Written by Tom
It turns out that [checks notes] Lemaitre was actually [checks notes] James Stirling all along. He gets Ian and Barbara to spy out a meeting between two French conspirators, one of whom turns out to be [checks notes] Napoleon Bonaparte. They find that there are plans afoot for Robespierre to be arrested, tried and executed. Robespierre is then arrested, tried and executed. As a thanks for spying on the meeting, the Doctor is able to get [checks notes] Susan out of prison and Team TARDIS are given passage back to the TARDIS.
Right, let’s get this over with. It’s the final episode of the French serial and all of its set pieces are getting one last airing: the Doctor tricks the jailer one last time, there’s more random French rebels talking in hushed tones about politics, we get a few more excuses for Team TARDIS to play dress up, and then we get a final scene in the TARDIS in order to wrap the series up. The compression does result in an episode where it feels like more is happening than usual, though it also does make you wonder why all of this material has been held back to the final episode. Surely you could’ve got an entire episode out of Barbara and Ian pretending to be the owners of a French tavern, particularly given that it’s a plot which comes with its own sets, costumes and supplementary characters. More than this, deciding to have Napoleon suddenly become an important character, only to feature him for one scene in your final episode, is, to put it charitably, odd.
The episode also provides one final example of Donald Cotton being unable to decide what this serial actually is. On one hand, it’s meant to be a history lesson about the French Revolution featuring a lot of French people double-crossing each other. On the other, it’s a story about Team TARDIS trying to return to the TARDIS. Here’s a major problem – these two narratives are actively competing against each other. The French Revolution material requires us to want to spend a lot of time interacting with the serial’s historical characters. The TARDIS plotline requires us to want Team TARDIS to get as far away from these characters as possible. Thanks to this, the episode finds itself incapable of figuring out what its focus is supposed to be. It needs to wrap up all of its French plotlines, but also needs to give Team TARDIS their required hero moments, and this turns out to be too much material to fit into half an hour, forcing the plot to gloss from event to event as quickly as possible. The serial continues to feel frustratingly surface level as a result.
The episode itself even appears to be vaguely aware of the tensions within its setup, to the point of quietly mocking its own conventions. At one point, Barbara asks what would’ve happened had she tried to warn Napoleon about events to come in his future, only to be told that nothing would have come of it (more material lifted straight from the Aztec serial). She responds to this with the idea that if Team TARDIS had tried to shoot Napoleon, the bullets would’ve just bounced off him. The joke here is lampshading the way that Doctor Who‘s historical stories and their fealty to history reduces its characters down into ineffectual figures who are extremely limited in what they can do, a very writerly point that does come off as the serial complaining about itself.
It’s difficult to claim that Barbara’s wrong though. Several times throughout the past few serials, we’ve pointed out how Doctor Who‘s historical episodes seem to hold their historical settings in contempt. The reasons they’re doing this is because of the need to generate drama out of these environments. Drama comes from conflict – a bunch of characters want to do something and we watch their attempts to do it. With Team TARDIS incapable of affecting the worlds around them, the only way to get conflict out of them is to make them in conflict with the world they’re in. This usually results in the defining plot of Doctor Who series one: Team TARDIS enter a place and want to leave. This desire to leave everywhere fights against the show’s desire to be an educational tool though, teaching us little other than why this week’s historical setting is a nasty shit-heap that’s not worth interacting with.
In short, there’s still fundamental issues with Doctor Who‘s historical episodes that the writing team are struggling to figure out. The Marco Polo serial got away with itself through pure novelty and spectacle, though even then we spent six weeks complaining about how boring it was. The Aztec serial got away with itself by generating conflict between Team TARDIS’ desire to change the world and their inability to do so. The French Revolution serial meanwhile seems to be mocking the idea of a historical at all, only it’s doing this while forgetting to include any jokes in its script. All seem implicitly aware of this issue with historical episodes, and all struggle to circumvent it.
And so we end Doctor Who‘s first series with a disappointing flop which brings into question just how well the show’s “Team TARDIS get stuck somewhere and try to leave” setup actually works. This is unfortunate. The starfield speech at the end and the “NEXT EPISODE: PLANET OF GIANTS” title card is here to remind us that the show will go on though and, given that they seem very conscious of the issues with the show at the moment, that they will presumably keep on trying to fix them.
Let’s see what they do next then.
FNORD 