The Long Game
(Series One, Dr 9 with Rose and Adam, 7/5/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Brian Grant)
Rank: 130
'Here is the
news at nine - Doctor nine. Bong! A blue box has been seen in the vicinity of Satellite
5. Approach with caution. Bong! There is a sale on for 2005 vintage clothes
from River Island, even though its the year 200,000. Bong! The next series of
I'm a non-celebrity strictly cooking home improvement on ice has been cancelled
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Bong! David Cameron continues to serve his 11 billion year sentence for crimes
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hide it but...Today the director general of Satellite Five was revealed to be a
gigantic alien blob with scary teeth who was brainwashing all you humans by
showing you endless re-re-runs on TV. Bong! There are concerns for the editor's
wellbeing as he was last seen as a melting puddle. Coming up next: Big
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So far the comeback series of Dr Who has been going better than anyone could have expected: five stories in a row that proved to be (mostly) popular with fans. Dr Who never went more than five episodes in a row with fans loving every story (mostly). Surely it couldn’t carry on like this? Then in walks ‘The Long Game’ like a lamb to the slaughter (or a Gond to a Kroton if you prefer) and suddenly the papers and fan forums are back-tracking: Dr Who is cheap again, with an obvious satire and a pantomime villain blob. It’s a story doomed to be ‘the forgotten one’, in between the all-dancing all-singing all-emotion all-explosion episodes either side of it even though it’s a story that, had it been on in almost any other era (certainly the last era previous to this one, in the late 1980s) would have been hailed as a pretty decent episode. Only by the end of the season and the finale is it revealed quite why ‘The Long Game’ turned out the way it does and that it’s actually playing a much more subtle and, well, long game with viewers. A similar problem happened with ‘Boom Town’, the late-season low budget filler, which also tends to get dismissed by fans as the year’s sacrificial Ergon. But I like Dr Who stories that are thoughtful rather than, well, boomy and shouty and was glad the genre hadn’t died out with the ‘old’ show. Especially because Satellite Five was also one of those stories that did what so many of my favourite Dr Who shows do, they showed the world as it was at the time taken just that little bit too far and pushed slightly further out of kilter, even though everyone watching knew exactly where it was coming from. It was a story that screamed ‘now’, one that Dr Who would surely never have been able to do quite like this with the ‘old’ series, a satellite run by a monster that broadcasts nothing but fake news bulletins and trivial broadcasts to help brainwash a population and distract them from asking questions. While it’s taking a bit longer to get there for television the mid-2000s were the last time the tabloid newspapers were all powerful and could make or break celebrities on a whim, before the slow collapse of the paper industry and the rise of social media meant people could much more easily share news between themselves.
So it’s a shock to learn that, actually, Russell had been playing the long game as a writer and that he’d written a first draft a full quarter century before this, back when he was a teenager trying to break into the television industry, reviving it some time in the Andrew Cartmel years of Who (1987-89) when it was submitted to the then-current Dr Who production (they were oddly rude, with a comment from a BBC highup –not Michael Grade but it sounded like him – that Russell should ‘stick to more realistic and less imaginative concepts and write about something that appeals to a man and his mortgage’ if he wanted to see his work made for science-fiction TV, something Russell seemed to take to heart given the council estate setting of so much of this first year: perhaps remembering this Davies makes sure his rejection letters are far far kinder. Always be nice to your fans, people. Even the weird obsessive ones. For one day they might be continuing your franchise and employing you and paying your pension).). It’s not quite Russell’s first Who script (he actually started writing his Who stories as comics, one reason why his stories are all so visual) and ‘Mind Of The Hodaic’ seems to have been written at around the same time (Russell found it in a drawer and published a bit of it for fans to read during lockdown, Big Finish turning it into a story with Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford in 2021), but either way ‘The Long Game’ is one of the first time Davies actually sat down to think about how to write for the series he loved so much. To some extent ‘The Long Game’ is your generic Dr Who story: there’s a corrupt regime that the Doctor overthrows (or does he?), a bunch of brainwashed people in denial at it happening and a land of people who’ve stopped being curious and asking questions, something the Doctor does as naturally as breathing. If anything it’s a story that suits the 7th Doctor better than the 9th, a cruel dystopian world (like ‘The Happiness Patrol’) where ordinary people are made to perform for their viewing public (like ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’) with a touch of good old Thatcherist survival of the fittest ideals (like ‘Survival’) and a manipulative monster out-manipulated by McCoy’s scheming Doctor. There are touches too though that are pure Davies even this early: the Doctor doesn’t save the day the ordinary working class people around him do (such as journalist come whistleblower Suki) with plenty of period detail about how the people of this world live who get to talk about their fears, hopes and ambitions. There’s the sense that humanity both brought this world upon themselves by being ignorant and not paying attention to the people in power, but are smart enough for one or two brave people to see their way through it and save the rest from disaster, the short term pessimism long term optimism that’s a hallmark of most of Davies’ run then and now.
‘The Long Game’, then,
has perhaps the longest genesis of any Dr Who story (something like 25 years)
and was always part of Davies’ submission for his comeback year – it appears on
the earliest documents along with what turned out to be ‘Rose’ ‘The End Of The
World’ ‘Aliens In London/World War Three’ and something along the lines of
‘Father’s Day’ even when he hadn’t quite worked out the second half of the year
or the guest writers’ stories yet. However, Russell kept changing his mind
about it. For instance there’s one big change that seems to have only struck
Russell when writing his first draft of ‘Rose’, full of all the reasons the
Doctor notices what a great companion she’d make(being brave, kind, curious and
quick on her feet): what would the Doctor do if he had a companion who by
contrast was really rubbish? Wanting his audience to fall in love with his
heroes all over again and show how special they are he came up with Adam, a
character who looked on them and their ability to travel different planets and
immerse themselves in different cultures with awe, given that he’s a small-brained
closed-hearted sort of a person who sees time travel as a business opportunity
and nothing more. At first the story was told entirely from Adam’s incredibly
jealous point of view (in a script more akin to what ‘Dot and Bubble’ became in 2024) before
Russell began to have second thoughts along the lines of what a lot of critics
(but not me) said about that episode: would the audience really spend that much
time in the head of someone who was so clearly bad? At first his solution was
to soften the blow and give him a reason for his bad behaviour: he knew Adam
would be introduced in the previous story (which turned out to be ‘Dalek’) and at first had him down as Van Statten’s
son, the only person the great man trusted with the news that he was secretly
crippled by arthritis. Adam spent ‘The Long Game’ looking for a cure or at
least the money to find one, sending ideas back in time to his (surprisingly
retro) answer phone the way he does in the final story. The ending was to be a
big moral debate: was Adam right to steal if it was to help a loved one? Did it
matter that his loved one was a monster who cared nothing about anyone beyond
himself? Did his response to the Doctor pointing out the people he was putting
at risk and the timeline fracturing it would cause if he could still help one
person close to him? Then Russell worried that he was getting too far from his
original idea of a companion being simply ‘bad’ and took it out. He’d also seen
by now just how good Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper were in the early
rushes of ‘Aliens Of London’ and thought what a waste it would be if he only
got the chance to make one series not to have more of the two together (he wasn’t
to know that Eccleston was having second thoughts about staying – mostly
because things only seem to have come to a head between actor and production
team during the making of this very story). And then the story changed again
when Russell suddenly had the idea for the season finale and decided to start
properly threading it here. Talk about ‘The Long Game’! Few other Who stories
can have changed quite so much since conception – not without changing author
as well, anyway.
In the end everything feels
a little toned down by the time of the final draft: normal for Dr Who in
general but deeply unusual for Russell, a writer who generally wrote Who
stories about things that made him cross or passionate and whose emotions only
got bigger when he was actually writing something. The original idea, of having
an evil monster who considers the Human race to be ‘cattle’ ends up as Simon
Pegg in an ill fitting suit (because the effects tea don’t have the budget for
a full CGI monster the way Russell always envisioned it – and so far he’s
reluctant to go back to monsters as actors in rubber suits). Adam isn’t fully
corrupt nor misguidedly good, he’s just a bit rubbish and the story mostly
separates him out into his own story, which only intersects with the Doctor and
Rose by the end (when he nearly costs them their lives through his greed). Most
of all the idea of pres barons who control everything has warped from the
article that originally set it all off, a teenage Russell shocked to learn
that, back in 1980, there were only two main agencies who delivered maybe 95%
of all the news worldwide, to all newspaper organisations (Reuters and The
Associated Press). They basically said what was and wasn’t news everywhere
around the world to the point where anything that wasn’t picked up by either
company was drowned out. For a struggling British writer, who only had three
real TV companies to choose from back then (BBC and ITV, the other channels
didn’t exist back then) it must have made him think about how hard it is to get
into an industry like news reporting and how they tended to go for people they
already knew. We know from other stories, like ‘Dot and Bubble’ this story’s
close cousin, just how much Russell hates vacuums and people only talking to
people who think the same way as them: his vision of the future is a
multicultural universe where we all learn from each other. Note the throwaway
line that the Jagarafess has been in charge of Satellite Five for ’91 years’: The
Associated Press had been around in some form since the 1830s but was only
recognisable as what it is now in 1909 (96 years).
By 2005 though there’s
been a change in how most people get their news, with the rise of
twenty-four-news stations (at least in the UK, starting with BBC 24 in 1997,
America of course had had them longer), most of them from satellite stations
just like the one in the story (only unmanned and not big enough to live on!)
It seems strange to think there was a time when these didn’t exist, delivering
news all day at the touch of a button but they were big: now all you had to do,
to learn about events across the world, was sit down, tune in and drop out of
your real life while you got wrapped up in someone else’s. There was a serious
talk, for ooh about five minutes, about whether drama shows would even survive
given that people had ‘real’ drama to watch now. The thing is, though, you
don’t have to watch any news channel for very long before you realise how
biased it is. Even more than newspapers TV news always has an agenda somewhere:
generally keeping in power whatever government the owners of the station want
(or whoever is most likely to renew the TV license fee if it’s the BBC). And
that goes doubly for Sky, a TV network that Whovians of my age already feel
less than generous to (they basically bought out and closed their satellite
competitors BSB, who were very fan-friendly, with a ‘nostalgia’ channel of
repeats - UK Gold back when it was good – and the first UK TV broadcasts of Dr
Who for longer than a week at a time, well, ever, culminating in a fondly
remembered entire weekend of wall-to-wall Who in September 1990. Compared to
Sky they were low budget and often amateurish (a mistake over the Who
celebrations that saw the two episodes of ‘The
Edge Of Destruction’, repeated for the first time in Britain since 1964,
the wrong way round) with an imaginative but low budget scifi space opera
‘Jupiter Moon’ that made Dr Who look positively lavish (and is absolutely the
sort of thing Russell would have adored, as teenagers try to do their exams and
do Humany things like fall in love, only in space). Suddenly, over night more
or less, the channels were gone.
And if Sky had a monopoly
over repeats of old British TV programmes and lowkey soap operas, what sort of
a monopoly did they have over the news? For the Jagarafess controls everything,
having news literally pumped into people’s minds, directly. For those of you
that have never been in a newsroom the very idea of an ‘info spike’ is funny:
they have an actual one in most newspaper offices to this day: officially its
to place all paper copies of work so that you didn’t accidentally print the
same stories twice, but it’s also used occasionally to shelve stories that
you’re not allowed to print (the audacity of giving a broadcast full of empty
stories that haven’t been spiked!) And whose controlling this spike of news? An
alien blob with a funny name. The baddy in both variations of Russell’s script
are surely based on the same person, Rupert Murdoch, who in the 1980s owned
most of the press (‘The Sun’ ‘The Daily Telegraph’ ‘The Times’ and ‘The News Of
The World’) by 2005 owned the whole of Sky TV and 20th Century Fox
(including America’s Fox News) as well as publishers Harper Collins and – not
long after this story went out – ‘The Wall Street Journal’. Murdoch has never
been slow to promote his interests who are most likely to protect his profits:
basically whoever the most right-wing government is at any time. It’s not like
that all the time but there are certain flashpoints, particularly 1980 when
Russell was writing this story, the late 1980s when he was submitting it, 2005
when it went out and, most obviously, in the 2010s when Jeremy Corbyn was in
charge of the Labour government, where the left was pilloried with such a
co-ordinated frenzied attack that it felt as if you were living in a parallel
universe where the truth was no longer enough to be heard or prove a point. For
a lefty writer like Russell, who wrote about science-fiction precisely to have
baddies toppled and bring people together, it was far too tempting not to turn
him into a baddy in something. Murdoch is clearly the target for The Mighty
Jagarafess, a villain who controls the media so much that it ends in a glass
ceiling – a glass ceiling that has a literal monster clinging to it, projecting
what everyone hears. Murdoch is clearly the main target of ‘The Long Game’ (the
amorphous blob even looks a bit like him if you squint) but I’m sympathetic to
other fan theories that it’s about someone else: fellow media baron Robert
Maxwell (mostly because of Simon Peg’s ad libbed line ‘I call him Max’) or –
that 90 year dating thing again – Victorian press moguls Lords Northcliffe and
Beaverbrook, who also had a monopoly on what people read (they are, I’m
convinced, the main reason Britain didn’t follow France and have a revolution
in the 19th century with constant propaganda about how great Queen
Victoria was. Even the excellent Jenna Coleman ‘Victoria’ series seems to take
most of its facts from their press reports, not real life events). It’s worth
pointing out that both Murdoch and Maxwell kept their big news empires in
massive buildings in London’s Whapping Wharf after moving there in the mid
1980s and that both look very like the structure of satellite Five.
There might well be
another inspiration at play here too. Officially we’re a bit too early for the
‘phone tapping scandal’, one which started in a Murdoch paper (‘The News Of The
World’) which was brought down because of its close links to it. The news only
reached the papers (not the Murdoch papers obviously but the few he doesn’t
own) in 2007, when high profile stars clubbed together to force the issue in
court. However it was an open secret for years before then (I remember being
appalled finding out about it, as a trainee journalist, circa 2004 and having a
similar conversation to the one Suki has, though thankfully I wasn’t eaten
alive) and Russell is a writer with his ears close enough to the ground to know
this. Plus it was obvious: what strikes you, looking back at stories in the
press circa 2005 when ‘The Long Game’ went out is how trivial they are compared
to the shift of the real news happening: instead of religious wars, climate
change, meddling in the Middle East and the rise of the far right we got
stories about celebrities sleeping with other celebrities, or scandal about
some inconsequential moment from their past, or worst of all what they were
wearing (it’s clothes, same as the rest of us, just with a different price tag.
What more d you need to know than that?) It’s a vacuum of noise, made to fill
people’s heads and distract them so they don’t ask the bigger questions. The
season finale ‘Bad Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’ then makes an even more damning
point about how, with nothing to replace the news with (and the Doctor walking
away, the way he always used to, in order to let a clueless people fill the gap
of knowledge themselves instead of sorting it out for them), the population
turns on each other, inventing deadly game shows that kill people off instead.
This plot inspires some
of Russell’s most barbed cynical writing and it’s delicious: a monster that
considers the Human race to be ‘cattle’, where humanity doesn’t call this
satellite home so much as be ‘allowed’ to live there and who are seen as
consumers. The monster and his pet editor live at the very top floor, where
‘the walls are made of gold’, even while the people at the bottom live in
squalor (yet are far happier than he seems to be, alone on the ceiling, while
they live hand to mouth out of food vans – we didn’t have food-banks back then
before David Cameron came to power). The irony of a story about knowledge and
how control of that knowledge is power, as controlled by an alien that no one
even knows exists, who manipulates people without them realising. There’s a
great line where the Dctor talks about how the news has meant people grow up in
a ‘climate of fear’ where they hate outsiders and demand to keep the ‘borders
closed’. This is a space station not a planet. They’re in space. Space doesn’t
have borders. If you’re going to worry about things like that best to stay back
on your own planets (it’s tempting to see ‘Satellite Five as’ our’ British
version of America’s Deep Space Nine from the Star Trek Universe, with benevolent
aliens dropping in for a chat who somehow end up at war with each other; no
wars here but everyone moans a lot and blames other people when they’re not
listening). The monster gets away with what he does because he also owns the
banks, or at any rate threatens to eat people who don’t keep providing him
money, which as close to a metaphor for the real thing as you can get (banks
need somewhere to put their adverts and get their customers too so would never
touch a press baron with so much power). Best of all is a gag that many fans
miss: the giveaway sign that the monster lives upstairs all is the excessive
heat given out from the top floor, in the form of ‘hot air’, a side effect of
the Jagarafess needing to keep cool (you could also make a joke that his office
is closest to ‘The Sun’ in all sense of the world, given that it’s the
publication at the heart of Murdoch’s empire).
‘The Long Game’ is, on
the surface, very traditional Dr Who, perhaps the most traditional story
Russell’s written so far. This tale of all powerful rulers and clueless minions
is straight out of the Bob Holmes book of Dr Who scripts (indeed it’s closer
than many people realise to ‘The Krotons’,
which is to education what this story is to the news). Most of all it’s exactly
what Dr Who is for, tackling the real monsters of the day and making them pay,
if only on screen, offering warnings to those who didn’t get it and catharsis
to those of us who did. If only more people had listened: it’s because of what
was going on in 2005 that we ended up with fake news and right wing conspiracy
theories and people who don’t take deadly pandemics seriously and which put
Donald Trump in the White House while keeping Jeremy Corbyn out of no 10;
basically its the reason why none of us can have nice things in 2023. A lot of
this story’s critics say this story goes too far but if anything it didn’t go
far enough. On the other hand, though. It’s really quite daring: nobody but nobody
was daring to go after Murdoch in the days before the phone scandals when
everyone was afraid of their career and Russell’s arrows really are barbed with
poison this week, even more than usual. I love the idea that a civilisation is
only as good as it’s news reporting of it and that without a fair unbiased and
competitive news source civilisation is doomed to fail whether you talk about
it or not. The idea that a society where people who ask questions get taken
away seems more prescient everyday with news of whistleblowers like Julian
Assange taking refuge (a modern remake of this story would have Suki hiding out
at the Alpha Centauri embassy for years, driven mad by all the squeaking!) Russell
is often seen as the ‘cosier’ showrunner of the three we’ve had before but
goodness knows why at his best he’s the bravest and if one of the founding
reasons for Dr Who’s success is the way it shakes foundations of institutions that
make our lives worse then few stories are as worthy of inheriting the 20th
century series format as ‘The Long Game’.
The story is most
remembered, if it’s remembered at all, for Adam, a lad from 2012 (so slightly
from Rose’s future but near enough her contemporary) who is, well, not Rose. The
working title for this story was ‘The Companion Who Couldn’t, something
softened by the re-writes but still an important part of the story, which asks
‘could some random bloke off the street be as good as Rose and was she just
lucky?’ Well, no: Russell aims to show that Rose was specially created by him
as an idea of our best representative of the human race and this particular
generation by showing how bad Adam is by contrast. It’s something that hadn’t
really been done in the show before, not since they messed Turlough up in the
1980s anyway. This is the era, after all, of reality programmes deciding which
contestants are good enough to ‘go through’ an audition (something that happens
on ‘Satellite Five’ for real next time we see it at season’s end), it makes
sense it would be on one of the Who programmes on this year. And it’s a big fat
uh-uh from the panel. Adam comes along at Rose’s request because he talked to
her about always dreaming of seeing the stars, but it’s dollar signs in his
eyes instead as he uses the Doctor’s stock of cash to buy up the ‘info-spike’
that’s physically transplanted into his head and uses it to send a flood of
messages home. Even before that though he’s rude to the aliens he meets,
reluctant to talk to them and mingle or learn from them (or any of the things
Rose would be doing). Where an already open-minded and open-hearted Rose
embraced the idea of other alien cultures, Adam faints with shock. For Adam the
universe is a plaything there for him to have fun with; for the Doctor and Rose
it’s a place full of other people to help. Taking the arthritis cure element
out and making Adam simply greedy is a great move: it’s not that he’s
unlikeable (compared to everyone else in ‘Dalek’ he’s really nice) but
unlikeable doesn’t cut it when the Doctor doesn’t just travel with anyone and
can pick his companions. He’s a pirate, trying to see what he can get out of
people. Rose, by contrast, is an explorer: she’s not trying to exploit the
cultures she sees around her but understand and sympathise with them and she’s
near her best in this story, offering an understanding ear while the 9th Doctor
spends most of the episode in an (admittedly understandable) bad mood. It’s a
worthy lesson for newcomers on why Rose is so special (even though again her
pick of pseudo boyfriends is less than sound) and Adam manages to be just the
right side of irritating for the story to work without being an Adric or
Mel-style pain. Adam’s greed almost leads to the deaths of the Doctor and Rose,
were it not for the quick thinking of whistleblower Suki who comes back from
the dead just long enough to spread the truth (I don’t know quite how she came
back from the dead, given that no one else did, but it’s such a poetic ending
I’m not complaining). Adam’s punishment is a great one: he’s dreamed of being
so very much but the Doctor sends him home, condemning him to be ‘average’ for
the rest of his life, despite his memories of how big and busy the universe is.
The Doctor sends him home in disgrace, sulking, as he’s delivered back to the
arms of his mum, his answer-phone tape deleted and a huge spike in his forehead
that opens at the snap of fingers (anyone’s fingers, as he discovers in the tag
scene, when his mum greets him, the story’s silliest yet funniest scene: I love
the bit before it best though when Rose gets the Doctor to back off and behave
after he clicks his fingers, only to do it herself giggling saying ‘I’m sorry,
I can’t help it’ – an earlier draft I’m glad they cut had her cross for the
petty reason that ‘I called myself stupid and you didn’t tell me I was clever,
big mistake!’) It’s an interesting idea showing how the ‘wrong’ person as a
companion would be, which sadly gets a bit diluted in final form (it might have
worked great if we’d seen the whole story from Adams’ viewpoint but he’s just
parked and forgotten about for too much of the story). We never see Adam again
(well, not on screen anyway: see below).
One thing that I love
about new Who, which the old series never did, is the idea of consequences. You
see it whenever Adam messes up but the Doctor is not immune either,
accidentally using the events that will lead to his regeneration thanks to the
events in this story and the way he just wanders away without a second thought
for the people whose lives have been uprooted. There’s a sense, common to a lot
of Russell’s work but particularly here, that we’re all interconnected: it’s
why having one alien control everything is so wrong but it’s also why
everything we do causes ripples and even the Doctor isn’t immune. But then why
would he? Everyone’s Human. Even a timelord sometimes (on his mother’s side and
for one regeneration, anyway: see ‘The TV Movie’). The Doctor isn’t outright
damned for interfering and leaving though: he doesn’t see it as his job to tell
Humanity what to put in the place of the empty news cycles, he leaves it up to
them. He’s even less of a super hero now than he used to be, but he still does
what he thinks is right, even if ends up inadvertently causing something wrong,
because to leave injustice and corruption intact without trying to change
things is even worse. ‘Boom Town’ is an even better example of this but that’s
a special case, a last minute cheapo replacement when a planned Stephen Fry
script fell through, which has the Doctor and Rose return to their past victory
and look their assassin in the eye over what happens next, while ‘Long Game’
is, little did we realise it at the time, really doing the donkey-work of
setting up the big season finale six stories early (with a title hiding in plain
sight). Given that previously season arcs were all kind of obvious (the White
Guardian’s asked the Doctor find the key to time!’) this felt new at the time
and still kind of does given that every season arc since has tried to top this
one and done it by shouting, not whispering. I long for them to go back to
doing this sort of thing because it’s really effective I think: not since the
similarly undervalued ‘The Ark’ have we
been more surprised at coming back to the same setting years on and finding the
Doctor being there has made things worse, not better.
Not that ‘The Long Game’
is perfect by any means and I can also see why people were so underwhelmed by
it compared to the opening quintet of the comeback year. The space station is
the least interesting place we go all year – even London or Cardiff in 2005 are
more visually interesting – and the overspend on ‘The
End Of The World’ is really beginning to show, with this story as cheap as
21st century Who ever looked. Just take the satellite itself, which
is boring in the extreme and the way what’s clearly meant to be two different
floors of the Satellite are clearly the same set redressed with icicles. There
are extras who walk around in strangely mid-2000 Earth fashions considering
we’re in the year 200,000 (It’s not my joke but there’s a good one about how
apparently ‘River Island’ have a monopoly on every other clothes shop so
everyone walks around looking like Rose. Her distinctive ‘punky fish’ t-shirt
she wears throughout this story, incidentally, caused a ruction on the fan
forums that it must be a sort of clue, maybe the return of the Fish People from
‘The Underwater Menace’ or Kroll the squid. It’s just a shirt). The
‘Kronkburger’ van, referencing a foodstuff for the first time since the
original Dr Who magazine comic strip ‘The Iron Legion’ in 1978 (the one before ‘The Star Beast’, in which The Roman
Empire never fell), is the sort of thing writer come up with when they need to
fill time and just looks and sounds silly. Unusually for Russell this feels
like a Tv set, rather than a place real people live and work and play. He’s
slightly stronger on the characterisations, with his usual strong suit of
writing people’s whole personalities inside just a few lines so you feel you know
them really well: the rivalry between Suki and Catheca, for instance is well
drawn and plausible, not least they’re nice to each other’s faces and yet
Catheca bitches about her rival and her unsuitability the minute she’s passed
over for promotion. Even The Nurse, a small part with just a couple of scenes,
makes The Nurse into a believable character and Tamsin Greig makes the most of
her short screen time (people wonder why such a ‘big name’ isn’t in the story
more, but then she wasn’t that big a name at the time: though not quite like
Carey Mulligan in ‘Blink’ this story did
help boost a sort of mid tier career that properly took off after she’d been in
this and ‘Black Books’). Adam is, well, Adam: he’s not meant to be that
charismatic or that much of a threat to the two main leads so Russell plays it
safe and gets in an actor best known for soaps who delivers pure ‘soap acting’.
Twelve years after ‘The Long Game’ Bruno Langley was in the news himself and
his sexual assault conviction means most fans don’t dare mention him or the
character nowadays. The Editor is a bit of a shame though: Simon Pegg was,
along with Simon Callow and Zoe Wannamaker, the earliest ‘big name guest’ to
take a chance on a show that everyone said was never going to work and a well
known geek who adored Who. However Russell gives him a very lowkey role that
doesn’t really suit his acting chops: Pegg seems overawed and confused
throughout (just contrast to his comedy partner Nick Frost’s role in ‘Last Christmas’ – Pegg is clearly the
better more natural actor in their films but Frost owns the part of Santa).
There are a couple of reasons for this: one is that Russell simply didn’t write
the part very well. After all, until late on, the part didn’t exist at all and
all the lines were said by the Jagarafess; getting a human stand in makes sense
for the budget but not for the script, with Russell struggling to work out why
a Human would be in on the enslavement of their own race. Having the editor be
a banker in the real world sort-of fits but raises all sorts of questions about
how he got the job and why he continues to turn the other cheek even when
paying customers get eaten.
The other is that ‘The
Long Game’ sounds like an unhappy episode to make. Christopher Eccleston was,
by all accounts, in a foul mood (so much so that Pegg took to nicknaming him
‘old misery guts’). Chris was still seething over problems in the first
production block, when he’d been appalled at first the treatment of extras on
set and then the way first the director and then showrunner placated him then
carried on without changes as if nothing had happened. Then Eccleston caught a
cold. And then his beloved dad died. Eccleston, desperate for time to grieve
and mourn his dad properly, tried to take time off but the deadlines were too
tight and instead of being able to cry he was talking nonsensical lines about
kronkburgers and spike implants. Eccleston must have felt as if the whole world
was against him – and then so legend has it, the production team decided in the
middle of this, of all series, to sign him up to another year of the same. No
wonder really that he said no. What he needed right then was a hug, not a
contract extension and Russell’s barbed wordplay. Professional to the last
Chris turns up to work but you can tell that his heart isn’t in this story –
not the way it is in some others – and it’s easily his weakest performance of
the thirteen. Billie Piper’s on good form but with Adam getting all the plot
points she would normally have there’s comparatively little for her to do
(Russell even apologised for only giving her ‘info dump’ questions, but she was
just pleased at having less lines to learn this week). Whether by virtue of the
fact that this story is so heavily rewritten or because it was one of the first
Russell wrote with this Doctor-companion pairing or because of the mood in the
room they’re not quite ‘right’: I mean, they don’t do anything that contradicts
their characters or anything but their banter feels forced in places where it
usually comes so easily. It’s because of those reasons that not many people
remember this story fondly and that it generally seen as the runt of the litter
of this first year, along with ‘Boom Town’. Either that or the Jagarafess,
which is The Mills’ first disappointing special effect: looking like both a
leech and a homogenous grey blob with teeth, he doesn’t really get to do much
other than gnash them and as huge all-conquering tyrants go is a bit of a
pushover (although that kind of fits: why else would someone become all
powerful if they didn’t feel all weak and squishy inside? All this noise is a
distraction. If this was Russell in his comeback year he’d probably make the
Jagarafess an anorexic with body issues). The big finale we’ve been getting
used to each episode ends up being someone pressing a thermostat that makes the
editing room over-heat (it’s not even that original as its basically its the
ending to ‘The Seeds Of Death’ in reverse). I do love the irony that its the
heat of ‘The Sun’ wot did it for the Jagarafess though. Gotcha, to coin a phrase!
To this day this is the 9th
Doctor’s lowest story in polls, coming out bottom in surveys held at the time
and on every anniversary since. However it’s still a mid placer in the overall
polls and if this is as bad as it gets, though, well: it just shows up how
strong and consistent this comeback year was. There’s nothing here that
calamitous and indeed the only thing this story really gets wrong is the fact
that less happens than normal – something that everyone will make up for come
‘Bad Wolf’. The story’s critics say that it’s all less than subtle and it
isn’t, being amongst the least-layered and most blatant metaphorical stories
Russell ever wrote, even with the link to the finale to come: I’m half
surprised there isn’t a mention in the script about how the satellite had a
‘swing to the right’ since the Jagarafess came along. But that’s the point: you
can’t be subtle about something most people haven’t even noticed, not the
people of satellite Five or the people of Britain for whom this story was
written. Certainly ‘The Long Game’ makes more sense when you remember that it
was written originally to go alongside Dr Who’s most drab and bitter yet
colourful period, the late 1980s when every other story seemed to be about
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. For
all it’s faults, for all its flaws, I’m still mighty fond of this story, if
only because this tale of an unseen newspaper and satellite TV editor whose
really an alien blob pulling the strings, running news-desks and telling
reporters what news to show people was exactly how I felt working at the bottom
of the heap in a real news-room when this story went out. It was all so
chillingly plausible, given how many of my stories seemed to get altered,
censored or altered beyond comprehension by people I never met and who more to
the point had never met the people I was writing about, where in a crowded,
popular market if we spoke out there were another few thousand people happy to
take our jobs (I love the line ‘why would I ask questions’ ‘You’re a journalist!’
You’d be amazed at how many ‘news stories’ are just copy and pastes of press
releases that only say what the people sending them want you to say – I always
getting in ‘trouble’ for trying to get hold of people to represent the ‘other’
half of any story I was given). Of al the trades you can have out there this is
the one that ought to be doing the most good – and yet so often causes the most
harem. I mean, journalists used to be a good thing to be before people became
so fed up and cynical and so many let the people down: just look at how Sarah Jane
Smith is portrayed compared to the journalists here and weep. I didn’t get to
do what Suki did in this story but I could cheer her on from the sidelines and
see the Doctor at least try to put right all the wrongs I couldn’t and say all
the things no one else was talking about. In a series full of big party pieces
someone has to do something quiet or all you have is shouting and equally some
stories have to be cheap just to make sure that a series makes it to the air at
all without bankrupting the BBC. ‘The Long Game’ isn’t DrvWho at its deepest or
subtle or well made, but it does make a lot of very important points and makes
them very well, with better yet to come. Yes it could look better, with a
tighter plot and better performances, but that’s just making up a scandalising
story for the sake of it and tearing down a success story (the way the British
press always do). ‘The Long Game’ is still a great little story, one much
under-rated, that says a lot of things that desperately needed saying and which
says most of them well.
POSITIVES + Huh,600
channels and still nothing’s on! The idea of a satellite TV station that has
the wonders of the universe at its finger-tips showing repeats of non-news
items as non-news stories and crude game shows, a confusing story about The Face
of Boe giving birth to ‘Boemina’ which seems to contradict everything we know
about ‘him’ but, let’s face it, is probably made up anyway and (plus two Dr Who
repeats; blink-and-you-miss-them scenes from ‘The Ark In Space’ and ‘The
Leisure Hive’) is the perfect 21st century update of that old 20th century Dr Who
standby: the idea that the future isn’t some golden paradise where everything
is perfect, just as long as we ourselves aren’t perfect and that the best time
to work on making your environment perfect is now, because nobody’s coming
along to save you in time or space. More than any other story of the 2005
series this is the one that the creators of ‘An Unearthly Child’ back in 1963
would have recognised (with its own comparisons of 1963 the year it was made
and the stone age), even if viewers would have found the idea of people
watching so much telly far-fetched in an era of two measly channels and they’d
have been busy having kittens at Rose’s highly revealing tops this episode
(useful, really, given how much it heats up at the end).
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Sssh, we’ll keep
quiet about it if you’re watching these stories in order and you haven’t got
there yet but err (spoilers) the season finale ‘Bad
Wolf/Parting Of The Ways’ is a
direct result of events in this episode.
Adam is still travelling
in the Tardis at the time of ‘The Other Side’ (2017), the third story in Big
Finish’s ‘Ninth Doctor Chronicles’ series that saw Bruno Langley performing as
Adam alongside Nicholas Briggs (and was rather overshadowed by Bruno’s
subsequent conviction just a few weeks later). Set between ‘Dalek’ and ‘The
Long Game’ it has a still protesting 9th Doctor trying to take Adam
home, only for the Tardis to be knocked off course by a ‘temporal tsunami’ and
end up in the clutches of ‘The Bygone Hoard’, a villain that can manipulate
timelines and separates the trio by sending them to 1890s Birmingham, a cinema
and a jazz club. One of those ‘enemies have to work together to save each
other’ type stories it has Adam finally learning to be brave and responsible
(which rather contradicts how cross the Doctor and Rose are with him when they
finally get him home in ‘The Long Game’s final scene, given that he’s been a
good companion 50% of the time, but is a better arc for the character in many
ways). It’s a decent atmospheric and often unsettling story, albeit one that
borrows a bit too heavily from the concept of The Weeping Angels sending people
back in time and one that doesn’t really do as much with Adam’s character as
you might hope.
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