Scream Of The Shalka: Ranking - N/A (But around #230)

 

Scream Of The Shalka

(BBC i-player webcast animation, Dr ? with Alison, 13/11/2003-18/12/2003, producer: Murinn Lane Kelly, writer: Paul Cornell, director: Wilson Milam)

Rank: N/A (but around #230 if I had to pick)

 ‘Victoria and Mel, it’s so good having you both in the Tardis with me again after all these years. Meet the Shalka, Shalka meet Victoria and Mel…’  

‘Scream!’

‘Scream!’

‘Scream!’

‘Oh, that reminds me, where did I put my ear-plugs?!?’

Does ‘Scream Of Shalka’ count as ‘proper’ Dr Who? The answer is it rather depends on who you talk to. At the time it was made, as the only new Who product for the 40^th anniversary, it very much was: this was the re-launching point for the series with hopes of making a whole run of these stories if they were successful, in a completely new medium once getting Dr Who made on telly seemed as dead as a dodo (not Jackie Lane, an actual dodo). Even before this webcast went out though, once a week for six weeks on the official BBC website, though, its days were numbered: nobody making this animation knew it yet as everyone was sworn to secrecy but Russell T Davies’ bigger, bolder comeback for TV was already being prepared and the new showrunner had ambitions far beyond a tiny ormer of a sprawling website only a few tech-savvy fans could get anyway. There was a time, even after the comeback, when we weren’t sure whether this ‘counted’ or not – sure the Dr never mentioned it when he was Christopher Eccleston, but it was a long time before the new series was comfortable enough to even register the ‘proper’ Drs and we only had our first confirmation that Paul McGann was canonical as later as the Dr’s human ‘dreams’ in ‘Family Of Blood/Human Nature’ in 2007 (also by this story’s writer Paul Cornell – and even that could plausibly be a fever dream, so it’s not until Matt Smith takes a walk through memory holograms in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ in 2010 we knew for sure). In the end ‘Shalka’ is not quite good enough for fans to push for it being welcomed back into the fold – and yet in other ways it feels a lot more like ‘proper’ Dr Who than the TV Movie ever did, being more quirkily British than the American re-launch.

Really though, as a project made by fans primarily for fans, you can’t help ut feel it ought to be even more Dr Whoy than it turned out. That’s not, and it should be stressed, the fault of the people making it. They had huge plans for DW’s 40^th anniversary, hatched bold ambitious plans for what they wanted this project to be, won over up and coming actress Sophie Oeknodo right before she hit big and got hold of cult hero Richard E Grant while wringing every last penny out of the measly budget and jumping over every hoop to get this story made. No its the BBC who mucked this poor project around, still suffering from the Michael Grade ‘r Who isn’t popular’ hangover that had lasted since the 1980s (admittedly the poor response to the TV Movie hadn’t helped), who were forever going back on their promise of help and promotion, not caring enough about this show to help it but caring too much in the way they interfered over and over, reducing the original promisingly punchy three-story twelve episodes down to a single storyline that rambled through six and made the only person who had any experience of running websites or working on animations for the corporation redundant just when the project was taking off. While you can point the finger at all sorts of wonky decisions along the way, the biggest difference between this and the comeback to come is that Russell T Davies had a lot of people who believed in him even when they still didn’t believe in the series and have him carte blanche to at least try things that seemed bold and radical, whereas this story had to tick all the rtight boxes and not get into too much trouble in case it was immediately cancelled. This is Dr Who, the most imaginative, elastic-breaking format of them all, with its wings clipped to keep it generic, made by committee because nobody in control of the purse strings trusts any one person making it. The few times anyone sits down to write a ‘generic DW episode’ they tend to be the worst: we have lots of different engines of different sizes throughout the show but its imagination that’s the fuel this show runs on. Alas this script might be the most generic of the lot: a screechy alien from space tries to invade contemporary Earth. It’s the sort of thing a committee who’ve watched a few episodes to get a taste but who have no love for the show would come up with which must have irritated the hell out of the genuine fans who stumped up a lot of money and all the ideas for this project who knew that was how other fans would view it too.

In many ways ‘Shalka’ is the missing piece of the Dr Who puzzle, first uploaded seven years after that McGann TV movie and two before ‘Rose’ (with the actual show anniversary falling between episodes two and three), with a foot in both camps without really having much identity of its own. It suffers from the worst of the TV Movie in its need to spend so much time going over old ground to ‘feel’ like Dr Who, while laying ground rules for what’s to come so fiercely and definitively, that the plot itself doesn’t really have room to breathe or do anything you don’t expect it to. This is a story that had some nicely original ideas that feel like ‘proper’ Dr Who that get interrupted with requests to put more ideas from past stories in - requests that, ironically, are the bits that seem the least Dr Whoey: the 3^rd Dr for instance, ended up working by UNIT by choice but here the Dr ends up crossing swords with the local military because that’s what he always used to do, The Master turns up because one of the big names from the series was always going to (and getting the rights to the Daleks off Terry nation’s estate was asking for trouble back in 2003), while there’s lots of escaping and capturing because those are the bread and butter of past episodes. You know, almost from the first plot beat, how this story is going to go: just take the Dr’s first scene when he enters a bar and, within seconds, is chatting to the bargirl in such a way that you know she’s going to end up the new companion, name-drops people from history just for the pure hell of it, says something eccentric and crazy, then works out that everyone is acting shifty because they’re scared of something (rather than because its Lancashire and people in pubs always tend to be a bit like that with oddly dressed strangers). The Shalka too are giant insects who are almost like those we’ve seen in Dr Who so many times before  but who still feel as if they’ve wandered in from some lesser scifi show like ‘Star Wars’ ‘Stargate’ or ‘Timeless’: they’re like a sentient version of the Wirrn, with a bit of Zarbi thrown in, exactly the sort of cliché someone who could draw anything on screen without worrying about rubber suits would come up with (even if they’re still a lot more interesting than their close cousins The Tritovores from ‘Planet Of The Dead’).

However the best of this story resembles ‘Rose’ and might have been more of an influence on Russell T than people realise (he was, after all, close to Paul Cornell, hence his invite to write two of the better received stories of the comeback) and you can tell that at its core this is a story being made by people as a labour of love who know their Who. The story sensibly doesn’t spend an eternity re-establishing old Drs and letting us catch up with the past for half the story – instead it gets on with it, while dropping big hints at some awful past catastrophe that took place in the past and shaken the Dr’s confidence (it’s written to be part of a series arc that never happened, with vague plans to have it be a companion who died sacrificing themselves for the Dr, although as written it could just as easily be the time war). This Dr is a spiky, grouchy, darker character, more ambiguous morally than any we’ve had before but not unlike the 9^th Dr to come, especially when he sometimes forgets himself and starts throwing Dry jokes in as if he’s a natural clown with the weight of the universe on his shoulders who, occasionally, forgets that he’s meant to be sad (very much how Christopher Eccleston will play the part). The plot revolves around the very contemporary companion (played, as well as such a sketched in character can be, by Sophie Okenodo long before she was a Hollywood star) who is either a calmer Ace or a more jumped-up Rose depending how you look at it. She’s a lot more promising than Dr Grace in the T movie anyway, it feels like she has a family and a life beyond what we see on screen, even if that life is just a few lines for now, seeming quite a lot like Rose at times. This is the first time a Dr Who story has been around since the invention of the mobile phone (something that would have changed almost all the ‘classic’ stories from the 20^th century in one way or another) and there’s a clever idea where Joe is worried about whether Alison will make it home if she runs off in the Tardis – so the Doctor points out it’s a time machine and she’s probably home right now; of course, she isn’t win when he promptly tries to ring her, pointing at a future Rose-like sub-plot where the Doctor fails in his promise to keep her safe (she’s still curious enough to leave anyway – not sure I would be!) Alison  even gets a bit of alien tech in their heads, just like in ‘The Long Game’.

There are bits of this story that are never actually tried again too, but should have been. The setting of my adopted home county of Lancashire is a neat touch (it makes a change from London), with 4000 holes, just like The Beatles once sang, only they’re all caused by the Shalka not the council and lots of fun snarky jokes  at our expense (‘I have a much bigger plan ‘What Yorkshire?!’) There are two very clever and very DWy twists that make the plot bearable too: The Shalka might live underground (just like the Silurians) and the Dr might try to broker a peace deal with them (just like the Silurians) and they might be the sort of clichéd beings that want to take over the Earth without quite knowing why (like practically every other Dr Who monster except The Silurians) but they’re a shadowy threat who attack their prey when they make noise. The tension, between a particularly noisy Doctor arriving and trying  to shock them into arriving and the sleepy village  who’ve learnt to stay quiet and have been walking on eggshells, is nicely handled, a neat idea quite unlike anything seen in the series before (and a clever subversion of the big booming explosive start to the special we expect, which starts quietly with everyone trying to keep still – the explosions come later).

The Shalka’s screaming is a clever idea too, the opposite of the usual idea where the companions scream at the monster, and it’s a little like the plot to ‘Fury From The Deep’ the wrong way round, where sentient seaweed was put in its place by the Dr’s screaming companion – here it’s the screams that scare the humans, with a sound that’s quite genuinely terrifying (and caused half the cast to get laryngitis). The Master too (played by Derek Jacobi some five years before he returned to the part, briefly, in ‘Utopia’) is not what he seems at first: the most memorable and unexpected part of the story by far is when he pulls his face off, Auton style, to reveal himself to be a robot (although it would have made more sense if he was actually an Auton). This Kamelion-like incarnation is intriguingly less of a baddy and more a sort of benign companion, stuck inside the Tardis and unable to leave (in a foreshadowing of what they tried with Missy in the 12^th Dr era, sort of). He’s fun too, much more so than he’s allowed to be the brief time Jacobi actually is The Master in ‘Utopia’, the snarling put-downs between Dr and Master very like the relationship between Derek Jaocbi and Ian McEwan’s very spiky Dry character in the series ‘Vicious’, who are so busy bitching at each other to cover up genuine affection its as if one heart loves each other and the other hate each other. There are some great, witty, very Dr Whoey lines almost smuggled into the generic plot too: ‘Oh sorry about the house’ says the Dr, nonchalantly, as he walks away from having destroyed Alison and Joe’s cottage they’ve risked their lives trying to keep safe, while another early scene has him sympathising with a homeless woman in the streets over not having a house and maybe having to live in her vehicle – he knows how that feels, after all. ‘What are you?’ Alison asks early on, in one of the story’s many clichéd lines. ‘Mildly annoyed’ is the Dr’s amusing reply. At another The Master muses on life as a robot: ‘Why did I choose existence and listening to the Doctor being right all the time, rather than a slow painful death?’ Set against this are some lines clearly there to shovel plot ideas in as the episodes were contracted though: ‘I just hope [Joe] doesn’t get killed because that would be so bad now things are so up in the air’ says Alison, reacting to certain death and alien invasion with all the urgency of someone attending a knitting group, while the Dr’s attempt to bring us up to speed with his UNIT days is all wrong: “I seem to attract the military. They’re either arresting me, making strong sweet tea, or killing my friends.” And, of course, that very military send-off: ‘I guess you just saved the universe Doctor. Good on ya!’  

For all its bright moments this is a story that ultimately falls as flat as the rather disappointing (and clearly low budget) 2D animation, without the depth of this series at its best in ways beyond the way it’s presented. The parts that thrill are only there for a few seconds and then they’re gone, while the fifteen minute format doesn’t quite work, the action interrupted by a cliffhanger every time it’s just started moving. A lot of this story relies on B movie clichés, from the Shalka on down, and the rest relies on Dr Who clichés, with more capturing and escaping that seems natural in such a rigid 75minute plot. The best moments have nothing to do with the plot at all: they’re the ones between the Dr and Alison, his eccentricity bouncing off her ordinariness, even if both halves are a bit broadly drawn in for now (you have to question, too, why this Dr whose so frustrated by humanity takes to her so readily given that the most time they share before he risks his life to save her are a few barbed comments: this is a Dr, after all, who is as spiky as we’ve seen him since he was Colin Baker, saving the universe wearily out of duty but trying to find every excuse not to and apparently hating all humans. He’s been in Lancashire before, then). There are plot holes big enough for a whole herd of Shalkas to pass through, the ending wrapped up in an all-too neat bow (as the Doctor – and you don’t really need a spoiler for this – does something clever and uses a black hole to suck the baddy out of existence, an idea that comes out of nowhere). There’s little here to keep you watching until the end except loyalty to the brand, which given that this story was meant to be away of gathering new fans who didn’t know the series is a bit of a handicap. Indeed, for all its criticisms, it should be remembered that this story has a very different audience to every other Dr Who story in this volume: this wasn’t some grand statement to make Dr Who for a whole new family audience to fall in love with, the way the two stories sandwiched either side of it were, This is a story that wasn’t aiming for the cosmos and a Saturday teatime family audience in the millions but a cult for the faithful and a few curious newbies, with an audience that only stretched as far as the BBC website, back in the day when the internet was still privy mostly to geeks and students rather than a natural part of everyday life and when most people’s technology just wasn’t up to watching it (I well remember my frustration trying to watch it on the beaten up computers at my university library when I should have been studying and waiting for each episode to upload for approximately twice the time it took to watch, because I didn’t have the internet at home till years later). It has a much smaller ambition and spectacle and has the feel of one of the extra-curricular Dr Who spin-offs, like the Big Finish audios, the comic strips or ‘New Adventures’ books than a ‘roper’ episode rather than the series proper, just one that happens to have visuals and audio at the same time. So does it count as proper Dr Who?  Not quite (its worth noting that, as yet, this story isn’t alongside other similarly extra-curricular Dr Who projects on the BBC i-player ‘Whnoiverse’) but at the same time its more deserving, and made with a lot more love, than some of the actual episodes (especially that McGann thing).

At the time it was glorious that we had any new Who at all and the shock, following the Paul McGann disaster, was that it turned out as being even halfway decent. It’s only since the all-singing all-dancing comeback that it seems like a mild disappointment, a cul-de-sac that it was probably for the best the series never followed for good (because had we not ended up back on the main road and DW had continued being made for such a small audience, it would have arguably been at least another seven years before it came back at all). Like all Dr Who animations (including the ones for missing episodes and the twin 10^th Dr stories to come in 2007 and 2009) I’m not entirely sure it’s a medium that works for Who anyway: so much of this series relies on the things between the lines and even the worst actor in the world conveys more with their eyes than a flat talking squiggle. The animation is pretty basic, bordering on poor, too, the animators with a ruthlessly cut budget sticking too closely to the faces of the actors and the B movie monster rulebook to deliver on the promise of the format and do imaginative things they couldn’t do with actors. Future DW animations ‘The Infinity Quest’ and ‘Dreamland’ look similarly low budget, with characters who move just as awkwardly and only seem to have two or three expressions but ‘Shalka’ sometimes doesn’t even match that – the only interesting bit of animation is the Shalka itself, the ultimate in bug-eyed aliens (although it doesn’t do anything interesting and the design a little too obviously ripped off the ‘Alien’ franchise). The Dr, especially, looks all wrong: a gothic vampire with perpetually raised eyebrows without the magical twinkle in the eye all the Drs, however different, share. Lancashire, particularly, is all flat and beige and straight lines which doesn’t feel like a real place at all (actually come to think of it maybe this part of the animation is bang on!...) All that said, though, its at least the equal of the bigger budget ‘Infinite Quest’ and ‘Dreamland’, stories which have far better animation and more space to do Dr Who things in the sub-plots, but without this story’s stronger ideas and occasionally sparkling dialogue. Twenty years ago this looked like the future. Now it seems more awkwardly like the past than almost any other Dr Who story, made at a time when this technology was new rather than commonplace, following rules to the letter because everything is so new that a modern production would have fun breaking. Like this Doctor, its hearts are in the right place, but it’s also stranded a very long way from home.     

 + I’ve given him a bit of a pasting as ‘The Great Intelligence’ in the stories ‘The Snowmen’ and ‘The Name Of the Doctor’ but actually Richard E Grant is an excellent Doctor, more natural in the role than his ‘Withnail and I’ co-star Paul McGann (though I would have liked to have seen more than one story by both to be sure; Paul found his voice on Big Finish as a nervier yet friendlier Dr than the rather mad one we got on screen though it took him maybe thirty stories to find it) and Grant is far far better as a two-dimensional voiceover than he is in person as a three-dimensional baddy, raising his game whenever co-stars Okenodo or Jaocbi are in the same scene with him (even if he still sounds embarrassed talking to monsters). Like the plot too is like a mixture of the Drs he came between, mixing the Edwardian vibes of McGann and the ‘midlife crisis through trauma’ of Eccleston. Grant nails the eccentricity and unpredictability of the Dr and makes the most of the lines that enable him to do more than just talk about the plot, making him darker but still likeable, with less of an extreme swim between those two halves than Eccleston manages. You totally believe that’s he’s an impossibly old alien whose seen everything, but who longs for the simpler life of his companions he can never have and I would have been quite happy to have had him around as the Dr for a while longer. Oddly, Russell T wasn’t a fan (though he liked this story, which is just as well given how many its of it he recycled in his first year), calling Grant’s performance ‘lazy’ and ‘phoned in’, the main reason why ‘Shalka’ never got a reference in the modern series. That’s a bit unfair; I’d say he’s the best thing in it by miles, he’s just playing a Dr whose maybe smaller and more muted so that his extremes of noise forcing the Shalka into revealing themselves come over more violently. Interestingly, little did anyone know it but there is a future Dr lurking in the voice cast: David Tennant plays the caretaker of an army base who only gets two lines before he snuffs it (a part that wasn’t even big enough to be credited on the original release, despite him being, even in 2003, one of the biggest names in the cast list). At the time this was the closest David had come to being in his favourite programme – he got a part in Big Finish story ‘Medicinal Purposes’ off the back of it in 2004 while playing Casanova in Russell T’s last series before Dr Who and from there it was a short hop to the Tardis doors.

 - There’s a point when The Shalka, who for the first half of the story are mildly interesting in a scary distant animalistic alien threat kind of a way, start talking about the plot in proper BBC English as if they’re sitting down with the Dr to have tea and crumpets because the plot needs someone to reveal something about their plan, done in such a clumsy way that it makes you want to throw something at your laptop.
BEST QUOTE: The Doctor: ‘I’m just popping out do so something…mildly eccentric’