Vengeance On Varos: Ranking - 56

 

Vengeance On Varos

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri, 19-26/1/1985, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Phillip Martin, director: Ron Jones)

Rank: 56

   'Well, Arak, what's today's review like then?'

 'Oh Etta, I've given up reading them. Dr this, Dr that, too much violence, not enough violence, sardonic interplay of postmoderism principles underlying a multi-dimensional script, its the same every day. particularly this one. I think they get an alien in to write them some weeks' 

'Well, I like to marvel at the perspicacity of his wit' 

'Huh that writer lost his wits the second month when he tried to defend 'Time and The Rani!' 

'Only 56 reviews to go. What are we going to read when they're over?' 

'Dunno' 

(The screen shows static)

 

 The 6^th Doctor’s masterpiece next and one of DW’s most original stories which both delivers a critique of that very 1980s moral dilemma of video nasties and accidentally creates ‘Gogglebox’ twenty years early. This is a world that’s recognisably like ours, only taken a stage further: in this democracy everyone has to serve out their term as governor and if the people at home don’t like their policies they can subject them to torture. Which is a particular problem when a brown alien slug named Sil arrives paying lots of money in return for the local resources, even if it means a much harder life for the local inhabitants (kind of like the Conservative party donors today – and indeed in Margaret Thatcher’s day when this show went out). As much as people refer to it as ‘dystopian’ I think it could work in the future rather nicely: it would soon sort out our lot of tyrants and despots and stop them being in politics only to please their mates and get rich I can tell you. Phillip Martin’s script crackles with ideas that had never been seen in the series before and which indeed could never have been done before the mid-1980s: this is the era when videos contained gory material you would never be allowed to broadcast on TV in case children were watching, so what better series to make your point in than DW, still ‘officially’ a children’s series but one increasingly watched by grown-ups. ‘Varos’ has some of the finest characters 1980s Who has to offer and unlike a lot of stories in the John Nathan-Turner era has some excellent actors and actresses perfectly cast to play them too. Alien, unlikeable, brown, slimy, disgusting and with an evil laugh, David Cameron would have approved of Sil’s underhanded tactics here, pretending to be the saviour of the planet Varos when really he’s undermining its resources and putting the ‘I,/Me’ into its ‘Mines’. This conniving alien slug could have been an annoying caricature, an alien concerned with nothing except profits, but Phillip Martin’s clever script gives him some softer edges that almost make him likeable. It was a clever move, for instance, to make him a character who thinks he looks dignified and brilliant, then saddle him with a faulty translator circuit that makes him look like an idiot without him knowing. Then there’s the Governor, a noble man who started off wanting to do well but now will just to do anything to survive, hanging on in power and ruled by slugs: again, the Conservative party of 1985 really wasn’t that removed from ours in 2023 (we desperately need a sequel if you’re watching Russell T!) Martin Jarvis gets the meatiest of his three DW roles as the nice gentlemanly Governor having a crisis of confidence in public (the sort of part he always plays, but in a situation pushed to extremes you never get to hear in radio 4 dramas) whilst Nabil Shaban is word and laugh-perfect as Sil, one of the best actors the show ever had.

Phillip Martin only ever got two DW scripts on screen and its a crying shame because he could write characters better than anybody still left writing for Who in this era; as we said in ‘Mindwarp’ his greatest strength is that he can take grotesque caricatures of people and then slowly fill in the gaps so that they have more depth than characters usually get in 90 minutes, turning a world that seems outlandish and cartoonish at first becomes more subtle and real by degrees. This is a world that solves its problems with violence and where if you don’t like it there must be something wrong with you –a world that if you disagree with it can ‘devolve’ you by turning you into an animal, through acceleration of certain strands in your DNA. Even the much-criticised scene of the Dr knocking two guards into an acid bath is a gruesome death caused by an accident, added because violence is a way of life and TV shows, especially in 1985, taken as proof of how unnecessarily vilent the show had become (even though that’s the whole sodding point). There’s also a ‘Greek chorus’ who comment on the action and (uniquely in the whole of DW or a part this substantial) never get to meet the Dr, instead commenting on the story the way the viewers would be at home, only they’ve become desensitised to the point where they enjoy seeing people squirm and writhe in pain (best line when discussing an execution: ‘You’re thinking of that other one. He wasn’t blind. Well, not in the beginning anyway’).Which leads us onto another point: this might be the most meta and postmodern DW story of the whole of the original run (and beaten only by ‘Love and Monsters’ in ‘new-Who’). The Doctor and Peri are rightly horrified that people are made to watch the horror that unfolds on this planet, broadcast live into people’s homes, a world that keeps people in place by making them afraid and having part of this world’s no-go areas make people hallucinate their fears. Only, of course, that’s exactly what the viewer is doing; those viewers we see on screen are really ‘us’ commenting that its not as violent as it used to be (in Varos’ pre-Mary Whitehouse days perhaps) and complaining that there isn’t as much blood and guts as in other weeks. The playful script also plays up the cliffhangers of old, with the one and only one in this story (in the only 20^th century series to use of 45minute episodes) ending with the Dr drowning on dry land watched by the governor in the control room who yells ‘Cut!’ right at the point we switch to the credits. It’s a very different way of doing the things DW always does, laughing at us for laughing at it, and it works so well it’s a surprise no one tried it again (there’s something similar going on in ‘Dragonfire’ what with literally dangling Sylvester McCoy over a cliff and naming characters after postmodernist theorists, but it doesn’t try anything quite as brave as this). There’s another less-well remembered joke midway through the second chorus when, by necessity the script has had to introduce a couple of talky sequences to get all the plot points facing in the right direction for the big finale and Arrak and Etta sit around bitching about how its all become dull! For all that though the ending when the regime has been overthrown and their screen turns blank, leaving with nothing but a vacuum in their lives is really quite sad, as well as a bit eerie given that DW will itself be ‘rested’ at the end of the year. The 6^th Dr gets to do a lot of flouncing around and acting shocked in this story, which gives Colin Baker his best platform for his permanently outraged Dr, shouting at a world that won’t listen to him and he’s met his match in Sil, his antithesis in a way The Master had stopped being in this era, a character ready to argue back at him but one driven by control rather than freedom and misery rather than joy. A lot of writers for the 6^th Dr don’t really understand him (something script editor Eric Saward confessed later – and he pretty much created him!) but Phillip Martin gets him completely: he’s a timelord who has none of the sense of doubt the others (sometimes) have but unlike his close cousin the 4^th Dr he doesn’t see the absurdism in the world either. For him, more than any other regeneration, his adventures a crusade and a moral wrong he just has to right. He’s a professor who sees the rest of the universe as his classroom of pupils and isn’t above lecturing them and punishing them when they get things wrong. He’s a more black-and-white Dr than the others, despite his multi-coloured costume, without as much mercy as the others. Which is a problem against more nuanced, pitiable characters like Davros or The Board, but perfect for a character as downright nasty as Sil and a planet so obviously ‘wrong’ as Varos. That, perhaps, is why this is the only DW story to have the word ‘vengeance’ in the title: he doesn’t so much save the day and put things right by removing the baddies as avenge the people who’ve suffered under this regime, every bit as much as the political system hurts people it disagrees with. Only, of course, the Dr is morally right and un-corruptable. Colin Baker is often the best thing in his era, but never more than here when he gets to be the Dr he was always meant to be, smarter and more learned than your average monster and not afraid to show it. Poor Peri goes through the works here as she often did, but with more humanity than she usually gets, not just letched over by pervy aliens but actively transformed by them (she’s half-turned into a bird, a fascinating detail: the machine, you see, is meant to fixate on the subject’s subconscious and picks up on the fact Peri wants to ‘fly away’ from all her problems, which is after all how she came to be in the Tardis; the script’s one flat note is that it doesn’t do more with this subplot and have the Doctor at least acknowledge it when he rescues her. It would also have been interesting to see what he might have been). Again, Peri is one of DW’s great companions and Nicola Bryant one of its best actresses, even if she never gets the chance toshow just what she can do; along with debut ‘Planet Of Fire’ though this is Peri at her best, sarcastic and sulky as the monsters try to have their way with her and with a put-down equal to everyone trying to put her six feet under. Also, remember the Doctor’s speech in ‘The Twin Dilemma’ that a ‘peri’ was a fallen angel who needed to repent? What he missed out was that the literal translation of ‘Peri’ is ‘wing’; with any other writer of this most depressingly average of seasons I’d assume that to be a coincidence, but given how erudite his scripts are Phillip Martin he probably looked this stuff up. We can all learn a lot from Varos it seems; not least the fact that a DW script can be this daring and postmodern without it getting in the way of telling a good story, which rattles along at quite a pace and makes a lot of salient points in such an entertaining way this viewer sitting at home has no reason to complain. Michael Grade clearly hadn’t seen or – more likely – understood ‘Vengeance on Varos’ when he cancelled the show at the end of this season for being ‘too violent’ and ‘not very good’. This is, more than anything, an attack on the very violence he was complaining about, but done in better and subtler ways than a monster as one-dimensional as Grade could ever understand. The result is a brilliant inventive and creative story in an era when, more than any other in the 20^th century, DW had fallen into a rut and was recycling its own ideas, with ‘Vengeance on Varos’ vastly under-rated all round.

+ So many positives to choose from here but let’s just hear it for Sil one more time: we raved about both character and actor under ‘Mindwarp’ but there are so many more details to choose from that make him seem like a ‘real’ character in a way so many of the others don’t. The tank he sits on to breathe water the way we breathe air. The way he splays his hands out like a fish’s gills every time he gets annoyed. The faulty circuit that makes him say ‘govennnnyeurrr’ every time he thinks he’s being clever. The marsh-minnows (really died peaches) that he grazes on across the story. And oh that laugh, which is chillingly alien and sluglike. Sil is a rare case of a writer being on top form coming up with ideas and an actor on top form adding more details on top. We need Sil back in the series and quick!

- The Doctor, Peri and two of the rebels (one of them played by Sean Connery’s son) are terrified because of a light distortion that’s made them afraid of…a fly. Even when huge, flies aren’t that threatening and the Doctor’s used enough to holovisions and giant ants and butterflies alike to recognise a mirage of a fly when he sees one.