Written by Tom
The Doctor meets Robespierre, a character whose actor is ham on cheese (appropriately enough for a Frenchman). Susan continues fulfilling her plot function of being ill enough to stop everyone around her from being able to act sensibly. Ian finds/gets found by the rebels and is given clues to the whereabouts of James Stirling, the person he’s after. Susan and Barbara get recaptured and sent back to jail (boo!), though this does result in the Doctor and Barbara being reunited (yay!). Meanwhile, Ian meets with Leon Cobert, one of the revolutionaries, only to find out that he’s actually a mole working for the bad guys.
This is the episode where I finally realised that, in contrast to the usual stories about rebels fighting against those with entrenched power, this serial actually follows a range of pro-monarchists fighting against a collection of anti-monarchists. (Well, being anti-anti-monarchist doesn’t necessarily equate to being pro-monarchist, but let’s go with it for the time being.) If I was actually more into the Reign of Terror, maybe I would have been able to figure this out earlier, though it does reveal something that’s a bit of a flaw with the script: namely that it’s still to explain what the motivations and worldviews of half of it’s characters actually are. For a serial that’s meant to be an exploration of France after the revolution, there’s very little exploring happening here.
Indeed, let’s have a closer look at the society being depicted in this episode: a grim place where dissidents are ratted out to the authorities by their fellow countrymen; a place where dissidence results in your disappearance and murder; and where all of this is maintained by a rigid hierarchical system, even if the people at the top say it’s all in the name of equality. This serial isn’t about the French at all, is it? It’s another look at what it’s like to live in Soviet Russia. It’s the Dalek city, or the city from “The Velvet Web”, or the city from “A Sentence of Death”, or the Sense-sphere. Can we make this about the Cold War? Yes we can. We always can.
This at least helps us work through the second odd thing about this serial: the way that it’s another Doctor Who serial which seems to actively hate the environment it’s set in. When we talked about the Aztec serial, we kept talking about the disdain it held Aztec society in. Well now we’re in France during the Terror and all the serial really has to say about it is that it absolutely sucks: the figureheads are backstabbing grotesques, everywhere is dark and miserable, you can’t trust anyone, and you could get murdered at any point.
When discussing this in the Aztec serial, we largely contextualised it within the realm of colonialism. Its reappearance here implies that there’s more of a telos at play though. Both the French Revolution and the Aztecs get treated by our Team TARDIS as violent, backward places that are only good for escaping from. Team TARDIS, for the most part, have come from modern day England and are often used as our vantage points through which we can look at the show’s worlds. So what we get here is a bunch of modern English people looking at a bunch of old foreign countries and going “Bloody hell, isn’t it good that we’re not there?” These environments become Othered and tacitly present modern England as being relatively utopian purely because it’s not anywhere else. When combined with the way that Doctor Who‘s environments are often Soviet coded, one of the main messages of the show does often boil down to “Thank God we’re not communist”.
(This does odd things to the Sensorite serial whose themes really are the direct opposite of the rest of the series it’s a part of.)
Part of this is a by-product of Doctor Who‘s status as an adventure show. The main thing which unites all the stories from Doctor Who‘s first series is that they’re all about Team TARDIS arriving at a location, getting in trouble, and having to get out. This fits quite naturally into a Golden Age Science Fiction mode where “beautiful worlds filled with violent savages” are commonplace (all being sci-fi flavoured retellings of colonial stories such as Heart of Darkness). It fits less well with the historical settings though. The requirement to have Team TARDIS want to leave each environment requires the scripts to make their environments into unpleasant places you wouldn’t want to say in. As such, the show never really has much to say about the places it visits other than “Boy, this sucks, doesn’t it?”
What ends up falling out of the mix is any sense of wonder, or that travelling through time and space is particularly fun. There are moments throughout the series where the fun’s been there. Hartnell’s Doctor has frequently come alive when he’s been placed in a Trickster position, running rings around Ian and Barbara, the cavemen, a Marinus court, or Aztec warriors – this is still based on a sense of superiority to the world at large but is at least a relationship based on engaging with the universe rather than browbeating/fleeing it. When the series has gone for awe-inspiring spectacle (or at least as much of it as budgets will allow), it’s largely hit the brief with aplomb. And there’s something to way that the Sensorites wedded its complex narrative structures to an equally complex society in order to make for something morally satisfying. Doctor Who as an actually fun show can be made to work.
It just needs to enjoy itself more.
FNORD 