The Ultimate Foe
(Season 23, Dr 6 with Mel, 29/11/1986-6/12/1986, producer: Joh Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, John Nathan-Turner (uncredited), writers: Robert Holmes, Pip and Jane Baker, Eric Saward (uncredited), director: Chris Clough)
Rank: 243
'There's nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality - and other songs. A new singer-songwriter album by The Valeyard featuring all your fave raves'
It's the end #6 - and the moment is so unprepared for nobody making this realised it was the end, including the actor playing the Doctor. What’s weird is that the actor playing The Doctor is the only person who ended this story still wanting to stay: what should have been a ‘happy ending’ with The Doctor cleared of all charges and walking off into the sunshine a hero becomes marred by a nasty taste in the mouth and a sense that no one knows what they’re doing. For of all the behind-the-scenes in-fighting in this book none comes as big as ‘The Ultimate Foe’ which, despite being a humble two-parter, was written by four people whatever the credits say. The story, planned as a heroic conclusion that proved to the powers-that-be wanting to take this series off the air, ended up fizzling out with a quickly cobbled together story that papered over the cracks rather than truly concluding anything, with a trial verdict that was muddled and inconclusive. Most fans’ response was ‘well, that was a waste of fourteen weeks of my life, I wonder what’s on the other channel?’ – hardly the ringing endorsement and shot in the arm a series that BBC executives were itching to cancel wanted. So what went wrong? In the defence of the many people who put their time, effort and money for this, practically everything. Season 23 really is the unluckiest of series. What was meant to be a re-launch, full of everything the series could do best and which would show the powers that be that Dr Who is a viable commercial successful series is scuppered at the eleventh hour by production problems, disagreements, walkouts and even death and no story more than its finale. It ended with the script editor walking out, the producer handing in his notice and Bonnie Langford wishing she’d never signed up to this madhouse.
It started off so well
too. Script editor Eric Saward was enough of a Whovian to recognise that Bob
Holmes would be a safe pair of hands to write this conclusion. At this point
he’d written or script-edited more hours of Who than anyone (a record beaten
only by Russell T Davies twenty years later and then by Steven Moffat) and was
a safe pair of hands who knew the series inside out. He was commissioned to
write this story alongside his opening four instalments ‘The Mysterious Planet’ in
November 1985 but understandably wanted to see what the other writers came up
with before writing a story that tied up everything – a problem, given that JNT
and Saward kept changing their mind to the point where they didn’t even have a
third part still at the point this story was meant to go in front of the
cameras. Holmes was also fed up to the back teeth with Dr Who: he’d given his
life to this series and yet the new chimpanzees at the BBC had the audacity to
criticise ‘The Mysterious Planet’, sending it back to Eric and demanding
changes because it wasn’t good enough. It is, admittedly, not close to vintage
Holmes but to criticise this story when they’d actually praised the likes of
‘Timelash’ and ‘The Mark Of The Rani’ was galling. Holmes wasn’t the sort of
writer who liked re-writes and perfecting: he was an instinctive imaginative
writer who loved the first draft and writing issues out of his system and he
got decidedly less interested with each passing draft. He got through ‘Planet’
re-writes through gritted teeth but wasn’t about to hurry into the next part.
Besides, he’d been feeling a bit dodgy lately. Holmes had always been a heavy
drinker and it was beginning to catch up with him, with twinges in his liver.
He went to see a Doctor, got diagnosed with hepatitis and rushed to hospital.
He died in May 1986 with only a first draft of episode thirteen started and a
basic sketch of what fourteen would be.
In stepped Eric, who was
heartbroken. He’d thought of Holmes as a mentor and he was the one person he
felt cared about the series and concerned about what he saw as a downward slide
as much as he did. Now he no longer had a buffer against the decisions taken by
JNT that he thought were killing the programme: the stunt casting, the constant
removal of actors for conventions and Christmas pantomimes, the disinterest in
everything that couldn’t be milked for publicity. Saward was appalled at the
shoulder-shrugging that went on with the death of Holmes (and it’s surely
significant that a series that was always so good at honouring lost friends in
every era never paid tribute to its most prolific writer on-screen). So Saward
handed in his notice, sending it to the BBC highups (it read ‘I’m sick to death
of Dr Who and the people working on it’) and avoiding JNT altogether with as
many days out the office as he could manage (and next to no interest in the
‘Vervoids’ story), but agreeing to honour his friend by finishing his script
for him in private as a freelancer. Then came what he saw as the last straw:
the producer objected to Holmes’ original ending and demanded it was changed.
Saward agreed to change everything else but the ending (saying JNT had already
agreed to it in principle with the scene breakdown months before), there was a
colossal blow out and the script editor walked off, taking his script with him.
Fans have wondered about this since: was Eric holding the series hostage
because he believed in Holmes’ vision so much? Pushing to get his own way? Sabotaging
a shw that had brought him nothing but misery lately? A personal attack to make
JNT look stupid? Or just the desperate move of an unhappy man who’d been pushed
to exhaustion? (Perhaps a little of all of the above?) Things got nasty quickly
and soon JNT was served with a writ: under no circumstance could he use any of
it. After a meeting with lawyers JNT worked out that, as a BBC employee during
the editing of episode thirteen, Eric had no grounds and the script could be
used as it was – but episode fourteen was a different matter. Copies that had
already been circulating amongst the staff were quickly pulped and JNT hired a
lawyer to sit in with all meetings pertaining to the story as proof that if
anything turned out in any way similar to Saward’s version he could prove it was
a coincidence.
The problem was things
were by now so close to the wire that locations had been booked, costumes made
and actors cast – everything was ready in fact but the script. It’s also the
ending to a story that’s been running for weeks – inevitably there was going to
be some overlap. And yet not as much as you might think: the ‘Trial’ season is
such a crazy sprawling mass of disinformation and lies that it’s hard to tell
what’s going on for a viewer who owns the thing and can re-watch it, never mind
writers who have no real idea of what’s going on. And those writers were JNT’s
reliable friends Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker. Their work on this story is, in many ways,
incredible: given just three days, established locations that couldn’t be
changed, already cast actors and no clue of where the story was meant to go
besides episode thirteen (including a typically Holmesian ‘impossible to
escape’ cliffhanger) it’s a wonder they came out with anything coherent at all.
Of course there are
problems. For one thing the only way the Bakers can explain the story
thoroughly enough is to write lots – so much that the story ran badly over, to
thirty-eight minutes. Even after frenzied nights in the editing suite cutting
out a lot of superfluous Master or Glitz dialogue and some establishing shots the
producer and director Chris Clough could only bring it down to 29”30. JNT,
already in trouble with his immediate boss Jonathan Powell, figured that he
didn’t want to hang around anyway so bit the bullet and asked for a five minute
extension, figuring that if they sacked him they would be doing him a favour.
In the end the extra time was granted, making this the longest running Dr Who
episode in the ‘classic’ slot (with the obvious exception of season twenty-one’s
45minutes and the ‘Five Doctors’ special). For another they weren’t privvy to
all the details about the trial that Homes and Saward both knew – they hadn’t a
clue, for instance, what evidence had been tampered with by the Valeyard and
came to some really curious ideas on how to solve bits (such as the limp reveal
that Peri is still alive and married to Brian Blessed, a fate worse or at least
noisier than eternal rest; Nicola Bryant wasn’t told and found out years
afterwards – her shocked laughter at the gaudy pink background with hearts on
the only scene she isn’t grimacing at King Ycarnos as part of the commentary
for this story is the single best moment in the set) and didn’t like to give a
final verdict – instead the whole trial part just crumbles away as
circumstances change. The biggest problem though is that, with all the love in
the world, they’re hack writers, there to fill in twenty-five minutes (well,
thirty in this case) of television and nothing more.
Holmes was a
three-dimensional writer who used metaphor and symbolism and who was clearly
getting at something that none of his successors quite managed. A lifelong
rebel, he’d spent his time on the series gradually chipping away at his friend
Terrance Dicks’ idea of timelords as being this authoritarian omnipotent race
(Just look at how un-scary this lot are compared to their first appearance in ‘The War Games’) and revealed them to be a
race of charlatans. The whole crux of episode thirteen, all but ignored in
fourteen, is that this trial is a sham and they’re a kangaroo court there to
cover up their own faults. The thrust of Holmes’ narrative (working title ‘Time
Inc’) is that Ravalox, the new name for Earth, was taken out of time and space
and The Doctor is being silenced because as a rebel with a cause they know he’s
going to spill the beans. The Doctor isn’t the one really on trial: they are.
What’s more, Holmes has long used the ‘monsters’ in his stories as symbols for
other people getting on his nerves. In ‘The
Sunmakers’ it was the Inland revenue (turned into a plutocracy on Pluto
where workers are permanently in debt and work it off their whole life
through), in ‘Carnival Of Monsters’
it was the viewers (watching monsters through a miniscope) and as early as his
first Who story ‘The Krotons’ it’s teachers,
who are stooges of a corrupt system who want to keep their children thick and
ignorant and kill them off if they start thinking for themselves. Here his
target is clear: the timelords, who he’s already shown to be bureaucrats who
like tying people up in knots of red tape, are the BBC themselves. The pen
pushers (‘Processing is very important in this establishment!’) who keep
imaginative writers like him tied up in circular knots and live in a circular
‘fantasy factory’ that bears an uncanny resemblance to TV centre where the
staff are all clones of each other who make you sign your life over in
contracts that make no sense. There’s a very Victorian smell of decay in
episode thirteen, with Mr Popplewick (who may or may not secretly be the
Valeyard in Holmes’ version) preventing people from doing good by driving them
insane in an imaginary hallucinatory illusionary world of their own making.
They’re trying to distract The Doctor by bamboozling him with a sort of
‘circular time’ not to mention a trap laid with quicksand (anyone who’s filled
in forms for a corporation and had to change departments knows this feeling) and
prevent him doing good by fighting the monsters who cause the real harm. Cue one last glorious speech from The Doctor
about how timelords are the real monsters (‘The Daleks, The Cybermen, they’re
still in the nursery compared to you!’) which, like so many of his stories,
takes someone who seems like a big important scary bully and peers behind the
curtain to show what a coward they secretly are. After all Dr Who and writers
in general go out into the universe to hold up a mirror and make humanity
better by telling the truth as they see it; this lot are just pushy pen-pushes
casting judgement on things they don’t understand, like creativity and
imagination, even though their livelihoods depend on it. Also one of the slyest
references in the story, which nevertheless the Bakers were smart enough to
pick up on: the ‘seventh door’ leading to the matrix is the door of endless
possibilities and it’s the seventh door because the first six are known (and
stored on videotape just like the ones in the BBC archives. Notice the
reference to phases one and two being ‘obsolete’ – well, they are in black and
white so overseas countries had stopped buying them by 1986 though they bought
the ones from Pertwee onwards). Dr Who has been reduced to a commercial
enterprise and the only thing Holmes can think of for his finale is to have The
Doctor save the trial room and hurl the Valeyard into his own time vent, in a
tussle to the death that can’t be resolved until Dr Who is ‘free’ to be itself
again.
Who knows what Holmes’
episode fourteen would have been like? I’m guessing it would have upped the
metaphorical ante and had everyone at the trial turn out to be the Valeyard in
disguise, with The Doctor somehow broadcasting it to his fellow timelords so
that ‘television’ and the truth saves the day. In other words stuff you Michael
Grade and Jonathan Powell and all of you other people trying to silence the
truth: it would be very Holmes, figuring the series’ days are numbered anyway,
to stuff it to the man one last time – even if it’s biting the hand of the man
that feeds it (he probably reckoned they were all too thick to notice anyway).
Although given the synopsis featured an unfeasible sub-plot about The Doctor
being mistaken for Jack the Ripper and going into hiding (yes, again!) maybe
I’m wrong and it would have been more basic than that and a whole lot worse
than its replacement? Goodness knows if
Holmes had the idea that The Valeyard was really The Doctor all along or not –
his shadowy side ‘between his 12th and 13th regenerations’;
that doesn’t sound very Holmesian to me. It does however sound like a Saward
idea and a copy of his re-write for episode fourteen exists (despite JNT
telling lawyers every copy had been pulped: three pages of it were turned into
prose like a Target novel and printed in the fanzine ‘In Vision’ issue
eighty-nine. This version is much more about who The Valeyard really is and he
very much is The Doctor (it might also be an attempt to go one better than ‘Star
Wars’ – not ‘Luke, I am your father’ but ‘Doctor, I’m you!’) It’s a twist that,
well, most people saw coming if I’m honest. Only at least in this draft it
makes a lot more sense – this Valeyard is a pitiable man afraid of dying. He’s
lived such a long life and put death off as long as possible but yet he remains
terrified. So terrified in fact that he’s come to have a mental breakdown and
isn’t thinking straight, turning his ire on the younger man who’s happily
running round saving worlds. He hasn’t thought through the very obvious point
that if he kills the Doctor in his 6th incarnation he won’t be alive
in his 12th. This version is far more of a character piece, with the
trial watching in horror as The Doctor saves their lives (admitting that they
were so wrong about him and ending on a voiceover of The Doctor and Valeyard
locked in combat as The Keeper (who got a lot more to do) seals the doors. Mel
is heartbroken and assumes The Doctor is dead, but is cheered when The Keeper
tells her that he isn’t dead, just trapped in a sort of endless limbo. ‘I’m
sure the Doctor will succeed’ says Mel in a voiceover ‘he must!’ The serial –
and possibly the series – would then end with The Keeper adding ‘If he doesn’t
the vent will remain his prison for all eternity’. This version of the story
softens Holmes’ bite a lot by the look of what we have but would still have
been a strong finale, The Doctor becoming one of the greatest heroes of
Gallifrey and a legend on his home world, where truth will out and where The
Valeyard gets what he wanted – eternal life, albeit in a timeloop.
The Bakers have no such
ambition. All the subtlety has gone from their final version. They
understandably leave most of the threads dangling (such as what The Valeyard’s
motivation actually was and how many people at the trial were in on it all, not
to mention how The Doctor can possibly leave to have new adventures with Mel, a
companion he hasn’t technically met yet!) They see the Doctor-Valeyard tussle
as a more straightforward fight and turn him from a shady dangerous being into
a moustache-twirling petty villain and the story a simplistic fight between
good and evil, keeping the idea that they’re the same person down to a minimum
(JNT, as ad hoc script editor, took out a few other references from episode
thirteen to make that fit too, such as Mel saying The Valeyard has the same
look as The Doctor – though curiously he left the line about them having the
exact same handwriting in. We also now think it was a lie, given that David
Tennant didn’t turn into Michael Jayston, although it could be that time was
re-written by The Valeyard being turned into David Tennant’s spare arm or
possibly, given that ‘Time Of The Doctor’
granted another thirteen lives, that he’s part of the next batch). As For The
Master he’s back to being the stooge he was in ‘The Mark
Of The Rani’, The Bakers really missing the mark with who he is (also
there’s no way he would hire someone like Glitz – he’s not that stupid! – and
usually does his own dirty work when Ogrons aren’t around). It’s one The
Valeyard has pre-prepared with lots of obstacles and traps ready-made and the
story is mostly about The Doctor getting past those. They do at least pick up
on the Holmesian theme of not being sure who to trust, so we get Glitz as an
opportunist switching sides, The Doctor planning to lie to The Valeyard about
agreeing to his terms (which Mel then ruins by being heroic and so honest she
doesn’t realise it might be a ruse) and The Master being an unlikable means of
escape because he fears the more ruthless Valeyard more than the do-goody Doctor
which makes no sense – if he kills the Doctor the Valeyard won’t exist at all,
whereas kill The Valeyard and he still has The Doctor to deal with). None of
this feels as if it quite ‘fits’ episode thirteen and is there to fill the time
with and show off the already hired locations as much as anything – the only
part where the Bakers raise their game to match is by having a sham trial which
only exists in the matrix and having us pull back to see the trial watching
this (not knowing The Doctor has seen through it). In some ways it’s an
improvement on their other scripts – it makes sense that everyone here talks
theatrically, especially The Valeyard who seems a lot more comfortable with
these ridiculous words than The Rani or Professor Laskey ever did (although
they still take it too far: I mean honestly does a sentence like ‘There is
nothing you can do to prevent the catharsis of spurious morality’ doing in
there?) and given that characters were never their strong point it helps that
they’re writing for ones who are already established. In other ways though it’s
their worst: at least most Pip ‘n’ Jane scripts move at speed but this one just
goes round and round in circles. There’s easily five minutes more that could
have been cut without losing anything I reckon, while their resolution to every
obstacle they put in The Doctor’s path (‘it’s all an illusion!’) is the biggest
creative copout since ‘it was all a dream’. I mean, I completely understand why
JNT wanted to backpedal from Holmes/Saward’s ending, as it gave the BBC the
perfect excuse to cancel the series. But having The Doctor walk off into the
sunset, all charges dropped, after what should have been the narrowest squeak
and most harrowing day of his life, seeing his future self and all the things he’ll
turn into if he allows his worst impulses to run riot, is very much the ‘wrong’
ending too. To me the solution seems obvious: hand it to Phillip Martin, who at
least knew what he meant in his own story ‘Mindwarp’ and knew the trial arc
enough to guess the rest whole being brave enough to go for more than the
‘simplest’ ending. He was also someone largely neutral in the Saward-JNT wars
who could have liased with both sides.
After all, someone
involved in this story should have done enough homework to catch even basic
errors. What they do with the matrix is particularly stupid. Holmes invented it
in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ to be the
resting place of every last timelord consciousness, a cross between an interactive
museum, Star Trek’s holo-suites, the internet twenty years before it was
invented and a book of remembrance. You aren’t meant to exist in it physically
and when you do it’s a terrifying surreal landscape where the usual rules of
physics don’t apply and rules can be changed on a whim. It’s a place where you
can be hurt though or even die if your brain is fooled enough into thinking
that you’ve been damaged. In ‘The Ultimate Foe’ it’s a physical place that can be stepped in and out of at will,
complete with doors. Try to imagine stepping into the internet with doors: the
closest you’re going to come is via a modem. And the Bakers, who were after all
born in the 1920s, have no idea what that is, so we get the hilariously wrong
scene of a gigantic wall sized modem that, rather than connect analogue to
digital equipment (which Holmes intended to further the joke of the ‘archive’s
being old Who stories) becomes an all standard macguffin, never properly
explained. The Doctor, meanwhile, avoids most jeopardy by telling himself it
isn’t real – a useful get out of the gallows free card on far too many
occasions. It’s all solid though, normal, not at all like the last time we were
in here – The matrix has gone from being a surreal landscape of hell to a
magician’s conjuring trick. Talk about taking the extraordinary and making it
ordinary! It even has beach huts now
(albeit it should have had more: the port authority at Rye had agreed to loan
one out to be The Master’s Tardis but a mess up meant that the hut, which had
stood empty for months, had just been sold and the key no longer fitted. JNT
got permission to break in and film anyway, but the new owner came in just as
they had and was irate to say the least – Dr Who footed the bill for a new
lock).
The acting continues to
be poor. Lynda Bellingham is not a natural fit for the Inquisitor and there’s nothing going on behind those eyes.
Even though she holds the power of life and death over The Doctor there is no
sense of danger here. Bonnie Langford, in her first time in front of cameras
learning a new script that wasn’t there this morning and still not sued to
being in front of the cameras as an adult after years on stage, is at her
worst, over-enunciating everything and vamping like mad at times. James Bree, unrecognisable
from his role as The Security Chief in ‘The
War Games’ signed up because of Holmes’ meaty script that have him lots to
get his teeth into and was appalled at how the Bakers re-write it to give him
so few lines. He’s too professional to simply phone it in but he’s clearly
sulking at times. Anthony Ainley does his best but he’s playing second fiddle
to The Valeyard and The Master should never be that – the script doesn’t play
enough on the ‘helping The Doctor aspect (the Master ought to be taking a quick
Tardis shower to wash himself clean after doing the one thing he would hate
more than anything). Sabalom Glitz has been re-written from an interesting
quirky untrustworthy character into a comedy thicko, there simply to give Colin
someone to talk to. He ends up parked with The Valeyard in the end when he
needs someone to go to and to all intents and purposes gets left behind. The
only person who comes out of this with any credit and throws himself into everything,
no matter how stupid contradictory or indeed soggy, is…Colin Baker. His sacking just has to be an agenda, no doubt
with best pal and Colin’s ex Lisa Goddard whispering in Michael Grade’s ear:
nobody watching this could come away without thinking Baker was the best thing
in it. His sacking is one of the most dastardly cowardly acts in the history of
the series: Grade saw the lower viewing ratings for ‘Trial’ (nothing to do with the lack of publicity
this year, oh no) and decided that it was all the Doctor’s fault. Only, chicken
that he was, he got Colin to do it with the promise that he would be ‘allowed’
back for a single regeneration story and leave at the end of it. Not wanting to
give up the chance of other work when his family needed it and hugely annoyed
with the BBC instead Colin went to the papers and spilled the beans on all the
behind-the-scenes gossip everyone had been keeping quiet. See ‘Time and The Rani’ for more on that sorry
spectacle, which once again has Pip ‘n’ Jane Baker coming to JNT’s rescue and
making a bad situation worse.
‘The Ultimate Foe’ is
ultimately a mess. It ought to be big and epic but it is, in so many ways,
fifty minutes of The Doctor talking to himself (even if he’s in disguise as The
Valeyard and Mr Popplewick at the time). As a story in its own right it’s
baffling and hard to follow. As the conclusion to a fourteen week series it’s
weak, given that The Valeyard reveals his true identity at the point when he’s
winning for no good apparent reason and leaving the trial null and void (while
The Doctor, as screened, walks away as if nothing has happened to a diet of
carrot juice, the most unfortunately timed last words on screen for any Doctor)
and it would be much easier to have The Doctor killed and having it explained
by an ‘accident’ in outer space rather than put him on trial for uncovering
secrets. As The Inquisitor herself says, it’s a weird kind of trial where the
accused and the accuser are both the same person, yet the script never plays up
to the fact that everyone loved The Doctor except, apparently, himself (it
could have been like ‘Amy’s Choice’
this finale, The Doctor sending himself poison pen letters and pushing for his
own execution). As the all-important finale that could well have been the last
episode of Dr Who ever it’s a travesty, a terribly dull and anticlimactic way
to go. The end feeling is ‘what was all that about the eh?’ followed by
annoyance that you’ve just wasted fourteen weeks of your life and seven hours
watching a story that could have been solved straight away had The Valeyard
revealed who he was sooner. Dr Who needed to be bigger, bolder and better than
ever. Instead things have got far worse than the previous year. It’s not just
the way this ending was re-written from scratch either: surely if you’re going
to do an all en-casing season arc like this then you need to know where you’re
going to end up before you start writing. Holmes was asked to decide this later
and if he ever did decide it wasn’t in a completed enough state to tell Saward.
By rights the ending ought to have been so obvious that even the Bakers could
have picked up on it. But then the idea of putting the Doctor on trial, to
mirror real life events behind the scenes, was a stupid idea anyway: the BBC
were always going to have assumed they’d ‘won’ whatever the verdict on The
Doctor actually was. Sense. Goodness knows why The Valeyard tries to kill the
entire courtoom either as that both blows his cover and makes his prey seem
innocent all of a sudden. Or indeed why The Valeyard disguises himself as Mr
Popplewick, a creation of Holmes' that he never actually wrote any lines for so
because he had to be in the script ends up simply as a 'disguise'.
That said there are parts
of even ‘The Ultimate Foe’ that are actually quite good. It's a waste of
Geoffrey Hughes being easily the best 'celebrity comedian cast against type' of
the 6th Doctor era, a cultured Victorian as opposed to his usual scouse slobs
(he also voiced Paul in the Yellow Submarine film, whose kind of a halfway
house between these two extremes, a cultured Scouser). Hughes was a surprise to
many who only knew him from bland comedies and sitcoms, making the bumbling
Victorian Mr Popplewick a lot more threatening than The Valeyard ever is. The
location sequences look amazing and Pip ‘n’ Jane, being more visual writers,
use them well – it helped that they knew Camber Sands and could picture the
beach (which is only round the corner from where they filmed ‘Mindwarp’). However the Gladstone
Pottery Museum in Stoke is even better: a real 19th century
building, it had been closed since the 1960s but turned into a tourist trap.
The fact that Who only got permission to film at night, after the crowds had
gone home, really adds to the atmosphere too – the sight of The Doctor sadly
quoting Shakespeare on his way to the gallows on a horse and cart in the moody
dim light is a good one. It’s a real shame the show hasn’t been back since –
although that said they did blot their copybook when an errant exploding quill
(it’s that kind of a story) set off an alarm and the local fire brigade was
called out. The cliffhanger, with The Doctor falling to his death in quicksand
and a sea of grabbing hands (such a strong image Moffat repeats it for the
‘hand mines’ in ‘The Magician’s Apprentice’)
looks stunning and isn’t CGI: they really did spend two days digging a pit in
Camber Sands, sticking extras in one half and covering it with waterproof
cladding before sticking Colin on the other side in a hydraulic lift. There are
moments, especially in episode thirteen, where it feels as if the trial is
really getting somewhere and some decent lines, although it’s the clumsy ones
(‘That’s it Doc, now you’re getting to the dirt!’) that linger in the memory.
Even so, the speed of the filming shows in many ways (‘Foe’ being rushed into
production ahead of ‘Vervoids’;, which was closer to being ready, because of a
BBC verdict that location filming always took place before studio – just to
emphasise Holmes’ view of the BBC as mindless bureaucrats).
There are lots of
mitigating factors of course. Given the mess going on backstage it’s a wonder
this story manages to be even this cohesive and solve even the few points it
does. Considering the speed at which this story was made it’s a success in
itself in many ways – we so nearly got a blank screen and no ending at all. Nevertheless,
‘The Ultimate Foe’ really doesn’t have much going for it: this is a badly
acted, poorly directed, clumsily written disaster. The onlyperson who comes out
of it with any credit is the one who got sacked, while JNT was given an even
bigger punishment when he handed his notice in – he was ‘persuaded to stay’,
the BBC bosses afraid of letting him loose on any other series they liked more.
He’d show them as things turned out, turning this show’s fortunes around to the
point where, in a couple of years, it was healthy as it had been for a decade.
But it was too late and the damage was done – the fans who tuned in for the
finale couldn’t follow it and even those who’d been prepared to give the show
another chance post-hiatus were left disappointed. The BBC continued to stick
the knives in, going so far as to make Dr Who the focus point of an episode of
critical series ‘Open Air’ where even the Liverpool FanClub (including a
seventeen-year-old Chris Chibnall, asking for scripts that were ‘less cliched’ and
‘with less silly monsters and endless running up and down corridors’ while his
colleague asks for ‘stories with an actual beginning, middle and end’ in two
sentences that have come back to haunt him ever since) gave ‘The Ultimate Foe’
a pasting while the presenter admits she’s only ever seen the one episode and
couldn’t follow it (of course you couldn’t you numpty – how many series can you
follow if you skip he first thirteen weeks?) You will never feel as sorry for
Pip ‘n’ Jane as you do in the DVD extra, as they bite their lip and say they
liked working on the show ‘until now’ without mentioning all the
behind-the-scenes stuff they’ve probably been legally told not to mention (they
look shell-shocked as if they weren’t expecting this at all after thinking
they’d be greeted as heroes for coming up with anything; what with Saward
having quit, Holmes having died and JNT conveniently doing panto and only appearing
by phone they were deeply unlucky to get the short straw). ‘The Ultimate Foe’
isn’t as bad as all that – its an unlucky story not a terrible one, with a
perfectly great idea from Holmes slipping through the net more by circumstances
by design, something that automatically makes it better than the bottom run of
entries in our rankings. But all the understanding in the universe can’t make
this flawed mess seem good. It was completely the wrong sorry to have on at
this period in time when Dr Who’s life was in the balance, never mind The
Doctor’s, one that far from showing confidence and strength feels as if
everyone is making it up as they go along. The fact that they pretty much were
excuses a lot of the mistakes and the fact they got anything made on time at
all is a triumph. It sure doesn’t feel like a triumph watching it though;
instead it feels like a, well, like a trial. The final verdict then is not
guilty, albeit mostly on the grounds of diminished responsibility, with most of
the fault lying no not with JNT (who usually gets the blame but did after all
manage to get this story made by the skin of his teeth and held a crumbling
production office together, whatever his faults in his treatment of Holmes and
Saward) but firmly at the door of Michael Grade whatever he said about the
series’ faults either at the time or since (he officially considered season
twenty-two ‘an improvement’ over the one before even though that one had ‘Vengeance On Varos’ and ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ in it. Which shows
you how little he knew about anything).
POSITIVES + Considering
nobody knew it was the 6th Dr's farewell it turns out to be a really good
celebration of his Doctor. His regeneration is born for impassioned
speech-making and he gets to make quite a few of these after three stories of
being told to be quiet, while Colin also gets to show off his full range from
humour to tragedy to horror to scientific gobbledegook to petulance to
philosophising. We also get to see his Doctor way further out of his depth than
normal, still blustering his way through with fake confidence after we can see
that it is really a bluff and he's secretly terrified. Some of the acting in
this season is variable to say the least but Colin is always the solid reliable
centre, this story and 'Varos' in
particular proving that he could have been a great Doctor in different
circumstances (and, arguably, a different costume). It's a real shame he never
got a regeneration story (till Big Finish's excellent 'The Last Adventure', by
far the best 'Valeyard' story out there) but you can also completely understand
why Colin didn't want to work for the company that had just sacked him.
Muttering about carrot juice was not the way even his biggest haters wanted to
see him go.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: A lot of extra-curricular sources have had fun with the
Valeyard and what might have happened to him off-screen both before and after
‘The Ultimate Foe’. ‘Millennial Rites’ (1995) is a 6th Doctor
‘Missing Adventure’ by Craig Hinton that’s a neat combination of past present
and future. Technically it’s set before ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’
but sheds a lot of light on the Doctor-Master revelations in the finale, with
friends from the past (Anne Travers, last seen in ‘The Web Of Fear’ and now an elderly lady) and odd foreshadowing of the future
(it’s set on millennium eve 1999, just like the ‘TV Movie’ that’s still about ten months away from being screened at
this point - weird to think there are two Doctors hopping around at the exact
same time having adventures with two different foes on opposite sides of the
world). As if all that isn’t enough there’s a colossal amount of ‘in-jokes’
with H P Lovecraft’s books too, with the ‘parallel universe’ the Earth jumps
into at one stage apparently the same one. Mostly, though it’s a ‘millennium
bug’ story with a piece of software that’s about to go wrong and put the Earth
into chaos, used as an excuse for The Great Intelligence/ancient God ‘older
than time itself’ to break through via some irresponsible experiments on
another yeti rescued and put in the Travers museum (do these people never
learn?!) For the most part it’s standard 6th Doctor fare: he gets to
pontificate and argue and moralise (naturally he points out the error that most
people are celebrating the new millennia a year early and that it actually
starts on the 1st of January 2001!) while Mel stays remarkably perky for
someone who knows that everyone is about to die a horrible death. The Doctor’s
not quite himself though, The Valeyard choosing this point in his timeline to
interfere with history and ‘warp’ him so that he shimmers in and out of his
‘moral but brusque’ Sixie side and his ‘evil yet charming’ Valeyard side. It
all makes the revelations in ‘The Ultimate Foe’ so much more logical and
natural, even though you have to ask why neither The Doctor nor Mel guesses
that The Valeyard is really The Doctor earlier, given that he’s been in The
Doctor’s body already! A pretty good adventure, epic and daring in all the ways
‘Trial’ promised to be but never actually was, especially the creepy surreal
bits set in a destroyed future London (like the moments in the two Sutekh
stories ‘Pyramids
of Mars’ and ‘Legend Of Ruby
Sunday/Empire Of Death’). It does rather
waste Anne Travers though (who – spoilers – dies partway through the book in a
most banal way). Plus what has Mel done to her hair on the front cover? Surely
nobody in 1995 really thought 1999 fashions were going to look like that?!
Previous ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ next ‘Time
And The Rani’
‘
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