Whowatch Part 3
Don't find myself with a ton of truly major new news or life notes to cover, so let's get right to it.
The Brain of Morbius
The Christmas Invasion
New Earth
Tooth and Claw
School Reunion
The Girl in the Fireplace
Rise of the Cybermen
The Age of Steel
The Idiot’s Lantern
The Impossible Planet
The Satan Pit
Love & Monsters
Fear Her
Army of Ghosts
Doomsday
Sean: Hello David! These past three days have been pretty uneventful from a writing perspective. Anyways, let’s talk Doctor Who!
David: Oh lord. This is one of those ‘of the moment’ moments, but for those who aren’t checking out our other feature, we just spent the past 3 evenings at time of writing piecemeal putting together our thoughts on Batman V Superman with our pal Ritesh Babu. And while this technically amounted to considerably more screentime, this is still the desert after eating five servings of vegetables in terms of the workload for picking media apart. Anyway, I know you’ve mentioned Series 2 not being a favorite of yours, but I quite enjoyed it! That’s not where we’re starting though.
Sean: Nope. Because, it’s Morbin’ Time! That is to say, we’re beginning with our first taste of the Classic series in the Fourth Doctor adventure, The Brain of Morbius.
David: My actual first exposure to classic Who, as unlike the modern era I hadn’t had even a taste before. This first time around, and I don’t know how controversial it is when it comes to these episodes, gotta say: wasn’t wild about it. The first episode in particular felt like a transmission from some parallel universe where they had just invented TV and were still only starting to figure out how it could work in 1976, which is odd considering it was 13 seasons in already. I dunno, maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for it, but there was a chintzy, lowball Trek feeling pervading the whole thing for me I wasn’t charmed by, and while Philip Madoc’s Solon was thoroughly charismatic and I liked the basic plot structure of recreating Frankenstein as a comedy of errors, I wasn’t wild about the whole thing being wrapped up in an education of superstitious natives (via the Sisterhood of Karn, who I get the impression are basically the Zamarons to the Time Lords’ Guardians). Did love it ending in a recreation deliberate or otherwise of that one Mr. Fantastic/Doctor Doom battle where they engage in mental combat via ENCEPHALO-GUN though.
Sean: The Brain of Morbius is, for many fans, a well liked episode (I have fun with it, though it’s not in my top 10 Classic era stories). There’s a love of the Frankenstein plot to bring back a galactic tyrant trapped in his own brain like Dr. Willow as well as the general additions to the lore with the existence of the Sisterhood (of whom, this is their sole appearance in the classic series) and the titular Morbius. The thing about the classic series that contrasts with the new one is that, due to its length, there’s a multiplicity of styles, modes, and aesthetics such that one could probably fall in love with the ‘Overthrow the Government’ stuff while having a fondness for the ‘Hammer Horror’ era.
It’s interesting that you bring up the Encephalo-Gun sequence considering many a fan has speculated on one particular part of the scene: Doctor Who’s mind shows all their previous incarnations up to that point, then shows Other faces. Some have speculated that these are previous incarnations of Doctor Who from before the series. Do you have any thoughts about this?
David: I’m very vaguely aware this is something that’s played with lately - there’s some kind of Doctor Who: Year One-type comic right now spinning out of that by Jody Houser, I think? - but I’m shocked fans didn’t harangue a definitive answer out of the cast and crew decades ago.
Sean: Oh boy, I get to explain LOOMS! Fuck me, I was hoping to not have to explain this.
David: Maybe, but at the end of the day isn’t explaining to me ‘oh god, so here’s this horrifying context’ what this project’s really going to be all about?
Sean: Ok, so in the 90s, a sentence that should bring about great fear to anyone who is following David for his comics opinions, Doctor Who was shunted off into novels. Some of these novels were pretty good (I’ll talk about one of the best ones in two entries time). But among the novels was a plan by some of the writers often referred to as The Cartmel Masterplan (though, if we’re being honest, it should be the Platt Masterplan).
Essentially, in the before, before time, when the Gallifreyans were young and not capable of time travel, three whippersnappers came up with time travel and created a civilization out of that. One of the time travelers made a bad business with the Sisterhood of Karn, who didn’t much care for these modern, expansionist sons of bitches. Especially after said time traveler stole the flame of immortality to give his people the ability to regenerate. In anger, the Sisterhood decided to curse these new fangled Time Lords with Asexuality.
Given that, the trio developed a scientific means to reproduce asexually via Looms, wherein old, dead Time Lords can have their biodata reused to create a new Time Lord. Over time, the member of the trio who fucked the Sisterhood over got jealous of the other two and shunted one of them into a parallel universe while the Other one, fearing for his granddaughter, jumped into a Loom. And that’s how Doctor Who was born.
David: …huh. I assume this was the product of said haurenging given the context you’re presenting it in? I’d ask if this is canon but my understanding is that’s a basically heretical question.
Sean: Doctor Who’s relationship with Canon is very much like Bugs Bunny’s relationship with Elmer Fudd.
But moving on to the main reason I used this episode: Sarah Jane Smith. Do you have any thoughts on her here and, as a segway to the main topic, her appearance in School Reunion?
David: She was fine in Morbius, pretty much fit my vague cultural impression of what a Doctor Who companion is supposed to be like, and in that regard it set her up well. As you mention it, I actually am fine with popping straight ahead to School Reunion - I liked the first three stories of the new era just fine (my main thoughts up to that point being ‘the effects seem a little worse this season?’, ‘Y’know I can buy the Doctor would fall for a ridiculous con like Cassandra was pulling for a minute, if I were time traveling 900-year-old I’d get tripped up on appropriate era-specific regional dialect too’, ‘Sharp turn from dissing Thatcher to talking up the Empress of India’, and ‘The 70% water bit was funny’), but I was half-distracted grappling with the cognitive dissonance of the change from Eccleston to Tennant where I was trying to simultaneously understand him as a deliberately new guy while still being the continued consciousness of who I had been following. And as it turns out, seeing him bounce off a whole OTHER layer of history was what squared the circle for me.
Sean: If I’m being honest, Series 2 is one of the harder series for me to watch. It’s the cinematography that kills it for me. A lot of the episodes feel too bright and saturated. Not in the way Series 1 was saturated, but it was like they were trying to do that type of cinematography, but with a color pallet that wasn’t yellow. As a result, it just kicks me out of the experience. You’re right that there’s a degree to which the Tennant era has some rather… choice politics.
But moving into School Reunion, we have the appearance of first time Doctor Who writer, Toby Whithouse, a man who wrote my second least favorite episode of Doctor Who. But here, he’s equipt to write television for a more ManPain era. You’re right that Sarah Jane does allow a bit of a contrast between the traditional TARDIS Squad dynamic. The ex-girlfriend popping up, living her life with her robot Dog.
David: K9! Crying emoji. But yeah, this puts forward one of the most fascinating aspects of Who I hadn’t considered before: that not as a matter of traditional recast but by the basic design of the setup, you’re going to have what amounts to one character paying off another’s emotional arc, sometimes decades after the initial setup, and everyone involved is gonna have to sell it. I totally bought that Tennant and Sladen were having a big getting-the-band-back-together reunion episode even though as far as I know the two had never met before! I’m almost shocked they waited this long to pull this trigger with a revival, and perhaps more importantly it really demarcated the difference between the 9th and 10th Doctors for me; brusqueness vs. charm in terms of how he deflects from whatever’s killing him. And when you see past the front? Eccleston bruises. Tennant bleeds. “I used to have so much mercy” is haunting, and I just don’t quite see the last guy pulling it off in quite the same way.
This does also set up this gaggle of episodes’ killer flaw though: boring-ass threats the writers have nothing clever to do with, especially ones that come from the original version of the show.
Sean: The thing about Series One is that there was a lot of fear about bridging the gap between The New Series and the Classic Show. Besides the Autons, the Daleks, and the Cyberman head, there are no returning elements from the Classic series in series one. Even the Cyberman head had to be fought for.
There’s a reason I wanted to push past through this entire series, and that’s because of the other reason I often don’t watch it: It feels superfluous. Besides maybe three episodes, there’s no weight to what we’re watching. I mean, we have the fucking Devil as the main antagonist of a two-parter, and he feels rather crap. And not Doctor Who crap, but just generic ‘Monster of the Week’ crap. How do you fuck up Doctor Who vs the Devil!
David: So we’ll get to how frighteningly wrong you apparently are about Impossible Planet/Satan Pit in a bit; first we’ve got the return of Moffat in The Girl in the Fireplace, possibly my favorite episode of the series to date and a blessed drink of water to prepare me for the desert I was about to march through.
Sean: Oh thank god, you’re going to like the Moffat era. Anyways, I found this to be the weakest of his pre-Moffat era works, and (like another story in this series) a first draft for what he’d do later on. In particular, this episode highlights his love for one of the more bonkers science fiction novels of the 21st Century: The Time Traveler’s Wife. In that novel, a woman falls in love with a time traveler and their relationship occurs out of order. So he’s 35 when she first meets him at 7 and she’s 25 when he first meets her at 27. It’s an extremely weird book that Moffat would eventually adapt a few years after he finished his era in a flawed, but inexplicably charming series for HBO that will no doubt be pulled from HBO Max in the next three months.
David: Afraid of the sad guy time travel stories recommended to me by my dad, I read Ken Grimwood’s Replay instead, but among the many kernels of foreknowledge I possess is that Moffat goes back to that structure in a big way with one of the companions referred to as The Impossible Girl because of the scattershot chronological order in which she and the Doctor ‘first’ met. Anyway, in this more condensed format I loved it, a half dozen truly bonkers sci-fi high concepts assembled in wild yet strictly logical ways that made the foundation of a charming, absurd, melancholic adventure culminating in an astonishing gutpunch of a final shot. Also followed Empty Child in being the most generally romanticized take on The Doctor to date (“My lonely angel…”), though I know that changes a great deal once Moffat takes over himself.
Sean: When it comes to Moffat’s weird structural tricks, Doctor Who actually marks a stepping back from sheer experimentation. Later episodes will have bespoke chronologies that don’t line up until they suddenly do. But in contrast to his work on Press Gang or Coupling, there’s always one timeline that’s the main timeline of events. You have the Doctor experiencing the life of Madame de Pompadour as she gets older and older and he remains the same. The heartbreak at the end where he arrives after she’s already dead and silently puts the letter she wrote in his pocket is just heartbreaking.
David: And then we get the shit episodes.
Sean: Yeah. Look, the Cybermen have only worked four times, and this isn’t one of those times. What’s worse is that there’s really nothing to say about the two-parter in question. It’s just “What if we did Spare Parts again, but shit?” Just an absolute waste of everyone’s time. Especially returning director Graeme Harper, who is the only director to do both work for the New Series and the Classic era.
David: The Cybermen are a cool design! But if Girl In The Fireplace was a masterful bolting-together of a clutch of seemingly irreconcilable concepts, Rise of the Cybermen and The Age of Steel are like 5 episode ideas squashed into one with no interest in developing any of them, sending off Mickey in brutally perfunctory fashion to boot. I almost wanna go back on my own time and pick these two episodes apart piece-by-piece to crack how they fail as pieces of serialized adventure fiction compared to their neighbors, but at the same time…no I don’t.
Sean: And then there’s The Idiot’s Lantern which… has some concerns as to whether or not it’s about a queer kid having to accept his homophobic father. Which… Y I K E S!
David: Yeah it’s kinda the only thing in the episode not worth glossing past besides Maureen Lipman’s beautifully hammy performance. I was gonna shrug my shoulders and go ‘well that one was fun enough,’ and then we got the Hitler-stache ‘you’re just like the Nazis!’ guy getting maybe-redeemed at the literal last moment through unconditional love offscreen. No thanks personally! Then we reach the promised land, which…Sean I cannot imagine what issue would be taken with Satan Pit beyond that it does The Doctor vs. The Devil as a throwaway story, and personally? I LOVE that it does The Doctor vs. The Devil as a throwaway story. The most pointed testament imaginable to the scale this series and character work on, and in the form of a really damn fun haunted house sci-fi jaunt to boot (zero qualifiers: enjoyed this a hell of a lot more than Alien. Okay, one qualifier, which is that that doesn’t count for much as I don’t like Alien, but).
Sean: Yeah, but it plays Doctor Who vs The Devil straight while doing it as a throwaway story. There are a bunch of episodes with the premise Doctor Who vs The Devil that do actually inventive things with the concept beyond ‘The Devil is a thing in the center of the universe.’ And it does it in a much more thoughtful, fascinating, weirder manner than this episode does.
David: I gotta disagree, because it takes two extremely straightforward versions of that idea and by playing both straight turns ‘the idea of evil is greater than any one figure’ from a neat little metaphor to a completely bonkers concept of Satan as freefloating idea-virus that literally left behind the horns and pitchfork eons ago. Love it love it love it.
Additional important note: The Doctor clearly loving Rose and just as clearly being repulsed and horrified at the idea of building a life with her - well, less her than any kind of life at all in spite of it being with her - is such a perfect little bit.
Sean: Yeah, Doctor Who’s relationship with Rose is very much one of a swinger who has the whole of the cosmos while also wanting to be with her. This will have… consequences later on, but for now their relationship is in its honeymoon phase. And then the Monsters come and ruin everything.
But before we get to that, Love and Monsters: the second most hated episode of the series by the fans. I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that it’s about Doctor Who fandom in general and Ian Levine in particular.
David: Wait what.
I…guess? Clearly you’re gonna provide context in a second, but I didn’t even see this as a ‘fandom’ thing even if I can see that they’re basically a ersatz fan club, just a perfectly decent little bottle episode exploring the already-established notion of The Doctor as being a cryptid in certain communities through the legends accidentally cropping up in his wake, and tacking on another layer of how he means well but ruins everyone around him sort of just by existing as much as anything that’s his fault. I didn’t have huge thoughts beyond that it was fine, nice little sad ending, and I was wondering where I recognized Ursula from and looking it up now it turns out she was the horny bathroom ghost in the terf wizard movies.
Sean: You have to remember David, being an English actor often means eventually showing up in Doctor Who.
The story in general is about a group of people who came together because of their love of Doctor Who. Their desire to rediscover Doctor Who and how they grow and change as people because of their fandom. Keep in mind, Davies is a writer very in-tune with the larger popular culture. He did an entire episode around throwing Doctor Who and their companions into reality television. Rose herself is a character straight out of a Soap Opera like Coronation Street or Eastenders or Springhill.
As for Ian Levine, in the 1980s, the show made the rather disastrous move to start making the show for the fans. Have cliffhangers and monsters appear not because there was a story to be told with them, but because the fans liked them. So you ended up with some rather dreadful stories that feel like Kurt Buseik being allowed to do Avengers Forever every single week.
David: Oh. Oh dear. That uh, ain’t his best.
Sean: But the thing of it is, they also made the even worse decision to hire a fan to act as a continuity advisor. Enter Ian Levine, the sort of man who owns every single issue of DC Comics. He’s an… opinionated fan who has done some good work with film preservation via uncovering lost episodes of Doctor Who, but his time as Continuity Advisor was… very much forcing Doctor Who to be a specific thing: Crap Sci-Fi. He’s the sort of fan who reacted to Jodie Whittaker being cast as Doctor Who by deciding that Doctor Who was no longer for him and fucking off to be a Babylon 5 fan. He also was probably actively aware of the sexual assaults and rapes going on during the Nathan Turner years.
He’s an unpleasant fellow derided by various portions of the fandom. But with regards to Love and Monsters, Victor Kenedy represents the sort of fan who thinks the only thing that matters is the Lore. Is the point by point Doctor Who continuity. Who makes loving this weird, amazing show into homework. And he will consume everyone and anyone who disagrees with his singular vision.
And the thing about Doctor Who, and indeed all sci-fi worth talking about, is that it has a multiplicity to it. It can be about metal men stomping down the streets of Wales one week and Werewolves the next and a little girl whose drawings come to life the week after that. Just as Superman can be All Star, Smashes the Klan, and For Tomorrow or Star Trek In the Pale Moonlight, The Empath, or The Straight Story. What makes these things worthwhile isn’t them being shunted into a box of ‘Time Traveling Alien,’ but that the box is so much bigger on the inside.
But more than that, it’s about what happens when these communities of love turn monstrous. The core scene is when Elton does some truly fucked things to Jackie to get to know Doctor Who better. And while other stories in the series treat Jackie with some degrees of contempt, here her vulnerability has her at her most sympathetic. She’s devastated that she’s being used by a man she quite liked. And it hurts every time to watch.
David: Yeah, now that you mention it it all clicks, dude wants to eat Doctor Who so he can have all the knowledge and be the most specialist guy in that world, and leaves a bunch of people whose love for this thing is irrevocably tained behind.
Do we have a ton to say about Fear Her? It’s fine, the alien kid’s a little shit but, y’know, kids.
Sean: The only thing worth noting is that Fear Her is apparently the worst episode of this series and the worst episode of the New Series overall. Which… I mean, I don’t much care for it, but there are so much worse episodes to come. It’s middle of the road only seen as an abomination because it’s not targeted to the older crowd.
David: That’s wild! It’s a perfectly serviceable throwaway Doctor Who whatever, the kind of thing I was expecting a million of when I signed up for this. I don’t see what even the traditional fandom brainpoisoning could freak out about here compared to, idk, Unquiet Dead or Tooth and Claw or Idiot’s Lantern.
Sean: Doctor Who fandom has so many opinions that can be described with “That’s wild!”
David: So we’re at the finale now. The Cybermen are better here I suppose accompanied by the Daleks delivering a BEAUTIFULLY sick burn, and there’s some funny 3D glasses as a Chekov’s Gun and a half-baked ‘ghosts’ idea and some decently pathos-riddled one-off characters and some Lore that I guess builds to the Barrowman show down the road, yadda yadda, I liked it well enough but all that’s standardy-standard Who (which I guess I’m replying to a lot of these episodes with; I enjoyed it at the time, but I’m starting to see your point about this chunk). The part that matters is the farewell to Rose, and how it ends the only way it could because - and I’m curious how commonly-held an opinion this is - her story is in retrospect for all the good and growth she found basically about addiction.
Sean: The problem I have with it is… it feels very much like a first draft of a later series finale that does everything so much better. Every single element is done superbly there, where here, it’s fine. The best parts are the ending of Doomsday where Doctor Who and Rose are separated from one another is heartbreaking and sad and the fact that Doctor Who can’t say those three words just hurts me so much. But the stuff surrounding it is… fine. (Save Daleks vs Cybermen banter, which is proper brilliant.) The Ghostbusters gag is shit. The Torchwood lady being the one to help save the day after fighting off Cyberconversion continues the Tennant era’s strangely conservative bent.
David: See, this is why it’s supposed to be Season, not Series, because then Series Finale sounds like a completely different thing. America at least got this much right.
It’s going to be so hard to live up to Rose Tyler for me, because she’s such a perfect reflection of him, in that she’s absolutely wonderful and the best friend you could ever ask for and genuinely kind of a shitty person. Her whole life from the moment he shows up is soaring to greater and greater highs to avoid the comedowns where she faces what her jaunts do to everyone she’s supposed to hold dear, and while the question is there to be asked how much The Doctor rubbed off on her, you ultimately get the sense she was always waiting for the opportunity to be this person in all the best and most awful ways. It’s why her physical separation from him has reality itself bending to have the three closest people in her life joining hands to comfort her in imagery that to me clearly evoked an intervention, and her final farewell brutally provides zero catharsis whatsoever. She saved worlds, saw wonders, but emotionally this was always going to crash and burn in the worst way and it’s pretty much all on her. Spectacular work on Piper’s part and on the assorted creatives for stringing together that extended thread.
Sean: There is one thing going into the rest of the Tennet years that we have to address before moving on from this, and that’s a moment in the first Series 2 episode of the list, The Christmas Invasion. As with Love and Monsters, The Christmas Invasion marks the beginning of a tradition in Doctor Who to do something different. With Love and Monsters, it’s to have an episode where Doctor Who doesn’t show up for much of it so the lead can shoot other episodes. But The Christmas Invasion is the first of many charming Christmas episodes Doctor Who would do.
And yet, at the end of the story, our sympathetic politician from Aliens in London/World War Three, now Prime Minister, shoots down the fleeing defenseless spaceship. And in response, Doctor Who burns her whole government to the ground with just six words: “Don’t you think she looks tired?” Thoughts?
David: Oh that it were so simple in real life. Yeah, there’s enduring political confusion at best, but the power and perceived responsibilities of rulership absolutely destroying this once good woman and her ‘Golden Age’, and that weight dragging her down from on high the moment the Doctor pulled on that thread, was killer for me.
Sean: Oh things are going all according to keikaku*. But for now, we have a trip to the Classic Era with The End of Doctor Who!
Next Time: I felt like I could run forever. How many women have you abducted? Rose, her name was. Rose’d know. ROSE LOVED DRUGS! I am your future. I know who the Doctor really is. Have you voted?
*Translator note: Keikaku means plan.