Dreamland: Ranking - 231

 Dreamland

(Animated Special, Dr 10, 21-26/11/2009, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Phil Ford, director: Gary Russell)  

Rank: 231

'Hello we're the Men in Black and we do lots of bad stuff in suits' 'Well I'm the Black Guardian played by The Man In Black and I created evil and wear a crow on my head, so I win, ahahahahahaha [evil laughter]'

The third Dr Who animation was part of the David Tennant ‘gap year’ of 2009, broadcast in the gap between ‘Waters Of Mars’ and ‘The End Of Time’ and offers us one last belated look at the 10th Doctor as a dashing excited overgrown puppy type hero rather than a sombre timelord with a guilt complex (so much so that fans have assumed it’s a story dated earlier, but no – not according to Phil Ford who wrote both this and ‘Mars’). A Piers Wenger baby (Who’s incoming executive producer in the 11th Doctor era, who specialised in websites and multimedia that all looked a bit like this), ‘Dreamland’ was commissioned to fill in the long gap of 2009 when Who was mostly off the air in preparation of the handover between Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat. It felt grating at the time, a return to the olden days just as we were getting ready for the big new eras and the animation didn’t help; though the story’s a big improvement on ‘The Infinite Quest’ and ‘Scream Of Shalka’ both the animation is far worse, looking like the sort of blocky 1990s pc shoot ‘em up game (e.g. ‘Destiny Of The Doctors’, an unplayable headache-inducing Who game worth owning merely for Anthony Ainley having great fun during his last performance as The Master that’s still better than the horrific games released in the 1980s) that by 2007 felt as if they belonged in the steam age. At the time ‘Dreamland’ was dismissed and forgotten, relegated in episodic form to children’s channel CBBC and then the BBC digital service’s ‘red button’ (which showed a programme from a different flagship series on a loop for a few days at a time in an attempt to interest viewers into switching over from the analogue service that was being turned off to save costly maintenance on the original transmitters) because ‘Totally Dr Who’ was long gone, the children of the comeback era having grown up. Even an omnibus version, given its one and only transmission on Christmas Eve (and thus the day before ‘End Of The Time’ part one) seemed like a started before the main course that nobody wanted to stuff their faces with. They didn’t even put it on the ‘2009 specials’ set or give it a standalone release (to this day the only way of buying it on disc is as part of the pricey ‘animations’ box set alongside ‘Shalka’ ‘Quest’ the part-animated ‘Shada’ and, weirdly, ‘Power Of The Daleks’ as the lone ‘missing story’). As a result ‘Dreamland’ is arguably the least seen ‘official’ Dr Who story of its golden age, the 2000s, gathering dust in the collective memory as surely as if it had been parked in area 51. 

 Time has been kinder to this story though: animation is one of those areas that grows so fast that any and every series from that era brings a pang of nostalgia and it doesn’t matter as much if it looks retro. Now that we don’t have our regular fix of the 10th Doctor in his heyday we can appreciate the fact that this script makes him live again, with far more Doctory moments than we got in ‘Quest’ without all the baggage of the other stories of that year. The fact that there’s been a revival of interest in Area 51 has helped, the murky military base in Nevada that may or may not be real (denied at all until a few years ago, while nowadays the official line is that it’s real but used to test new military vehicles America doesn’t want its rivals to know about), mostly since fans could start looking it up on Google Maps without having to travel there, and wondered why any military base would need land that big. Although it really came to fame in the 1990s when Dr Who was off the air, thanks to a revival of interest in the news reports of the Roswell alien saucer crash with lots of eye-witnesses who’d been sworn to secrecy now in their old age and dying and not as scared of reprisals as they were (and the sheer number of them, more than any other detail about the crash, is what convinced so many people that the crash was more than just a weather balloon as the official story has it). Although there are three bits of information that convinces many people that we have a real life Torchwood grabbing alien trinkets in our universe too: a much disputed ‘alien autopsy tape which various people have come forward and admitted/denied, but which for a few frames at least are still officially of ‘unknown’ origin with the right period tape, the right conditions, the right props and the right procedures whatever they make out in the deplorable film starring Ant and Dec that people in the know all take to be America trying to cover up investigation into the real thing; clever technology means that we can now read the ‘official report’ featured in the infamous picture taken of Major Marcel and the balloon printed in small text, upside down and printed on blocky newspaper print (which clearly mentions a ‘they’ involved in the crash, though frustratingly doesn’t give a species); and Bob Lazar, an engineer who claimed to have been one of the military personnel hired to reverse engineer the ship that crashed at Roswell who discovered a new element in the periodic table, 115, that powered an anti-gravitational device that allowed the ufo to fly at impossible speeds without crashing (well, except in 1947 apparently): dismissed at the time as the ramblings of a lunatic who wanted attention, it’s now being slowly accepted by the scientific community that there might be something in this. And so, in the space of twenty years, Roswell went from being one of many rumoured crashes to something that ufologists considered as being as close to evidence as we were ever likely to get (until the Slitheen crash into Big Ben for real anyway). Nobody in the ‘classic’ years of Who in the 20th century would have thought about doing a story on Roswell and yet the feeling in 2009 was ‘why haven’t we had a story on it yet?’ It’s such a part of the international psyche that Dr Who has since done it for real on television, twice (‘The Impossible Astronaut’ and The Sarah Jane Adventures). 

The American Government is seen by many British people as being a bit sketchy, so they can realistically be written in as the ‘baddy’ without much back story, which is useful for a story this tightly plotted round short segments. And it’s the sort of thing they could never fully do justice top in Wales where creating an area 51 hangar on TV was always going to be a bit of a problem. For a start there’s nowhere in Britain big and flat enough: we don’t have deserts like great swathes of America: there used to be too many trees and now there are too many houses, while in some places there’s both. And frankly it rains too much here: even in Summertime droughts the foliage looks dead but doesn’t get long enough to die off. They could CGI it or have location shoots but both are pricey and besides the US military is still jumpy about people filming too close to the real thing: there are scores of accounts of indie film-makers being interrogated arrested or fined (or all three) for straying too close to the ‘keep out’ signs, while Dr Who is a show that does so much research it used to be notorious for getting in trouble with military personnel for accidentally predicting real life secret plans (such as a submarine in ‘The Sea Devils’). So, even though everyone was expecting an alien planet again, animation is used to tell a story much closer to Earth, we get something much closer to home. Having this in animation does at least mean that we can get a proper flying saucer (in the opening crash, which is so much better than the rest it looks as if it was done by a different animation team) something we’d never properly had in Who before except in model shots (though they sort of re-create it for real in two Phil Ford ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ stories). There are also no less than two types of alien – the familiar grey alien, famous from 90% of all abduction stories, which turns out to be a ‘Saruba’ and a giant insect named a Viperox. 

 There are other influences on this story that grew up at the same time as interest in the Roswell crash in the 1990s that Who had never properly dealt with, given that it was too busy having fun with 2000-era references and in-jokes. The most obvious one is ‘The Men In Black’, who were big in folklore and comic strips back in the 196-0s but had been all but forgotten until the Will Smith films and had the revelation that who we thought were just FBI agents covering up alien crashes were really working with the aliens themselves. Also, Dr Who was mostly off the air when ‘The X Files’ was on so we never got the full-on government conspiracy thriller that was in vogue back in the 1990s: for most Brits it really isn’t a surprise that their government might be lying to them and covering up the truth because it’s something our Punch cartoonists have been assuming as a matter of course since at least the Victorian era. A lot of X Filed features Roswell or similar crashes and a lot of the military commanders that David Duchovny and Gillian Andersen (who appeared in Torchwood’s attempt at a similar thing, ‘Miracle Day’) fought with are just like Colonel Stark here. However I think there’s another influence too: it’s forgotten now by all but the biggest scifi nerd because it’s so slow and creaky and more repetitive than a Dalek with a stutter, but almost the first science fiction series made for television was the American series ‘The Invaders’. In that story Roy Thinnes, as architect David Vincent, witnesses a real life ufo crash with buddies who are ‘disappeared’. Desperate to contact someone I charge who can do something about it he keeps going further and further up the food chain only to discover that the aliens (who can take on human appearance) have infiltrated all governmental departments (alas the series was axed two years in before we can find out if the president was one but that’s where it s headed). That story even began in a ‘desolate deserted diner’ just like the one the Doctor walks into at the start of this story. All of these influences can be felt in this story heavily, which makes it feel more ‘American’ than actually the American-financed TV Movie does (perhaps because they actually filmed it in Canada for budget reasons). 

 However ‘Dreamland’ is still peculiarly British, with this story a sort of cross between ‘Independence Day’ and ‘Pancake Tuesday’. The Doctor is presented as an English eccentric, doing crazy things, referring to past history and babbling at top speed so that nobody can understand him (though the audience at home are having trouble keeping up with The Americans). The moment when the Doctor is looking for something alien an asks if anyone has noticed anything, while a whacking great blue one comes out of the ground behind him looming while everyone else runs away is the sort of scene we’d adore if they’d done it in live action in a ‘proper’ episode. Ford, despite only writing for the older, sadder 10th Doctor, really nails this Doctor’s younger-sounding self, all excitement and hope and joy and thinking out loud and even with just his voice to act with Tennant gives a sterling performance, sounding far more comfortable than he did in ‘Quest’. The dialogue is smart in other ways too, especially the digs at the military who are last to work out what’s really going on and therefore the opposite of all the gung-ho American Hollywood blockbusters this episode is aping (‘I want you to figure out how the prisoner could escape in an alien spaceship the us military doesn’t even know how to fly yet!’ ‘Sorry Colonel, I would salute but I seem to be strapped to a table’ and of course ‘You’re not American’ ‘I’m not even Human!’) It’s like the old days of the 3rd Doctor and UNIT, a scientific advisor that tries to advise but nobody ever listens because everyone’s too busy shooting at things and missing the bigger picture, that would all be solved if the humans weren’t so jumpy. Only of course, being Americans in a British series everything is bigger, including the hypocrisy and the denial (only since Trump came along and proved our worst fears true do a lot of Americans – though not enough frankly – see themselves as we’ve seen traditionally seen them for decades now). 

 There’s a darker message behind all the larking about and yankee comedy stooges though. You see, this is also the era of the post 9/11 days when Britain was ‘helping’ America in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The vast majority of the public didn’t want to: Unlike America these countries were quite near to us if the wars spilled over, plus we could see through George Bush’s speeches about the need for revenge and safety and to the truth that none of these countries were properly involved with Al Qaida (and even the ones that were had nothing to do with a terrorist group) and that it was really a war for resources like oil. We resented being America’s lapdog, keeping quiet in return for a cut of the profits and trade deals from our ‘special relationship’ with the States and most people considered our politicians even bigger traitors for kowtowing than the American military (because they were just doing what most Brits thought Americans did: shoot at things). And so there are a lot of digs at American military firepower and arrogant yanks who think the universe revolves around the,: most of this story revolves around Colonel Stark being outfoxed by a giant insect he claims he can crush and trying to get an advantage in the cold war to defeat the Russians even though the earth is collateral damage in a much bigger war. The Americans really don’t come out of this well, which might be another reason why this story has been so buried: it was two years later, in 2011 when Matt Smith became the Doctor, that Dr Who became bigger than ever in America and the tone against all Americans softens greatly (although that might also be a difference in mindset between Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat, or because we’d had so many other wars to get hot under the collar about since then). It’s also hilarious that the villain turns out to speak in posh British, just like every Hollywood blockbuster ever made – even though he’s a giant insect! 

The Doctor also gains his first native American Indian companion, Jimmy Stalkingwolf (whose about as realistic as his name suggests). The script doesn’t quite come out and say it but it’s obvious from the hints and asides that writer Phil Ford doesn’t think Americans have come very far since the days of cowboys and Indians. Colonel Stark’s attitude, of grabbing another culture’s resources and shooting at them instead of trading and letting everyone be happy, is exactly what happened in the bad old days of the wild west, when men were men and little grey aliens were little grey aliens. Jimmy doesn’t make it a big thing but he does refer to members of his family who died so American military might could live so that anyone watching this thinking ‘those Americans can’t all be that bad’ are provided with ammunition that, actually, they can be. The accents too are borderline insulting: Stuart Millington, as Colonel Stark, is a proper American (he’s Nixon in ‘The Impossible Astronaut’) but Georgia Moffett is hired partly because she has an American mum and claims she can do the accent (although it all becomes clearer when you remember that her mum is Sandra Dickinson, who sounds like no other American that has ever lived). 

 Ah yes, Georgia Moffett. While the revelation she was working on this story led to rumours of a much much more interesting story revolving around ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ she was probably chosen to keep David Tennant sweet in what was very nearly his last work in the job (with just ‘The End Of Time’ and a Sarah Jane episode to come). The pair had met on set in 2008 and started dating soon afterwards so that, by this point, by they’re very much a couple. So it must have been odd for David to see Georgia, as Cassie, falling in love with Jimmy across the story! Alas the two fill-in companions aren’t that well written, with characters more one dimensional and blocky than the animation. Colonel Stark fares better but really he’s just your two dimensional shouty ranting tyrant. Instead the story is stolen by David Tennant (Ford writing some very Doctory lines) and David Warner, defying every typecasting he’s ever had by playing villainous giant insect Lord Azlak. The Viperox are an interesting race I wish we’d seen more of: they’re involved in a sort of Sontaron-Rutan type war across the stars with the grey aliens and are out-militarying the Americans for most of the story. The animation, so poor for the rest of the story so that they can’t even get the Doctor to walk like David tenant properly (walking and taking simultaneously is the hardest thing to do in animation, so they’re unlucky in being given a Doctor who does that all the time!) really comes alive when they’re on the screen. We know from past misadventures like ‘The Web Planet’ and ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ how difficult it is to put alien insects on screen convincingly so having them star in an animation is a good call. Not sure about giving him what look like false teeth though! 

 The grey alien though is disappointing. He has no character, not much of a voice (despite being voiced by Lisa Bowerman, a hero to a generation of ‘wilderness’ kids after her appearance as a big cat in ‘Survival’ and producing many Big Finish stories as well as playing ‘New Adventures’ companion Bernice Summerfield on audio) and doesn’t get to do much. Having everyone’s stereotypical idea of an alien is such an obvious thing for Dr Who that it’s amazing it took this long and yet, when we get one, he’s no ET in the alien stakes. You ought to really feel for his plight, given that the whole plot revolves around his welfare and he is a victim of society, detained against his will for a full eleven years. He’s also, surely, a metaphor for all the Al Qaida suspects locked up in Guantanamo Bay, held illegally by Americans frankly because there was no authority powerful enough to stop them. We’ve seen before, in ‘Dalek’, how the Russell T era felt about this and having it in the penultimate ever Russell T story feels like a reiteration of old policies: that every individual has the right to freedom, whatever race or species they be. However it doesn’t feel as if he’s been through any great hardship. He never once complains about all those missed years away from home for instance (maybe he’s part of an impossibly long lived species for whom eleven years is the blink of an eye?) 

 The Men In Black, too, are lacklustre after waiting so long to see them in Who. They’re not FBI agents at all it seems, but members of ‘The Alliance Of Shades’ hiding alien technology from humanity. Only they’re doing a really poor job at covering up their tracks. It’s a pity that we get such a boring explanation for what’s one of the biggest folk mysteries, certainly of the 20th century. Though long dismissed as a dumb conspiracy theory it’s one that always felt as if it had more traction than most. I mean all the early ufo abductees had no reason to start making up stories about being visited by odd hairless humans all dressed in black. There’s so much more that could have been done with these characters than have them be the punchline to a joke: what if the Americans had really been part of an intergalactic war instead of hording weapons? And chose the wrong side? What if the government couldn’t control these aliens either who were a rogue element who kept getting in the way? What if their black suits were part of their alien bodies? Instead they feel as if they’re included in the story at the last minute because somebody mentioned that there couldn’t possibly a story about Roswell that didn’t feature them, but they don’t actually do anything. 

 It’s the animation that really lets this one down though. Nobody feels like a person. Nobody walks properly. Nobody moves like a real person. There was a shared rush of disappointment from the collective fanbase when we fgot past the opening rather good ufo designs and saw that the slightly shakey animation used in ‘Quest’ was actually worse. Littleloud, an animation company based in Brighton, had rescued many workers who lost their jobs from Cosgrove Hall (home of Count Duckula and Dangermouse) and recently worked with Phil Ford on an animated re-make of Gerry Anderson’s Captain Scarlet that, quite rightly, died a death (which is more than the main character could, ha!) To be fair to them they didn’t have time to properly immerse themselves in Dr Who and were a new company, working on a tight budget without the chance to let their imaginations soar the way the animators had on ‘Quest’ (which was made by Cosgrove Hall). Even so, they miss quite a few tricks here. Nothing in this story feels ‘real’ the way the best animation does, but neither does it feel larger than life or full of things you can’t see anywhere else. Instead it feels a bit drab, which is the mortal sin for any animation (although it’s still better than a lot of the animated missing episodes for my money). 

 All that said, ‘Dreamland’ (a sort of local nickname for Area 51) isn’t great. It feels at times as if you’re watching a low budget AI reconstruction of a Dr Who episode – not just the unconvincing way that everyone moves but also the script that only borderline makes sense and a plot that feels like lots of Dr Who clichés strung together (typical, the one time we don’t have to do the old ‘running up and down corridors’ ‘being captured and escaping’ and even the old ‘ventilation shaft’ moment because there’s no limit on budget and that’s what we get for a good half of the plot). There are several surprisingly basic errors: Cassie and Jimmy driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road for instance (well, correct to us, it’s the Americans who are weird). Characters refer to things that just weren’t around in 1958. There’s no sense that we even are in the 1950s: Jimmy and Cassie, for instance, feel as modern as Martha and Donna, perhaps even a hit more so. The Doctor also solves everything with a wave of sonic screwdriver (the sort of get out clause John Nathan Turner feared when he insisted on writing it out in the 1980s though few Dr Who writers ever stooped to using it) and repeats the ending of ‘Fury From The Deep’ to boot, by using soundwaves to destroy the alien spaceship (the story in which the sonic first appeared, incidentally, although the Doctor doesn’t actually use it in that scene weirdly). The story was originally broadcast in six minute instalments (bar the first, which was double-length) so by the time you’ve taken the credits and opening titles away that doesn’t leave much space for anything other than ‘how’s the Doctor going to get out of this? Tune in next week. Oh he’s solved it!’ plot beats. Admittedly this is less of a problem than it was in either ‘Shalka’ or ‘Quest’ (or even ‘Slipback’, a 6th Doctor radio series from the ‘hiatus’ year that also came in five minute bursts) and the plot overall is much stronger so that it works much better as a ‘full length’ 45 minute story. However the downside to this is that the animation is so poor and such a step down from the other two animations that it hurts your eyes if you stare at it for too long. Mostly it’s a bit of a disappointment simply because with animation everyone had the chance to tell a big and bold colourful story and instead if t feels as if everyone played it safe, with a story that had it been made for TV, however well, would have felt dull and ploddy. Not quite a dream, then, but not quite nightmare either. 

 So, a far better story than ‘Infinite Quest’ but one with far worse animation; the end result is as close to a draw as you can get in the Dr Who universe, fun extras that are strong but not quite good enough to be essential viewing, even though both are telling very different styles of stories. It’s a shame we never got a third (or a fourth counting ‘Shalka’) because, had the next one built on the strengths learnt on these animations and tae the best from them, it could have really established Dr Who in a whole new format, but alas the format retired along with Russell T as the series became slightly less child-orientated in the Steven Moffat years (though he did do a lot more with computer games than his predecessor, of which the last, ‘The Gunpowder Plot’ was the best, with Ralf Little as a surprisingly good Guy Fawkes with animation far better than this despite being interactive). I’m glad they tried a Roswell story and it’s a sensible trying it with an animation rather than with a big budget (because, let’s face it, if even the expense that seems to have been spent on at least part of the alien autopsy film couldn’t fool all the experts all the time then Who has no hope and would have been inundated with even more people than normal pointing out bits they got wrong). It’s just that we only got three cartoons and only two of them ever got a proper share of the spotlight – having such a down to earth story, shot in such boring colours, with such a generic plot, seems like a waste. This isn’t a bad story for what it is, there are Dr Who stories with far worse plots, without the sparkling dialogue and with far more irritating characters than this. However it still feels one-dimensional in all the worst ways from animation and plot down and given that an animation doesn’t need to be restricted to the usual bugbears of budget and time that scupper so many Dr Who stories it could have been so much more, so much more! Sob! Oh well, any and all David Tennant, especially in a ;gap’ year, is better than nine at all and ‘Dreamland’, if nothing else, feels more like ‘proper’ Dr Who than some actual 10th Doctor stories (like ‘Fear Her’ and ‘Voyage Of the Damned’) despite the animation. Today it even has its own spot on the BBC i-player ‘Whoniverse’ alongside ‘Quest’ (though annoyingly there’s no ‘Shalka’ as yet) so ‘Dreamland’ is getting more attention than it’s ever had, nestling with the big boys where it always deserved to be after 14 years of being largely unloved. 

 POSITIVES + David Tennant was by this point exhausted. He’d been the doctor for three full years and was at the end of a dourth which had balanced intense DW work and two episodes of Sarah Jane Adventures with lots of Shakespeare on the stage, on top of which he hurt his back. Being inside a voiceover studio was probably the last thing he felt like doing (not least because he’s such a ‘physical’ actor), but he’s excellent even when the script, well, isn’t (the first episode particularly has him talking like a space cowboy, which didn’t work when they tried it in ‘The Space Pirates’ in 1969 either). 

 NEGATIVES - We didn’t get as much of the ‘Roswell’ story as you might expect from, so far, the only time DW has tried to tell one of the most famous stories in ufology. The alien doesn’t get to do much except get rescued and all we see of his space-ship is when it crash-lands in the opening credits and a brief battle that’s gone in a flash, so we don’t really know who he is or why he was there. Instead of finding out we mostly get shots of the New Mexico desert, which is about as interesting as watching, well, sand. 

BEST QUOTE: Lord Azlok: ‘You are not of this world. I hear two hearts beating’. Doctor: ‘Then note their rhythm. I'm not scared of you!’ 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS:Phil Ford was also a regular writer of The Sarah Jane Adventures and his next story following this one was the episode ‘Prisoner Of The Judoon’ broadcast a month before ‘Dreamland’, one of the more straightforward and blander episodes of the series (though its amazing in retrospect just how consistently good that series was when even a story as good as this is one of the weaker efforts). The Judoon are following an escaped prisoner called Androvax (an alien known as a ‘Veil’) who can take over bodies. One of these is Sarah Jane and Androvax manages to get a number of details about alien spaceships that have crashed on Earth, including one in Area 51 that’s the spitting image of Rivesh Mantilax’s ship in ‘Dreamland’. However Luke (Sarah’s adopted DNA spliced months old son who looks aged eleven, don’t ask – it’s complicated) manages to steal the ionic fusion bar seen in ‘Dreamland’ to stop Androvax from leaving, whereby he is finally captured by a much-delayed Judoon officer and sent packing. A nice bit of continuity there! Androvax turns up again the following year in another episode written by Phil Ford ‘Vault Of Secrets’ in which he meets the Men In Black from ‘Dreamland’ (although it’s never established whether they’re the dodgy androids who’ve been improved or the ‘real’ thing). 

 Ford may well have got the idea for all three stories from an earlier Sarah Jane story from 2006 – no, not the TV ‘Adventures’ but Big Finish’s earliest Who spin-off series that’s really rather good, more adult but not in a sex and violence ‘Torchwood’ type way, more of an ‘X Files’ conspiracy way. ‘Dreamland’ is the big finale of the second series (there were only ever two, sadly) and has Sarah finally finding out whose been chasing her and her friends for two years now (which is all a bit tricky to explain without going through eleven other plots first). It’s not the men in black or grey aliens or anything, but it is (partly) set in Area 51 and does all fit into the conspiracy proposed in ‘Dreamland’ that the American government knows exactly what aliens have been passing through their airspace and have been collecting odd bits and pieces to study along the way. 

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