Doctor Who is Required (Doctor Who: “The War Machines” Part One Review)

Written by Tom

The Doctor and Dodo have made it: London, 1966. The Doctor immediately (and inexplicably) senses a great evil coming from the newly built BT Towers. After a quick investigation, the Doctor and Dodo find that some scientists have built a highly advanced computer called WOTAN which thinks for itself and is about to connect all the world powers together. Dodo goes off with Polly, the scientists’ secretary, to a nightclub called Inferno, meeting a young sailor called Ben. Turns out that WOTAN is hypnotising its scientists as part of a plan to wipe out all humans, having decided that humanity no longer has the ability to progress and thus is surplus to requirements. It also hypnotises Dodo as a way of attracting the Doctor, claiming that “Doctor Who is required…”

And so, after four episodes of extremely traditional Doctor Who reigning in the inventions of the Tosh era, the show suddenly goes and re-reinvents itself in the other direction, doing a bunch of things that Doctor Who‘s never done before. You get this from the episode’s very first shots: an abstract montage which displays the serial’s title before jump-cutting to dynamic location footage of London, the camera panning through the streets before resting on the TARDIS. All of a sudden, the show is being influenced by British New Wave cinema, marrying expressionist imagery with dynamic camera work and a focus on the real world. This then leads to a story about computers, a topic that Doctor Who hasn’t broached before, which is structured like a political thriller, a genre it’s never used before. The word which links all these things is “contemporary”. This is Doctor Who making a show about 1966, set in 1966, and doing everything that’s trendy in 1966. It couldn’t be shouting “I AM NEW!” louder if it tried.

Indeed, it’s hard not to read this as Doctor Who coming out swinging after several months of being incredibly unsure about itself. Little over a month ago, we were reviewing Doctor Who‘s Cowboy Serial, one of Doctor Who‘s best serials in a while, and finding it being completely outshone by Batman. Part of this is that Batman‘s aesthetic was just more in tune with the swinging 60s, drawing from pop art and nightclubs in a way that Doctor Who had never even attempted. Well, here we have Doctor Who already trying to beat Batman at its own game. A mystery story in which a dashing hero runs around a city investigating a villain, the backend of which is largely set in a nightclub where the main characters drink and dance? That’s literally the Batman episode “Hey Diddle Riddle”. And yes, there’s no way that this could be a case of one series directly influencing the other – Batman only started airing in the UK just over a month ago, way after “The War Machines” would’ve been written – but it does show us the exact nature of the course correction that Davies, Lloyd and Stuart Black are attempting here. Part of setting Doctor Who in a London nightclub is an attempt to re-embrace the utopian, youth-led cultural spirit that other programmes of the time are making significant bank with, re-establishing Doctor Who firmly in the middle of mainstream 60s culture. One has to imagine Gerry Davies and Innes Lloyd watching Batman to see what their competitors are up to and actually being relieved by it, secure in the knowledge that their future direction for Doctor Who was indeed in tune with the times.

We Mustn’t Look Back (Doctor Who: “The Savages” Part Four Review)

Written by Tom

Jona opens the doors to the city, allowing Team TARDIS to escape. They run to the Savages’ caves and give the Doctor some medicine so that he can recover from the Elite’s experiments. Jona enters the caves to join the Savages, having been given a sense of morality by the Doctor’s life force and now regretting the society he runs. He agrees to let Team TARDIS into the Elites’ laboratories so that they can destroy their life force draining equipment. The plan goes off without a hitch and Team TARDIS gleefully tear the Elites’ society down. Jona decides that their new society needs a new leader and the Doctor recommends Steven for the job. Steven accepts and goes away to rebuild the city. The Doctor and a highly upset Dodo head back to the TARDIS.

Shove the status quo up your arse, the image of Team TARDIS as a bunch of revolutionaries is back! It’s not even being subtle about it. Through the Doctor’s presence, Jona realises that his society is built on moral atrocities, goes to the machines that facilitate this society and tears them all down, bringing forth a new age of peace and prosperity. How much closer to “This person achieves class consciousness and takes the means of production away from the elites” can you get? Sure, we do have the interesting wrinkle that the revolution comes less through the rising of the proletariat and more through a single member of the elite using his privileges to destroy his society from within. Then again, we frequently argue that Doctor Who is a show that’s specifically written for a white audience on this blog: maybe the parable of a person with entrenched power supporting those who are being oppressed by his people is what you want this audience to watch. More than this, when the mainstream BBC serial ends with several minutes of Team TARDIS and friends gleefully committing property damage in the pursuit of social justice, maybe nitpicking the exact start-point of the revolution is us losing the wood for the trees. “The Savages” is so blatantly being a revolutionary text, the actual details find themselves drowned out by the whole.

This creates a virtue out of an element of the Gerry Davies era that we’ve previously critiqued. When looking at the final episodes of the Huguenot and Ark Serials, we observed that Davies really likes scenes where the main characters explicitly spell out the episodes’ morals to the audience. This was an issue in those serials because they were both trying to work via Donald Tosh’s more morally grey and subjective approach to the series, providing us with complicated social problems that the script wanted us to work through ourselves. To do that and then end both stories with the Doctor explaining whether we were right or not seemed to miss the point of the exercise, particularly given that Davies’ morals never quite worked as summaries of the episodes’ content. (Of course they didn’t, the stories were never designed to be summarisable.)

It’s a Perfect Transfer (Doctor Who: “The Savages” Part Three Review)

Written by Tom

Steven and Dodo hide in the Savage’s secret cave. One of the Elite’s guards follow them in there, only for Steven to reverse the guard’s light-gun with a mirror and capture him. Meanwhile, the Doctor has his lifeforce drained and transferred to Jano, the leader of the Elite. Though the process initially seems to go well, Jano increasingly exhibits Doctor-ish mannerisms and starts looking confused. Steven and Dodo use the light-gun to break into the Elite’s city and find the Doctor’s body. Alas it’s a trap and the Elites immediately start gassing all three of them…

I can’t lie, I really enjoyed this episode. I think the most common reaction to this serial has been to claim that it’s just there, not doing anything badly but not being particularly exceptional. Hell, that was basically what I said last week. But as the serial has continued and finally got to its more idiosyncratic elements, I have found myself being happily carried away by it. Turns out “The Savages Part Three” is an underrated bit of fun.

The episode is split into two major segments: a chase sequence through the Savage’s caves and the Jano gaining the Doctor’s mannerisms. We’ll focus on the chase sequence first because I can’t resist it. We’ve got ourselves a Cave Episode, baby!

One of the first narrative techniques we codified while watching Doctor Who‘s first season was the Cave Episode, this being a single episode of a longer serial where the plot moves into a cave for a bit. The Dalek, Marco Polo and Sensorite serials all had one of these, and variations on the form abounded (from the Aztec’s cave-like sewers to the Caveman Serial being entirely built around them). The reasons why they were so omnipresent at the time were threefold: they gave the story a nice change of visuals that could be used to be keep interest up; caves are dark, claustrophobic and dangerous places that action-adventure serials are often set in, meaning that they fitted Doctor Who like a glove; and they were cheap sets to make, requiring only some styrofoam rocks and a judicious use of shadows. Given that “The Savages” is a Whitaker-style serial and it takes a quick dalliance into a cave for an action sequence in episode three… well, let’s just say that Ian Stuart-Black certainly knows his Doctor Who and the narrative structures which defined it at its start.

Do You Not Realise that All Progress is Based on Exploitation? (Doctor Who: “The Savages” Part Two Review)

Written by Tom

Dodo watches the Savage shuffle past her and continues investigating the city, happening upon the Elite’s scientific experiments. She tells the Doctor about them and he realises that they’re harvesting the Savages’ life energy. Apocalyptic with rage, he starts an argument with a guard, gets taken to the Elites and begins lambasting them for their evil. Not appreciating this, they strap him to a machine and begin harvesting his life energy…

The great reset of Doctor Who continues apace, “The Savages” settling into a plot that’s basically the Ark Serial (here’s the results of a society in which one group exploits the other) mixed with the first Dalek Serial (there’s a bunch of bastards in that city and we need to get these weaklings to fight them). There are two things that distinguish it though. Firstly, its focus on human experimentation (and thus on body horror) does gift it a sense of immediacy and discomfort, particularly given the distinct Nazi-ness of it all. This then gets aligned to the surprising amount of moral outrage that the Doctor shows this week. When you get the leader of a society shouting “All progress is based on exploitation” and the Doctor responding with “This, sir, is protracted murder!”, you don’t really have to work hard to figure out what this serial is trying to say, and the directness proves invigorating.

Having a direct message doesn’t mean that the episode is about only one thing, though. Indeed, you can layer any number of readings over this plot. We have a tiered society that’s run on the exploitation of those on the bottom rung, making it anti-colonial. The upper classes run their society by literally sucking the energy out of the lower classes, making it a story about class war and Marxist alienation. The colonial subtexts, the focus on the Savages as “inhuman”, and the fact that this has aired so close to the Ark Serial makes it feel palpably anti-racist. Yes, these things are all different flavours of the same concern – the eternal fight between established power and the labour it rests on – but it does speak to how much of a broad church the episode is trying to be. There is something refreshingly egalitarian about it.

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.