Written by Tom
The cat walks off. When the businessman and his scientist friend arrive to dispose of the government official’s body, the minaturised Team TARDIS scarper, Ian and Barbara hiding in a nearby briefcase. Alas, it’s this briefcase that the scientist picks up and takes inside his shed/laboratory. Ian and Barbara investigate the lab and figure out that the businessman and scientist are manufacturing overly effective pesticides. The Doctor and Susan climb up a drain pipe to rejoin Ian and Barbara, ending up in a sink. Team TARDIS are almost united, only for them to have to scarper again when the business and scientist reappear. The Doctor and Susan hide in the sink’s drain pipe while the scientist washes his hands. This leads us to the best cliffhanger Doctor Who‘s done so far – a shot of the scientist taking out a sink plug, the credits rolling as the sink slowly drains.
After last week set up a pretty complicated collection of elements, this week’s episode settles into something much simpler, becoming the type of pragmatic “how do we survive this environment” adventure narrative that’s commonplace to Doctor Who by now, albeit in an environment that’s more high concept than usual. This is good for us though as it allows us to look a little deeper at the exact mechanics of how the serial’s absurdism works, something I slightly scrimped on last time in favour of everything else going on in the serial.
Let’s take some examples. Last week, Ian and Susan were made to cower from the sudden blotting out of the sun; a jump cut revealed that this was being caused by a somewhat bumbling government inspector walking past, completely unaware that Ian and Barbara were even there. Last week’s cliffhanger of Team TARDIS being threatened by a cat was resolved by it getting bored and running off. The plot content of this week’s cliffhanger is the Doctor and Susan apparently being violently drowned, but the visual content is a thirty-second shot of a sink draining. Each beat works via a mechanism in which something that is life-threatening to the main characters turns out to also be something completely innocuous from the perspective of a normal sized person. It’s this duality and disconnect that makes the episode specifically absurd – that everything in it is both patently ridiculous and genuinely dangerous at the same time.
This disconnect is what allows the episode to function as a satire against the businessman and the scientist. A common function of satirical pieces is to render things we otherwise take for granted as absurd, giving us a new perspective of the topic that should hopefully force us to change our perspective on it. In this case, the splitting of the episode into the sublime and the ridiculous allows the episode to make two separate comments on the businessman/scientists that wouldn’t otherwise naturally fit together. On one hand, we see their work as genuinely destructive and unpleasant, involving the murder of not just one civil servant but an entire landscape of living creatures. On the other hand, the fact that every jump cut to them is fundamentally underwhelming means that we also see them as silly, innocuous people fiddling about with things that aren’t actually that impressive. Both get simultaneously built into these murderous existential threats and into two dullards messing about with a stupid invention in their shed, as detestable for the banality of their evil as they are for its scope. They remain are fearful and pitiful at once.
This disconnect is also mined in a much stranger way in the scenes during the middle of the episode where Ian and Barbara have a mental breakdown at how weird the adventure is. Scenes where various members of Team TARDIS have psychologically broken down haven’t been rare so far – the Caveman serial, Dalek serial and French Revolution serial have all featured them. These serials are also the ones which have been the most focused on the idea that their environments are genuinely awful places that no human being should have to endure though, their breakdowns being the inevitable endpoint of plots dedicated to putting the characters through as much misery as possible. This is significantly different from this episode where everything that Team TARDIS goes through is being constantly undermined through jump cuts revealing their causes to be ridiculous. The minitarisation serial so far has been pretty close to a straight comedy episode; for this to also be an episode where the characters are reduced to wailing and fainting is an odd decision on behalf of the screenwriter.
It’s here that we should look at absurdism’s common bedfellow though: existentialism. Existentialism is one of those diffuse concepts which shall always be bowdlerized by any attempt to pithily summarise it. Nonetheless, let’s give it a go. Basically, existentialism argues that, in the face of an absurd universe, meaning is not to be found inherently within the universe but instead to be consciously created by the individual. Related to this are such concepts as the existential crisis, a depression felt by the individual due to their understanding that the world is meaningless. And, well, that sounds an awful like what Barbara and Ian are going through. Faced with a ludicrous situation, sat on a tabletop complaining how everything “sounds ridiculous” and that they should “just forget how absurd things are”, Barbara and Ian spend a lot of this story completely shutting down. This story is at least partially about the existential crisis brought on by the ridiculous; just because something’s silly doesn’t mean it isn’t also horrible, particularly if you have to live with it. This in turn reflects back on the businessman and scientist, reminding us that just because they’re pitiful doesn’t mean they’re not also genuinely unpleasant. Their actions are banal, but being banal doesn’t also stop them being evil.
The question is whether this actually works dramatically. On one hand, the uneasy tone that gets created here is effectively alienating, reflecting the existential alienation being suffered by Barbara and Ian. On the other, it is used to effectively steamroll Barbara as a character. In previous episodes, Barbara has always been an incredibly strong character who’s kept it together while other people (usually Susan) are flailing around her. Here though, she is reduced to the Susan role of screaming at everything, becoming inactive through stress and fainting at the drop of a hat (or at least at the reveal of an admittedly impressive fly model). The issue here is perhaps not the way she reacts – as said, it’s a pretty sensible reaction to everything that’s going on this episode – but the fact that it just doesn’t feel right for Barbara. Ironically, you sorta wish that Susan had been paired with Ian and was doing this instead. There’s something half-baked about the entire setup.
That said, it is nice for the Doctor and Susan to get material which is based on them adventuring together without the Doctor being too unpleasant towards her. Compare the scenes where the Doctor allows Susan to climb up the drain pipe in front of him to the scenes of him belittling her during the Sensorite serial and the difference is night and day. It’s also nice to see how dedicated the Doctor is to saving Ian and Barbara – Team TARDIS’ evolution into best friends and the Doctor’s evolution into a selfless hero does appear to have been finalised over the course of this story.
And the sets and models do continue to be very impressive, particularly the pre-mentioned fly model and the sink set. It’s a gimmicky episode but at least the script and production are dedicated to getting the most out of the gimmick as possible. Doing a miniturisation story is one thing, using it to produce a spectacle-led piece of existential satire is another. While it can be headscratcher, it’s certainly not unambitious.
And this ambition does count for a lot. I am fully aware that I started this review by noting how much simpler this week’s episode was compared to the last week’s, only to then start discussing such things as the philosophical concept of existentialism. It just shows how much Doctor Who has a lot going on under the surface nowadays. Even when it doesn’t quite work, it continues to be absolutely fascinating.
How much further can they push things?
FNORD 