off-chance he got to write for the series properly one day? (Maybe even after reading about the cancelled original story and wondering what it might have been like? – the original is rather cartoonlike too, probably because writer Pat Mills wrote for the comic strips; he finally gets an on-screen credit for being co-creator of Beep The Meep and ‘The Star Beast’, an actual comic strip adaptation; interesting how both of his stories contain the word ‘beast’ in them). If so then you have to say he was one smart kid; all this story is lacking is the experience of how a great script will inevitably end up on screen after other people like directors and actors get their hands on it. 

 Tying into this is the way that so much of the story is about growing up, as if an old idea from childhood is being revisited through the eyes of an adult. Amy spends the story (and indeed most of series five) fleeing her responsibilities. At first, before we meet Rory properly and learn how sweet and caring he is, we think it’s her fiance she’s fleeing, but later stories will tweak this and make it plain it’s being an adult that scares Amy most (after all, we know from ‘The Eleventh Hour’ that bad things happen to adults around her and she was a child handed far too much responsibility for one so young: if adulthood is all responsibility as so many adults like making out to their offspring then it makes sense she’d be particularly scared of it after such a taste of it). There’s a telling line cut from the first draft of the script where Amy mentions an aunty once telling her that ‘your wedding day is the day you have to grow up’. The Doctor, her one-time imaginary friend, is painted here as ‘Peter Pan’ to her ‘Wendy’, with a time machine that can mean she can stay a child always, forever on the cusp of growing up but never quite getting there and she’s an eager participant. Just look at the scene where 12 year old Mandy talks about not being able to vote till she’s sixteen and she looks petrified at the idea. It’s another childhood source that’s in this story too though: ‘Pinocchio’. Part of this story takes place inside a whale for a kick-off, but it’s more than that: this is a story all about the consequences of lying, when it would have been better all round to tell the truth. This entire society is based around lies, that the space whale needs to be tortured to work properly when really it came to help. Every time adults learn the truth and look the other way, made complicit in the lie, they become more like wooden puppets every day, doing what they’re told. Speaking the truth gives you freedom and the responsibility to the truth is another aspect of responsibility and being grown up (so the voting on this ship is all ‘wrong’ –in this scenario only the youngest like Timmy should get to vote because they’re the only ones not worried about the consequences). As much as people like to make out that Pinocchio is a cute story about a puppet coming to life, it’s really a harrowing tale about innocence and trusting the wrong people to keep you safe, learning the hard way when to speak your truth and when to hold your tongue (and this is a story where the Doctor and Amy do just that, inside a whale’s mouth). The Doctor, then, is Jiminy Cricket, the ‘conscience’ telling people how they should act and cross with them when they don’t listen. And let’s face it if any fictional character was going to sing ‘hen You Wish Upon a Star’ it’s him. Right up until the last act anyway when Amy earns her stripes as a companion by working out the solution that even the Doctor doesn’t see and becomes a ‘real live companion’ of her own. 

 The ideas are great then – but they don’t fit together to tell a story quite right. It’s like a piece of a puzzle is missing. There’s just a little bit too much going to fit comfortably inside a 45 minute episode – not the first or last time we’ll be saying that about a Moffat script. Out of the three showrunners in the modern era he’s the one who’d be most comfortable with the olden days of four 25 minuters stretched out across a month: he needs that extra time to explore his ideas and has a natural gift for changing a story’s direction just when it’s getting boring, which is how the best Dr Who writers used to use cliffhangers in the olden days. Here though, at half the length and no week’s pause between installments, it means we never get to the bottom of a good idea before another comes along to replace it. Moffat himself, a sharper critic of his work than either of his colleagues, calls this story the most disappointing of his Dr Who scripts because it ended up quite ‘muddled’ and sadly he’s right. People come and go without proper motivation and act out of character even for the brief time we’ve known them because the plot needs them to: the Doctor, especially this playful childish regeneration, is usually a lot more forgiving than this (especially after being all over Amy and wanting to make the missing years up to her last week), while Amy has seen too much bad stuff in her life to just randomly start messing with dark holes on alien planets (she’s brave and would absolutely do it if the Doctor asked her, but she isn’t foolhardy given the life she’s had and would be more likely to comfort a crying child than investigate what’s been scaring it). Amy also starts talking about her impending marriage at the most inappropriate times (it feels like Moffat had to fit this bit in somewhere and it wouldn’t go anywhere so he just dropped it in at random). Ditto the Doctor casually mentioning that he’s the ‘last of his kind’, something Amy doesn’t even react to (though she clearly heard it, given her comments later on comparing the Doctor to the whale). Why does a pre-recorded Amy leave herself a message of warning to run away? It’s not as if she heeds the warning or tells anyone about it and it feels as if this is going to be a major timey wimey sub-plot that never quite arrives. Most of all though, why would Amy choose to ’forget’ that a colony of Humans she’s barely met is being powered by a space whale? She doesn’t know the implications of people dying if the whale flies off and she’s one of life’s natural protestors, forever in trouble at school as we’ll soon see. The plot point that fitted Peri or Turlough or whoever the 4th Doctor’s companion was going to be in the first draft (Romana?), companions that are more naturally timid and afraid or used to seeing bigger pictures might side with the humans, but Amy has a low opinion of humanity anyway – she’d totally side with the whale every time, even at pain of ending up lunch. Things might be different if this was starship Scotland and she was saving Scottish people of course, but it isn’t: to Amy these people are foreigner sassenachs anyway. 

Ironically then, for a story thirty-odd years in the making, the overall impression of ‘The Beast Below’ is a potentially great story that just needed a bit more time, to edit out the parts that ended up a bit, well, fishy. Of all the stories in Moffat’s era it’s ‘the one that got away’ and would have been catch of the day had the production team just relaxed their hold on the fishing rod a little and let it soar. Or better still had Steven submitted this to Russell and got a level of feedback to sort out the oddities. But even this early in the new production things are going too quick and time and tide on TV programmes wait for no showrunner, even (especially?) shows about timelords. The result is a story I’m glad they tried (especially after so many attempts in the past), which has some great ideas, a brilliant message about humanity’s inhumanity and lots of great moments to keep you watching and some cracking lines (Dr Who has got it in for one of the places I live again. Hmm…I ought to be cross about hat but it Lancashire does happen to look exactly like the inside of a whale’s mouth…) but still ends up oddly slightly unsatisfying, a promised beast that turns out to be a tiddler underneath it all.  Even as one of the era’s more average stories though it’s still worth watching though of course: you’ll have a whale of a time in fact. 

 POSITIVES+ Ah yes, the whale. When we see it in space it’s a thing of beauty and a real triumph for the effects team - about the only element of Dr Who that hadn’t changed with the showrunner and main cast and it was clever of Moffat to rely on their experience as much as he does when everything else is new. You can totally believe this whale is real and without speaking a word (that we can understand, anyway) it has more character than many villains in entire seasons of Dr Who. The shots of it against the backdrop of industrial cities, spread out on its back, is one of the all-time great ‘extraordinary hits the ordinary’ moments in the modern series, on a par with the Edwardian sailing ships of ‘Enlightenment’. 

 NEGATIVES – Alas the whale’s not so magnificent from the inside. You have to pity the poor set designer who was asked to cone up with the inside of a whale’s mouth and even more so the poor actors who end up sliding down a chute that’s meant to be an oesophagus (but just looks like your common or garden playground slide) into gloop. This scene is oddly childish for an episode with such deep themes and you can just imagine some of the curious newcomers gripped by ‘The Eleventh Hour’ who don’t understand how unusual this is for Dr Who turning off because ‘it’s only a kids programme innit?’, thinking the previous week must be the anomaly. The effect is so like watching 1980s kids TV gameshow ‘Fun House’ that you half expect Queen Liz to turn out to be Pat Sharp in disguise. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘What are you going to do? ‘Do what I always do…Stay out of trouble. Badly’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: A mini-sode titled ‘Meanwhile In The Tardis #1’ fills in the missing time between the end of ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and the start of ‘The Beast Below’.  Basically a deleted scene  it’s three minutes of Amy being in awe of the Tardis interior and being ruder about the Doctor’s appearance. Something only Amy would notice: she asks if the bulb in the Tardis light ever needs changing and asks how it can possibly be made of wood. For his part the Doctor looks as if he’s regretting inviting her along. A useful catch-up for any fans who’ve used the re-boot as a jumping on point, it does its job but a bit more clumsily than the episodes proper. You can find it on the series 5 DVD and blu-ray.

As mentioned a lot in this review ‘The Song Of The Megaptera’ is a Big Finish recording of a ‘Lost Story’ intended for the cancelled season 23. Written by Pat Mills, more usually known for his work in the world of Dr Who TV comics, it’s an excellent adventure with a space whale that swallowed a ‘time core’ and has since been hunted through space by Humans wanting to harvest its abilities. The story is just like ‘Moby Dick’ but in space and while the plot beats are different the sense of disgust with how humanity treats magical space creatures is much the same, with Colin Baker even angrier than Matt Smith.

Previous The Eleventh Hour’ next ‘Victory Of The Daleks’

The Androids Of Tara: Ranking - 226

  The Androids Of Tara

(Season 16, Dr 4 with Romana I, 25/11/1978-16/12/1978, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Anthony Read, writer: David Fisher, director: Michael Hayes) 

'Ah! But a Taran Wood Beast cannot be held to write down in cold blood the wild and black thoughts that storm it’s brain when an uncontrolled passion has battered a breach for them. Yet, unless he sets himself up as a saint, he need not hate himself for them. He is better employed, as it humbly seems to me, in scaring time-travelling maidens so that they run into the arms of Count Grendel and fretting over his wicked impulses, extorting unwilling hospitality from the weakness of his nature. In other words: Roaaaaaar!’  

Rupert, Woodbeast of Hentzau

In an emoji: ⚔

Ranking: 226

‘Androids Of Tara’ then. Or ‘The Romana In The Iron Mask’ as they might have called it with just a few tweaks. Well swash my buckles! If you’re the sort of viewer who loves plots involving android doubles and swordfights in a great big ol’ castle then this is the story for you! For what it is, it’s an impressive 100 minutes of everything you’d expect from that description done with aplomb: boo-hiss villains, exotic location filming, Tom Baker getting a rare chance to be a dashing hero rather than a lovable eccentric and a plot that nips along at high speed if you don’t think about it too much. Everything looks exquisitely lush (with some of the best location filming of the era), the performances are all solid, some of the lines especially witty. It’s hard to find fault with something this entertaining and nothing that important goes wrong, which in itself makes a nice change for a story in the Graham Williams era, which was beset by problems more than most. At the same time though it’s just one of those Dr Who stories that’s not for me, my buckle having never swashed and being so bored by android replica stories in scifi in general that I’m considering building an android double to watch them all for me and report back so I don’t have to see them myself. So soon after ‘The Pirate Planet’ this feels like a step back to the Dr Who dark ages, a story that doesn’t go wrong mostly because it plays things so safe everyone can achieve this sort of thing in their sleep. From the moment five minutes in when Romana happens to bump into the baddy (who seems so charming he can’t possibly be that nice) and a couple of minutes later when the Doctor happens to bump into the goody (surrounded by such pro-active guards that he can’t possibly be that nasty and inspire such confidence) you know where this story is going to go, doubly so if you know the source material ‘The Prisoner Of Zenda’ (the working title for David Fisher’s story was as unimaginative as Dr Who names comes: it was literally called ‘The Prisoner Of Zend’ and set on a planet called ‘Zend’, before script editor Anthony Read thought he’d better add at least some imagination). Weirdly the two big unexpected twists – that we’re in a civilisation from the future not the past, despite the Medieval trappings and that there are androids afoot – are revelations casually tossed aside in the middle of part one. There’s a decided feel of ‘everyone knows what to expect anyway so we might as well give it to them straight out’ this week. For once the extraordinary world of Dr Who comes over as a little too ordinary, without the series’ customary imagination to spice things up. 

Nevertheless, just because it’s not high on my list and doesn’t have the twists and turns of this series at its best that doesn’t make this a bad story. With a show that’s this varied and run for this long there are always going to be stories made for factions of the fanbase who aren’t me. I still get to enjoy the lovely location filming in Leeds Castle and the Doctor crossing swords and indeed crossing words with a human antagonist who is for once pretty much his equal (Peter Jeffrey’s Count Grendel somehow manages to stay just the right side of Pantomime Dame despite being larger than life – or larger than a Taran Woodbeast anyway). Everyone does the most they can within the format, from the actors (Romana effectively plays four parts here, including android doubles – Mary Tamm jokes on the DVD commentary she should have asked for four pay-packets) to the set designers (this really feels like a castle even when it’s a TV studio set, as if it’s all shot on location) to the script (which has some classic lines, most of them added by Tom Baker and Mary Tamm), everyone rattling off the clichés with such aplomb they still somehow feel fresh and new.

Even so, it blatantly isn’t. The 4^th Doctor era is chock full of stories that take a particular source material and do something ‘Dr Whoy’ with it. The mixture varies, but it’s generally somewhere around 50:50 what’s recycled and what’s new. In the case of ‘Androids Of Tara’ the lifting is slightly lazier, so it’s nearer 90:10 source material to Dr Who stuff. Anthony Hope’s original is a heavy, rather dull read livened up by occasional bursts of action and with some good lines, the best of which is ‘Fate doesn’t always make the right men Kings’. You can say much the same about ‘Tara’, a story that contains practically everything you see in ‘Zenda’ (all the plot beats of impersonations and poisonings and kidnappings and doppelgangers) that’s a bit ploddy and repetitive, livened up by the action sequences and a couple of laugh out loud moments  – the only things added are the ‘Key To Time’ bits (which Romana gets out the way a few minutes in this week) and the fact that at least two of these characters are really androids. The film version of the book even starts with an eccentric English gentlemen who turns out to be the hero fishing in a local stream, which explains why at the start the 4^th Doctor suddenly takes up an uncharacteristic interest in the sport and abandons Romana to take the day off, never to show the slightest bit of interest again for a couple of regenerations.

To be fair to the writer there’s a good reason for all of this. Until the last minute this slot was meant to be filled by a story, based around the same booked location shoot, about the Doctor and Romana meeting an ‘evil’ variation of Robin Hood (some thirty-five years before a similar idea in the 12^th Doctor story ‘Robots Of Sherwood’, this story’s closest cousin in  modern Who for all sorts of reasons and similarly mixed), script editor Anthony Read coming up with the idea that myths and legends were the way to go, material that everyone recognised but which still gave him wriggle room to surprise the audience by not having to fit historical stories to a set timeline of events. Author Ted Lewis was hired to write it and he was quite a feather in the cap for the series at the time: he was a ‘serious’ writer, whose second novel ‘Jack’s Return Home’ (the source material for the film ‘Get Carter’ about gang-members trying to become respectable) made a big stir in the 1960s. Only, unbeknown to everyone in the Who production office at the time, the reason thatLlewis took the commission was that his life was falling apart and he needed the money in a hurry: he was on the verge of splitting with his wife and had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, hitting the booze to cope with his problems. There are tales that he turned up to a ‘let’s see how you’re getting on now you should have finished the first draft’ tone meeting blind drunk, admitted that he’d not done much at all and was sent home – even if, as you suspect, it’s one of those tales that’s been exaggerated with every re-telling (and there’s a lot of that in this series, with so many fanzines looking for juicy stories from production team members pleased at the extra pay cheques) it must have been bad for an era of Dr Who filled with such heavy drinkers as producer Graham Williams and writer Douglas Adams to have seen his drinking as a problem worth dropping him over, rather than being patient. Fisher was hired at the last minute and asked to come up with a replacement story on the same lines using the already-booked location. It seems odd that he wasn’t just hired to write the same story, about an evil Robin Hood, but maybe Read thought that Lewis might get his act together to write that one in the future (sadly he never did, dying in 1982) or maybe he was just superstitious about the idea now it had fallen apart. Given the brief time and the strict brief, Fisher actually does really well – and given the speed you can forgive him for borrowing so heavily from existing literature. It’s easy to imagine him getting the panicked phone call (he’d only just finished work on ‘Stones Of Blood’ after all, being one of only the writers in the ‘classic era of Who to compose back-to-back stories) and looking round his library for a book with a plot he could re-hash quickly and directly.

That’s fitting really because superstitions and customs are what ‘Androids Of Tara’ are all about. This is a world that’s based around sixteen astrological signs and has sixteen hour days, one for each sign. Things happen by routine and tradition here, based around the stars and constellations, such as who gets to be monarch at any one particular time. There’s a good reason for this that sadly the script only touches on lightly: plague wiped out 9/10ths of the population (with androids built to fill out the workforce as needed): at times like this all the science and logic in the world won’t stop survivor’s guilt and wondering why you were spared and not your ancestors’ nearest and dearest, so people look for signs everywhere, something Count Grendel is relying on in his quest for power. The key to time segment that Romana finds so quickly is hidden as a statue of a lion-like animal that Count Grendel says is a sort of family mascot, with a legend attached to it that danger will befall his family if something happens to it (such as, say, it disappearing altogether and transforming into a supernatural crystal). We at home know differently of course: its easy to see why a story about one of the six segments of time meant to protect the universe and disguised by an immortal being with special powers would have grown, down the years, to the point where all sorts of legends have grown up around it. And as ever in Dr Who those myths and superstitions turn out to be true – it’s probably not much of a spoiler (but I’ll throw one in anyway) to say that the Doctor defeats Count Grendel in the end so the superstitions all come true. It seems that odd Count Grendel himself should mention this to Romana (and us) though, given that he’s the only person on Tara who doesn’t seem to be superstitious: instead he’s a pro-active schemer who thinks he can defy fate, going to such lengths as kidnapping the Taran Royal Princess Strella.  Wouldn’t you know it – she turns out to be Romana’s exact double (it’s funny just how often that happens to timelords; given what we now know about Gallifreyans having the ability to sub-consciously shape the face they grow into, something that wasn’t a tradition yet in 1978 when this story was made, it’s somehow fitting that Romana of all people subconsciously based herself on a princess she might have read about somewhere: she has that kind of upper class caste vibe. Indeed its hard to imagine this story working as well with any other companion as she’s the only one who would naturally mix with Royalty, especially in her first regeneration – I mean, just imagine this story with, say, Ace or Bill in the Tardis). Grendel’s plan is to put his own specially programmed version of Strella onto the throne, marrying her and thus inheriting the right to rule the planet with all the riches and privileges that come with it. The only person who can stop him is the man who is betrothed to her, Prince Reynart, whose holed up with the Doctor (who helps make him his own android double) and who Grendel is desperate to kidnap too.

Tara is, like many a medieval setting in Dr Who, something of a mixture. We never truly find out where in space this planet is or what the date is, but it’s generally accepted by all concerned that we’re somewhere in our future. Like ‘The Ribos Operation’ three stories earlier it looks old-fashioned to us (and indeed viewers of the 1970s), full of such anachronisms as Royalty, castles and a deeply ingrained class system (it’s a general rule in Who that the more civilised a planet is the more equal the hierarchy is). At the same time though this is an actually quite rare species that have actually mastered the art of making robot replicas, ones so accurate down to the last detail that they can walk and talk and even their chief creator assumes Romana is an android having a malfunction rather than a time-travelling body double (despite what she says). It’s a neat twist that a companion is saved this week precisely because she sprains her ankle escaping a monster (the swelling proving that she really is flesh after all). The weaponry on this planet might look old-fashioned, with its cross-bolts and bows and fencing swords, but these are weapons laced through with electrical currents. What we have here then is a society that once had immense technological powers but which has fallen into disarray for unknown reasons, either collapsing or rejecting the idea of progress to go back to the good ol’ days. Everyone always quotes ‘Star Wars’ as an influence for this story (as lightsabers are just Medieval swords with a funky sound effect) but I think a bigger impact is the Von Danikan books ‘Chariots Of the Gods’ and its many many squeals, the very Dr Who sense that we ourselves once had great civilisations from ancient times that crumbled into dust and left only a word of mouth legend of their existence. Honestly, it would be keeping with this stage of the series if this planet turned out to be Earth in the future (but it doesn’t, for a change). In a series that’s all about time being a constantly shifting force, with the Tardis darting about seeing the ripples and causes of one era impacting another, it’s a neat idea to go full circle and a planet whose future looks just like our past.

One neat detail you don’t often get in stories like these is that it’s the peasants who understand all the technology, which has become just another art form practised alongside the Blacksmiths and Tailors in the town. The aristocracy haven’t got the first clue how it works: they only care that it does. Generally speaking, in Dr Who technology is hoarded by the people in charge so the everyday workers are kept under tight control; it’s a neat twist on the usual formula to add that detail. Even having Royalty is quite unusual for this series (as it happens we’ll have yet another princess in a couple of stories’ time – and wouldn’t you know it, she looks like the ‘other’ Romana! – but the only other ones in Who are in stories definitively set in the past). I like the idea of an android replacing a Royal. It would be easy. All they’d have to do is be programmed to wave and ask ‘what do you do?’ every few minutes. King Charles (oh that still feels funny to type even a year on from his, sadly much duller coronation than the one on Tara) acts like a malfunctioning android now. Would that we had this lot instead: Prince Reynart is my favourite of the handful of royals in Dr Who. He’s willing to put himself in danger for others, looks out for his men and most of all is unusually humble. Despite being a Prince he’s genuinely worried about being worthy enough of Princess Strella as a man, beyond his powers as a Prince. This is no nepo baby but someone who takes his inherited power very seriously and worries too about what sort of King he’d become (which is how you tell a good ruler in Dr Who: the more confident they are about how brilliant they are, the more useless they tend to be). I reckon his King’s Christmas messages every year (and Tara is so close to Earth I bet they have Christmases, with chocolate wood beast replicas opened in front of a roaring electronic fire and a benevolent white bearded robot animal named ‘Sandy Claws’ who delivers gifts to all the Tarans who’ve been good) would be really uplifting and comforting. Even when chained up and half-starved the Prince still has more moral backbone than any of our Royals (Count Grendel, of course, would so have an alibi from Tara Pizza Express to cover himself at a time when he was actually working on an android in secret and locking the Princess up in a dungeon). I find it interesting how close the Prince is to the only other candidate in Dr Who, Prince Peladon, who is also new to the throne and a little wet behind the ears. Even more interestingly we never find out what happened to either set of parents and both plots don’t revolve around it: given events here it would totally make sense if Count Grendal had bumped off King or Queen Reynard too, but if they do then we never hear about it and obody even questions it.

There’s another source text that often gets overlooked for this story (perhaps David Fisher found two books on his shelf and couldn’t choose between them?) ‘Grendel’ is one of the (many) baddies in ‘Beowulf’, the 10^th century poem that’s one of the oldest in the English language. A giant, the cursed descendent of Cain from the Bible, he’s the ‘wicked Uncle’ who wouldn’t accept being a spare, not a heir (so in modern times he’s a mixture of Prince Harry’s position and William’s scheming personality). He’s not worthy of ruling though: he doesn’t love his people, he loathes and detests them, particularly the happy singing that goes on in their kingdom every night. So he attacks by stealth, kidnapping or killing the people one by one to make them scared of him, because if he can’t rule through love maybe he can de-throne his brother out of fear. Only there are too many people in the kingdom so that even after twelve years of doing this night after night there are still too many peasants around and he’s seen as a minor irritant rather than a mass murderer. So Grendel loses his temper and goes on a giant massacre, to make sure the people he thinks of as ‘his’ fear him –by which time he’s lost their respect and ends up being rejected again, banished before being killed.  Unlike ‘Prisoner Of Zenda’, which is a modern-ish Tale (1920s) set in Ye Olde Ancient Past this is a genuinely old legend, told round campfires and spread and expanded on by word of mouth. For all we know it may well be older than we know, a tale of something real that happened in ancient times. Either way, ‘Androids Of Tara’ feels like a morality play that’s been played out over time: every generation, every planet has a Count Grendel who thinks they can thwart justice but they always get found out in the end. There’s a sense of cathartic relief when the Doctor defeats him (with a snazzy swordfight no less) and a very funny pay-off line that Grendel, humiliated, having toppled from the castle into the moat, is still spouting furious denials (‘next time I won’t be so lenient!’) unable to accept that someone’s outsmarted him.

Another of the more interesting aspects of this story is that it’s a rare Dr Who romance. There really aren’t that many – take the long-running story arcs of the Doctor and Rose plus Amy and Rory out the equation and all you’re really left with is ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ (and that’s a gonzo love story if ever there was one). There are more snogs per screen minute in this story than any other classic Who story (and no I haven’t counted them all, but let’s face it there aren’t many competitors – even Jo and Cliff just swap hugs and pecks on the cheek) – it’s not until David Tennant comes along, kissing people in more stories than not, that this record gets thrashed. Prince Reynart and Princess Strella are a good match: this might be an arranged marriage but they both stay loyal under pressure and risk a lot to keep the other safe and there’s eefinite chemistry between them, as if they’ve enjoyed a life together before we joined the story. You sense the Kingdom of Tara is in good hands when the Doctor leaves (and yes there is a debate over whether Tara is the kingdom or the planet given the ambiguous way people refer to it; in my head it’s both: Tara is a planet with just one great big land mass and both are named the same, because why would you give a planet a different name if the land is all one thing anyway?) Honestly I don’t know why we don’t get more romances in Dr Who as it’s something that works really well: it adds a touch of humanity to the supporting cast that makes you care for them, gives the plot an extra gear of jeopardy for reasons (at least some) viewers can relate to and the idea of ordinary people doing extraordinary things to be together is something that fits well with the Dr Who elastic format. Oh and talking of romances, one of my favourite behind-the-scenes stories concerns ‘Tara’:  bored between filming, Mary Tamm got talking to stuntman Terry Walsh about how he stayed so fit and Walsh mentioned his love of martial arts, partoicularly aikido. He offered to show some moves to Mary and was showing her a particularly close body position when Mary’s husband Marcus walked in early, ready to pick her up, and naturally assumed they were embracing until the mistake was unravelled. The only thing that would make that story funnier is if he was dressed as the Taran Wood beast at the time!

That’s the real motivation for ‘Androids Of Tara’: misunderstandings. This story would be cleared up a lot sooner if the peasants could see through Grendel for who he is, but they’ve learnt to trust in fate, not the truth of what’s before them. Everyone is too polite to say anything to stop the events that nearly lead to their doom: it takes the Doctor’s perspective, as  an outsider, to see through the customs and traditions that are restricting rather than liberating. This all lends itself to a story that, despite being about a culture with scientific knowhow, really feels more like a fairytale: this is a story about good people out of their depth somehow coming good against evil scheming people with all the power and knowledge. It’s not just the locals though; Romana too is a little too trusting and naïve, booksmart instead of lifesmart (really, the Doctor should know better than to leave her alone – of all the ‘Doctor and companions get split up’ subplots this one happens particularly early). If people are just going to take things on trust without thinking about them, the plot says, they might as well be unthinking androids.
That’s a very Dr Who message and a worthy idea for the show. The problem is it’s all a bit too Dr Who and even more it’s a bit too ‘Medieval drama morality play’. It’s  story aeguably closer to the source material of ‘Prisoner Of Zenda’ than the BBC’s own 1984 adaptation (one written by former Who script editor Terrance Dicks no less, which must have given him a real sense of déjà vu given that he wrote the rather bland novelisation of ‘Tara’ just four years earlier).  It’s all very watchable but oddly unsatisfying by the time you get to the end of it and everything goes exactly the way you suspected once you saw through the twist of this being in the future looking like the past (a twist that comes roughly five minutes into a 100minute story). There are some lovely moments along the way: seeing Tom Baker handle a sword is fun (and while it’s not as good as the fight in ‘The Sea Devils when Jon Pertwee eats a sandwich while defeating The Master one-handed, it beats the one in ‘The King’s Demons’ easily), some fun gags (Romana, having never seen a horse before, assumes it’s another mechanical beast) and you get the sense the cast are having a brilliant old time making it (especially Peeter Jeffrey as Count Grendel, an actor once considered as the second Doctor before Patrick Troughton said yes and so enthusiastic about the shoot he even did his own stunts, jumping into the moat – but admittedly not from as great a height as the camera makes out). Something about this story always lands flat though: the pieces of the jigsaw are there and the acting and some of the dialogue and the sets and scenery are first-rate: it’s just that this is such a simple jigsaw to solve you’re left wanting more and you can’t help feeling that it should be more fun to watch than it is.

Maybe it’s the script, which was certainly rushed (with many of the lines reportedly changed by the cast during filming). Or maybe it’s the direction (Michael Hayes looked down his nose at Dr Who and wanted to be known for making ‘serious drama’ – he agreed to do this partly as a favour to family friend Who producer Graham Williams who’d been nagging him for ages and to please his fourteen year old son Patrick who was a guest on location and even got to rustle the bushes as a stand in for the Woodbeast in episode one, but you can tell dad would rather be elsewhere; it seems odd that of all the ‘Key To Time’ scripts the most overtly ‘fun’ and childish one was given to a director who already considered Dr Who childish). Or maybe this is just one of those stories that was never meant to soar in this format. Ultimately the biggest problem is simply that ‘Androids Of Tara’ feels like a very minor tale indeed, dispensing with the series arc of the key to time within the opening minutes and being a mixture of at least three very obvious Dr Who plots: robot doubles, people getting captured and recued and having tyrants overthrown due to their own stupidity and negligence. It just never quite connects, as if its part android itself, a clever replica of another tale rather than the real thing. 

POSITIVES + The story was filmed on the lush grounds of the very lovely Leeds Castle. Which, despite what some guide books might accidentally tell you, is nowhere near Leeds (it’s in Kent, so much nearer to BBC TV centre). A 9^th century genuine Saxon manor (with additions made in the 13^th century), it really looks the part and has been used in all sorts of films down the decades. Dr Who nearly lost it too: the Castle became the unlikely scene of a frantic two-week peace conference held about the war in the Middle East (some things never change eh? Talk about history repeating itself…We’re probably under the same Taran star sign we were in 1978 again in 2023), held between American, Israeli and Egyptian dignitaries (it’s fun to imagine Henry Kissenger walking down the exact same steps Tom Baker swordfights peter Jeffreys on just a couple of days earlier, although that’s a very different kind of a story). There was a danger the talks might have over-run and the show cancelled; in the end the biggest casualty was the matte paintings used to depict the castle: the poor artist planned to drop into the grounds and paint it leisurely over two weeks before filming but he was barred entry due to the extra security and ended up having most of a single morning instead. Considering that, it’s not a bad effort at all, only looking fake when the camera shoots it from the ‘wrong’ angle.

NEGATIVES – The Taran Wood Beast is notorious in Dr Who fan circles, despite only having around two minutes of screen time (and to be honest he might as well not be there: the plot just needs Romana to be scared enough to run off towards Count Grendel; a sound effect would have done). A sort of Ewok with teeth crossed with a teddy bear, it seems very much the afterthought of a production team who thought 'oops, forgot to put a monster in for the kiddywinkles, lets have a rummage round the back of the cupboard on the morning of filming and then get it out the way'. As it happens, they’d booked a bear costume already from BBC stock but hadn’t bothered to look at it and found to their horror that it was moth-eaten and in disrepair and had to be hastily patched up, with a new mask fitted at the last minute. Unlike some Dr Who costume disasters that inspire last gasp moments of genius, this one looks just like a damaged costume improvised at the last minute and the Wood Beast is one of the few Dr Who ‘monsters’ that’s never been turned into a toy (amazingly there is a figurine, added to the long running model collection but not till as late as 2022). Even so, if they ever make a cuddly toy version of it I’m first in the queue. I think I’ll name mine ‘Taran the Toothy’.

BEST QUOTE: One of my favourites, The Doctor’s ‘Do you mind not standing on my chest? My hat’s on fire’, something I use in everyday life more often that you might suppose.