The Distant Horizon of an Age of Peace and Prosperity (Doctor Who: “The Savages” Part One Review)

Written by Tom

Team TARDIS land on a planet, are menaced by savages, and greeted by soldiers who take them to a city. The city is a scientific utopia run by the Elders, a group who have been following the Doctor’s travels and predicted his arrival. They make him an honorary Elder and begin explaining the secret of their utopia, this being a new energy force that’s increased the skills of their citizens. Meanwhile, Dodo and Steven are given a tour of the city. Dodo sees one of the soldiers marching a kidnapped savage into a secretive back entrance and decides to investigate. We see that the Elders have scientists who are operating on the savages. One of the post-operation savages happens upon Dodo and walks towards her meancingly, arms outstretched…

In a great boon to the length of my post titles, this week has seen the replacement of individual episode titles with overall serial titles. This week’s episode isn’t “Dr. Who and the Savages”, it’s “The Savages Episode One”. Given that this blog has always argued that the base unit of television is the individual episode, you’d think that this would be Doctor Who pulling away from one of its default modes: no longer is the series an ongoing serial that can chopped up into individual stories should you wish, it’s now a series of individual stories that happen to have been released under the same banner. I don’t think that this is actually a massive change though. Even during the Tosh era where the long-term serialisation in Doctor Who was at its densest, the show was still cleanly separable into different stories set in different locations and written by different writers. Meanwhile, the overall requirements for an individual Doctor Who episode to be a satisfying half-an-hour on its own, a satisfying part of a larger serial, and a satisfying addition to Doctor Who as a whole still hold true. There are no real differences between giving each episode a name and giving each serial a name, at least from the perspective of someone watching them week by week.

So why make the change at all? Well, the actual production reasons for this are remarkably prosaic: producer Innes Lloyd simply wants to make it easier for people to tell when a new serial is starting. If you want to get into Doctor Who, are put off by the idea of starting a story halfway through, and are looking through the Radio Times to see what’s coming up, how do you know whether it’s “The Steel Sky” or “The Bomb” that’s the start of a new adventure? At least if this week is called “The Savages Episode One”, you know that a new story is beginning and that you should be able to follow what’s going on. Given that Doctor Who does around ten stories a year, this then gives the show ten separate jumping-on points for the average viewer. More than this, if you don’t like a particular serial, at least you’ll be able to see when it’s finished and a new story has started. From a pure “trying to get people to watch the programme” perspective, this is a great idea.

Batman! Batman! Batman! (Doctor Who: The Gunfighters P4: “The O.K. Corral” Review)

Written by Tom

Angered by the death of his brother, Wyatt Earp invites the Clanton Brothers to a shoot out. Doc Holliday teams up with Earp while Johnny Ringo works with the Clantons. Earp’s deputy and the Doctor try to talk everyone out of fighting but fail. The shoot-out happens with Holliday and Earp killing the Clantons and Ringo. The Doctor, at this point completely sick of the Wild West, leaves Tombstone as quickly as he can.

That’s all fair and good, though that’s start somewhere else for this review: namely Batman, the newly imported American superhero series that ITV’s started running opposite Doctor Who this week. On first glance, you wouldn’t think that Batman and Doctor Who have that much in common with each other, one being a comedic action show while the other is a metafictional horror series. Nonetheless, Batman and Doctor Who‘s Wild West Serial have arrived at the exact same joke this week, both providing us with a take on an established genre that’s so over-the-top that the shows must be taking the piss even though their characters treat everything around them as deathly serious. More than this, despite their similarities, the first episode of Batman has been an immediate ratings success while Doctor Who‘s Wild West Serial has continued its current trend of losing viewers and getting slaughtered by the press. Given that Doctor Who‘s Wild West Serial has partly been about British people undercutting American media, to have its final episode be directly challenged and beaten by an American import is both pretty funny and surprisingly cutting. There’s a transition happening here and it’s worth focusing on.

So what happens in Batman‘s first episode, “Hey Diddle Riddle”? An explosion at a museum leads to Batman and Robin finding that the Riddler is apparently going to rob an art gallery. Arriving at the gallery, they instead stop the Riddler from taking part in a perfectly legitimate transaction. He then sues Batman to false arrest, leading to an upcoming trial that will force Batman to reveal his true identity. Looking at the legal papers, Batman and Robin find clues to another crime that leads them to a nightclub. There, Batman and Robin get separately tranquilised and the Riddler incapacitates the Batmobile. Taking an unconscious Robin to his hideout, the Riddler starts to operate on him. A now awake and car-less Batman has no idea how to get to him…

It’s Curtains for Charlie (Doctor Who: The Gunfighters P3: “Johnny Ringo” Review)

Written by Tom

Wyatt Earp disrupts the lynch mob, saving Steven and arresting one of the Clantons. Charlie the bartender tells the remaining Clanton Brothers that Doc Holliday killed their friend, proving to them that the Doctor isn’t Holliday. Doc Holliday, Kate and Dodo travel to a nearby town, though Dodo gets a gun and immediately forces Holliday to take her back. Cowboy Johnny Ringo arrives in Tombstone after Holliday and shoots Charlie because he can. After chatting with Team TARDIS, Ringo goes with Steven to the town and finds Kate, forcing her to come with him back to Tombstone. The Doctor tells Earp about the murder of Charlie and they leave the jail to investigate, leaving Earp’s brother in charge. The Clantons arrive to spring their brother out, killing Earp’s brother in the process…

From a purely structural point of view, this episode has two separate narrative pulls. Having spent last week gearing us for Doc Holliday and the Doctor to eventually team up, this episode proceeds to constantly oscillate away from and towards this plot point. Holliday goes through with his plan to get out of town, taking him away from the Doctor, only to be forced back by Dodo. The Doctor starts trying to find him, bringing them closer, only to get distracted by Charlie’s death. We’re being actively teased here, Donald Cotton constantly giving us the promise of a plotline and then yanking it away as if it was a cat toy. While this is happening, he’s then putting all his other chess pieces in place ready for next week’s big finale. Johnny Ringo is introduced and becomes embroiled in the hunt for Holliday. The Clantons kill Earp’s brother, giving him a reason to want revenge. It’s a standard penultimate episode of plot shuffling, using the promise of the Doctor and Holliday’s reunion to give the episode enough momentum to cover the amount of admin it’s doing.

The odd thing about the episode is the tone it has. So far, the serial has established its take on the Wild West genre as a comedic pastiche under which is hidden genuine brutality. In practice, this has meant that its cowboys are simultaneously funny farce characters and genuine physical threats. This is a relatively easy mix of tones to maintain: you simply have your villainous characters crack jokes while doing morally reprehensible things. Placed within the standard Doctor Who comedy-history format where things start comedic before getting more serious though, this serial’s dedication to remaining funny even as things get increasingly dark ends up creating this really weird effect.

I’ve Sung This Song Four Times Already (Doctor Who: The Gunfighters P2: “Don’t Shoot the Pianist” Review)

Written by Tom

The Doctor walks into the bar and, with the help of Doc Holliday’s fiancée, holds the Clanton Brothers at gunpoint. Alas, this results in his arrest. The Clanton Brothers give Steven a gun that he can pass to the Doctor, allowing him to escape the local prison. The whole thing is a setup though, the Brothers planning to kill the Doctor the moment he leaves his cell. The Doctor just hands the gun to the police and wonders why Steven gave it to him. Meanwhile Doc Holliday kidnaps Dodo, staying in her hotel room until things start calming down. The Clanton Brothers raise a lynch mob and kidnap Steven, heading towards the prison. Realising that things are only going to get worse, Holliday tries to flee Tombstone entirely, shooting another of the Clanton Brothers’ friends as he does. Dodo pleads with him to help the Doctor. The Brothers arrive at the prison and demand that the Doctor faces them, else they’ll kill Steven instead.

The Cowboy Serial appears to be speedrunning the plot of the Huguenot Serial. In both, Team TARDIS land in a historical location where two groups are caught in a power struggle. The Doctor gets mistook for an important member of the one of the groups and finds himself separated from the rest of the cast, leaving Steven to deal with everyone else’s machinations while trying to stay alive. The bit that has no precedent in the Huguenot Serial, and thus the part that makes the Cowboy Serial most stand out, is the plotline where Doc Holliday and his fiancée take Dodo hostage. Whatever is going on in this serial specifically all revolves around that.

There are two important things to note about Doc Holliday and the way he’s portrayed by Donald Cotton. Firstly, he’s an anti-hero. Though he’s got a blood-soaked backstory and spends this episode committing crime after crime, the script also focusses on his desire to move on from his past and presents him as a person of honour, treating Dodo with decency even while kidnapping her and doffing his hat to the cowboy he kills as a sign of respect. He’s a polite guy trying to survive violent times rather than a maniac gunning down everyone in sight. And though last week showcased him as a trickster character who happily sent the Doctor to his death, he’s also the main agent of chaos in a farce story: there’s no way that the script will ever be able to truly hate him. In a Wild West environment defined by both silly pastiches and genuine brutality, Doc Holliday stands as the Wild West incarnate, a transgressive character in challenging times.

Fill Up Your Glasses and Join In the Song (Doctor Who: The Gunfighters P1: “A Holiday for the Doctor” Review)

Written by Tom

Team TARDIS land in the Wild West town of Tombstone, looking for a dentist to treat the Doctor’s broken tooth. The Clanton Brothers have also arrived in Tombstone to get revenge on Doc Holliday, the man who killed one of their siblings. Doc Holliday has set up a new dental practice in Tombstone and has the Doctor as his first patient. Aware of the Clanton Brothers’ arrival, Holliday tricks the Doctor into taking his identity and walking straight into their path…

I suppose we should start with the episode’s big structural conceit: the covering of scene transitions with a song that describes upcoming parts of the plot. The last time Doctor Who tried anything like this was when the Marco Polo Serial covered scene transitions with maps of China and a voice over of Polo reading his diaries, using non-diegetic elements to smooth over the month-long gaps in its plot. Here though, the song is being used less as a structural device and more to re-enforce the serial’s particular tone: one that is generally comedic but laden with oncoming dread.

We’ll start by focusing on the comedic. This episode is another Doctor Who historical comedy, only set in the Wild West rather than Rome or Ancient Greece. The Wild West is an obvious choice for this type of comedic episode, being a famous part of history with a well-defined iconography but one that’s primarily known through movies, TV shows and comic books, making it ripe for parody. We’re doing both history and genre fiction here, much like the writer’s previous Ancient Greek Serial which simultaneously existed in Greek history and mythology.

This dual nature frees the episode to go ham on as many cowboy stereotypes as possible. Team TARDIS might spend the first half of the episode having fun with putting on costumes and trying out their most outrageous American accents (and I do like the fact that Steven and Dodo get appropriate outfits for every single serial nowadays) but that’s really what everyone’s doing in this episode. The whole point is to have everyone let their hair down and luxuriate in a bunch of cowboy tropes; hence the cowboy song, because if you’re going this far into being a pastiche of cowboy movies, you might as well go the whole hog and import as many elements from those films into the serial as you can.

My Legions are Coming (Doctor Who: The Celestial Toymaker P4: “The Final Test” Review)

Written by Tom

Steven and Dodo play a board game against Cyril above an electrified floor. Cyril boobytraps the playing field, wins the game, gets excited, and runs into his own trap. Having won by default, Steven and Dodo finally find the TARDIS. Meanwhile, the Doctor completes all but the last move of the Trilogic Game. The issue: once the Doctor makes his final move, the Toymaker’s realm will instantly self-destruct, taking Team TARDIS with it. After some deliberation, the Doctor mimics the Toymakers voice while inside the TARDIS and makes the game advance itself. The Toymaker’s realm destroys itself and Team TARDIS escape, materialising seconds before it collapses. In celebration, the Doctor eats a sweet from the Toymaker’s realm and immediately recoils in pain…

By this point, we’ve attacked the Toymaker Serial from a lot of angles. At its core are some absolutely brilliant ideas, giving us a story in which the Doctor is faced with an evil mirror who embodies the show’s suppressed radicalism layered over a thematic debate about the relative merits of modernism and postmodernism. This is all good, meaty stuff. Unfortunately, production issues have required a last-minute rewrite of the serial to remove several main characters and the elements that they’ve been replaced with haven’t had enough time to be developed properly, making for several episodes which vaguely gesture at bigger ideas while actually focusing on interminable sequences of people arguing in kitchens and sitting on chairs. It’s not been good viewing.

Alas, the flaws continue into the serial’s final episode. It really is impossible to escape the fact that no-one does anything during the episode’s first half. The Doctor is dutifully performing a series of moves that he’s already memorised, or at least he is whenever the Toymaker isn’t forcing the game to make the correct moves for him. If he’s feeling the pressure, we’ll never know because he’s invisible and mute. Meanwhile Steven, Dodo and Cyril are playing a board game that entirely consists of rolling dice and following random instructions. The Toymaker does nothing but watch everyone else. Everyone is just passively going along with whatever random things happen around them. It’s completely dramatically inert.

The Game of the Twenty-First Century (Doctor Who: The Celestial Toymaker P3: “The Dancing Floor” Review)

Written by Tom

Steven and Dodo must race against a maid and a solider to find a key. The maid and soldier can’t stop arguing, so Steven and Dodo win. Their next game is a race to cross a dancefloor where dolls latch themselves onto you and force you to dance. Tricking the maid and the soldier into the arms of the dolls, Steven gets to the other side of the floor. Game 3, to be played in next week’s episode, is against a schoolboy called Cecil…

Sometimes I reread my old reviews from the start of this project and am surprised at how short they are. If you compare my “The Aztec Serial is racist” post to my “The Ark Serial is racist” post, you’ll find that the later is three times longer than the former. While part of this is me relaxing into my writing style as I’ve gone on, I also think it’s true that Doctor Who is a more complex show than it used to be. This isn’t to say that the average Gerry Davies script is necessarily doing more than the average Whitaker script though. Instead, I think it’s true to say that TV shows naturally accrue complexity as they go on. The more time you spend with the characters, worlds and rules of a show, the more you can develop and complicate them. The more ideas get established, the more you can contrast them against old ones and see how they build on each other. If you want to review the average David Whitaker script, all you have to really do is figure out what that script is doing and whether it works or not. By the time you get to the Gerry Davies era, you can start by figuring out what the script is doing and evaluating if it works, but that script will also be in conversation with similar scripts from previous eras, and in conversation with the changes in society that have occured since the show started, and in conversation with the Doctor Who franchise at large, something that didn’t even exist until the Spooner era. An episode from the third season of Doctor Who will just naturally have more ways of discussing it than an episode from the first, particularly if you’re discussing them one after another in order.

As such, it really takes something for an episode from the third season of a TV show to leave you with nothing to talk about. Despite this, last week gave us the second episode of the Toymaker Serial and… well, let’s just say that getting 2,000 words out of it was a challenge. To achieve something like that this late into the programme, the episode must have some form of anti-meaning built into it. How would you even manage that?

Turned Galaxies into Spinning Tops (Doctor Who: The Celestial Toymaker P2: “The Hall of Dolls” Review)

Written by Tom

Steven, Dodo and several playing cards play a game where they’re confronted with seven chairs, six of which are booby-trapped. The person who picks the safe chair is the winner. The Doctor tries to help his companions but is found by the Toymaker and has his ability to speak removed. After about half an hour, Steven picks the right chair. He and Dodo move onto the next game.

Last week’s episode was full of possibility. A story in which the Doctor faces a perverted mirror of his former psychedelic impulses sounds rad. Maybe it could go in a full Elizabeth Sandifer direction where psychedelia, drug use and ego death all get linked, the Doctor winning his game by reclaiming his psychedelic impulses and integrating the Toymaker into his psyche. Maybe the metafictional angle of last week’s episode could keep getting stronger until we find ourselves being personally threatened by the Toymaker ourselves. Maybe the Toymaker’s games will get increasingly strange and extreme as the Doctor and the Toymaker continue to fight, the entire show building to a crescendo of unadulturated psychedelic wrongness.

Or maybe the Toymaker will make the Doctor invisible and mute, stopping them from being able to interact such that the episode becomes entirely about Steven, Dodo and some chairs. What’s that, the serial’s apparently suffered budget cuts and last minute rewrites which have required Gerry Davies to chuck out massive chunks of the original scripts in the bin? Well that’s alright then.

I Made a Jigsaw Out of Your History (Doctor Who: The Celestial Toymaker P1: “The Celestial Toyroom” Review)

Written by Tom

We’ve landed in the realm of the Toymaker, a Godlike figure who’s obsessed with games. He issues a challenge to Team TARDIS: if Steven and Dodo can’t win a series of contests before the Doctor finishes a devilishly difficult brain teaser, they will all be forced to send the rest of eternity in the Toymaker’s lair. In this episode, Steven and Dodo are forced to play Blindman’s Bluff with two clowns. After almost losing, they find that the clowns are cheating and force them to play fairly. The clowns lose and the two move onto the next game…

We’re in Weird Meta Episode territory! During the Whitaker and Spooner eras, Doctor Who would frequently do episodes where things would go surreal and metafictional for a bit. You could always tell when we were about to go in this mode because something strange would happen to the TARDIS scanner. And wouldn’t you know it: here we have a serial set in a bizarre dimension of perverse children’s games that begins with the TARDIS scanner getting taken over and displaying a hi-res image of a black void. It’s a welcome return to a fun Doctor Who standard.

This carries on from the absurdism of the last serial, extreme oddness having suddenly returned to the show after the relatively serious Tosh era. We also have the return of the psychedelic to Doctor Who. The last time we talked about psychedelia, we described its aesthetic as the combination of Victoriana and varying forms of surrealism taken from 60s drug culture. This episode provides that exact mix, offering us a Fu Manchu archetype who takes Victorian doll houses and turns them into absurdist traps set inside a swirling black void. Sure, it’s a shame that they’ve gone specifically for a Fu Manchu style villain, particularly after the last serial’s issues with immigrants, but this is where we are. Venturing into the Toymaker’s domain is the equivalent of taking a bad drug trip.

Make Peace with the Monoids (Doctor Who: The Ark P4: “The Bomb” Review)

Written by Tom

The Monoids leave the Ark and invade Refusis II, leaving the humans with a giant bomb that’s about to go off. Upon landing, the Monoids immediately get into a civil war and start shooting each other. The Doctor and Dodo overhear the location of the bomb, go back to the Ark and launch it into space. The Refusians welcome both the humans and the Monoids to Refusis II on the condition that they live in peace.

If nothing else, it is nice for this episode to confirm that last week’s reading of the serial was indeed correct, literally spelling it out for us in the final scene. The pertinent dialogue is this:

Refusian (speaking to the humans): [You must] make peace with the Monoids.
Doctor: He’s right. A long time ago, your ancestors accepted responsibility for the welfare of these Monoids. They were treated like slaves. So no wonder when they got the chance, they repaid you in kind.
Refusian: Unless you learn to live together, there is no future for you on Refusis.

So the script is trying to be a call for unity in which the humans are at fault for everything because they treated immigrants like shit. Sure, the idea that the humans “accepted responsibility for the welfare of the Monoids” is a reheated version of the White Man’s Burden, seeking to elevate the status of immigrants from slaves to particularly useful pets in a way that’s still pretty damn racist. It is trying to point somewhere in the direction of “Stop treating others like shit” though, even if it’s aim is decidedly off.