Shada
(planned for season 17, Dr 4 with Romana II, planned for 19/1/1980-23/2/1980, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Douglas Adams, writer: Douglas Adams, director: Pennant Roberts)
Rank: 3
The Shada
Redemption:
‘Dear fellas, I
can’t believe how time doesn’t fly on the inside. I dreamed of punting on a
Cambridge river once when I was a kid, marvellous things that were everywhere.
But now I’m stuck here, away from everyone else tearing around in such a damn
hurry. The parole board got me in this cell after helping a Dalek with the
prison plumbing when its plunger got stuck to a wall. It’s hard work. I try to
keep up, but my hands and brain were meant for books, not menial work. I don’t
think the Judoon prison officer likes me very much. I keep thinking of my own
kids who put me here, the timelords, might show up and just say ‘hello’ but
they never do. I have trouble sleeping. Bad dreams. I keep feeling like I’m
falling. Through time and space. I wake up scared, thinking of the life I
should be leading, in quiet contemplation, at a university on Earth. Sometimes
it takes me a while to realise where I am when I wake up. That I’m sharing a
cell with a Voord. I don’t like it here. I’ve decided not to stay. And the
best thing about being a space-time traveller is they’ll never be able to find
me. I doubt they’ll kick up a fuss. Not for an old timelord like me on his last
regeneration. Although I will miss the prison tea. Now, was it one lump or
three?!?’
There are some guidebooks
that will tell you ‘Shada’ doesn’t count as ‘proper’ Dr Who because it was
never finished. There are others who will tell you that, even if it had been
finished, it wasn’t very good anyway and the colossal interest there has been
in the story over the years is precisely because it was never made, not least
by its own author who dashed it out in less than a week. There are others fans
who say that, even if it had been completed, it’s so different every other DW
story that it would exist in its own little vacuum like ‘The Timeless Child’ or ‘The TV Movie’ that we try not to think
about too much and should never be mentioned again. Even allowing for the fact
that one of the great things about this series is the variety which means
everyone gets to have an opinion about this show, they’re all wrong. ‘Shada’
isn’t just one of the most brilliant Dr Who stories ever, it’s one of the most
Dr Whoy Dr Who stories ever. It’s like a summary of all the other 334-odd
reviews I’ve written, where an eccentric outsider who defies crumbling
oppressive institutions is chased by another eccentric outsider who was so evil
his own people had to lock him up, in search of a third eccentric outsider who
was exiled to Earth and who has made a home away from home within our own
crumbling archaic institutions where he can be as eccentric as he likes and no
one will notice. It’s the tale of good versus evil and individuals of the
present versus archaic institutions but where the line between all of these
gets blurry. A story that asks big questions about mercy and justice and forgiveness
and whether a reformed criminal who did horrific things so long ago that he
can’t remember them is more deserving of redemption than some wannabe newbie
who knowingly causes hurt. A story that asks whether the extraordinary can be
defeated by the courage of ordinary people who were having an ordinary day and
fully expected to lead out ordinary lives until the Doctor’s extraordinary
world came crashing in on them head-first and turned everything they knew
upside down. It’s a tale of how learning and education is sacred across the
universe, but how knowledge itself isn’t what saves us, because it can be used
for good or ill – its wisdom that makes the world a better place (a lesson all
the more resonant given that its set in the grounds of one of Britain’s two
oldest universities by a local lad who would have watched all the stuck-up
people arriving in his home town). It’s a tale that no other scifi series would
deliver, of impossible mundane objects given the greatest power, from floating
orbs to books, with chases not in space shuttles but on bicycles and gondolas. Mostly,
though ‘Shada’ is a tale of morality and how only by working together and
bringing out the best in each other can we defy the worst, a thread that’s been
running through Dr Who since its earliest day. It’s a story every bit as thrilling
and funny and thought-provoking and as downright bonkers as any in Dr Who’s
long history, intended as the grand finale for two of the unsung heroes of Dr
Who in the 1970s, Graham Williams and Douglas Adams, who had saved enough
budget to make this closing epic every bit as big and important as it deserved
to be.
And for years it brought
me such pain that such an important part of this series, it’s quiet two
hearstbeat, was missing so that we couldn’t see it – a little like all those lost
black-and-white stories, only worse because there wasn’t even the hope of it
being recovered in some strange and mysterious way in the future. Because they
never finished making it, with Shada a victim not of Krags or criminal
timelords or even time in an abstract sense, but clocks. Yes clocks. The
production team had got as far as the extensive location filming in Cambridge
and the longest of three planned studio blocks (some 77 minutes recorded out of
approximately 130) when ‘Shada’ was halted by a technician’s strike that meant
the studios were unusable across TV centre. It was a strike about workload that
had been brewing for a long time (something Dr Who had accidentally added to by
requiring two lighting riggers to work overtime during the location night
shoot) but which came to head over, of all things, the extra duties needed
looking after the wind-up clock on the set of toddler favourite series ‘Playschool’.
The cast and crew had just arrived back at TV centre to start the second run of
filming and camera rehearsals had gone fine in the morning, but when everyone
turned after lunch they found the studio shut and lights out. Usually when this
sort of thing happened in years past a re-mount would have been booked within
the next story so that we’d have got the ending in some form, even if it was
rushed and incomprehensible (‘The Power Of
Three’ springs to mind), but this strike was a deep one that ran across
more programmes than usual and given that it was taking place in early December
the BBC wanted to prioritise it’s high profile Christmas specials (Morecambe
and Wise got the Dr Who studio, for instance, when the strike ended a day after
‘Shada’ was meant to be completed). Usually a delay this serious would see a
story shuffled to the following year (that’s what happened with ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’) but this was a Douglas
Adams script with a lot of input from producer Graham Williams and for the
first time in the show’s history men in both roles were leaving the show at the
same time.
By this point Douglas had
already got fed up of the series and the long hours he was working on honing
other people’s scripts instead of the long hours when he should have been
working on his own (but was more usually in the bath trying to avoid writing at
all). He’d been unlucky enough to have been unemployed for years before scoring
his two biggest successes back to back, hired to write and then script-edit Dr
Who on the back of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’, which had become bigger
than he’d ever realised when he’d accepted the Who job. Left to his own devices
Douglas liked the show and would have stayed longer, but he was already very
late for the book adaptation of the first series, he’d already had to cancel
the first recording sessions for his second radio series (sheepishly admitting
to his producer that he hadn’t actually written any of it yet). He’d tried to
soften the blow by getting his old flatmate and collaborator John Lloyd (yes,
the QI guy) to write for the show and maybe take over, but that story ‘The
Doomsday Contract’ been a non-starter that hadn’t got past the scene breakdown
and other scripts from friends of his or the show had fallen apart too (‘Child
prodigy’ by a new writing partnership Beaton and Dumant, ‘The Secret Of
Cassius’ by a teen fan Andrew Smith who’ll finally get his big break with ‘Full Circle’, ‘Erinella’ by director
Pennant Roberts, ‘Valley Of The Lost by old producer Phillip Hinchcliffe and an
untitled story about Halley’s comet by scifi writer James Follett). So Douglas decided to write the finale himself,
using it as his big finale before leaving the script editing job after one of
the shortest but busiest runs of anyone in that role (he’s already written ‘City Of Death’ at short notice this same
year). As for Graham, he’d loved his work on the show but had run out of steam,
deciding to quit after one too many fights with Tom Baker (who was reportedly
devastated at his leaving). While Douglas got on with the work he should have
been doing, the producer’s last days on the show were spent sadly hanging
around the studio doors and filling in paperwork (as cast still got paid if
they turned up), with what should have been one of the show’s greatest triumphs
one of its biggest anticlimaxes (and forget some of the reactionary things you
might have read, all the cast loved this story and knew it was special when
they were making it – and trust me, Tom Baker especially didn’t say that about
many scripts). This story would have been John Nathan-Turner’s last job as
production unit manager before becoming the new producer and he was fond of it,
sending a request in to the BBC to have it made before the cast moved on or
were unavailable, offering to make it as an extra story in his season or a
special if he got a bit of extra budget to cover the new filming but they
refused. JNT, who’d worked hard on what ‘his’ year of Dr Who would look like
and already stung by the BBC shortening the episodes per season, simply didn’t
have room for it. For the first time Dr Who had run out of time. Only JNT’s
quick thinking, officially asking for a ‘preservation order’ on the surviving
footage, meant that any of this story survived at all back in the last days
before home video when the BBC were still merrily junking parts of our heritage
to make way for football or something equally useless.
Soon the only sign fans
had that ‘Shada’ wasn’t just the fever dream of the actor’s wonky and/or boozy
memories was a couple of scenes cleverly re-used in ‘The Five Doctors’ to cover up the fact Tom
Baker didn’t want to do that story, where a Gallifreyan timescoop supposedly
picks the 4th Doctor and Romana up during the start of this story
and preventing them from having it (presumably they’re dropped down at the
start of ‘The Leisure Hive’ and never
actually have it – or at least that’s what the Paul McGann audio version hints
at). That and the lo-fi bootlegs of the
rushes that began to circulate during fan get togethers that were fascinating,
even unfinished with unreadable shaky text for the missing bits and without the
special effects or music. So you can imagine how thrilled I was when ‘Shada’
was finally released, as a super-expensive video in 1992 with typically
eccentric Tom Baker links for the missing scenes as he taunts a kraag at the
British Museum of Moving Image. Admittedly the music was a bit weird (Keff
‘Cacophony’ McCulloch claimed he was doing what Dudley Simpson, also working on
his last story, would have done – but not without travelling to the 1990s and
using it’s cheap synthesisers he wouldn’t!) and it was still hard to tell what
was going on, but my goodness the footage that was shot was good: Tom Baker and
Lalla Ward at the top of their game! A perfect supporting cast! The single best
use of location filming in the series’ history! And that script – even
unfinished it made more sense than most. The inclusion of the script with the
video (apparently signed off by Douglas in error amongst a batch of papers for
other things – he was so mortified he gave all his royalties to Comic Relief so
at least something good would come of it all – sadly there isn’t a pdf of it on
the DVD as I’d hoped).) was tantalising though: even as an unfinished rehearsal
script rather than the finished product, weirdly, it was fabulous. What a shame
we couldn’t see it all. So you can imagine how over the moon I was when ‘Shada’
was released on DVD in 2017 with ‘proper’ music this time and a more accurate
script filling in the gaps. And how over the universe I was when they finally
made it ‘whole’ in 2021, a mere forty-one years later, using even more
eccentric live action Tom Baker links, animation in the style of the completed
‘missing episodes’ and all the surviving actors returning to finally tell the
story complete. Yes I now own four different versions of ‘Shada’ but I don’t
care – there’s no other colour Dr Who story I watch more than this one anyway.
I’m thrilled over any restrictions of space or time, sitting here in November
2023, that so many fans get to see ‘Shada’ as part of the overall collection on
the BBC i-player’s ‘Whoniverse’, back where it always belonged as another story
to be judged against others, located in between ‘The
Horns Of Nimon’ and ‘The Leisure Hive’,
so that this story can dance and sing and live on down the ages. It feels like
a Dr Who tale all in itself, one that defies the logical progression of time.
After all, so many fans till now have given this story a miss: it was always a
pricey DVD/video/blu-ray and fan response is mixed, with ‘Shada’ dismissed as a
not very good, not very Dr Who story only aficionados and completists ever got
round to seeing but now it can be judged like the others, as another Dr Who
story.
And what a story!
Douglas’ original plan was to make the Doctor ‘retire’ along with him, putting
his feet up for good in a Sherlock Holmes bee-keeping weay, only to be tempted
back for so many ‘one last adventures’ that eventually he gets the bug to set
off all over again. Williams worried that it sounded a bit too much like
sending the show up, to which Douglas is said to have replied ‘How is it possible to send up a series about a
man who flies around the universe in a police box defending evil, armed only with
a long scarf, a bag of jelly babies and a robot dog?’ Then he went away and
read the paper and came across a story about the Yorkshire Ripper who had just
been caught and the debate about what should be done about him. Some
politicians were talking about bringing back the death penalty in England just
for this one case (a few suggested using it as a deterrent to the IRA bombers
too) and a lot of the public was supporting it, though others felt it made the
law as bad as the murderers and that it was better to lock them up and forget
about them. Douglas began to wonder what the timelords might do. It seemed more
in keeping with Gallifreyan lore to simply ignore the problem and get rid of
it, but equally giving someone with thirteen lives who changed character with
each one ‘life imprisonment’ seemed especially cruel. Douglas decided that the
very Gallifreyan way would be to send the worst prisoners to a special prison
so secret that everyone would have their memories of it wiped so that they
couldn’t be embarrassed by it and came up with a criminal who was both on the
run and settled in his new home. Knowing the way Douglas’ mind worked, being ordered
back to ‘work’ rather than writing about a fun holiday for him and The Doctor
would make him automatically think of a prison anyway!
To take those revelations
in order, it’s a great and very Dr Whoy idea to have a plot revolve around a
book. While other scifi franchises are both about and for people who have never
read a book in their life or only read comics and/or scifi books, it’s a given
fact that The Doctor has read every book going and that if he’s your ‘hero’
then chances are you have too. There’s a reason they novelised each and every
Dr Who story up to 1996 when most other franchises stopped at one or two; it’s
because Whovians are trained to read. Not just Dr Who books and not even scifi:
Sydney Newman wanted this series to be educational and for children to go to
the library and look something up after it had been in an episode, whether it
was about science, history or simply people. While the educational remit got
lost to some extent that idea of The Doctor as a bookworm who solved things not
because he walked around with weapons but because he was very clever and knew
things runs through the series and rubs off on a lot of the fanbase, who by and
large share the same curiosity for how the world and the people in it work and
the same thirst for knowledge. It’s more buried in the modern series perhaps
but it’s there too, far more than other shows that stick to a rigid formula and
encourages the viewer to learn about all sorts of things they might never have
heard of in any other way. As a result so many Dr Who stories have been about
how knowledge is key to understanding life and planets, but they’ve nearly
always been about aliens coming to destroy us or searching for an actual
physical tangible object – having that information be contained within a book,
something that’s interactive and depends on the reader coming to it in the ‘right’
way to be used properly, is such a delicious idea. Also, to have an alien come
to destroy Gallifrey via Earth through it (instead of the other way around)
allows Douglas to write in all the usual Dr Who formulas, but from the ‘Inside
out’. As a result we get to see all sorts of in-jokes about how the usual Dr Who
world ‘works’: Skagra the villain ends up doing what the Dr usually does,
growing increasingly impatient at the eccentrically dressed locals who are
either ignorant or nonchalant towards him and misunderstand the dangers when he
tries to be all powerful, the epic fight to the death takes place not in Bessie
or some space rocket but on a humble bicycle and the Doctor and Romana get to
pilot a Tardis in one of the most dangerous chase scenes ever seen in the
series from the comfort of Chronotis’ own arm-chairs. Even the book, though it
looks like any other book, is impossibly different, breaking the carbon dating
machine and being negative 20,000 years old (Nice to know they still have books
not ebooks that far in the future!) Equally we see the conventions of our
normal world turned on their head: the two Cambridge students are amongst the
cleverest people in their chosen scientific field; they’re on post-graduate
courses in one of England’s two most prestigious colleges so their knowledge is
as up to date as it gets. Yet The Doctor turns everything they ever knew in
hours (and has to ‘soup up’ poor Clare’s brain to get it up to a Gallifreyan
standard. One wonders if it fully wears off after the story ends or whether
there’ a residue she has to ignore for the rest of her studies). A lot of Dr Who
stories tell us that knowledge is power but ‘Shada’ is the only one that means
it so literally, something to be treasured above all else, to be savoured, for
its ability to wipe out planets with a single world, where the right book in
the right hands can be the single most important object on a planet leading to
whole new worlds of information and where bad people will go to very desperate
lengths to suppress other people knowing things.
Douglas clearly loves
books and yet there’s a slight dig at both his and anyone else’s student days.
We saw when Romana first turned up at the Doctor’s side (in ‘The Ribos Operation’) that she was book
smart, but he’s world smart, clever in another way. There’s a bigger world out
there, Douglas seems to be saying, away from our books and learning and if
humans only knew what the bigger picture was we’d never bother to learn
anything again – which is ironic, because it’s our ability to learn and adapt
to new knowledge is what makes the human race better than animals and the
ability to adapt from new information is what allows us to grow. Skagra the
‘real’ villain is evil because he doesn’t learn – he has that same rigid
mindset of someone who thinks they know everything already and people only need
to know what he does. Skagra doesn’t learn the information he needs, he takes
it, stealing from some of the greatest minds of the future (and presumably risking
robbing it of several inventions, books and theories along the way). He’s the
scary tutor who wants you to remember everything he tells you and to never
think for yourself, soomeone who wants everyone to conform, to be just like him
(Douglas’ stage directions for his first scene say that he ‘walks with the
arrogance of someone who doesn’t know what the word ‘arrogance’ means’). He ‘loses’
in this story despite his amazing scientific knowledge because he can’t adapt,
he’s thrown off by chasing three eccentric timelords who are full of surprises
and turn his carefully controlled box of logic on its head. Douglas’ point is
that respecting someone for knowledge is not enough: they have to be wise with
it, to be open to learning because it never ends. Cambridge is the perfect
setting for the era when the Dr is still trying to be a sort of teacher with
Romana as his pupil, but in a story where knowledge isn’t enough to save you
and even the oldest teachers can be fair game to mindless thugs like Skagra. As
a side effect of this there are a lot of delightful and very Dr Whoy jokes
against institutions and authorities in ‘Shada’: it’s very Douglas that the
timelords, who are still seen as an all-powerful and conquering race in 1980,
are shown to be forgetful and flawed, while the story ends with a policeman
scratching his head over reports that a Cambridge room can possibly go
‘missing’(the irony being that the story’s criminal is finally arrested not by
his own people for crimes he really did commit but for a crazy sounding story
here on Earth that he didn’t). Along the way we get an internal logic that only
a fan of Cambridge uni favourites the Goon Show could have written: a logical
computer is defeated by its own logic and a kind word, as the Doctor persuades
it that if it’s all powerful master wants him dead then there’s no way he could
possibly be alive and so it doesn’t need to actually kill him. There’s also
poor put-upon Wilkins, a college dean so used to the Doctor’s crazy comings and
goings that he knows the Doctor’s movements better than he does (even the times
he’s turned up with a ‘different face’). Then there are Douglas’ digs at old
humans traditions that make no sense now the context of what they once meant
has been lost (may week really did used to take place in may week, until I was
moved until after final exams in June, but the name somehow stuck).
The revelation that we’re
inside a Tardis is played to perfection and Douglas makes great use of the
Tardis as more than just a rocketship the way some writers do: here it’s a home
away from home and a library is the perfect disguise for something that’s
bigger on the inside, given how many different worlds are carried around in
books sitting shoulder to shoulder on our bookshelves. A whole pile of them
mentioned and debated by the Dr and Romana while searching for the rare and
dangerous text ‘The Worshipful And Ancient Law Of Gallifrey’, a mismatch of old
modern and not-yet-written volumes that any timelord would have. The scene
where the Tardis disappears, confusing poor Wilkins as to why there’s suddenly
an empty shell in the professor’s rooms, makes for one of the all-time great
comedy moments too. Not to mention the gag about the milk being twenty years
old, but kept fresh in a statis chamber. Although the funniest scene is The
Doctor, after years of struggling with the Tardis, struggling with a simply
punt on a river, much to Romana’s bemusement (though The Doctor’s scripted to
be hopeless, Tom Baker really was – he had lots of extra rehearsal and still
the only time he successfully managed to manoeuvre the boat in the right
direction was the one time the cameras weren’t rolling! To be fair the crowds
of children giggling at him probably didn’t help. Those things are harder than
they look too: I’d have fallen in).
It’s not all jokes
though, despite Douglas’ reputation for never taking anything seriously and a
lot of Shade is tense and at least heading towards scary, despite the threat
being more abstract than usual. Rather than a killer book that hurts you by
dropping on your foot, however, the physical threat in this story is a simple
sphere (a sort of balloon attached to a rod that’s surprisingly effective on
screen, growing and shrinking at a sneaky press of a button by the actors even
though it’s so incongruous it totally looks like a special effect added in post
production...until you remember this story didn’t get far enough to have any
post production). The effect it has is agonising: it doesn’t just kill, it
takes away a person’s intelligence, so that all that learned wisdom, whether it
be in person like the Dr and Romana or at universities like Chris and his
nearly sort-of though-he-hasn’t-got-round-to-telling-her-yet girlfriend Clare,
is gone for good. In a series like Dr Who knowledge is the single greatest
weapon in the universe and having that taken away from you, to forget who you
are and what the world is, becomes more terrifying than death or regeneration.
On that score, together with Chronitis’ dottiness (he’s clearly at the end of a
long life) ‘Shada’ also feels like a comment on dementia, on the tragedy of
losing access to who you are. It’s another reason why Chronotis seems so sweet:
he genuinely can’t remember being anything else (that great line about not
remembering the sieve his memory is like is a Douglas injoke, from his first published
work, a short story in a 1965 edition of ‘The Eagle and Boy’s World’, when
Douglas was all of twelve).
I like to think, too,
that Douglas might have been having a little dig here with the football-like
sphere: sports are the antithesis of many an intellect and writer, who don’t
understand why they have to waste half their education slogging away chasing a
bit of leather up and down a muddy field when there are worlds to uncover and
explore – and gangly nearly seven-foot uncoordinated Douglas was, it’s fair to
say, not a natural athlete. He might well have shared with me the secret
feeling that people turn to sports in their youth because education and
knowledge isn’t taught properly, in a flawed educational system that lets rogue
timelords sit in power over us without question and its only fans of series
like Dr Who that slip through the cracks and realise how valuable and wonderful
and brilliant education can be that see this, worshipping intelligence and
originality instead of worshipping braindead sports stars who can’t see beyond
the end of the football pitch. Too many brilliant minds are sucked dry by
believing that there is nothing more important in the world than football and that
the world beneath our football boots is all that there is (just don’t tell Matt
Smith who was very nearly a national player till he got a back injury and
became an actor!) For why should anyone want to rule the universe or ignore the
universe when they can explore and learn about how utterly wonderfully
brilliant it is, like the Dr? That’s the message that runs through Dr Who like
rock but no other story says it quite as passionately or as clearly as ‘Shada’
does. Skagra’s still intense immovable psychopath is a good match for the 4th
Dr’s wild flippant eccentric, a symbol of the sort of rigid unthinking
authority Douglas would have been used to at Cambridge and its very Dr Who to
have a villain who wants to shape a universe to look like him that’s actually
efficient and reliable but who also sucks the joy and individuality out of
life; he’s a less shooty Dalek from the same Hitler school of fascism: Skagra’s
taunt to Romana in episode three that the only alternative to his purpose is
‘entropy’ caused by dissident outlaws who should be wiped out is very 1930s
Germany, not least because Skagra himself is a rebel figure not an authority
one (to quote another Dr Who story, what is he going to do with people like
himself who fight against his authority?) ‘Shada’ itself is a fascinating
concept, a prison where all the worst criminals in Dr Who are kept who are too
dangerous to be let loose flying around in time (we were due to see a Zygon,
Cybermen and Dalek in the cells in the script, but sadly they never filmed
those bits). We already saw in ‘The War Games’
what the timelords do to errant but harmless rebels like the Doctor, so you can
only imagine what they must do to real criminals – and what a threat Salyavin
must be. There is, though, a major twist in the middle that’s rather been lost
to the days when most people tend to read about ‘Shada’ in books first before
seeing it (so more major spoiler right here). For half the story you’re meant
to think that nice old Chronotis is squeaky clean and Skagra must be mastermind
criminal Salyavin. But of course he isn’t, Chronotis is, because Skagra is too
thick to be a mastermind criminal wanted across apace and time – it takes
someone with brains to buck the system and fight it from the outside and while
we never do find out what he’s done Chronotis is a threat to the timelords more
because of what he knows that could be a danger to them than what he did (the
way sadly that a lot of legal systems work based around legal rather than moral
justice - there are always a lot of law students at Cambridge too).
We’ve rather lost the
shock of the revelation, now that most people tend to come to this story after
reading about it in guidebooks, but it’s is one of the best twists in the
series. You spend most of the story thinking he’s the Doctor’s soulmate, someone
who ran away from the rigid rules of Gallifrey to a place of knowledge and
learning and even before he knows he’s in Salyavin’s presence the Doctor talks
about him with some awe, as someone who was brave enough to break the rules
rather than a dangerous criminal, a charismatic outlaw disobeying the rules for
all the right reasons, in the ‘Robin Hood’ mould (which makes his later behaviour
in ‘Robot Of Sherwood’ all the weirder). He
isn’t The Master or The Meddling Monk in hiding, he’s not an evil villain who
wants to uproot the place he lives and rule it through terror, he’s just a nice
old man living a quiet life out amongst his books, the equivalent of the Russian
spies living out a quiet cold war life in Britain (where quite a few were
granted safe passage in the 1960s and 1970s in return for selling out their
Russian paymasters; if this was a new Who story they’d have lobbed in a sub
plot about him being poisoned with his library door handle to make the point
even clearer). We never fully find out what Salyavin did or even which
regeneration he was in when he committed his crimes (after the 6th Dr and The
War Doctor, not to mention Missy being a version of The Master who tried to
become good, its clear that a timelord’s morality changes along with their
personality) and the worst we see Chronotis do is be late handing a book back
late (even in the Dr Who universe that’s usually just a fine). We can’t
bring ourselves to see him punished, especially when he ‘dies’ during the
course of the story (something that was meant to be definitive, but Douglas
liked the character so much he kept writing him back in, having Clare
accidentally bring him back to life by fiddling with the Tardis controls – this
part makes most sense if you assume his ‘soul’ was on its way to the
Gallifreyan matrix but hadn’t made it yet, the same way people ‘die’ on
operating tables and report coming back to life before they follow the clear
white light all the way to Heaven). It’s Skagra who really ought to be locked
up of course, someone who was born evil, even if he’s so hopeless he doesn’t
actually manage to do anything evil. Skagras are two a penny but Chronotises
are rare and, like the Doctor, don’t belong on a world full of people with
power turning a blind eye to corruption because they’re always going to see the
bigger picture and fight back (and, like a lot of the best Dr Who stories, this
one urges us to follow the Dr and be like him rather than a unfeeling Skagra,
even if it ends up with us being persecuted for it like Chronotis). The Professor
is clearly no longer any harm to anyone, if indeed he ever was, and is actually
doing a lot of good by passing on his knowledge and enthusiasm to the students
in his care; by contrast Skagra is evil and needs to be locked up for the good
of everyone else, even if he’s too incompetent to have actually done anything. There’s
no such thing as a one-size fits-all criminal and a lot of criminal actions
were only seen that way in hindsight anyway. Just look at the Humans that would
have been in Shada had the script been filmed as intended: larger than life
people like Genghis Khan, Boadicea, Lucretia Borgia, Emperor Nero (see ‘The Romans’) and Rasputin (really the Master?
See ‘Power Of the Doctor’): not your
cold-blooded killers, more your imaginative dictators, with debate raging about
how ‘evil’ or ‘good’ they really were. It’s
an interesting take on capital punishment and how people can change – literally
in a timelord’s case - contrasting a repentant criminal mastermind against a
hapless wannabe who really does mean to cause harm. There are different levels of
criminals and not all deserve prison. In that sense ‘Shada’ is like a less
abstract ‘The Mind Of Evil’, although rather
than seeing evil impulses as something separate to individuals that spurs them
on it suggests that there’s a little evil in all of us. Even the people in
charge of setting up the ‘Playschool’ clock (honestly, all those pro-union Dr
Who stories then this happens!)
As well as brilliant
themes this is a story littered with great characters, exceptionally cast:
Denis Carey is mildly disappointing in his other Dr Who roles (‘Keeper Of Traken’
‘Timelash’) but he’s exceptional
as the sort of dusty crusty lovable professor you long to have for real, so
absent-minded he can’t even remember the proper analogy for how absent-minded
he is and the moment when he dies (or so it seems) is properly
tear-jerking. Christopher Neame as Skagra is often picked on by other reviewers
but I think he’s great as a contrast to the other more emotional actors, stiff
and tightly controlled and serious to a fault, unable to understand any of the
wild goose chases the Dr leads him on. The students, who could have been simple
ciphers, get a lot of character, Clare being the more naturally heroic gutsy
one (she’s Liz Shaw mark II), while Chris is clearly Douglas writing his
younger self into the story as a passionate science nerd who ends up doing all
the scientific pontificating the Doctor normally would – who is then forever
being told he’s got it wrong! Even the minor role of Wilkins is deliciously
played by Gerald Campion, once TV’s Billy Bunter (see ‘The Celestial Toymaker’), with just the
right amount of eye-rolling (Baker was thrilled when he found out as it was one
of his favourite programmes as a boy – and even more thrilled when he found out
Campion was a distant relative of his hero Charlie Chaplin). Even better is
what this story does for the regulars; Tom Baker clearly adores letting his
eccentricity loose and laughing at quaint English customs and is never wittier
or snarkier than here, a bohemian student let lose in a real student world,
really raising his game now he at last has a script worthy of it. Lalla Ward’s Romana
gets even more to do than he does, with the air of someone who’s in on the
single funniest joke in the universe and delighting in telling it to people who
just won’t get it. What’s more their combined chemistry leaps out the screen:
this is, by all accounts, the last of their ‘loved up stories’ when the two
actors were very much an ‘item’ (maybe on screen too: note how the first thing
Skagra’s sphere picks up from the Dr is a picture of Romana, whose the
‘dominant thought’ in his mind, rather than say The Tardis or K9), before the
realities of seeing each other outside work and the frustrations of their last
year together under new management get in the way of one of the most unusual
courtships in all of time and space (there was another unusual courtship, too,
with Chris actor Daniel Hill later meeting production assistant Olivia (nee
Bazalgette) on this story during location filming in Cambridge and later marrying
and having a family together. Ahhh). Even K9 enjoys one of his best stories,
being used the way he always should have been, simultaneously as comedy relief
who’s still the cleverest person in the room even in Cambridge that still no
one listens to and doing all the things that the plot needs someone to do in
order to free up the Doctor and Romana to run around madly having fun.
If there’s a fault, well,
it’s nobody’s fault (except, maybe, a misguided clock technician who was living
off a pittance in 1980) and they do their best to get away with it, but even
the finished version never feels quite finished. The switch between live action
and animation is jarring (even if the voice overdubs are seamless, the actors
sounding as if they haven’t aged in decades – and a quick shout out to that
glorious last scene of a 2017 Tom Baker emerging from under the Tardis console
to give us one last big grin that I find even more emotional than his cameo in
‘The Day Of The Doctor’). The story does
rather give out a little in its last third too (the part that was never
finished, mostly), reverting to a template Dr Who story with monsters after
two-thirds of a story showing just how far everyone can get away with not
needing one. An invisible spaceship is a bit of a budget copout too, though I
suspect the shots of Skagra and later our friends disappearing into thin air
would have been quite something if finished in 1980 with contemporary
technology (rather than 21st century that doesn’t quite fit).
Mostly, though, ‘Shada’
is a gem, a masterpiece of comic timing that’s only ever a few minutes away
from a perfect belly laugh but one where the comedy is a side effect of the
drama, not getting in the way that it does in contemporary stories (such s the
two either side of it especially) in a story that’s still deeply serious about
the bigger points its making. It’s one of those Dr Who adventures that’s a
complete and utter thrill from beginning to end, with some of Dr Who’s scariest
moments, funniest lines, biggest concepts and finest acting in its entire sixty
year run, all somehow making sense nestling against each other in the same
story. There has been debate ever since it was made about whether ‘Shada’ is
‘canon’ or not, something complicated by the fact that little bit was recycled
in ‘The Five Doctors’ (does that mean
the Dr and Romana were pulled by the timescoop just when they were about to
have this adventure so they never actually had it? Or were they dropped back
into place, their memories wiped, straight back again?) and a Big Finish audio
adventure that teamed Romana up with the 8th Dr (can you have the same
adventure twice without noticing?) No less a person than Douglas Adams himself
rather killed off the cult growing round this story by saying that he made it
in a rush and he was kind of glad no one saw it. But literary geniuses are no
guide to the power of their work sometimes or the best advocates of the power
that words can have (a very Shada theme) and Douglas wasn’t one of those
annoying writers who boasted about their work even when they knew it was
substandard: he underplayed everything he wrote in interviews, very much
including his Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To the Galaxy series (and anyway if Douglas
had really hated ‘Shada’ he wouldn’t have recycled so much of it into
Hitch-Hikers volumes 3 and 4 or the two under-rated Dirk Gently’s Holistic
Detective Agency books). There’s also been a reactionary push against the
reputation this story once had from fans who question whether this story fits,
whether it deserves a place in the canon, whether its worthy of all the many
attempts to re-make it down the years (even though it keeps getting better with
each version; by the time hologram-actors come in around 2050 and the missing
scenes are re-created seamlessly it will be recognised where it should be as
one of the best Dr Whos of them all). More than that, there’s even been a push
about whether this story is truly funny or not. I like to think that’s just an
automatic reaction against something that people still haven’t seen properly
the way it was intended, a story which most everyone would have loved
automatically if it had. Not proper Dr Who? Not funny? Ha! This story has more
Dr Who-ness and more jokes per minute than probably any other story, where eccentric
timelord prisoners could be living just round the corner, where you hold the
greatest power of the universe in your hands when you open a book and where you
never ever stop learning, even when you’re impossibly old and on your last
regeneration. What could be funnier or more Dr Who than that?! I say ‘Shada’ is
not just one of the greatest Dr Who stories ever made but one of the greatest
bits of TV made by anyone anywhere at anytime, a love song to just how mad,
scary, funny and uplifting the universe can be, especially to those of us who
go about with our nose in a book. Had it been broadcast as planned it might
well have seen Dr Who return to its peak at the top of the TV charts, at least
amongst under-graduates who would have got the jokes most. Instead it had to be
replaced by a repeat of ‘Wonder Woman’. Sometimes there really is no justice in
the universe. Which is, more than anything else, what ‘Shada’ is all about.
POSITIVES + There are
some excellent model shots by Dave Harvard. Skagra’s spaceship looks like
nothing else seen on the series, a cross between Blake’s 7’s Liberator and the
Battlestar Galactica, back in the days when most Dr Who spaceships still looked
like rockets or were big and unwieldy. The ship suits Skagra down to the
ground: it’s big bulky, practical, and not the slightest bit aesthetically pleasing.
The space station, meanwhile, looks as if somebody from Deep Space Nine bought
the video of ‘Shada’ along to an early production meeting. Given that this
story wasn’t finished (and the shots looked a little clunky by 1992 standards,
never mind 2017 standards, when they’re treated to lots of extra CGI effects)
the model shots don’t get enough credit, but by 1979/80 standards they’re
pretty darn great.
‘Shada’ is of course
unique in that it was never finished – not till animated versions in 2017 and
2021 anyway. The very first ‘finished’ version though was as a BBCi webcast produced
in 2002 (and re-issued as a CD in 2003 and included in the 2017 blu-ray
‘steelbook’ edition of the animated Shada), as the third online new Who in a
trilogy with ‘Death Comes To Time’ and ‘Real Time’ (see ‘Scream Of The Shalka’, though this one was only audio without the
slightly wonky animations this time), bridging two different eras as Paul
McGann is The Doctor and Lalla Ward companion Romana, with John Leeson also
back as K9. Gary Russell bookends Douglas Adams’ original script with a
bridging piece about The Doctor half-remembering an adventure that got cut
short and retracing his steps to work out what happens, even getting Romana
along on time off from her job as president of Gallifrey. Thereafter the story is very faithful to the
original, with just a few tweaks for the more visual scenes with the silent mind-sphere
replaced by something a bit more ‘audio friendly’. Otherwise it’s much the same
and the 8th Doctor even makes much the same wisecracks, although
McGann is a far more naturally laidback kind of Doctor than Baker was. They
make a good little trio these three regulars, while even after you know
Douglas’ script really well it never fails to make you chuckle. At the time especially
it was great to hear the last three episodes as full-on drama (rather than
simply reading what happened in the missing bits a la the 1992 VHS version, the
one made in such a hurry they don’t even print the Dr Who diamond log on the ‘correct’
page where it’s meant to show through the book cover cutaway). Of course now we
have Tom Baker himself completing the work this version is kind of unnecessary
nowadays and the animated DVD is very much the way to go now you have the
choice here in 2023, but it’s still an interesting exercise in compare and
contrast between the two versions.
Previous ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ next ’The Leisure
Hive’
Previous ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ next ’The Leisure
Hive’
No comments:
Post a Comment