The Visitation: Ranking - 219

   The Visitation

(Season 19, Dr 5 with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, 15-23/2/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Anthony Root, writer; Eric Saward, director: Peter Moffat) 

'Ring-A-Ring-O-Roses

Reptilian aliens with no noses

Atishoo! Atishoo!

Till London burns down'

Ranking: 219

For some reason fandom got it into their head that ‘The Visitation’ was a major story. It was, after all, Dr Who’s first trip back in time (on Earth at least) for five years, since the Tardis had left ‘The Horror Of Fang Rock’(give or take a brief trip to ask Da Vinci to paint some extra Mona Lisas). The debut of the writer who will become a future script editor and who will end up shaping more words of Dr Who across the 1980s, Eric Saward. A Dr Who story linked to one of the biggest events in British history, The Great Fire of London. There was even a book about how this story was put together, ‘The Making Of A TV Series’, part of a long-running series by Alan Road that covered all sorts of things (an early volume was about Paul McCartney and Wings on tour). Yet ‘The Visitation’ might well be the most ‘average’ story Dr Who ever did. It’s not that it’s bad by any means, it’s a competently made story that at least makes sense and nothing major goes wrong (well, only a badly choreographed final fight where Tegan beats up a Terileptil with an obviously rubber branch), which is more than you can say for a lot of the lower ranked stories. But really it just got lucky. Eric Saward’s fiancé of the time Paula Wolsey (co-writer of ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’ to come) happened to be studying 1666 as part of her university dissertation so it was an obvious thing to write about. Saward got the script editor post mostly because nobody else wanted it and he was at least a writer who had proven himself able to complete scripts on time and make revisions at speed without too many complaints. The big revelation only happens at the end, in a gag that’s almost a throwaway. And the book chose this story because the author wanted a combination of studio, film and location footage featuring all four regular cast members, which meant ‘The Visitation’ was the only option available.

To be fair Saward does ‘get’ Dr Who a lot better than a lot of the other newbies in this era. Considering that he wasn’t that much of a Dr Who fan (and had stopped watching in the early Tom Baker era) he nevertheless nails this series. This is an old-fashioned triumph of good over evil in a series that makes good use of the Tardis’ abilities to go back in time (ignored for far too long) and has The Doctor as a moral crusader in an era when writers often forgot to make him that. He also gets the mix of drama and comedy about right, even if a lot of the comedy falls flat. Saward is a great mimic, able to work in lots of different styles very quickly: it’s him that should have been first in John Nathan-Turner’s contacts book when scripts fell through, not the poor script editor trying to commission them. The trouble is, though, ‘The Visitation’ does such a good job of being an android-like copy of other Who stories that it doesn’t have much of an identity of its own. It feels like lots of other stories passed through a blender: the aliens on the run hiding out on Earth, the juxtaposition of their technology against the primitive locals, the robot android, the brainwashed locals, the postmodernism with the washed-up actor guest role who thinks everything is an illusion like those seen in the theatre. Basically it’s every Robert Holmes story ever (Saward’s favourite writer) along with the early Hartnells where Susan always twisted her ankle at the wrong time (though here it’s Adric. Of course it is. Those two are more alike than fans will admit). Especially ‘Time Warrior’ though: the plot is virtually identical, it’s just the setting and monster that’s slightly different – they even have a similar denouement involving a robot. However ‘The Visitation’ lacks any deeper thrust behind the messages. ‘The Time Warrior’ for instance was really a story about how barbarism continues across generations in different forms, it’s just the weapons that change form. ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ was about your place in the food chain, as humans end up in a timeloop zoo. ‘Spearhead From Space’ and ‘Terror Of The Autons’ were about consumer culture, people who don’t think for themselves hijacked by a bigger personality and manipulated for the wrong reasons. ‘The Visitation’ has some aliens doing something bad and The Doctor and co stopping them. That’s it, that’s the entire story. Even the so-called great twist, that this story led to The Great Fire of London, is really an accident that The Doctor decides not to go back and change (on-screen because it’s a set moment in Earth’s history; off-screen because the fire helped kill off the rats that were carrying the plague. Though The Doctor never thinks to go back and save the eight or so people who died in the flames he himself caused (one of them is the Miller we’ve met, unless he escapes off-screen but nobody thinks of telling him the place is on fire). That incidentally could have been the whole crux of the story: how did only eight people die in a fast-moving fire that started at night and devastated half the capitol in days before smoke alarms and fire brigades? Surely The Doctor gave a helping hand?) Instead this is a story more interested in the Doctor undoing what the villains do than the bigger implications behind everything and what they do is the usual Dr Who monster stuff: possess, rebuild technology, kill, wear a death mask disguise when out and about scaring the locals. Which actually they don’t much, at least that we see – they really are a most uncurious bunch, whilst this is one of those rare Dr Who stories where everyone is automatically accepting of everything they see: time travellers, androids, walking reptiles, ‘tis all the work of The Devil and no mistake.  

At least the monsters are pretty decent though. Of all the 1980s monsters the Terileptils should be top of the queue for a re-match. Saward is at least sharp enough to make his baddies more than just another evil race. They’re actually criminals on the run, sentenced to life on the Tinclavic mines on the penal planet Raaga, rather than a bad race per se, something people tend to think new Who invented but didn’t (what with their love of disguises and living amongst Humans the Terileptils are very much the Slitheen without the fart jokes). What’s more they’re not your average petty scruffy criminals either but a race who love art and culture and think of themselves as being refined, snobbish rather than slobbish like so many (the reason why people miss the fact they’re just a re-write of the original Sontaron, Lynx, from ‘The Time Warrior’). Instead of dressing in a costume like 99% of times we see more than one baddy in Dr Who they dress in their own individual colours, red yellow and blue, like they’re mutant ninja turtles. A series which might well have copied this story, given that the Terrileptils are also reptiles, lizards whose distinctive name is a reduction of the words ‘Territorial Reptile’. Their android, especially, is a thing of beauty not the usual sort of barely functioning robots we see in this series. Everything they do is neat and elegant and in Michael Melia the lead Terileptil has the perfect actor, someone who instinctively understands that his character would be softly spoken and confident, rather than emotional and yelling. The only part that doesn’t work is the idea they’ve been releasing a deadly plague to colonise the Earth via rats. Where did they get that from on their way on the run from the law then? This is far from the first outbreak of plague in England too (and England was never the epicentre). For this script to work this race must have been hiding since 1348. And look at them: they’re not built for hiding are they? Even dressed as the grim reaper someone would have been curious enough to have rumbled them by now (and out of all the many variations across Europe of what he might have looked like n one ever drew him looking anything like this). Even so, at least they have a back story and it’s (mostly) a good one. They really deserve a comeback and it’s amazing, after spending all that money on the costumes and having their creator on staff, that they didn’t come back: they deserve far better than being stuck in this story (and there’s an obvious sequel to be had, given how much Terileptil and indeed Gallifreyan technology is left behind at the end of this story for archeologists to find). The Terileptils are so good you almost find yourself cheering them on.

After all, the Human (and Gallifreyan) characters really aren’t very well drawn. Due to the difficulties trying to come up with a workable Peter Davison opening story (‘Castrovalva’ being made fourth in the run) this is only the second time this quartet have worked in front of the cameras together and Adric is the only companion who’s been around longer than four. They still didn’t quite know who the 5^th Doctor was and who was going to be playing him when Saward first sat down to write a full-length script and there are times when it really shows that he first sent in this story for Tom Baker’s more alien Doctor and Romana’s more savvy companion. None of these people are the way we know them. In Tegan’s case that’s at least understandable, given that this most bolshie and argumentative of companions is brainwashed for roughly three-quarters of the plot and you’re meant to be shocked at how pliable and malleable she suddenly is. That’s actually an improvement in Adric’s case, who develops sudden moments of conscience and courage we’ve never seen in the Alazarian before, when he tries to stop the Android going into the Tardis and attacking Nyssa (getting beaten up for his trouble) and actually stops to ask Tegan ‘what about you?’ rather than running away. However sweet Nyssa turns suddenly bloodthirsty, spending two episodes in the Tardis creating a disintegrator gun and even if she’s sad to use it, use it she does. We’re used to Adric being annoying – that’s his thing – and Tegan too when the writers don’t know how to write for her properly, but Nyssa is incredibly whingy or once and spends half the story pouting. It’s The Doctor though who’s most out of character, sniping at his companions, telling them to shush, being a patronising bully. Even when he isn’t he’s written all weird, veering from being wet and passive, suffering from Jodie Whittaker syndrome where the bad guys explain stuff to her while she stands there listening and having a crisis. They really don’t know how to write for this Doctor yet and the revolving chairs of script editors means nobody will till a few recordings down the line. Honestly I’d have asked the Terileptils if I could join them instead given that they’re not really doing anything all that bad. If I was Tegan I’d have a lot more faith in their ability to take me home too, as The Doctor misses Heathrow 1981 by a mere three centuries!

Then there’s Richard Mace. A lot of what you think of this story will depend on whether you see this out of work thespian, who’s convinced of his own brilliance but is in reality a homeless chancer, as a hilariously original bit of writing played by that nice Michael Robbins from ‘On The Busses’ or whether you find him an irritating conman, a thick person’s idea of someone intelligent, someone who’s ill-suited to the story, annoying and less funny than being sat on by an Abzorbaloff. This being a Saward script (and in a sign of what’s in store the next few years) the writer is way more interested in what Mace has to say about anything than the Doctor or companions and he ends up becoming the lead character at times. He’s just not strong enough to carry the story. It’s as if Saward saw how many Dr Who stories look like some other TV programme and moulded this one to make it look like his own plays; at times everything else is subservient to this one character. There’s only so many times the ‘I don’t believe in aliens and science, it’s all trickery’ gag can work and the only significant thing he does in the plot is tell The Doctor about some weird goings on. It all makes sense when you learn that Saward sent this story to the Dr Who team partly so that he could use a character he’d really liked writing for before. Mace appeared in three BBC radio plays ‘The Assassin’  (1974) in which Mace helps solve the case of Jack The Ripper (again?! See ‘The TV Movie’ for how close were to the Dr Who version), ‘Pegasus’ (1975) where Mace helps a detective uncover a missing airship and ‘The Nemesis Machine’ (1976) where, now drunk and unemployable, Mace helps track down an x-ray machine being used by spies to smuggle secret codes. There were two more written and ready to go as well but even Radio Four can have too much of something and turned them down. However one person who was impressed by them was their producer who passed Saward’s name on when he heard Christopher H Bidmead was looking for new writers. So maybe Eric felt he owed the old boy a favour for getting him the job? John Nathan-Turner for one thought Mace was a send-up too far that would make the series look silly (and this from a man who had as his second story a tale of a talking green cactus trying to take over the universe) and the pair had their first of many (many) clashes. However Eric was a favourite of Bidmead (being the one of his newbies who’d caused him the least trouble) so he urged Eric to put his name forward for the script editor’s job when he left, though it actually went to the more experienced Anthony Root at first till he left after three months when a vacancy came up working on Juliet Bravo.

Which left Eric free to join the production team just in time to tweak his own scripts. Which is the problem with ‘The Vistation’ really: the pieces are all there for a really good story and Saward is a decent enough writer, but it’s like there’s no production team to put the oven on and make the most of things. It’s a problem that will follow him across his other stories in the series, a case of both going too far and not going far enough. Take the setting: it’s prime Dr Who and a really good idea! We don’t get nearly enough Dr Who stories set in the middle ages, a time of great change when everything was up in the air and lives were nasty, brutal and short even without aliens running around. The backdrop of the black death is born for Dr Who: the last remnants of humanity struggling for survival, not sure who will go next! It’s a plague that no one back then understood, that some saw as a punishment from God and others saw as the end of the world as they knew it. Especially this year which had the ‘mark of the devil’ 666 being the number of the beast at the end and when a number of comets had been spotted in the skies the year before (always a sign of impending doom). Only The Doctor knows that isn’t true and that it’s all caused by germs not superstition and him being a Doctor ought to see him go round keeping as many people as he dare without changing the timelines. They could have done so much with this by having one of the companions grow ill and having to be rescued from what passed as medicine in the 17^th century. It’s also perhaps the era children are most likely to have studied in school, after Romans Victorians and 1066 so the audience watching would have identified with this story more immediately than most and seen it come alive. But we don’t get any of that. Other than Richard Mace we don’t hear what any of the locals think. We mostly only see them when they’re possessed and they don’t even have actual names (there’s one credited as ‘Villager’ one as ‘Poacher’ one as ‘Headman’ and one as ‘Miller’ while even The Squire is only known as ‘The Squire). This isn’t real living history, the way the story is at its best, it’s a backdrop for a Dr Who story.

A story that mostly consists of capturing and escaping and not much else. There are two more problems that’s going to hurt Saward’s time as script editor – having too many characters to juggle and the side effect from that of pacing s story so that it stretches across all the episodes it has to neatly. With Mace here too there are five characters that Saward needs to find things to do, so Nyssa is literally parked out the way and Tegan gets to move some boxes (presumably Adric is left as he’s the only character who stayed the same from the first draft). Nobody really mixes in this story either: The villagers stay outside muttering, The companions go exploring, the android chases half of them and The Terileptils mostly talk amongst themselves, sharing only three scenes with The Doctor. Things don’t build up to any climax, they just sort of happen, with the reveal of the Terileptil particularly poor with none of the usual buildup (even the otherwise decent score has gone to sleep!) The dialogue doesn’t do much (the best line is one Peter Davison ad libbed as he mentions ‘flying off the handle’ at the same time he tugs on a piece of the Tardis set he found was loose at camera rehearsals; everyone else is trying so hard not to laugh!) The climax comes after The Doctor uses the Tardis to track down the Terileptils and there’s no reason at all why he doesn’t leg back and do this in episode one the minute he traces anachronistic sulphur in the air. There are only really two big action sequences: Nyssa destroying the android and The Doctor-Terileptil showdown where they do the old ‘hide behind the door’ trick and The Doctor accidentally sets them alight instead of sending them back into space as he originally planned. That leaves an awful of talking and not much happening. The talking too isn’t anything to write home about, which leads us on to the other problem with the Saward era: that he seems to think Dr Who works the same way other series do, where the drama all comes from people. So we have the real beginning of the era when the Tardis crew don’t get on and start bitching about each other both to each other’s faces and behind each other’s backs. Things will get outright silly when the 6^th Doctor and Peri knock great verbal lumps out of each other but already here the fact that all three companions are in various stages of wanting to go home (though they can’t because Adric leaves in e-space, Nyssa’s homeworld Traken was destroyed and the Tardis keeps missing Tegan’s home by miles or centuries) to make it seem as if they hate being here. That’s exhausting. I mean it’s 1666, Tegan especially should be wanting to go and explore. I know we at home do. But somehow we never do beyond some trees and an old barn.

They are, at least, some very lovely trees and a nice old barn. Because one god reason ‘The Visitation’ is remembered as much as it is comes down to the effort putting this on screen. The BBC always found historical stories easier to put on than futuristic ones and no expense is spared. There’s a gorgeous atmospheric opening where The Squire is enjoying a posset (as made famous by the Patrick Troughton series ‘Box Of Delights’ a couple of years later) before bed when he and his family are attacked by a…thing, the monster from the future invading a nice traditional Stuart house (Tithe Barn in Hurley, Maidenhead, with some strategically placed ivy to cover up the modern drainpipes and burglar alarm!) in the sort of juxtaposition Dr Who does so well and which you simply wouldn’t get anywhere else. It really looks as if we’ve gone back in time and it’s a real surprise to fans too young to remember that the series used to do this sort of thing all the time. It’s even a bit of a surprise to older fans  who recognised John Savident’s name in the credits (a big name from his lengthy stint on Coronation Street at the time) and didn’t expect him to die within the opening few minutes. The location filming is nicely done too, with Heathrow looking very different covered in trees (Black Park, near Iver, round the back of Pinewood Studios so you see the same trees in all sorts of British films, especially Hammer Horror ones; the marshes of Alzarius were filmed round the corner for ‘Full Circle’ too). Ironically filming had to be stopped regularly to cope with the traffic from Heathrow flying overheard – the very thing Tegan was trying to  get back to! Though for once industrial action worked in the series’ favour as there was a flight control strike that meant less delays than expected (and an all too rare early finish for the day, with all scenes completed early!) This isn’t some skimpy little bit of scene-setting either, but a whole three days of shooting which was a lot back then. Even in the studio, where things so often come unstuck, it all looks good. Ken Starkey gives the Terileptil spaceship insides a nice sea-green décor to fit with the aquatic theme and a piece of gauzing over each wall, that clever allows characters to come and go through the wall thanks to the wonders of CSO.

The android too might well be the best looking robot in all of Who, a soft spot for K1 (‘Robot’) and K9 aside. It’s an art deco creation, made out of coloured bits of glass that looks both nicely futuristic and nicely in period with the post-punk, new romantic age of 1982 when people got pretty for the sake of it again but in a more androgynous way. No wonder Nyssa is so upset at having to destroy it, it’s a real thing of beauty. They disguise the usual Dr Who problem that it can only lumber around slowly better than most too, even if there is an awkward scene in episode two where everyone basically shuffles past it. The Terileptils too look as good as men in rubber suits ever can. Costume designer Odil Dicks-Mireaux has properly sat down and thought about both the concept and what would work on telly, so he makes the Terileptils reptiles from the top half and Humanoid from the bottom, rather than having them swim or walk on flippers. They look like something that might plausibly have been ‘us’ if we’d evolved a different way and maybe swum to land later in our evolutionary life. They ‘breathe’ their own air too, something a lot of writers usually forget about alien races, with Dr Who’s first ever use of animatronics (by outside firm Imagineering) as their gills flap up and down and their lips curl. It looks pretty funny now we’ve had so many better things on similar themes, but for 1982 it’s such a leap forward that had I been born and watching I would have seen it as ‘witchcraft’ myself. There are some highly clever studio sets (with real working downstairs and a ‘painted’ upstairs, matched so well you can’t see the join even on DVD) that make it feel as if London is still surrounded by forests and people are living in wooden slums that are just waiting to be attacked by fire.

Turn the sound down and it’s easy to believe you’ve just taken a real trip through time. It was nice to take a trip back into the past (maybe a little less so when the Tardis went to the 1920s in the very next story. Dr Who historicals are like busses and come along at once!) Turn the sound back up, however, and it’s all a little less edifying, full of people acing oddly and talking even more oddly (especially Mace). ‘The Visitation’ is a great looking show with some truly excellent starting ideas. It just doesn’t do enough with any of them. I mean, this is a story about the biggest epidemic in British history, where you had a one in three chance of coming out alive, and a fire that decimated the city, it should be thrilling! What’s more the Terileptils have a tragic back story, with a forced crash landing on a backwards planet that killed one of their crew and for which they seem to loosely resent the locals. There’s a lot in there ripe for a story we don’t see.

 Personally I can’t wait for the inevitable sequel to this one in a few decades time, when the Perriteptils (close cousins who are giant space pangolins, who grew up near ‘The Leisure Hive’) unleash covid on planet Earth to kill of humanity and add to global warming, which can only be solved by ventilation and wearing masks. In fact, I’m going to pitch that to Big Finish right now before somebody else does... Back in 1982, though, not much happens, very very slowly. The production team thought they were being clever by having the twist at the end about the Great Fire Of London but the minute the date is mentioned we know exactly where we’re heading. Eric alone by the sound of things thought Richard Mace was a truly brilliant creation but he isn’t he’s a one-line gag that gets in the way and should have been left behind after giving The Doctor directions (Michael Robbins tries hard to make the rogue lovable but there’s just nothing in this pig-headed narcissist worth liking. The actor reportedly hated his experience working on this story – setting off a longterm knee injury again by being pushed to the grounds a little too forcefully didn’t help -  and at times it shows, though Saward was ticked off he kept changing his lines).Everyone thought they were giving fans what they wanted with a story that felt like ‘proper’ Dr Who, but most fans felt this was a step backwards after the inventive heights of ‘Kinda’. It’s a particularly sad way for Stuart Fell to bow out the stuntmen and part-time Katy Manning double, who’d been involved with the series longer than anyone by this point but who gets one clumsily ending climax and not much else. There just isn’t any ambition here, no sense of wanting to do anything than pay the bills and fill 100 minutes of television. It’s not bad by any means and there’s a lot worse stories in this book where you have to wonder what everyone was thinking. But this isn’t really an iconic memorable iconic story full of exciting events it’ s a visit forgotten after the aliens die. Still, it is a debut story that had to be heavily re-written to accommodate a revolving door cast and even Saward’s beloved Robert Holmes took three scripts to get there, however fond I am of ‘The Krotons’. In some ways it might be Saward’s best:  it’s a lot more likeable and less violent than ‘Resurrection’, a lot more fun than ‘Earthshock’ and less confusingly bonkers than ‘Revelation’. There is promise here after all (more so than close cousin ‘Black Orchid’, which doesn’t play it safe but doesn’t really have a story at all), even if the script ending up going in the wrong direction so a few clunky scenes and particularly the bloodthirsty ending end up knocking it down to average. A plague on it!

POSITIVES + This is the first score Paddy Kingsland ever worked on from home as a freelancer and you can tell that he’s enjoying having the extra time to think about things and let the score grow organically. Best of all is the way the ‘villager’ parts are presented by a more traditional instruments that would have been around (in some form) in the 17^th century, while the Terileptils are represented by an all-synth score. It makes more of a difference than you’d think having different textures like this rather than a one-size-fits-all-score that often ends up suiting nothing.  

NEGATIVES - They destroyed the sonic screwdriver! How dare they! We were robbed of the chance to see what the 6^th and 7th Doctors’ sonics would have looked like (I reckon the 6th Dr’s would have been stripy and flashy and the 7th a question mark to match his umbrella) The story goes that the production team considered it a ‘get out of jail free’ card that led to lazy scriptwriting and JNT had been trying to get rid of it since the day he arrived, but that’s nonsense – when used right it speeds up those interminable ‘being captured and spending an episode in a cell before escaping through a ventilation shaft’ larks we used to get all the time. And indeed get in this very story. As the Doctor says, it feels like the death of an old friend when it’s destroyed in not a very memorable or major way (and, given what we know now about the Tardis growing them, why is he so touched and yet doesn’t simply grow another?) The ‘New Adventures’ novel ‘GodEngine’ (1996) by Craig Hinton, written partly to fill in the gap that the 7^th Doctor has it back in time for the TV Movie, has him get his new one after successfully suing the Terileptils for criminal damage!

BEST QUOTE: Tegan: ‘You call yourself a Time Lord? A broken clock keeps better time than you do! At least it's accurate twice a day... which is more than you ever are!

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Published for the same market and looking much the same in appearance as the first two Dr Who annuals the magazine ‘Dr Who and The Invasion From Space’ (1966) was published between the two, for children to read in Summer. It’s a long(ish) story though (46 pages) rather than a collection of short stories, comic strips and features, with a lovely illustration of William Hartnell on the front. For the most part it’s a typical Who story clearly inspired by ‘The War Machines’ with a mad super computer controlling a civilisation, badly, though this is the first of many times that plot was played out another world (it’s ‘The Armageddon Factor’ without the Armageddon bit). However what’s relevant for ‘The Visitation’ is a flashback that reveals where The Doctor found his latest companions (who only ever appeared in this book): The Doctor rescued Helen and George Mortimer from the Great Fire of London in 1666 (so he has been here before). For their part this very Christian family, growing up in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, are not sure if he’s an angel whose taken them to Heaven or a demon taking them to Hell. It’s a mad old story, as many of these early ones are, probably written by World Distributors regular J L Morrissey (though not credited anywhere) rather than anyone connected to the TV series. Presumably this is the incident Dr 4 recalls in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ when he tells Sarah everyone always blamed him for the fire. So that’s two Doctors running around in the fire…

Actually make that three! ‘The Republican’s Story’ (2004) is a mini tale by Andy Russell included in the Short Trips anthology ‘Repercussions’ that has the 4^th Doctor and Sarah running around in the flamestoo; in an in-joke at one point they even spot the Terileptil leader with his cart and wonders who he might be (so Dr 5 really he should have had some warning of what was happening come ‘The Visitation’!) All the stories in this book involve the concept of a ‘web of time’ where The Doctor has to take people out of the slipstream when they accidentally change history; here it’s William Rokeby who’s busy protesting against Charles II. There’s an undercover spy in the crowd looking for suspicious looking people  - and they don’t come more suspicious than The Doctor and Sarah! Resisting arrest, the pair try to evacuate the city with their forewarning of the fire while a poorly Sarah begins to droop. Could she have the Black Death? The Doctor mocks up a cure using local ingredients but Rokeby pinches it – he’s taken into the time vortex before he can sell his secret. A decent enough story when read individually but if you’re reading these tales in order then by story twelve out of seventeen (as this one is) the formula of somebody nicking something or other off The Doctor is beginning to wear a bit thin. The fire itself isn’t as well explained or as atmospheric as on TV or in ‘The Invasion From Space’ either.   

Previous ‘Kinda’ next ‘Black Orchid’

 

 

 

 

 

Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks: Ranking - 220

  Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution Of The Daleks

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 21-28/4/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Helen Raynor, director: James Strong) 

'Well, here I am in a Whoverville camp, homeless after spending all my money buying the same old Dr Who episodes on the new format green-ray. I'm sharing my tent with an Ood who refuses to help with the washing up, a p'Ting whose given me fleas, a Slitheen who snores all night, an Ice Warrior who insists on keeping the place cold and I think The Silence was in there too but, honestly, I've forgotten.'

Ranking: 220

In an emoji: 🐷

America is a pretty big place. The Earth is bigger still. The universe is even bigger than that. Even after 320 stories there are still aeons of planets and civilisations out there that Dr Who hasn’t had time to show yet. So why does this story see the second invasion of The Empire State Building by Daleks? It’s not as if there aren’t other places in the world (or indeed other monsters), the building’s stature as ‘tallest building in the world’ was gone by 1970 (that’s as long ago as ‘Spearhead From Space’ if you count dates in terms of Dr Who stories, like I do) and you’d have thought one super natural entity with a head for heights in ‘King Kong’ was enough without Daleks wandering around the lift shafts spouting ‘elevate’ to the operators. If I was feeling charitable then I might say that this return was to plug a continuity point about why The Daleks ever landed on it for about five minutes during 1965’s ‘The Chase’. Except they don’t properly do that. It looks to all the world as if a second writer in Helen Raynor was given a vague setting and sat down to write a story around the building, showrunner Russell T Davies only later going ‘blimey, that fits in quite well that does’. So it turns out that the Daleks designed the building, hypnotised a bunch of Humans to build it for them, carried out genetic experiments on them that turned them into pigs and made it the tallest building in the sky to absorb gamma radiation from the sun to use as energy for their experiments and hired humans to build it. A New Deal, but with Daleks if you will.All this would make more sense if Dr Who had been given special dispensation to film in New York and they’d set the story around that – but they haven’t, not yet (that will come with ‘Angels Take Manhattan’). Instead they have to mock the Empire State building up in a studio (not all that successfully) and have rainy Wales stand in for New York. At times this story looks ridiculous, with British actors wandering around trying to talk in American accents and failing (not one of them sounds as if they actually come from new York, even the ones who apparently do). And at other times it looks very ridiculous, what with human-pig hybrids serving a human-Dalek master. Even in an era when Dr Who has way more budget than it ever use to have in the 20th century it was never going to work, so what made them even try? 

 The poor writer doesn’t seem too sure either. You see, she was given one hell of a limiting brief for this story, which is the downside of one person having such control over every aspect of a season. Helen Raynor had done superlative work during the comeback’s first two seasons as script editor (not like the olden days of the job as Russell still had final say-so over decisions, but still a big job on a series this big and epic, with so much research to get right) and had been rewarded (if that’s the right word) with the chance to write an episode of ‘Torchwood’ . ‘Ghost Machine’ was one of the better, more cerebral episodes of that series (a relative measure, admittedly – it’s the one about an alien stopwatch device that shows people incidents from the past) and it was Russell’s favourite of the first season (so much so he may well have nicked the pocketwatch idea for ‘Human Nature’) so despite her relative lack of scriptwriting experience he decided to give Helen a shot at the big series. Only he had lots of demands: the Daleks had always been in contemporary Britain and the future so he wanted the past but somewhere vaguely exotic and came up with a 1930s New York setting, with plans for docklands, Daleks and pigmen! He probably had in mind the most famous Star Trek story ‘City On The Edge Of Forever’, when the gang are stranded in this very timezone and end up involved in a mafia ring and working in soup kitchens. Only there had to be no speakeasies (not in a series for children), no prohibition and decidedly no jazz (Russell has always admitted having a strong hatred of all things jazz, which makes you wonder how he copes when Courtney Pine turns up to play the Cybermen to death in re-watches of ‘Silver Nemesis’). Oh and then the dockland idea fell through anyway because of cost and problems of having a location that had a New York skyline. That didn’t leave an awful lot. 

 Helen had never been to America (her first trip was for the ‘confidential’ behind-the-scenes programme which is when a skeleton crew tagged along and filmed the backgrounds, editing out any anachronistic buildings in post-production). This was not her specialist period by any means. She was not a natural fit for the sort of story Russell was looking for and given that his ‘shopping list’ of instructions was more a guide of what not to do it didn’t give her a lot to go on. There are hints, in a lot of the guidebooks that have come out since this story went on, that this story was in a lot of trouble for the longest time with nobody quite sure how to make it work but unwilling to give up on it either. However, Raynor’s a great researcher as well as a writer, though, and got stuck into the period, finding new ideas at the last minute. It was her research that turned up the idea of shanty towns, ‘Hoovervilles’ named for the president who didn’t seem to be doing much to help out working class men suddenly out of work and penniless and there was indeed a huge one in Central Park, just the sort of big recognisable location they need (though the problems of this era were hardly Hoover’s fault, his laissez faire I’m-alright-Jack persona didn’t exactly endear him to many people either).. It’s the idea that the government has abandoned these people and that so many are struggling that they don’t have time to care for others that makes this story soar – especially the quiet dignity of those at the bottom of the pile compared to the top and seeing it all through Martha’s more caring eyes. While Russell was probably expecting a different kind of script, full of gangsters and mobs, Raynor turns in a story that’s arguably much closer to the heart of what it was really like to be alive in this era: hard. The Wall Street Crash that had caused the great depression of 1929 was really beginning to bite. So many people were out of work and those that were in it knew that one fell swoop and their livelihood too could come crashing down, with millions of people competing for the same old jobs. So instead of a story about the Daleks this becomes a story about humans, how ordinary people can be pushed to be wicked out of difficult circumstances and juxtaposing their desperate fight for survival against that of The Daleks. This is a pig-hybrid-eat-pig-hybrid world out there and there are losers, especially the people who deserve to come out on top like Solomon who, you suspect, could solve the world’s problems in an instant if her were in charge but instead he’s the unofficial unelected head of a bunch of homeless people, solving their problems with tact and fairness, the last person left who still cares about anyone besides himself. He’s clearly named for the character in the Bible who solved problems of the poor (his most famous bit is telling two women fighting over custody of a child that he would cut the baby in half so they could both have a bit – and correctly guessing that the women who then gave up her child was the real mother because she wouldn’t want to harm her infant). It’s ever so nearly the perfect timing too for a world facing another great recession, the worst in so many ways since 1929, when the credit crunch caused similar feelings of misery and desperation, a crash that started being felt in…February 2007, two months before broadcast and far too soon for this to be a real influence. Spooky and proof that the Dr Who production team really do have a time machine of their own. Parts of this story really hit home much harder than anything else in the modern series’ third season and there are some great scenes as men who would normally be kind become monsters, just like in real life at the time a few months on from first transmission. ‘Manhattan’ is one of those stories that’s got better with age than it ever felt at the time. 

 Mind you, it was kind of in the air. They say that the first places that feel the bite of an economic crisis are those in the ‘luxury’ or ‘entertainment’ areas, that there’s a downturn in budget and that inflation means money just isn’t going as far as it used to. I certainly noticed as a journalist of the time that people were buying less newspapers and the money in season 3 really doesn’t seem to have stretched as far as the first two either (or maybe they just spent it all on the wizened old CGI Doctor in ‘The Sound Of Drums’?) Either way, it’s a great fit, like the best of Dr Who historicals making you see the parallels between then and now and how all time is related, the ripples of the past continuing to wash over the present and into the future. What Raynor does so cleverly in her script is not just make this lot a bunch of comedy hobos and tramps (the way the 3rd Doctor era would) but gives her incidental characters some dignity, hinting at the bright promising young lives they were leading before the financial crash. She also adds in their desperation: in normal circumstances they would never allow themselves to be taken for a ride for a pittance in unsafe working conditions the way the Daleks expect them to, but in this era human life is expendable and people have got to eat. Most of all also captures the burning injustice and anger of good people who have been thrown to the wolves for doing nothing wrong and the burning hared they feel for Hoover’s big vanity project, the construction of The Empire State Building, the tallest structure in the world, which is costing a small fortune. The shots of the Hooverville camps, poor beyond redemption, set against the skyline of the towering building is a great way of showing the divide in this world between the haves and have-nots and giving people a voice who don’t have one is exactly what Dr Who is for, even if the outrage comes eighty years too late to do any good. This is a story about the struggle for survival and being cut off from home whoever you are, Human or Dalek and how sometimes the two are closer than you might think even before you go fiddling with their DNA. More than anything, this story fits the ‘vibe’ of the time, when entertainment was full of Godzilla and King Kong and forces bigger than you getting their comeuppance in a tale of people having an even worse time than you were. Had this stayed a story about the economic woes of a cruel period, with the Doctor overthrowing a human tyrant, then I’d have been all over this story. 

 Only Russell T had, by his own admission in Dr Who Magazine, never heard of Hooverville camps. He’s still obsessed with his roaring 1930s story involving Daleks becoming Human via experiments with pig DNA and wants to place all the emphasis there, a story that’s far less interesting and far less, well, Human. There’s just no rationale given as to why the Daleks are here. I mean, it’s written that they somehow fell through time and landed here in 1930 New York, but why here? I sort of get that the Daleks need to build a colossal tower in order to stick on a radio mast and basically ‘phone home’ to Skaro for assistance – it’s as plausible a reason for the Empire State to be built as any (seriously, I’ve read around the subject like Raynor too and I still don’t know why it was built when it was as it’s the oddest response to a financial crisis until Davros and Margaret Slitheen’s lovechild David sodding Cameron squeezes public services so his mates can hoard money and crashes the British economy all over again). And why is it never explained, even in a throwaway line, that the Daleks of ‘The Chase’ found their time machine arriving here because of a distress call they made from the mast (it would have been very in keeping with Dalek nature to have ignored it after finding they were back on the path of the Tardis)? Not even a ‘gee, I wonder what would ever happen if The Daleks ever returned to 20th century America? I guess their dalekanium core would make them come straight here’ reference. In a series where there’s rarely such things as coincidences it all seems a bit odd. Plus…Didn’t anyone notice? Besides The Doctor I mean? Shouldn’t there be a folklore story about the half-pig, half-men that went missing in New York in the 1930s? It wasn’t exactly an out-of-the-way place, even during the Great Depression. And the Empire State Building was used for transmitting TV and radio broadcasts across America – didn’t anybody notice that? (Or is that how Fox News started, created by Daleks? Actually that would explain a lot). Most of all this sort of long-term plan, which demands a lot of patience even with workers being pushed to the point of death, just isn’t the Dalek style at all. They’re built for exterminating, not local politics. I would love to imagine a cut scene of the Daleks turning up to a planning meeting, elevating up the lift shafts and attending sessions with human planners where they explain why Dalekanium is the best metal for the job (all with glasses on the end of their eyestalks and ties). 

 Perhaps it’s because these aren’t your everyday Daleks but ‘The Cult Of Skaro’ in another sub-plot that goes a bit wonky. Dalek Sec is not like other Daleks. Perhaps it’s the sudden responsibility without a controller whispering in his ear (or whatever equivalent Daleks have thinking about it) or maybe it’s hanging around in 1930s America but he’s gone a bit doo-lally and thinks he’s forming a new religion. This is another angle they could have played up (it’s an odd quirk of human nature that desperate people reach out for divine guidance and far more likely to pay for it even when they have less to spare) but that gets lost in the mix too (perhaps because religions’ still the last no-go area in the show now sex and violence have turned up in greater numbers, though ‘gridlock’ had a bash at this so it’s not that prohibited). He’s become convinced that the way forward for the Daleks is to become a Dalek-Human hybrid and developing all those wonderful nasty little human feelings of envy, anger and hate that he senses, apparently learning nothing from his own kind’s similar fall in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ when they tried just that. To that line he’s been trying out some similar experiments with pig hybrids. I see where they were going – pig DNA is the closest to human DNA of all the animal kingdom and it saves the old problems of ‘how are the daleks going to cope on a world where you needs hands to survive problem that’s already seen the creation of the Robo-men and Ogrons before this. It might even be a bit of an in-joke: the ‘heavies’ in British television doing the dirty physical work for their intellectual superiors are often called ‘grunts’ – and what better ‘grunt’ can there be than a pig hybrid? It’s also perfectly in keeping with the Dalek metaphors that were written in from their earliest days, that the Daleks are Nazis. Having them carry out the sort of human experiments to better perfect themselves as a ‘master race’ just like Joseph Mengele carried out in Auschwitz is exactly the sort of uncaring inhumane thing the Daleks would do, the twist that they’re even more mutated by the end a slab of irony worthy of terry Nation at his most cynical. But frustratingly these points both get lost in the mix so unless you know your genetics (and a lot of the target audience are too young to know it) you wouldn’t get why. Instead you’re pointing at the television laughing and going ‘but that just looks stupid!’ That goes a quadzillion for Dalek Sec himself too, who comes dressed in a pinstripe suit just like the Doctor’s as if he’s at a cosplay convention (it doesn’t help that what could have been a shocking cliffhanger was given away by the Radio Times, not in a small page detail that most people would have missed but a whacking photo on the front cover!)

 There’s a really interesting script hiding in here somewhere, but it’s been lost, the good bits buried under the bits that couldn’t work or which are just less interesting. Had they hidden all mentions of Daleks in this story till the first cliffhanger and just given us the economical background until part two, building up the idea that the people behind these monstrosities are evil before revealing it’s the Daleks, then it could have been great, but they go and spoil it by giving us hints all the way through, filling us up so much with cookie mix that by the time the whole cake comes out the oven and the script properly needs them we’ve had our fill of Daleks already. The Broadway setting, which they went to the extent to film a big showcase for, also could have been in the plot more – there have been very episodes in Dr Who about actors, despite you know featuring actors, and the stage could have been the backdrop to this story the way it was in ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’, a place where everyone is real pretending to be fake, fighting monsters who are fake pretending to be real (it’s also a world the writer knows far better after her decade working as a theatre director). Plus the publicity made great play on the idea of ‘art deco Daleks’, someone in the marketing department clearly picking up on a period detail and putting an obvious two and two together that no one making this story actually did (there aren’t any – even though they sound great). Ironically for someone whose day job was to nurse all these scripts through to fruition and make the most of it, this one is missing the touch of a Helen Raynor to make the most out of it all. Oh well, at least this is a rare Dr Who story that doesn’t just rip off a plot element from Quatermass. No, instead it’s a rip off of the ‘other’ favourite source: H G Wells and his novel ‘The Island Of Dr Moreau’ with its own human-animal hybrids. Oh and ‘Frankenstein’ of course – it isn’t quite a lightning strike that wakes up the half-human but it’s close! 

 The thing is too, it’s all so unbelievable. Not the Hooverville shanty towns: they really do look for all the world as if everyone went out to New York for several weeks of filming rather than a few hurried background shots in a few snatched hours before getting the plane home. No, it’s everything else that comes off like one of those 1980s Hollywood homages starring Madonna where everyone talks in comedy accents that feel wretchedly impossibly wrong (‘Shanghai Surprise’ or ‘Dick Tracy’). Some Dr Who historicals really do feel as if you’re stepping back in time to the past, as if this is as close as it could possibly be to the ‘real’ life of the time period. In theory a setting within the past century in a recognisable location that’s not a million miles different to Britain culturally should be one of the easiest thing to film. But it isn’t. Nothing here feels real, ever. Maybe it’s the fact we’ve got hyamsn not quite being humans and Daleks not quite being Daleks. Maybe it’s the fact that the Doctor is all over the place too, actively asking the Daleks to exterminate him at one point as part of his big plan even though it’s clearly going to achieve nothing (since when do Daleks keep their word about the custody of other prisoners? And would the Doctor really risk stranding Martha in such a difficult time sixty years before she was even born?) ) Maybe it’s the wonky accents, with everyone talking as if they’re in ‘Bugsy Malone’ rather than an accurate historical drama (which is where Tallulah gets her name from even though it would have mighty unusual indeed for any real American women to have been named that in this era, plus most of the accents seem to be Southern rather than Northern American). Maybe it’s because rainy Wales was never going to cut it no matter how hard they try. Maybe it’s because the pig costumes just look awful – pig DNA might be nearer to our own than cat DNA but the prosthetics department don’t cope as well as they did with New York’s future successor ‘New New York’ in ‘New Earth’ and the fake teeth, particularly, look they’ve been bought form a joke shop. Maybe it’s because the writer is so desperate to tell us about her research that we get long great scenes of exposition, of the Doctor filling Martha in on what a bright girl like her probably knows already, rather than properly exploring this world beyond Central park and a single building. Maybe it’s the fact the incidental characters are written in using broad brush strokes so they never quite feel alive (Diagoras, for instance, is a tyrant every bit as cruel as the Daleks who deserves his comeuppance when he comes up against them, but there’s no back story for why he’s quite this cruel: it would have helped a lot if they’d painted him out to be desperate too, with a wife and 42 children to feed or something). Maybe it’s the way nobody reacts to the Daleks the way normal people would (I mean, Diagoras’ reaction to a Dalek is to ask ‘you’re in charge?’ rather than ’what the hell are you?!’ as if he’s been seeing metal monsters his whole life). 

 What doesn’t help the script is that in the middle of it all they make it a love story. There never has been much room for romance in Dr Who, the Doctor and various companions aside, and I think that’s a shame. It’s a worthy sub-plot to throw antidote to all the hate of alien invasions and gives humans a motivation for fighting back that doesn’t need to be explained, but this is surely the weirdest romance ever seen in the series – and I don’t just mean because one of them’s a pig either. Even before then Laszlo and Tallulah are a weird couple. He’s a quiet shy dignified man trying to live his life quietly and simply whose biggest character traits are his persistence and perception. It’s hard to pull the wool over Laszlo’s eyes and for all the Daleks put him through an intelligence test and turn him into a grunt he’s often the smartest person in the room (because the Daleks judge by pure booksmart cleverness rather than the wisdom that comes from being round people?) There are a lot of swines in this story ironically, Laszlo isn’t one of them. Tallulah is an extrovert dancing girl in a Broadway show, in period slang she’s a broad, a dame. What the hell is he doing hanging round her dressing room? And why is she letting him? And how come Tallulah risks her life for someone she knows so little she doesn’t even recognise his voice when he’s a few feet away from her and she’s looking for him (sure Laszlo’s silhouette has changed but his voice sure hasn’t). These relationships aren’t unique I guess (I can point to lots of couples where opposites attract – and in the Whoniverse I could cheekily point to this pairing being a dead ringer for Peter Davison and Sandra Dickinson, right down to the squeaky voice and fake American accent!) but never, at any time, do we ever see any affection between them or a speech about what the other means to them. Instead it feels as if they barely know each other and haven’t got past the ‘leaving roses in the dressing room’ stage of their acquaintance; certainly Tallulah doesn’t know enough about Laszlo to even know where to start looking for him. For him to risk everything to come back and see her as a pig, when he’s likely to be locked p by scientists and dissected at best, is portrayed as being a sign of sweet romance when really it’s bordering on mental illness. It doesn’t help that the actors have absolutely zero chemistry and don’t even seem to be looking out for each other by story’s end. Although it’s still less annoying than Martha still making gooey eyes at the Doctor and one of the most perceptive people in the universe still being entirely oblivious to it (as for the modern gag about him being ‘into musical theatre’ i.e. gay, I’m amazed that one got past a showrunner so keen on representation in his show. For a start it’s wrong for the 1930s when the theatre was the only place hot-blooded men could see women showing off legs and cleavage without getting arrested). 

 The story also feels a tad unfair. The 1930s are a time of real human suffering, the first real time in modern civilisation when people began to think that their leaders were uncaring monsters who treated them as expendable rather than clever rich people who were better than you who were doing a hard job in difficult circumstances and things would all work out in the end. Making out that the misery of New York, at least. The lessons learnt following the Great depression, especially into the 1930s when things got steadily worse and nobody seemed to be able to do anything, was one of the hardest things mankind ever went through. The poverty, frustration and anger led to riots, fascism, World War Two and simmers to the present day is diluted when you give that s scifi twist. Especially one as obvious and everyday as having the Daleks involved. This is one of those historical stories that would have been so much better had it remained a strict historical all the way through, a story about what monsters man can be rather than Daleks. 

 Considering they’re in the title and have a whole pair of episodes to themselves without sharing room with gameshows and Cybermen and Rose as a God for the first time it’s frustrating there aren’t more actual Daleks here too. They get precious little to do except scheme against each other in a Dalek type way and while there’s a mass extermination at the end if you were new to this series and somehow missed their earlier appearances nothing in this story would have you scurrying behind the sofa. Instead the worst they do is nuzzle humans with their plungers to give them an intelligence test – which, if you were of the right age to be sitting your SATS exams when this story went out, seemed a far less painful and unfair process than the real thing all round. And they could have been doing lots: they are, after all, just as displaced, homeless and rudderless as the Hooverville shanty Humans, this is Daleks in uncomfortable territory but instead they’re being treated the same as ever, just with religious vibes. Giving the names also seems deeply wrong: I mean Dalek Caan, Dalek Sec, Dalek Thay and Dalek Jast sound like a K-pop (kill-pop?) band not the biggest killers in the universe. They really should have made more of the differences between Solomon and Diagoras too, how two people who’ve lived through much the same past take two very different routes, one becoming kinder and one becoming crueller, a plot element that’s sitting on a plate that everyone seems to miss. Some Daleks are so well drawn on screen that they get real ‘cults’ built up around them, but as hard they try to make Dalek Sec into a character he just never feels plausible. Even for a Dalek that’s gone a bit mad he’s, well, gone a bit mad and you would have thought the other Daleks would have exterminated him long ago before his idea of human hybrids got this far. By Dalek standards not a lot happens at all in part one: you’d think we’d get some running down Empire State corridors at least, but no: the only ‘action’ is the Daleks trundling in to Hooverville slowly. Instead we get a torturous finale set around the roof of the building and the Doctor trying to do clever things with a radio mast, something they make run twice as long by throwing in a scene where he drops his sonc screwdriver and thinks it’s all over till Martha somehow catches it and brings it back to him. We’ve had this before: ‘Logopolis’ and ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’ both featured big finales up towers and the last one of these was less than a year ago. In an elastic series, with an unlimited amount of scope for different plots, it’s bizarre we end up in the exact same scenario again – and the Doctor doesn’t even comment on it. And what about Martha? The plot relies on her understanding the psychic paper (which she’s never seen) and what the Doctor’s plan is (that he never tells her), somehow convincing a security guard to let herself, a showgirl still dressed in her dancer’s outfit and a pigman inside the president’s pet building project when everyone knows there’s an angry mob in the distance who think the workers on it are scabs and would gladly tear it down brick by brick. Even the Doctor never gets the psychic paper to work that well – what on earth did it say on it? 

 No wonder, then, that this is a rare modern Dalek story that generally comes bottom of the polls, give or take the odd Jodie Whittaker entry to come, but it’s not without worth. There are some scenes that really take flight here, particularly the understated, emotional ones unusual for a Dalek story. The shanty town scenes are excellent, brimming with tension and shame, and it helps that the best two guest actors are in these roles. Hugh Quarshie brings a quiet dignity to Solomon and a pre-‘Spiderman’ Andrew Garfield (who happens to be best pals with Matt Smith – this story is good practice for battling human-animal hybrids in upstate new York) is clearly one to watch, doing a lot with a very empty role. This is a strong episode for Tennant’s Doctor to do a lot of rushing around while spouting gobbledegook and looking noble, while the Doctor’s horror at the Daleks surviving and getting power when he loses everything works well in a story about the haves and have-nots of a topsy turvy world where the monsters often seem to win. He’s aghast at what Dalek Sec’s done to himself though, more for the Dalek than humanity and Tennant gets to show a quiet compassion even towards his greatest enemy that even Christopher Eccleston never had. Martha is the quiet heart of the episode with Freema Agyeman as under-rated as ever as she becomes the only ‘normal’ person in a crazy mixed up world, characteristically sweet and empathetic as she tries to be a Doctor and help everyone. It’s her response to Lazlo’s plight that helps calm the Doctor’s usual no-holds-barred response when he hears a mention of the name ‘Dalek’. Ryan Carnes copes admirably well with the thankless task of portraying Lazlo as a person not a man in a pig mask (he couldn’t believe it when he got offered the script: he’d grown up on a pig farm in Illinois and was legitimately the one-time under tens pig caller champion of his state!) and Miranda Raison just about gets away with Tallulah despite the fact that no real American ever talked like that. Eric Loren has the toughest job, doubling up as human architect Diagoras (surely named after the Olympic athlete of ancient Greece who, uniquely for the tie didn’t want to be praised as a divine vessel of God for his abilities but wanted to promote his DNA by having his children match his achievements) and Dalek Sec and trying to make them both sufficiently different. Which he does, but only by dint of making them both broad caricatures. Still what else could he do with a script like this? There are a lot of people going the extra mile to make this work, which might be why it just misses rather than one that’s utterly wretched like some stories at the bottom of my list. 

For once though, and perhaps the first time in the Russell era, the script is where it all goes wrong and it’s an idea they never should have tried, or at least not like this. I don’t think its Helen Raynor’s fault either - if anything she brought Russell’s brief to life more than an idea like this deserved to be. He throws in some great lines too: before Tallulah even knows what happen she’s providing us the ‘beauty and the beast angle’ by telling us ‘some men are real pigs I know, but not my Laszlo’, before we cut to the poor man transformed. The line that the Daleks ‘have no concept of worry’ when they clearly do (if only about the mental state of their leader) juxtaposed against the humans pretending everything’s fine, honest is also a great under-rated little line. There’s a lot of thought gone into this story about how to paper over the cracks of the idea and make it work. But you can’t make a purse out of a pig’s ear, even when it’s a pig-human hybrid. Sometimes a bad idea is still a bad idea however many good people try to make it work and while there’s a lot to love in these episodes there’s a lot that’s deeply frustrating too, from the showgirl scenes that seem to be there purely so Murray Gold gets to write another wretched song ‘My Angel Puts The Devil In Me’ (it’s a sign of the slapdash approach to this story that Russell insisted on Cole Porter’s ‘Anything Goes’ till it was pointed out that song wasn’t written for another four years after the 1930 setting and Murray had to write a song to a similar beat to fit the carefully choreographed number planned) to the pigmen to the finale that goes on a good ten minutes too long. This is a story that could have been so much more: had they ditched the pigmen and maybe even the Daleks this would have been a vastly better story with a lot of worthy things to say about humanity then and now. It’s a story that still has a lot of worthy things to say in fact, but those are scenes slotted in between the ‘real’ story, a story that’s just plain stupid. Most of all they miss the one reason there could have been for doing this story: explaining what the hell was going on in ‘The Chase’. Maybe that means there’ll be a third story in another thirty years or so explaining the events of this one?! 

POSITIVES + Dalek Sec is no Davros, but the idea of a half Dalek half Human mutant is a strong one and gives a whole new area for Dr Who to explore away from the usual ‘giving Daleks emotions directly’ plot. The fact that the other Daleks disagree and bicker and debate about whether it’s against Dalek oath to exterminate their leader make for a neat mirror with what’s happening in the shanty towns (as above in the Emprie State building, so down below) and throughout Raynor ‘gets’ that the Daleks better than many writers who treat them as evil tanks. These Daleks are intelligent scared jealous children with a chi on their shoulder baubles, annoyed that the world is getting something that could be theirs and who haven’t learned to share. The headpiece is one of the series’ more gruesome designs and the voice changer Dalek Sec toy was a surprisingly big hit considering his short time on TV. 

NEGATIVES - Dear Americans, we know you don’t really speak like this, either now or in the 1930s. Please just remember that there aren’t that many American actors over here willing to work for BBC wages and understand that this is how we feel every time an American actor, usually the baddy, fakes a British accent in one of your shows. To this day many casual American viewers don’t know that this story is meant to be in America and wonder which British county talks in that weird accent while having mini versions of Central Park and The Empire State Building in their neighbourhood. And why is it always raining in every scene as it we’re in Wales? 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses and maybe the odd pig-slave-Dalek-mutant-hybrid, too’. 

Previous ‘Gridlock’ next ‘The Lazarus Experiment’

The Girl Who Waited: Ranking - 221

 The Girl Who Waited

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 21-28/5/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Tom MacRae, director: Nick Hurran)

How to tell a Doctor Who fan who lived through the 1989 cancellation: 'I've spent 37 years trapped in a parallel dimension dodging hand robots and I have to ask you one important question...Is Doctor Who still on the air? Really? He/She/They/It's the Doctor? It's not like in my day...' 

Ranking: 221

A lot of Dr Who fans adore this story. It might not be the most famous or the most talked about story, but once all the fuss about the bigger higher profile episodes in series six died away this episode’s reputation has kept growing. I can see why: for an episode that happens to be the 'low budget' one of the season (with the shortest cast list since ‘Edge Of Destruction’ in 1964, just four actors and a voiceover) and the penultimate of the ‘Doctor lite’ stories (so they could effectively make this story back to back with ‘Closing Time’, an Amy and Rory lite episode) its mighty high in characterisation and emotion. Karen Gillan is amazing, relishing the chance to push Amy Pond past her limits like no other companion before or since as she becomes an older, grumpier, sadder version of Amy 180 degrees from the feisty and fun character we’ve come to know. I admire this story a lot from an acting and writing point of view. I just also find it incredibly, heartbreakingly sad. 

 Let me explain: I know Dr Who is a sad and often melancholy series. You can’t avoid it: despite being sci-fi I’ve always considered Who one of the truest TV franchises in terms of showing life as it really, with all its up and downs from unexpected magic and joy and a burning hope that things will all work itself ut, combined with the crushing reality that sometimes hope isn’t enough to make things all turn out right and where magic can be bad as well as good. Dr Who is a world where people suffer and even across sixty years and multiple regenerations there are simply too many people out there for one Doctor to heal and too many wrongs for him to put right. This is a franchise where companions occasionally die, where baddies occasionally win and where the Doctor undergoes a symbolic death every now and again just to prove that he isn’t an invincible superhero but a fragile alien trying to do his best (albeit with an impossibly long lifespan). In this story nobody does and everyone flies away in the Tardis at the end unscathed: something that’s a rarity in itself in an era when Rory seemed to die every five minutes. So why does this story break my heart so much? Because of what it does to this particular character. 

 No companion would enjoy being accidentally abandoned on a planet hospital for thirty-six years in an alternate time stream where years pass in days (let’s face it, with NHS waiting lists as they are Britain isn’t far off this now), but when the Tardis lands on the planet Apalapucia during a plague a misunderstanding means Amy presses the ‘green anchor’ button instead of the ‘red waterfall’ and finds herself sent to another time stream with no way back to her friends and nothing to do but wait to be rescued. A rescue that, due to a quirk of the quarantine laws that stretch out a person’s last day for years so they can live a full albeit a highly secluded life, means that help isn’t coming anytime soon. Had this happened to Rory it would have been sad. Had it happened to the Doctor, with his companions in charge of the Tardis, it might almost have been funny. But writer Tom MacCrae decided to do this to Amy and so it all hits differently. So much of Amy’s life is spent waiting for people who let her down. The Doctor of course accidentally kept her waiting twelve years (which, when you’re seven, is an impossibly long time), but from the other hints we get something bad happened to Amy’s parents who were in a car accident and never came home. The rest of series six suggests she spent a long time wondering where her best friend Melody went to as well (hint: it’s complicated). And Amy’s not your patient Nyssa or even your Rory, figures who would happily wait a couple of thousand years if it meant helping the ones they loved; Amy’s an impatient soul whose exasperated by people who keep her waiting and always assumes the worst of them. Her worst trait is her understandable paranoia that people are going to abandon her, even people she knows and loves and trusts, so everything that happens in this episode just feeds into that distrust. It’s as if, across this episode, you see all the good the Doctor has brought in to her life being unravelled, as she has to re-learn to fend for herself, her hopes of rescue dashed, until she ends up the cynical bitter and occasionally cruel Amy we met in the second half of ‘The Eleventh Hour’, the girl who was robbed through disappointment and multiple therapy sessions to stop believing in magic and hope that things ever get better. We have already seen what 12 years of therapy and people around her insisting the Doctor wasn’t real did to her – how is she going to feel now after being made to wait for 37? Amy even reverts back to her original name ‘Amelia’, because being Amy reminds her too much of the person she used to be. By the time Rory finally gets there to rescue her, following the Doctor’s instructions, Amy turns on them: she feels let down by Rory and positively hates the Doctor for being everything she feared her would be and Rory has to watch the love of his life swear at the pair of them. Poor Amy. Poor Rory. Poor Doctor. 

 Now I’m the sort of fan who can watch Adric’s death on TV in ‘Earthshock’, Katarina’s far more brutal goodbye in the ‘Dalek’s Masterplan’ telesnaps, or more recently Rose being trapped in a parallel universe in ‘Doomsday’ or Donna having her memories wiped in ‘Journey’s End’ with nary a sniffle: after all they’re fine deaths/goodbyes, the perfect end to a character arc that was caused by a companion knowing they were facing a matter of life and death and bravely sacrificing themselves for the people they loved; if we have to go at all then that’s the ending I think most of us would choose. But this is different: this isn’t some terrible crime Amy can pin on some wicked foe and vent at nor is it karma for something terrible she did, it’s a pure simple mistake that anyone could have made, through simply pressing a wrong button (a mistake the Doctor and Rory were lucky not to make). That randomness doesn’t sit well with the way the rest of Dr Who works, all those story arcs and discussions of fatalism and karma and Buddhism and being kind to people so they can be kind to you, ripples caused by the actions you make. This was a mistake. Amy doesn’t know what’s going on when she pressed that button: how could she? Even the Doctor doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s not like she made a conscious decision to enter a parallel time stream, it’s not as if it made any difference to the universe that she took the ‘wrong’ path, it’s not like she chose to be abandoned, it’s not even that she made a mistake in the sense that she didn’t know what she was doing and yet she pays such a heavy price. This, for me, is worse. A lot worse. Amy did nothing wrong, she didn’t hurt anyone she didn’t intend to hurt anyone and above all she wasn’t saving anyone she loved from hurt either. It all went wrong because sometimes bad things do. And of all the Doctor’s companions (except maybe Clara) Amy needs desperately to be in control of how her life turns out – because of all the horrible things that have gone wrong in her life already. The Doctor had brought free-wheeling chaos into her life again and showed her that it was alright to trust again and then this happens. 

 If the story ended there, with Amy on a planet where she could start again and make new friends, that would be bad enough. But she’s in isolation, for thirty-seven years: the companion so alone she created raggedy dolls of the Doctor to fill that void (before Rory filled it instead). She’s on the run for her life against hand-bots, robots who – in a perverse trick of technology that only mirrors the abandonment she feels – promise to be kind to her but are really out to kill her. Anyone else would have given up, but not Amy: she’s a survivor, she knows from bitter experience that if she hardens her heart then she can keep on living. But it isn’t really living – and when the Doctor finally catches up and sends Rory to help she has to die all over again, all those years of survival wasted, for no good reason. For maybe the only time in the show’s long history Amy is punished for being resilient and a survivor, all the things Dr Who usually praises characters for, when she might have been happier had the scary robots got her early on given that the Doctor eventually reverses everything anyway. And she has no one to blame but herself, only she can’t do that so Amy blames the people around her she trusted to always keep her safe, Rory and The Doctor. Moreover what makes the episode even crueller than that is the ending: no one gets to learn from the experience except the audience, so it is in effect all for nothing in terms of character development. Amy doesn’t get the chance to make a virtue of her situation, to learn from it and pass those skills over to someone – she has to kill her older self so her younger self can live again, making all those extra years of survival basically pointless. I mean, I think I’m right in saying that this is the only time the Doctor ‘murders’ a companion: it’s what she wants sure and it’s to save her younger self but still, effectively the Doctor – who vowed to keep Amy safe – causes her to no longer exist by his actions in this story. Usually it feels as if the Doctor can make a difference and make things better, but this story feels more like one of those wildlife programmes where we’re powerless to watch and where the animal we’ve grown quite fond of gets eaten just short of mating season/reaching the water/etc, simply because life is cruel, something which might be true to life but which leaves an odd feeling I don’t get from any other Dr Who episode. Which is why, for me, this is one of those Dr Who episodes I always skip. Because it’s just too sad, without the joy or hope or uplift of every other Dr Who stories out there (yes, even the sad ones where characters die/leave, because at least they learned something or saved someone else). 

 The part about the space plague and quarantine also hits...shall we say...differently post 2019. Of course Tom MacCrae won’t have had a clue about what was going to happen in the world nine odd years after writing this story but it raises a few problematic points. We’ve had space plagues in Who before of course but this one sounds quite brutal: it kills most people who get it within the day. There are a whole host of families, that Rory sees using the Doctor’s magnifying lens, as ghosts darting about in their own little worlds without any interaction with anyone else, with everyone effectively in lockdown with rogue hand-bots attacking everyone so that there’s nothing to survive for anyway. Speaking as an immune-compromised person, whose in the front row of people likely to die from covid (14million odd deaths a year) so is largely trapped indoors even now years on the idea of being in isolation with nothing to do, your final day stretched out for years, just so that your friends and family can come and wave at you as they get on with their lives and get to lead the life you should have been having, is the single cruellest thing to happen in a Dr Who script that happens to people we don’t see. The feeling you get from watching this programme back now is that it is better to live a short but busy twenty-four hours rather than live a living death, because the handbots/Doctor erasing time are only going to get you anyway. Which is not an alternative that feels very Dr Whoy either: surely the message of this series is that there is always hope. After all, the Tardis does come, eventually. Older Amy thinks she’s going to be rescued after all. But then in the final few minutes changes her mind after seeing the way Rory looks at her younger self and realises she can’t take that away from him. This could so easily have been a happy ending. Instead it feels sad: what was all that extra surviving, clinging on to life, even for? 

 Which is not the same as saying that it’s a bad episode: not at all. There’s so much to love about this one, from the design to the acting but especially the writing. Tom MacCrae was one of the younger writers to work on the revived Who series and one of those authors whose a really good mimic: he has a great ear for what other writers are doing and matching them. He was given the short straw last time out in 2006 when Russell handed him a list of elements to get into a plot and left him to get on with ‘Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel’, a story that MacCrae duly delivered in a neat approximation of Russell’s style, with big emotional moments, los of characterisation and high stakes drama. Even so, it’s a story that suffers from having to fit within too many confines of the bigger story arc and not doing anything the Cybermen wouldn’t do or have ever done before, which doesn’t leave them much room to do anything except stomp around. MacCrae had a second story submitted for series four ‘Century House’ which would have been a bit like the BBC’s banned ‘Ghostwatch’, a paranormal drama presented as if it was a documentary with real-life celeb presenters caught up in the action (seriously, see it if you can though it will have to be on DVD as the BBC still have an official ban after so many watching children, assuming it was a documentary, were traumatised by it; I still haven’t forgiven my parents for sending me to bed early so I missed it first time round when the entire playground was talking about it the next day. It turned out the way I would like to imagine a pre-TV Movie 1990s Dr Who might have looked with all the hallmarks of the era: a little cosy yet deeply sarcastic, with low budget effects but some pretty nifty post-production compared to the 1980s and with an emphasis away from science to ghosts and ghouls, with celebrity cameos galore). That story was rejected for reasons unknown: the BBC have always been jumpy about ‘Ghostwatch’ though so it might have been that, or maybe Russell thought it didn’t have enough space for the Doctor inside it, or perhaps it was too close to the ‘ghosts’ that weren’t really ghosts of ‘The Unquiet Dead’ and ‘Army Of Ghosts’.

 MacCrae tried again under Moffat and copes much better under the next showrunner, who basically left him alone to get on with whatever he wanted – possibly because this was one of four stories that had been commissioned for the 10th episode slot of the series from occasional writers for the series (we don’t know what the others were: as far as I know the other three were left in a filing cabinet and never used, though it’s possible some were revived for later seasons). Moffat liked the first draft and asked for a second and liked that too, but still wasn’t sure if it was the one: MacCrae’s original draft was more like a prison breakout, with the Doctor and Rory at the heart of the action more, trying to avoid handbots and breaking Amy out of her accidental quarantine. In this version Amy only aged at the end and there were far more incidental characters; asking for it to be pared down MacCrae went away and re-shaped it so that the emphasis was much more on Amy. Moffat adored this third draft, which ended up a time-travelling parable so after his own heart, immediately giving it the production slot and shutting the other stories in competition down. I so wish we’d got a third MacCrae story under Chris Chibnall: it’s hard to compete with Davies and Moffat at their game but I suspect an outside writer piecing his style together might have benefitted the third showrunner in the end. There are some real gems amongst the dialogue in this story: Rory’s horror at what’s happened to his wife (‘It’s like you’re not even her!’), the Doctor’s shame-faced guilt listening behind the Rory-cam, Amy’s fake-Rory bot, Amy’s first laugh in 37 years which makes her draw up fast in shock and guilt because it suddenly feels so alien (something that’s so accurate for anyone whose gone through trauma), even the throwaway lines like the one where Clom of all planets has a Disneyland hit (I like to imagine lots of little Absorbaloffs running round absorbing characters with Mickey Mouse ears. Just please tell me they opened one on Pluto as well following the events of ‘The Sunmakers’, just for the joke that it’s full of Mickey’s pet dog. Why does a mouse even have a pet dog by the way? I never understood that).

 It could have been even better though: there were a number of scenes dropped along the way, a lot of which sound as if they would have improved it and maybe softened the blow a little more. Rory formed a double act with his Robot namesake (I wish they’d kept the cut scene, sadly never filmed, where Rory chats to the robot to ask how he’s managed to cope with an angry Amy for all that time joking he might need tips and Rory-bot shrugs in a very Rory way) and a lot of teasing where the two Amys gang up on poor Rory and take the mickey out of him with elder Amy figuring that maybe she still is the same person after all. There were two powerful emotional scenes I wish they’d kept in too: a very Moffaty timey wimey scene where an older Amy remembered her younger self having a conversation with her elder self and her horror at what she’d become, losing all that hope and passion and youth and a moving passage where Amy suddenly realises she’s older than her mum would have been when she died and wondering in this mirrorless world if she looked like her or not. I really wish they’d kept one line, cut from the first draft, too: ‘Sometimes there’s no right and wrong. Just wrong and less wrong’. That’s the real message of this episode, that sometimes you can’t fix things, but it gets a bit lost on screen. 

 The acting too is first-class: Karen Gillan obviously gives her all in the script that out of her whole two and a half years arguably demands the most out of her, insisting that she play the elder Amy when it was seriously considered in pre-production they find an elder actress to look like her. Karen spent a lot of time in rehearsals practicing walking and running slower, along with talking in a deeper gruffer voice she thought would suit an older Amy who hasn’t had anyone to speak to in such a very long time, both of which work well. I have to say, though, that despite the hours in makeup she still never quite convinces as a 57-year-old: she still looks far too young; Amy isn’t that much younger than me as a character and on first broadcast she still looked younger than a lot of my friends did after a heavy night out on the town. The fat suit she wears is also most unconvincing, not to say unlikely: after all this is an Amy who lives off her nerves and can’t settle for a minute, always running away from hand-bots. She would have lost weight, not gained it. And presumably the only food available to her is hospital food which, let’s face it, is never going to be the sort of thing you stuff your face with even if you’re staring and burning up calories. She also has impressively red hair still for someone whose been through so much and lived to her mid-50s in a universe without ready access to hair dye. Arthur Darvill and Matt Smith get lots of nice moments too, so much so that it actually feels as if they have a more substantial role in this episode than they do – Matt recorded all his scenes in the Tardis in a single day and yet he still feels ever-present in the action. Their shared looks of guilt with each other sell this episode more than all their speeches, however. 

 If this episode has a problem – despite the sheer unadulterated misery of it that is – then it’s how it looks. This is an episode that doesn’t have much variation: other than the Tardis it’s basically running around a white box followed by white robots in a white void; yes it looks neatly like a clinical hospital setting and yes it saves a fortune on sets but it’s a big ask for the bulk of a fifty minute episode. Would you believe they actually made a play-set of this, complete with a white brick wall, a hand-bot and portal ring? Needless to say it’s not one of their better ones. I mean, just take that ring: you’d also think the ‘portal ring’ that allows the two sides to communicate with each other would look more substantial than a disused toiler seat too. Most of the story was shot in Dyffryn Gardens making its second appearance in a row in this book following its appearance in ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ (it’s a weird coincidence given the odds are one in 328 and counting, but then a lot of weird things happen around this story – the next up in the book is ‘God Complex’ which happened to be the next story transmitted and that’s the only time that happens as well), while the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff was the home of the scene in the Two Streams Facility. 

 As gutsy as she was for learning a whole choreographed scene attacking hand-bots with a samurai sword, the slow mo action and general ridiculousness of it also undoes a lot of the bathos and emotion in the scene and Karen doesn’t look comfortable at all. There’s a lot more we could have seen of this world, even on a lower budget and while the scene with other ghosts flitting about living similarly isolated lives might just be the best one in the episode I wish we’d actually got to know some of these people and learnt their stories, as well as the source of the plague that sp[read so quickly. As much as the Doctor is in a rush to save Amy he never stops to ask about the other people in trouble or seek to rescue or at least help them after Amy is safe and well and things are back to normal. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago he was saving the universe from every disease known to man (or alien) in ‘New Earth’. Surely the cat nuns owe him a favour or three thousand? The best set for me is at the beginning, in the art gallery and shop (because all hospitals have one of those don’t they?) where we get to see alien art: something that’s actually quite a rarity in this series. It’s apparently not very good, given the look on Rory’s face although we only ever see two exhibits: The Mona Lisa (I like to think Leonardo Da Vinci’s spare fakes from ‘City Of Death’ were taken by the Doctor and sent to alien worlds afterwards) and a sort of purple crystal mountain. That’s The National Museum of Wales standing in for the gallery by the way: I’m gutted John Cleese and Eleanor Bron weren’t available for a reprise of their ‘art gallery critics’ gag. 

 But then it isn’t that sort of an episode: any laughs in this one are all over following the first five minutes, which does rather make ‘The Girl Who Waited’ unbalanced. There’s a lot to love and admire about this story it’s true and it was a worthy nominee for the 2012 HUGO award (though it was beaten by ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ – unusually there were no Moffat stories up for it that year despite being showrunner). However it still leaves me as cold as a night in Two Stream Facility: this is a tough watch and not one that makes you feel better after watching it the way some other tough watches in the Who canon are. I mean fan favourites ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ and ‘Caves Of Androzani’ aren’t exactly easy watches either and yet there’s something far more uplifting about them despite all the horrible things that happen: both end with redemption, of second chances, of things happening for a reason to learn and grow (or not in Davros’ case). ‘The Girl Who Waited’ wipes the slate clean, never to be mentioned again, one of those unlucky nasty things that happens in life sometimes that catches you unawares. Which is precisely what I watch Dr Who to escape from. Well made as it is, impressive as parts of it are, as much as Karen Gillan deserves a part in the Who hall of fame for her performance in this story alone, it just still feels like voyeurism, of watching people suffer for entertainment – and it’s a measure of how powerful this era of the series is that I care about these characters too much to do that. I mean, I know it’s all done very well but…poor Amy. 

POSITIVES + Karen Gillan gives the performance of her life, the qualities in Amy that were always there exaggerated good and bad: we know Amy’s a fighter and was always going to survive where others would have given up but here too we see how much of her fight is a cover up for the vulnerable little girl whose had to learn to fend for herself the hard way and is resigned to it rather than delighting in it the way, say, Leela would. She’s been betrayed, abandoned, is angry at the world, angry at herself for trusting but especially angry at the two people she loves she thought would keep her safe. All that joy and enthusiasm is long gone. It’s a tough role to play, losing the bounce that is such a part of the character, but Karen copes seriously well for someone who hadn’t done that much acting before Who. 

 NEGATIVES - The Handbots are potentially one of the most interesting Dr Who 'monsters' in that they think they’re doing everything for the greater good and health of a planet even when inflicting pain, which ironically is referred to as a ‘kindness’ when it is clearly anything but - anyone whose ever spent any time ill and been handed treatment worse than the illness itself will know that the two principles aren’t as distant in medicine as perhaps they should be. Sadly though they’re under-used and unexplained for the most part and just end up being another faceless Dr Who robot in an era that seemed to be full of them. Originally they were meant to look a lot quirkier with hands sticking out from under giant cloaks, an idea which was dropped for being a bit silly. 

 BEST QUOTE: Amy: ‘This facility was built to give people the chance to live. I walked in here and I died’. 

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