The Keeper Of Traken
(Season 18, Dr 4 with Adric and Nyssa, 31/1/1981-21/2/1981, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Christopher H Bidmead, writer: Johnny Byrne, director: John Black)
Rank: 29
'Right everyone, never fear, I'm here to eradicate all evil. Wait you're not the Keeper of Traken! Why did you bring me here?'
'Well, you're not the Dr I was expecting either'
'What do you mean?'
'I'm the wicket-keeper of Traken - I invited the 5th Dr for a game or cricket!'
There’s a particular kind of melancholy that hangs around Tom Baker’s final trilogy of episodes that’s unlike anything else the show ever tried. We’re so used to seeing the 4th Doctor as the universe’s errant youthful joker that it’s quite a change seeing him stay quiet and still, old before his time on a trio of very downbeat stories. All three parts are very different to each other though and they’re all so good they’re all in my top thirty. In this middle story of the three he’s on the rebound after losing Romana at the end of ‘Warrior’s Gate’, not even bothering to make a K9 mark IV when she leaves either as if he knows that it’s time to come of age and put away childish things like robotic dogs. That last story found The Doctor struggling to adapt to a world that was moving in its own sweet time regardless of anything he did and where he had to be brave to say goodbye to his friends. By next story ‘Logopolis’ he’s reduced to watching his arch-enemy permanently wipe out half of the universe in Dr Who’s biggest (thankfully off-screen) bloodbath and losing his own life alongside it. By comparison ‘Keeper Of Traken’ is almost jolly, but only almost. After all, it’s a story that tries hard to find the good in all things but comes to the conclusion that evil will always survive even amongst good people, with a rare conclusion that sees the Doctor loses, wiping out his actions during this story and quite a few others. The 4th Doctor once seemed invincible, unstoppable, unbeatable, but now he feels as if he’s living on borrowed time, his quips coming from a dark and dangerous place, his flippancy a cover-up for his approaching sense of mortality, his dashing heroics not enough to stem the tide of entropy that is engulfing the whole world and turning it the wrong way. If most 4th Doctor stories are a party in space, as he takes out the bad guys with a wave of his scarf and an offer of jelly babies, then this is a wake.
Watching ‘The Keeper Of
Traken’ is quite the trip in 2023, so imagine how it must have felt in 1981,
against a backdrop of planet Earth swinging to the right and moving away from
peace to war. This isn’t a time for jokes and jelly babies, this is a new
decade that’s working to new rules, as if humanity has taken away the
stabilisers and the steering hand that had kept it out of harm’s way and the
feeling that, just maybe, if the rest of the 1980s carried on the same way as
its first year, then it might be humanity’s last. There’s a general air of
hopelessness and despair to the news bulletins around the broadcast of ‘Keeper
Of Traken’, as Ronald Reagan comes to power in America on a wave of
anti-Russian rhetoric and Margaret Thatcher prepares Britain for its first war
in nearly forty years, a feeling that the hippie hope of the 1960s and the
colourful glam denial of the 1970s have only delayed the inevitable state of
decay. Where does that leave a series that so neatly reflected the 1960s sense
of optimism and peace? It leaves it here, in a story about the Eden-world of
Traken, where the hippies won, where evil just calcified and shrivels up and
dies on contact with the planet surface (no, I don’t know how that works
scientifically either, but it’s a fairytale so you run with it!) and where the
planet has been kept safe for hundreds of years by a ‘Keeper’ and their
mysterious source of power, which feels like a metaphor for all those 1960s
values the series once stood for and where it started (as well as being a bit
postmodernist: the ending sees a ‘source manipulator’ plugged into the ‘source
of knowledge’, a good barebones summary of what’s going on with the plot). Just
look at the way the Melkur, the symbol of evil that arrived from another planet
and turned into stone is stopped by kindness and the flowers the people hang
round it’s neck: flower power values saving the world. Even the name ‘Melkur’
translates as ‘a fly trapped by honey’, killed by something sweet. Only now the
Keeper is dying, the empire is crumbling and even though the Doctor can put
things right for a single story it’s all undone with an ending that spells the
end for the planet, the empire and in the future very nearly the Doctor
himself. Despite the odd setting, despite the fact that right u to the present
day this is the very final Dr Who stories to feature no Human characters
whatsoever (Adric is Alzarian, remember), it all feels very familiar, very
Human, as if this the latest re-telling of an age old tale that goes back to
our beginnings, a tale of good and evil.
And if Traken, the one world in Dr Who’s that’s genuinely full of good
and kind and lovely people, can’t keep evil at bay then what chance have we?
The 4th
Doctor, who once belonged everywhere, doesn’t feel as if he belongs in this
story. He belongs to a different era, with quick-fix solutions to knotty
problems, and the world is in too much of a state to be put right quite as
easily and nothing is easy in this story, where pure good is no longer a match
for pure evil. That’s not to say that Tom Baker is wrong – far from it; the actor
may have been brilliant as the smart alecky alien (and I’m even more in awe of
his attempts to go ‘evil’ in stories like ‘Invasion
Of Time’) but he’s a far better actor than he was ever given credit for by
the world at large away from Dr Who. His work in these final days, when he
walks around like a timelord with the weight of the world on his shoulders,
shutting down even when talking to his companions (none of whom he knows very
well as yet) is sublime, going totally against seven years of what we’ve come
to expect. This final trilogy might well be his best work in the role in fact. To
be fair maybe some of it wasn’t acting: by all accounts Tom met his match with
new producer John Nathan-Turner who, desperate to make his mark on the series,
was happier to shout down his leading man than either of his two predecessors,
the clean sweep with the broom happy to call Tom’s bluff that he would leave if he didn’t get
his own way. The actor too was suffering from an undiagnosed complaint that
made him feel rough and grumpy (some fans have wondered if it was psychosomatic
but something in his metabolism changed – his famously long curly hair went limp
and straight so that what you see on screen is the result of hours in makeup
he’d never had to have before). Losing co-star Lalla Ward, with whom he’d had
so much fun (well, some of the time) also came as quite a blow – as much as
they continued their relationship away from the series, even getting married in
December 1980 right in the middle between the recording and transmission of
this story, it was rarely as happy for them in the real world as it had been
inside a TV studio with characters to hide behind.
I’m not sure whether
incoming script editor Christopher H Bidmead sensed these melancholy changes in
the world or in the rehearsal rooms or would have made them anyway but, after
sticking all the previously commissioned stories of season 18 that had been
partly started under predecessor Douglas Adams at the start of the season, here
at the end of the year he finally gets to shape Dr Who the way he wants – and
it’s a much darker, sombre, better series for it. Most fans add ‘scientific’ to
that list given that Bidmead’s background was in computers and his promise to
make Dr Who more ‘realistic’ in the wake of harder-edged scifi films like
‘Alien’ and ‘Close Encounters Of The Third Kind’ that were doing so well at the
box office at the time but honestly, other than the mathematics at the heart of
his own story ‘Logopolis’, that isn’t necessarily true: Bidmead’s take on the
Whoniverse in the stories he commissioned himself are even more fairytale-like
than Steven Moffat’s to come, full of planets that don’t strictly exist
(‘Castrovalva’) are filled with giant alien frogs archiving humans from across
time (seriously – ‘Four To Doomsday’) and giant pink Buddhist snakes (‘Kinda’)
not to mention Dr Who’s most surreal story ‘Warrior’s Gate’. After half a year
of big bold bright colours and bright spotlights the end of this season and the
start of the next is all about pastel hues, out of focus lenses and blurred
edges. The stories too are gentler and softer even though the stakes are
higher, more abstract stories about the concepts of good and evil that don’t
use guns and weapons and sword fights so much as imagery and metaphors. And no
story is more fairytale-like than ‘Keeper Of Traken’, which feels like a
Brothers Grimm style folk tale, where a people who live in paradise on a planet
powered by a mystical unseen source of energy give in to their darker side.
This is a world that has been without evil for so long that people have
forgotten to be afraid of it and think they can always beat it, but they can’t:
good and evil have always existed side by side and always will exist in balance,
because you can’t have one without the other, and after periods of light there
are also periods of dark. Note the way that the ‘goody’ and ‘baddy’ swap positions
by the end of this story, where the shrivelled up old man and shrivelled up decaying
Master in parallel, only The Keeper starts with all the power and The Master
tries to end with it (the true balance is in the middle, when The Doctor
intervenes, a character whose neither all good or all bad).
Bidmead’s starting point
for this story was an unusual one for a Dr Who story forget your science
weeklies, your scifi pulp magazines and your children’s comics, it was an article
on the Christian concept of millennialism, the belief that civilisations always
went in cycles. Mankind would always get it together for a short length of
time, just long enough to believe that a time of longterm peace and prosperity
was possible, but that longterm any one thing was unsustainable. Peace and
stability were fragile and something would always come along and puncture it
when we had become too complacent and were looking the other way, whether a
natural disaster we couldn’t control or from our own hand (after all, it’s
harder to be scared of a war when you’ve never lived through one than when
you’ve survived one and vowed never to risk another). Though technology might
change and the rulers who sit in the big throne might regenerate and change
their appearance mankind never changes and each successive generation are
liable to make the same mistakes as their forebears. There has to come a point,
after all, when we stop evolving and start devolving – there must be a limit
humanity can reach somewhere, some shelf life when the civilisation we’ve built
for ourselves can’t maintain itself any more and crumbles. And what better a
time for that to happen than a year of great change, with a big fat ‘zero’ at
the end of it, or maybe a few? Specifically ‘Millennialism’ is the fear of the
end of a millennium and the start of a new one, something that’s in all sorts
of ancient texts (including the Bible) and in 1981 times was getting pretty
close to the year 2000; so many changes had already taken place with the start
of a new decade, what on earth would the start of a new thousand year cycle
bring? Of course to those of us sitting
here in the 21st century the idea of the year 2000 being at all
scary is patently complete and utter nonsense (the impending doom and imminent
collapse didn’t start until at least, ooh, 2001) but it was a real fear that a
lot of people shared. To quote Kassia, ‘nothing is normal at
such a time’. It’s a very Dr Whoy theme, then, this question
of balance, of how you can’t have good without evil or hope without despair,
happiness without sadness or victory without failure. And after seven years of
running around putting things right effortlessly even the 4th Doctor
must fall.
Given that idea of good
versus evil and a panic over the future you’d have expected Byrne to go down the
route of snakes interrupting the garden paradise, especially given that the
Mara are waiting in the wings four stories later, but instead he creates The
Melkur, a stone statue that’s ‘alive’ and welcomed into the garden by the kind
noble people of Traken. Everyone there knows the Melkur represents evil, but
legend has it that Traken was just too kind and pure a planet so evil just
shrivelled up and died when it arrived there, the Melkur ending up a calcified
statue unable to move. It’s become a monument down the centuries, a reminder
of darker times, and the locals still employ a girl every generation to look
after the statue and feed it, to make it welcome and feel a part of the planet.
If this was a Dr Who story in any other era that would be karma enough for
everyone to stay happy and safe: you can magine one of the black-and-white
comic strips having the 1st or 2nd Doctors turn up, talk
about how marvellous it all is, exterminate the Trods hanging around outside
and go home. You think for one glorious episode as if there’s not going to be
any peril at all in this story and that the ‘Keeper’ who called on the Doctor
for help with a distress call has simply got things wrong– if anyone’s an
antagonist in the early part of this story it’s the Doctor, arriving in the
Tardis and swishing his scarf around noisily, ruffling feathers amongst the
Traken nobles as much out of boredom as anything else (or perhaps to have a
break from Adric asking him endless questions over and over again). It’s fun to
see the Dr greeted with the sort of resigned diplomacy reserved for Great Aunts
and rogue politicians rather than as an all-conquering hero as a change and its
almost a shame when the Melkur starts to wake up and The Keeper’s sixth senses
of a ‘lurking evil’ prove to be true. And even then it’s a subtle evil: I mean,
the baddy is literally rooted to the ground, he’s not going to cause any real
trouble is he? But evil has funny way of getting inside people without them
really noticing, slipping through the cracks of the people in Traken who haven’t
known evil for so long they’ve forgotten what it looks and feels like. Forget your mass alien invasions, this story
is subtle in the extreme, with a nagging sense of something slightly wrong
rather than a horrific tragedy, and in a season that started with mafia lizards
playing tennis and talking lifesize cactuses is all the better for it. Of all
the planets that exist in the Whoniverse Traken is in my top places to move to
(err, give or take – spoilers – the fact that it’s destroyed in the very next
story!), a place where everyone is kind and helpful and benevolent, without
losing any time or resources playing silly soldiers, so that it’s had time to
create multiple wonders of its own (I love the way that despite this being such
a spiritual planet, Traken is no slouch when it comes to technology and has
things that even impresses the Doctor). Which also means that it’s a place
totally unprepared for anyone who wants to do them harm. It reminds me of my
days happily playing the computer game ‘Age Of Empires’ and building Ancient
Greece into a bastion of knowledge and learning. Only for my friends playing as
Ancient Romans and Vikings and the like to come along and smash everything up
(*sob*!) If ‘Traken’ is a story about anything then it’s a story about balance,
about how societies have to be a bit of everything to survive otherwise people
will take advantage of you, which is a hard lesson to learn but is sadly true.
The hippie philosophy
also makes this a story that, more than
any other in the 1970s and 1980s I can think of, seems like Dr Who’s roots in
the 1960s, where it started. Many fans have commented that ‘The Keeper Of
Traken’ is ‘like a Hartnell’, which might explain why I love it so much (the
1st Dr’s being my own particular favourite era, with a greater sense of magic
and wonder and endless possibilities than any of the others and a large dollop
of 1960s spirit and optimism) but for most reviewers that’s shorthand for
‘slow’ and they leave it at that. ‘Keeper’ is decidedly slow, full of characters
either so old or so at peace they don’t move very much and do a lot of talking
at each other, without the usual running up and down corridors, but that’s a
good thing when the dialogue is this good and involving: just take a look at
the ‘Internet Movie Database’ site for this story where there are more quotes
taken from these four episodes than pretty much any other Dr Who story. An even
bigger reason this feels like a Hartnell story is that we have time to explore
this world, that Traken isn’t a planet that only exists for the purposes of the
plot and has no life beyond it – there are a lot of scenes giving us things
that, strictly speaking, we don’t need to know to follow the story but which
really help give us the feeling of a world full of customs and traditions that
existed long before the Tardis arrives. It feels ‘real’, a planet that
beats to its own eternal logic that’s almost but not quite like ours, full of
small subtle detais that really sell this world and (rarer than you might
think) proves that writers, script editor and director were all on the same
page: the same lush ‘fairy dresses’ in un-crumpled velvet as if the Trakenites
have nothing better to do all day than iron; the fact that every female on this
planet genetically has curly hair (even Nyssa, which is a problem when she
becomes a companion later and Sarah Sutton has to spend hours getting her
naturally straight hair made up every time) and the men all have straight hair,
the way everyone keeps their voices quiet and respectful, even in anger (such a
contrast to all the usual shouting!)
Another is that ‘Traken’
is very much of its time, the way the 1960s episodes often were – for the most
part 1970s Dr Who has been about escapism, the Doctor’s exile to Earth
replacing the sense of exploring current affair in metaphors in space and while
we’re about to get lots of cold war parables when the 1980s hits its stride this
is kind of a halfway house, one that looks as if the camera is about to cut
away to ‘Spandau Ballet’ or ‘A Flock Of Seagulls’ performing in front of the
Trakenite extras in their velvet ruffs.. Most of the landscape has the same
sort of lushness as contemporary TV (we’re still a little early yet for the
‘Beauty and the Beast’ series but it looks just like that, with just a hint of
‘Knight Rider’) and people who live on Traken have that same sense theatrical
dress sense and gothic makeup, seeming like they write poetry about death in
their bedrooms at weekends after a week’s heavy pouting, even though they’re
quite happy people most of the time. Like all good new romantic somethings
though there’s just a hint of the punk rock Melkur that came before them that
everyone’s reacting to (an era entirely absent aesthetically from DW, the
closest being the back-to-basics everybody-dies horror of ‘Fang Rock’ – and
that’s a story about an alien green blob killing people in an Edwardian
lighthouse so it’ s not exactly a perfect fit; the drug-dealing ‘Nightmare Of
Eden’ is another candidate but if anything that’s an anti-punk story about the
dangers to your Mandrils if you keep stuffing things up your nose). This is a
planet of people who’ve seen their elder siblings get their hands dirty in the
muck and grime and slime of the universe’s underbelly and decided that they’d
rather live above it all, pretending to be nice to each other (even to visiting
aliens: honestly most other planets would have kicked the Doctor out given all
the problems that follow after he arrives). That’s the key word though,
‘pretending’ – Traken lives in fear that one day evil will come back and rather
than be above it all really everyone in this planet has got their fingers in
their ears going ‘la la la I can’t hear you’ and talking about how merrily
happy everyone is all the time in the hope that if everyone says it enough
they’ll believe it. I can’t decide whether this is a genuine catty comment from
a Dr Who production team laughing at their core youthful audience of the day
for lapping all this up in the early days of Thatcher and strikes and poverty
(the way ‘The Abominable Snowmen’
in 1967 laughs at hippies for trusting disembodied voices promising them
‘answers’ and ‘The Dominators’
dooms them all because pacifism is stupid) or whether it’s simply Dr Who doing
its old tried and tested template of showing that it’s impossible to have good
without bad, that as long as humans (and even their Traken near-cousins) are
around we can never have true paradise (or pure dystopia) because there is good
and evil in all of us and so therefore in our societies too. Sometimes ‘Traken’
feels existential despair on the writer’s part that we can’t have nice things
because life doesn’t work that way – and sometimes it feels like a warning not
to look the other way and ignore the danger signals like we once did because
bad times will happen again if we’re not careful. It might be significant, too,
that the Melkur is designed (and indeed described in the script) as being
rococo, from the ‘roaring twenties’ when the world partied away the years
between the two world wars trying to pretend that everything was alright again,
ignoring Hitler’s rise to power and the great depression (they would have been,
roughly, the grandparents of the children watching this the first time round). Designer
Tony Burroughs picked up on this with his sets, too, modelling them on the work
of the Spanish architect Gaudi whose work was most famous in that decade (think
Barcelona’s Cathedral), wanting the feel of a planet that had been hewn out of
rock and had been there for centuries (they look magnificent: Burroughs is,
deservedly, the only Dr Who set designer to go on to win an Oscar, for the 1997
film ‘Richard III’). Dr Who is briefly back to its origins as a multi-generation
family series then, for a whole new generation – if only they’d kept this up
into the 1980s and beyond!
I have another possible
theory too, which links in to that 1920s feel: ‘Traken’ was produced at the
height of the cold war when tensions were growing again and while Dr Who was
forever switching sides whether capitalism or communism was better this is a
story that feels firmly on the latter’s side. Only what we had in Russia by
1980s was not communist in its purest sense, but a dictatorship takeover. We
never fully got to see what ‘pure’ communism in the Lenin sense might have
looked like, a world where everything was roughly equal and where everyone had
their roles picked for them due to their abilities (nobody on Traken so much as
mentions money and everyone is only too happy to fulfil their responsibilities
and do what they’re told because the state knows best and is working to a
‘higher’ power’: indeed, the first sign for the elders that Kassia might be
‘evil’ is when she looks upset at Nyssa getting her job tending graves and
calcified statues). Leninist Russia following the October Revolution wasn’t
paradise but it was getting there: compared to the years under the corrupt
Royal family, when the rich were well fed and everyone else suffered it was a
far kinder, friendly place to live. Only Lenin died in 1924 when communism was
still fragile at best, without a natural heir: he’s surely the Keeper, the
interpreter of this great bountiful knowledge with a vision no one else shares
as fully. Trotsky seemed the obvious candidate to take over, the mild-mannered
protégé, ut he couldn’t command the crowds with the same charisma: in this
story he’s Tremas, felled not with a pickaxe to the head exactly but a blow
from inside a grandfather clock (don’t ask!) The Melkur? That’s Stalin, a being
that barely moves a muscle and tries to pass himself of as a friendly Uncle,
whose secretly plotting to take all the best things for himself even more than
the Royals did, ‘communism’ equality by name but no longer by nature. Only
Stalin was clever enough not to rule in a giant coup or by necessarily
denouncing his rivals but in quietly moving into power, bit by bit, until he
was in a position where his own people began to think of him as the good guy.
‘The Keeper Of Traken’ is George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, then, only with aliens in fancy dress and statues rather than
talking horses and pigs (‘Two Calcified Legs Bad…’) Given The Master’s links to
this story, maybe that’s why he felt so at home singing ‘Ra-Ra-Rasputin’ in
‘The Power Of The Doctor’? (There’s certainly no other excuse for that scene I
can think of…)
Another reason this story
feels like a Hartnell is that the supporting characters are just so good: Denis
Carey makes the elderly Keeper very different to his other Dr Who role, Who’s
best dotty professor Chronotis in ‘Shada’. He’s kind of The Pope, an elderly
figure that knows they’re going to die in the job but sees being plugged into
spirit as the greatest thing they could be doing with their life. Sweet and
innocent Kassia would have made a worthier companion even than her
step-daughter Nyssa and it’s a shame she gets bumped off so early on – as much
as she’s the de facto ‘baddy’ for the story, often characterised as an ‘evil
stepmother’ (like the fairytale theme of the rest of the story) really she’s a
kind person easily swayed; she becomes brainwashed by Melkur slowly, in waves,
when her biggest crime was trying to tend it’s grave with flowers. Jealousy is
her downfall, as it so often is in fairytales: she looks in the mirror and sees
a step-daughter prettier than her getting her favourite job, while facing
losing her husband to his life connected to source as the next Keeper, losing
the two things that keep her happy – it’s a natural and very Human re-action
for a Trakenite to be upset about but it’s enough ‘badness’ to let The Melkur
do its thing. Brainwashings in Dr Who are two a Movellan Knut, but
this is about the best in the series’ long list of them: you see Kassi’as mind
wrestling with what Melkur tells her, unsure which view is right, desperate to
do the right thing, but the more she argues the further she goes from her true
pure self and the greater hold the master has over her. Kassia is controlled partly through her necklace:
Byrne was inspired by Irish mythology and the ‘Jodhan Moran’, a bewitched
collar that would kill anyone unfair or unjust and worn by a judge as proof of
his kindness and mercy and that all his decisions were ‘right’ – only, in Dr
Who, it’s used in reverse, as proof that even the nicest person can be
corrupted. Kassia is a tragic figure, even more than her husband and daughter
and excellently played by Sheila Ruskin. The Traken elders are very believable:
old men who aren’t used to change and want things to stay the same, each one
with a slightly different plan to take over but not sure how. Their
disagreements with each other actively scares them in a way we’ve never seen in
this story, because under the old Keeper nobody disagreed about anything
(again, this is Leninist Russia in the aftermath of his death). Of particular note are John Woodnutt as Seron,
who continues to be one of Dr Who’s most reliable actors with several different
roles to his credit and Robin Soames as Luvic, who was so perturbed at not
having many lines that he decided there must be a reason he was the quietest
Keeper and invented a stammer in rehearsals (JNT made him take it out!) – he’ll
make the most of a similarly insubstantial role as ‘Chronolock Guy’ (that
really is the credit, not a description!) in ‘Face
The Raven’. You have to feel for poor Luvic: he’s the King Charles of the
Dr Who world, someone whose waited his whole life to be Keeper while his
long-lived predecessor takes over, only for events to mean he sits in power for
all of a day!
And then there’s Anthony
Ainley, who starts off as Nyssa’s gentlemanly father Tremas, upstanding and
sweet and just a little bit crotchety (he’s the 1st Doctor all over again, but
specifically the later 1st Doctor whose softened considerably by his last
stories) and then in the last daring closing minutes becomes (mega huge
spoilers that will ruin everything if haven’t seen the story)...the regenerated
Master. He wasn’t in Byrne’s script at all (he was a new figure, a megalomaniac
named Mogen) but Bidmead had been pushing to have The master back, to give the
Doctor a regular foe again and was already half-thinking of bringing him back
in ‘Logopolis’ – rather than have two similar characters back to back, though,
why not make them the same? Byrne was only too pleased – he’d liked The Master
and might have used him himself had the character been around. But weirdly, and
uniquely, The master is played by someone else for most of the story and Ainley,
who played The Master for more years than anybody, mostly plays another part in
this story. At first we see the emaciated version we see in ‘The Deadly
Assassin’ at the end of his 13 lives and it has to be said that ‘Traken’ is a
neat mirror to what happens later to Matt Smith when the Doctor reaches the
same age in ‘Time Of the Doctor’, only instead of invading a peaceful planet he
defends it from evil getting in. And then, after Tremas gets a bit too curious
with The master’s Tardis (oh that curiosity!)The Master takes over Tremas’
body. We’re a little bit robbed of that shock twist nowadays when chances are
everyone sees Ainley in costume and assumes Tremas is the Master all along (and
let’s face it, the anagram name is a bit of a giveaway given what they do every
time The master returns during the JNT years). That’s all in the future though:
serious brownie points to anyone who saw that shock twist coming on first
transmission because it really does come out of nowhere, at the point when in
any other story the Doctor would have ‘won’ and things would have been put
right. It really helps make ‘Traken’ feel more than just another Dr Who story:
it’s an inescapable fate in a story all about how you can never take defeating
evil or goodness for granted.
What’s more, unlike most
Dr Who twists that tended to be destroyed by leaks or Radio Times write-ups
they managed to actually keep this one quiet. ‘After all, following Roger
Delgado’s untimely death most fans thought they would never see the character
again and even when he came back in ‘The Deadly Assassin’ he was a husk of his
former self who really didn’t act much like The Master: it had been eight years
since The Master had been seen properly. The irony, fully in keeping with the
rest of this eerie story, is that the takeover couldn’t have happened to a
nicer guy, someone whose so pure that he couldn’t even conceive of the Master’s
grandfather clock being a Tardis-size trap (good life advice: never investigate
a surprise materialising object that ticks). It’s a colossal tragedy for
Tremas, for Traken (destroyed by The Master next time out), for the Doctor (who
regenerates indirectly because of The Master’s masterplan) and for the universe
(a lot of which is unceremoniously wiped out in ‘Logopolis’). Anthony Ainley
was a man with so many Who connections its amazing he hadn’t been in the series
already: he’d come to fame partly through his star turn in ‘Out Of The
Unknown’, BBC2’s highbrow scifi response to Dr Who on BBC One, where so many of
the production team worked, he was the illegitimate son of themed thespian
Henry Ainley who was very close to the Pertwee family (and was in fact Jon’s
Godparent) and his brother was Tom Baker’s one-time drama teacher and
room-mate. For my money he’s also one
of the best actors who was ever in Dr Who, under-appreciated only because Roger
Delgado as the ‘original’ Master was one of the absolute best – later stories
will reduce his Master to a pantomime baddy doing bad things because he’s
naughty, but here with a decent script behind him (and again in ‘Logopolis’ and
final story ‘Survival’) Ainley’s one of the greatest threats the Doctor ever
faces, driven by several centuries of being trapped in a statue plotting
revenge with nothing to keep him alive but thoughts of cruelty and every bit as
bad as the Doctor is good. And Tony is even better as Tremas, one of the
gentlest of men we ever get to meet, with Ainley given as real chance to show
off his full range in this story – it’s hard to believe that the close ups of
the two pairs of eyes at the end, merging as one, is even the same actor, given
that one is full of fading warmth and the other ice-cold growing in power. It
is, however, a whacking great coincidence that The master just happens to take
over someone whose name is an anagram of his own, almost as if this were a
blatant clue in a long-running science-fiction series rather than something
that was ‘really’ happening…
Interestingly Ainley
doesn’t play The Melkur voice even though would seem the most obvious (and budget
saving) thing to do: instead its Geoffrey Beevers, whose all too believable as
the presence of pure evil even though he has nothing more to use than a few
whispers – he’s so good at it that it’s sad we didn’t get at least a season of
stories of him as The Master (he’s excellent as Big Finish’s Master of choice
too, filling in the gaps between ‘Deadly Assassin’ and this story; in real life
he was married to Liz Shaw actress Caroline John and its one of my great
regrets they were never in a Dr Who story together before her untimely death,
even on audio). The Melkur is a great concept: a statue of pure evil that’s
been rooted in place, but can still create influence and overcome the whole of
Traken, despite the fact that they can just walk away from it. There is, so we’re told, a whole planet of
Melkurs (one we visit in Big Finish audios but never on screen) and the Trakens
used to be scared of them but not anymore in their Garden Planet Eden. They
don’t even consider it a threat until it’s too late. The Melkur lets the story
ask big questions, too, about mercy and kindness being misplaced in a world
that doesn’t respect them: if ‘The Mind Of Evil’ is the Dr Who story that
pushes the point for the rehabilitation of prisoners, of showing patience to
people who fell into bad times and made mistakes by giving them a second chance,
then ‘Traken’ is the story that makes the case, if not quite for capital
punishment, then the idea that some beings are too evil to ever be allowed near
your loved ones again, no matter how restricted and trapped they seem to
be.
Given the feeling of doom
and gloom that hangs over this planet (a rare story where the Dr seems to solve
everything, then it all unravels again when he leaves, as if even our hero’s
morals aren’t enough to stop pure evil) it’s no surprise that Traken is the
only named planet we recognise that’s in the half of the universe that gets
wiped out in next story ‘Logopolis’ (a story which builds on directly from
events here) – my one big fault with this story isn’t even with this story at
all but the fact that nothing else really comes from it. Nyssa should hate The
Master with a burning fury never seen in the series before. Not only does he
have the nerve to wipe out her planet and everyone she ever knew before meeting
the Doctor and Adric, he has the audacity to walk around in her father’s body
while he does it, those kindly features contorted with hate. Combined with
Tegan who’ll have her own beef with The Master in the next story (shrinking her
Aunt Vanessa down to size in the opening minutes) I would have loved to have
seen the new Who girls club together to bring The Master down to size
somewhere, perhaps with the new merciful 5th Dr looking sad over in the corner
seeing the bigger picture and trying to stop them while talking about mercy.
Instead Nyssa barely bats an eyelid when she meets The Master again in
‘Logopolis’ and ‘Timeflight’, as if this story never happened. This could have
been the single biggest companion-driven bit of drama in the series and would surely
have been a natural place to take the series had Bidmead stayed on: alas the
script editor’s already got cold feet and is getting fed up of clashing with
the producer so as well as being nearly his first hurrah it’s almost the last
he oversees from start to finish. And Johnny Byrne’s second story ‘Arc Of
Infinity’ is mucked around with so much it doesn’t feel like the work of the
same writer at all. There never was a second ‘Traken’, because pure good runs
of Dr Who can seemingly only sustain themselves for a little while. That’s a problem for the future though: as a
story taken on its own merits ‘Keeper Of Traken’ is a lovely little four-parter,
Dr Who’s prettiest and most beautiful tale in so many ways (until it abruptly
isn’t), an old fashioned tale of trust deceit and betrayal and how thinking all
the nicest thoughts in the universe won’t be enough to stop evil when it really
wants something, dressed up in contemporary clothes that makes it feel new and
up to date (or did at the time – although even then it seems like the most
ageless, timeless 4th Dr story in so many ways). Yes it could have done with
something more perhaps, a sub-plot or three and we never fully get to see
properly how peaceful Traken is before the Melkur arrives (some people walking
round smiling and handing out flowers isn’t quite the same thing). By and large
though its as close to perfect as you’re ever going to get: it’s a good story
for the Doctor, a great one for The Master, a highly promising one for Nyssa
and has a feel all of its own that makes it unique in the Dr Who canon, that
does something different with a planet full of good people rather than bad as
usual. There’s so much to love about this story, from the costumes to the sets
to the acting to the writing and a rare story where every department deserves
applause and no one messes up anything much at all, no one! But especially the
writing: there’s a\ poetry to this story (Byrne did indeed start life as a beat
poet), a word choice that makes the characters, the planet and the dialogue all
sing with a beauty few other Dr Who stories can match. While not too much
happens before the shock ending nothing much happens with such grace and style
that you can’t help but be entranced. Would that we had more Dr Who stories
this lush, this pretty, this poetic, this thoughtful. Much under-rated.
POSITIVES + The Melkur
statue is gorgeous and looks even more like something from 1981 than the planet
and actors’ costumes do. After all this was an era where its heroes and
heroines liked to stand still and stare vacantly down the camera with an
existential shrug, perhaps with an occasional arm wave. What better way to
represent that than with a statue and one that really fits the aesthetics of
the time, like ‘The Wicker Man’ crossed with the Tin Man from ‘The Wizard Of
Oz’ but with a very 1980s shape and design on top. The moment when The Melkur
finally moves, just when you’re convinced yourself it’s a prop not a costume,
is properly scary Dr Who and all the more so for coming in the middle of what’s
been quite a gentle and placid kind of story.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Guardians Of Prophecy’ (2012) is
Johnny Byrne’s intended sequel to ‘Traken’ which was intended for the 5th
Doctor in 1983 then re-written for the 6th in 1984 before being
dropped – the latter version ended up as part of series three of Big Finish’s
‘Lost Stories’ range (2012). It’s a good one, featuring the last few stragglers
of the Traken empire who survived the events of ‘Logopolis’ and set up a new
home on a planet they name ‘Serenity’. There’s a division though: do they try
and make this planet a new Traken or do they overthrow their elderly elect and
become more like other planets? Politics spill over when a thief is caught and
sentenced to be thrown into a labyrinth (yet another one in Dr Who!) In a
(spoilers) twist it turns out that the agitators have been stirred up not just
by one Melkur but dozens, all of whom have been living on the planet and who
have the ‘psychic power’ to pull the Tardis out of orbit as it flies past;
they’re the ‘real’ thing, not The master in hiding this time. Along the way
there’s scares with robot guardians, a living computer named ‘Prophecy’, a
‘shield of goodness’, and arguably way
too many expensive ideas to be done properly on a Dr Who budget in the 1980s,
one of the reasons the story was reluctantly dropped. On audio though it’s
another matter and like the majority of the ‘Lost Stories’ range the result is
way more interesting than most of the stories that actually made it to screen
that decade.
Previous ‘Warrior’s Gate’
next ‘Logopolis’
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