Shada: Ranking - 3

 

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 move in the outside. 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. 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 one of my own kid 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. 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 crook like me. Although I will miss the prison tea'.  

 

There are some guidebooks that will tell you ‘Shada’ doesn’t count as ‘proper’ DW 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 interest the story’s had over the years is because it has been talked about DW fans have been teased with it over the years, not least by its own author. There are others fans who say that, even if it had been completed, its 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 DW stories ever, its one of the most DWy DW stories ever. It’s like a summary of every other of the 314 reviews I’ve written, where an eccentric outsider who defied crumbling oppressive institutions is chased by another eccentric outsider who was so evil his own people ha 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. It’s the tale of good versus evil and individuals of the present versus archaic institutions where the line between all of these gets blurry. A story that asks big questions about mercy and justice and whether a reformed criminal who did horrific things is more deserving of redemption than someone who knowingly causes hurt. A story that asks whether they 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 Dr’s extraordinary world came crashing in on them head-first. Its 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 on bicycles and interludes on rowboats. 

It’s 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 DW since its earliest day. It’s a story every bit as thrilling and funny and thought provoking and as downright bonkers as any in DW’s long history. And for years it brought me such pain that such an important part of the story was missing so that we couldn’t see it, like all those 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. I was beyond thrilled when this story was finally finished in 2017, a mere thirty-seven years after it should have been on the air. And even more thrilled sitting here in November 2023, that so many fans get to see it 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’, rather than being a pricey DVD dismissed as a not very good, not very DW story only aficionados and completists ever got round to buying. It’s completion via animation and voice-overs with the cast (amazingly and rather against all the odds all the people with voice parts were still alive) so that this story can dance and sing and live on down the ages feels like a DW tale all in itself, one that defies the logical progression of time. All the more satisfying given the petty time-related way this story ended: would you believe this DW story was stalled roughly two-thirds of the way not because of monsters or villains but because of a dispute between unions over who was responsible for the maintaining the accuracy of all the electronic clocks that hung in the studio (and should therefore be paid for setting them), catching the cast and crew by surprise and horror when they came back from lunch towards the end of the second block (of three) of studio filming, this in a story with one of the longest runs of location filming of any DW story that had all been completed so that close to three-quarters of it had already been made. Usually when this had 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 (as happened a few times when stories under-ran on material and over-run on time or budget) but this time DW was unlucky enough to be hit at the last block of filming at the end of a season, so there was no other time to shoot it. For the first time in his history the Dr had run out of time, a matter complicated by the fact that producer Graham Williams and script editor/writer Douglas Adams were both moving on after this story, their final ‘official’ day on Who spent sadly hanging around the studio doors to turn away anyone who hasn’t got the memo and come in the next day, 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). 

To give him his due, next producer John Nathan-turner worked long and hard to make this story happen anyway, to raise an extra budget from his bosses to make this a Christmas special or to add it to the slot of omnibus repeats of the 4^th Dr that were sometimes shown during the summer break, slapping a preservation order on the shot footage in the hope that someone would get to make it some day (unusual in itself in 1979, the last year when mass junkings of black and white TV stories were regularly taking place just before home video made them see their archives in a different way) but the BBC stalled and then the regular cast moved on and 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 one. 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) and ended up with one of the shortest but busiest runs of anyone in that role, this being the second story he’d had to come up with at short notice to replace other scripts that had fallen through at the last minute (it is a great irony of DW that almost all people working on this show at some point have longed for a tie machine of their own). Faced with the usual end-of-year budget caps that rather precluded coming up with alien worlds and special effects, Adams began to think about where he could put the Dr that would be cheap but also different to the usual formula of the Dr trying to convince the locals that people were in great danger. Douglas figured that he’d known a lot of people like the Dr growing up in Cambridge, eccentrically dressed strangers who swanned around like they owned the place and who seemed to be older than time, and that as a student there he’d had secret suspicions that some of his lecturers were so odd they couldn’t possibly be all human. So he came up with the idea of a fellow renegade timelord to the Dr who’d become obsessed by Earth and was living out his exile in the university at St Cedd’s (a real house, named after another exile, a Christian priest who defied the local paganism and founded a monastery in Northumbria before dying of the plague in the 7^th century though Douglas’ real one was the more boringly named St John’s). 

Professor Chronotis isn’t just The Master or The Meddling Monk though, 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). Chronotis has been there for centuries, with each passing generation of students and teachers never noticing that he was still there and not aging, hiding inside a study that was actually the control room of the professor’s Tardis in disguise, one of the greatest twists on the DW formula of the ‘extraordinary impacting the ordinary’ (and makes great use of the Tardis as more than just a rocketship the way some writers do: here its 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 Ancient Law Of Gallifrey’). 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. Even in a series of dotty professors Chronotis is delightful, hard of hearing and mad as a box of frogs and you spend half the story thinking he’s the Dr’s soulmate, someone who ran away from the rigid rules of Gallifrey to a place of knowledge and learning. Only in one of the best twists in the series (spoilers) Chronotis is only his adopted name: really he’s an outlaw named Salyavin, a reckless abhorrent criminal sentenced by the timelords to their prison planet Shada, a place so dangerous that they’ve covered up their tracks that it even exists. We never fully find out what Salyavin did or even which regeneration he was in when he committed his crimes (after the 6^th 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 (even in the DW universe that’s usually just a fine). 

We do know the Dr has a different regard for Salyavin than his home planet’s laws do, regarding him as a sort of hero, a charismatic outlaw disobeying the rules for all the right reasons, in the ‘Robin Hood’ mould. It’s Skagra who really ought to be locked up even though his crimes pale in significance, an intergalactic thug whose happy to kill over that book which contains impossible secrets about the timelords’ home planet. It’s a great idea: so many DW 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 delicious, while to have an alien come to destroy Gallifrey via Earth (Instead of the other way around) allows Douglas to write in all the usual DW formulas, but from the ‘Inside out’. As a result we get to see all sorts of in-jokes about how the usual DW world ‘works’: Skagra 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 Dr 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. Equally we see the conventions of our normal world turned on their head: the two Cambridge students studying science we follow learn all there is to know from the universe from a book – but one that completely turns all human concepts of life on its head so that it invalidates their entire course of study, with the book being so impossibly old it breaks a carbon-dating machine. 

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 its 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 loses in this story basically because he can’t adapt, he’s thrown off chasing three eccentric timelords who are full of surprises and turn his carefully controlled box of logic on its head. Given that there are no less than four renegades running around this story there are a lot of delightful and very DWy jokes against institutions and authorities: its 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 Salyavin 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, with no idea of what a master criminal Chronotis really is). 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 Dr persuades it that if its all powerful master wants him dead then there’s no way he could possibly be alive and so doesn’t need to be killed, while a book that had to be physically written down by someone at some point is both older and younger than time, a college dean is so used to the Dr’s crazy comings and goings that he knows the Dr’s movements better than he does (even the times he’s turned up with a ‘different face’) and old human traditions that make no sense now the context of what they once meant has been lost (‘I thought it was May week’ ‘It is – May week’s in June’) are properly scoffed at. 

It’s not all laughs though: there are some properly scary moments too, with Skagra’s still intense immovable psychopath a good match for the 4^th 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 DW 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 DW 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 DW 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 Dr, 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 Cmabridge too - and which makes the Russian defect parallel all the greater). 

Skagras are two a penny but Chronotises are rare and, like the Dr, 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 DW 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). A lot of DW 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 strangest thing in the planet leading to whole new worlds of information and where bad people will go to very desperate lengths to suppress other people knowing things. 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 eve though its 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) that’s 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 DW knowledge is the single greatest weapon in the universe as well as the best way to find the truth of what’s really going on, with the greatest scientific minds of our time turned into gibbering wrecks onboard Skagra’s spaceship at the very start of this story and that’s exactly how it should be, DW having been created back in 1963 to educate as much as it was to entertain, returning to the point where teachers are our eyes and ears and the single most important people in the universe. 

I like to think, too, that Douglas might have been having a little joke 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, its fair to say, not a natural athlete. He might well 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 DW who 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 til 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 DW like rock but no other story says it quite as passionately or as clearly as ‘Shada’ does. As well as brilliant themes this is a story littered with great characters exceptionally cast: Denis Carey is mildly disappointing in his other DW roles 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 the Dr’s nemesis more than most given the way he’s tightly controlled and serious to a fault, unable to understand any of the wild goose chases the Dr leads him on and 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 Dr 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. 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, while Romana gets even more to do than he does, with the air of someone whose in on the single funniest joke in the universe and delighting in telling it to people who just won’t get the joke. 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 getting married to production assistant Olivia (nee Bazalgette) who he met for the first time during location filming in Cambridge). Even K9 enjoys one of his best stories, being used the way he always should have been, simultaneously as comedy relief whose 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 Dr and Romana to run around madly having fun. The result is one of those stories that’s a complete and utter thrill from beginning to end, with some of DW’s scariest moments, funniest lines, biggest concepts and finest acting in its entire sixty year run. 

If there’s a fault, well, its 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 the switch between live action and animation is jarring in the finished product (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 DW story 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 21^st 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. 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 8^th 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 dismissing the half-made version when it came out on BBC video in 1992 by saying that the fuss round this story’s unmade status had done it a favour and it wasn’t all that good really (he also said that he only agreed to the release of the script in the original box by ‘accident’ – sadly there isn’t a pdf of it on the DVD as I’d hoped). 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 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 (there are two different DVDs of ‘Shada’ out, one with text instead of animation, released just four years apart). More than that, there’s even been a push about whether this story is truly funny or not. Not proper DW? Not funny? Ha! This story has more DW-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 DW than that?! I say ‘Shada’ is not just one of the greatest DW stories 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.

+ Fresh from seeing how well the location filming in Paris turned out on ‘City Of Death’ Douglas scripts this story as a homage to his home town of Cambridge, lovingly recreated it in all its beauty daftness and anachronisms, with several dogs at the locale’s expense without ever losing an obvious love for the place. Whether we’re listening to the Dr comparing punting on the river Cam to a simpler Tardis as Romana takes in all the sights, watching him ride his bicycle furiously round town past a bunch of a capella college kids (who Tom Baker and director Pennant Roberts met down a pub and drunkenly promised a cameo – one they had to wait a full 37 years to see!) or watching the loving re-construction of an English university room in the studio, accurate down to the last detail, this story looks gorgeous and all the better for the fact that its a story that revolves around four separate time-travelling individual aliens (a lot even for DW) all the real location filming roots this story to a definitive place in space and time. It’s a real shame we didn’t have more location filming in cities away from London in the series (and more recently Liverpool and Cardiff) – only ‘The Awakening’ comes close to Shada’s love letter to the English countryside as a place where impossible things can happen before breakfast (and as a two-parter we barely get to explore there as it is – whereas there’s lots and lots and lots of location filming here).

- The Krargs are a little too obviously added at the last minute, thrown into the script to give us a cliffhanger for episode five where the Dr and Chris are onboard Skagra’s spaceship. Sadly these are the scenes that were due to be filmed and I sadly because while the costumes in stills have been much mocked by fans they look rather good to me – a collection of overlapping triangular bits of felt with big starey red eyes (which just look ridiculously rendered as an animation). Stylistically though they’re an unnecessary throwback to the need to put a monster into every DW episode, even ones like Shada that spend so long time debating who the real monsters and villains are, a drone unthinking race in a story that’s all about how intelligence is the real threat, not a lumbering brainwashed monster.