T: Chris Jeffries is the Doctor! That much is pretty obvious even on the grotty picture that I’m watching, especially as there’s an ill-advised (if slightly skewiff) close-up of him as Patrick Troughton’s stand-in. To give Jeffries his due, he does a bit of comedy juggling with the Dominators’ bomb, almost dropping it, in an attempt to convince us he’s the real thing. It’s not his fault that the director thinks we might neglect to look at his face. Once this is tidied up and made pristine for the DVD, I’m sure this will be even more obvious. Speaking of the DVD, once it’s released, even a ropey piece of old tat like this will be fun to see – I’m currently watching the VHS print, which has numerous tiny little cuts (notably the various death scenes), so there will be a few snatched seconds of entirely-new-to-me Doctor Who to enjoy.
And there are bits – just bits, you understand – of entertainment in this last episode as well. Toba for once actually obeys Rago (he becomes a submissive Dominator!), and the tables are sweetly turned as the Quark alarms go off all around Rago in his spaceship, and he doesn’t know where to look. To Morris Barry’s credit, he’s managed to suggest that there are far more Quarks than the three at his disposal. And while we know that Haisman and Lincoln fell out with the producers over exploitation rights on the Quarks – which, a bit optimistically, they hoped would become as big as the Daleks (does this mean the Dominators would have accompanied them on every subsequent appearance, which would have become tedious fast?) – they did get it right in one key area: “Quarks can’t climb,” says Jamie, thus allowing every lazy journalist, comedian and cartoonist in the land plenty of ammunition if ever they became popular.
You can probably tell that I’m scraping for compliments here. The sad truth is that by this point, Hines and Troughton have been mucking about so much, they’ve occasionally veered too close to actorly hi-jinks in their efforts to keep the audience invested in what’s happening on screen. You can’t really blame them, though, as the script isn’t sure at times of what it’s trying to say. Cully becomes sad that Balan is dead, but he’s thanked for rescuing Teel and Kando. But Balan would still be alive if Cully and Jamie hadn’t attacked the Quarks, and yet any culpability on their part isn’t so much forgiven as it’s forgotten. Also, how does it continue to be the case that if Toba is such an over-eager young hothead, with Rago as his long-suffering commander, that all of Rago’s decisions turn out to be wrong? These Dominators have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory – had they just paraded about shooting people as Toba has advocated for about two hours now, they’d probably have won. What’s the message here, then? “Sadism works”?
And – oh hell – we even get another bloody space-food scene. Note to all Doctor Who writers: in the future, food will be nutrition blocks that look unappealing to our contemporary eyes. You can take that as read. It’s not interesting, exciting or even funny. Please do not waste our time with it. It’s perfunctory at best, irritating at worst. This is an ex-narrative device. The end.
[Toby’s addendum, written 29th of May: Well, guess which lucky so-and-so was asked to moderate the spruced-up, uncut DVD of this story? That’s right, me! The reinstated cuts do make a difference. I’m audibly shocked at how gruesome Balan’s death is – it’s a protracted, repeated onslaught of death-ray that adds real oomph to the episodes in question. As for the Doctor’s double, I noticed Chris Jeffries because I was actively looking for him – the others present felt that they got away with it.]
[Toby’s addendum #2, written August 2011 and included in this volume’s second printing: Since writing this, I’ve discovered that James Copeland had actually passed away, unreported, in 2002, and that Maurice Selwyn is also deceased. Madeleine Mills died in 2010, and Roy Skelton in 2011.]
April 19th
The Mind Robber episode one
R: Of course, on any terms, this is odd. When in 1992 the BBC decided to root around the archives and show a repeat season showcasing one story per Doctor, this is the one that followed The Time Meddler. It was certainly different from watching a comical romp about a Monk in Saxon England, but not perhaps as jolting to the average viewer as when they settled down to watch The Sea Devils only a week later. Both the black and white adventures have Doctor Who doing strange things with a TARDIS – whereas the Pertwee story doesn’t even feature a TARDIS at all! The Mind Robber boasts lots of surreal imagery, white robots in a void and strange sound effects – but cut adrift from the other Troughton stories surrounding it, it looks maybe like a bit of weird sixties absurdism done on the cheap.
But in context, it’s the strangest episode Doctor Who has yet broadcast – and the greatest wrench the series has ever made from its established house style. And, as a result, the barrage of surrealism doesn’t merely look imaginative and clever – the way it might have done to the patient viewer back in the nineties – but genuinely discordant. Even frightening.
As is generally known, of course, this first episode was an emergency script written to plug a gap when The Dominators was cut back. It had to be made with speaking roles for only the regular cast (save a quick voiceover for the next story’s guest villain), the TARDIS set, an empty studio and a few robot costumes dug out of the storeroom. It’s tempting to think that script editor Derrick Sherwin (who also wrote this episode, uncredited) looked to The Wheel in Space for inspiration, which had also opened with a Doctor and companion-heavy episode – hence the fluid links playing up again, mercury fumes all over the place, and the TARDIS showing tempting things upon the scanner. Indeed, to begin with, the episode seems deliberately to toy with us by offering only the familiar. It emphasises a direct link to the previous story by showing a reprise, and then plays around with the Doctor fretting about the TARDIS controls in just the same manner as he’s done so often before.
The difference, though, becomes quickly obvious. Doctor Who has always revelled in the thrill of adventure. It’s entirely what it’s about. And the Doctor loves adventure – just think of the delight he takes in The Web of Fear when Victoria asks if what’s outside the TARDIS will be safe (“Oh, I shouldn’t think so for a moment!”), or his reaction to her fears in Fury from the Deep (“The spice of life!”). And Troughton is the most anarchic of all the Doctors, the one most likely to stride cheerfully into trouble without checking to see whether there’s radiation on Dulkis or not. So when he insists that the TARDIS must not be left, it’s very effective. And all the more because it isn’t just Troughton acting frightened – we’re used to that now as comic shtick. Instead he downplays his warnings again, and becomes as serious as we’ve ever seen him. All we can see through the doors is white blankness – and his refusal to look at it, his refusal even to contemplate it, makes it genuinely the most threatening location the TARDIS has ever taken us to. When Zoe first succumbs and steps outside, she just shimmers and vanishes into the void – and it looks as if she’s just been erased.
And what makes that even more insidious is how the characters are tempted out. For Jamie and Zoe, it’s the idea that they’ve returned home that is so appealing. Not so for the Doctor – the ghostly voice plays instead upon his heroism. What’s shocking is that he fights so hard to resist it. He won’t go to his friends – instead he sits down, shuts his eyes tightly, and refuses to listen to their cries for help. His weakness, inevitably, is his own predictable compassion. And one of the most chilling moments in the episode is the depiction (in his head? as he imagines it?) of a widely grinning Jamie and Zoe calling for him and beckoning him outside into danger.
It’s extraordinary. I used to think that it was rather a shame that the limitations of the time meant that the viewer could easily see that this whiteness isn’t a void at all, but has edges and corners in the distance. But now I find that strangely odder – that the “nothing” isn’t as clean and as perfect as that. It’s David Maloney’s first time directing Who, and straight away, before he’s had a chance to work out how the series should look, he does everything he can to dislocate it. He has Jamie and Zoe run dire
ctly to camera – as if they’re actually looking out on us, the viewer, in horror. He has the camera pan upwards over their heads as they talk, only to reveal them again above, as if somehow in this mysterious place they’re on two different planes at once. He has them dressed in white suddenly – all the better to blur them in and out of negative when he sees fit. (Negative, of course, by this stage the traditional death ray of both the Daleks and the Cybermen – it’s as if he’s killing them, and impassively, emotionlessly, set as statues, they don’t even care.)
And then the story cheats. It cruelly suggests that the crisis is over. It allows us to believe the Doctor has rescued his friends. But the background sound effect we’ve adjusted to becomes a point of attack. The very sanctuary of the TARDIS is invaded. And the Ship breaks apart. The image of the central console spinning, with Jamie and Zoe riding it for dear life, is justly famous – but eerier still, I think, is that Zoe sees the Doctor, and screams: and he’s in a different close-up, his head and shoulders filling the screen, turning around on the spot, unreactive. It’s as if he’s in another scene altogether, and there’s no connection between the shots. We cut back to the console, getting smaller and smaller, then getting lost within the murk.
For the first time in Doctor Who, we really can have no idea what can happen next.
T: Technically, this episode is just padding – and yet, it’s one of the most interesting, unnerving and well-realised episodes that we’ve ever seen, and ever will. It mainly consists of three actors and a blank set, but the set-up enables Troughton and Hines – who have been skirting perilously close to excess over the past few weeks – to get down and dirty with some proper acting again. And because of the limited nature of what we can see, Troughton really has to sell this hard – and he really does, throwing in a bag of suspense for free.
David Maloney is also very clever here – this is odd, yes, but it doesn’t descend into confusing nonsense; we’re aware of the narrative rules within the surrealism. But while you’re right about the slowly roving camera that displaces us, I would disagree with you on one point. My first copy of this was middling enough for the nothingness to be just that – a floorless, empty space. Now that the picture has been all spruced up on DVD, meaning you can see the joins and the studio wall (the visuals are now flawless, yes; floorless, no), I think it loses something. Sometimes, the murkiness of the past helps to give atmosphere to archival gems. I could get all metatextual and say that it’s deliberately blurring the walls between reality and fiction because the nothingness now looks like a TV studio, and that the unreality of the production subconsciously reflects our complicity with the inherent fiction within the fiction of The Land of Fiction... but, well, I’m not you. That said, the words “Produced by Peter Bryant” appearing on the scanner at the start of the final TARDIS scene did tempt me to walk that route!
If there’s a real shame here, though, it’s that I’ve seen clip shows where that iconic bit of Zoe’s bum, Zoe and the spinning TARDIS console has been used to illustrate the typical cliché of the “screaming companion”. It’s irritating, because they couldn’t have chosen a more inappropriate example. Zoe’s first scream in this episode is imposed over that shot of the all-white, Cheshire Cat-grinning Zoe and Jamie, who beckon and tempt the Doctor. Neither this, nor Zoe’s scream at the cliffhanger, are “I’m-a-terrified-girly-who’s-seen-a-spider” screams – they’re peculiar cries of anguish that puncture the minimalist soundscape, keeping us on edge, and telling us that the normal rules of storytelling don’t apply. Besides, if the TARDIS breaking up, followed by Zoe and Jamie clinging to the console while they and the adrift Doctor tumble into dark nothingness isn’t cause for screaming, what is? Wouldn’t you let out a bellow of terror? I would.
A final thought: it feels like familiar territory when the TARDIS scanner shows incorrect images to get the crew to react in a particular way. In that regard, this is a Land of Fiction as Written by David Whitaker Story. That makes me wonder, though – what happened to the food machine when the Ship exploded?
The Mind Robber episode two
R: And, I suppose, the maddest thing episode two could do would be to be so utterly unlike episode one. Whereas the tone for last week was fractured and chilling, here it’s warm and whimsical. The weirdness this week is all about the mad characters the Doctor encounters, not in a madness that preys upon the Doctor – in that way this is much more traditional, showing our heroes wandering around a new planet and bumping into stuff. As fans we know the reason for this shift in tone, of course – we’re now into the story as written by Peter Ling, not the filler episode written by Sherwin. It’s an ugly fit – but, for once, that feels rather the point. When Jamie makes the one allusion to the events of last week, talking about how the TARDIS broke up, the Doctor reacts with panic as if it’s something new to him – it feels like a dream, even compared to the dreamlike things that are happening here. It’s so hard to imagine how this episode might have worked had The Dominators gone out in six episodes as planned, and the TARDIS had just plonked our regulars down into a world of giant jam jars and clockwork robots. It might have all looked rather twee. It certainly would have looked very disjointed. As it is, we’ve got used to the idea that anything can happen.
So maybe in a way, episode two is a little compromised by the brilliance of episode one. If you’re told as an audience to expect the unexpected, then the twists can hardly have the same impact. (As anybody watching Roald Dahl introduce his Tales of the Unexpected on ITV in the eighties might have agreed, and as much as anyone going to see the latest movie from “strange twist-meister” M Night Shyamalan might think now.) But that’s not a bad thing. Because the difference between Sherwin’s weirdness and Ling’s weirdness is that Ling wants us to see his story as a game to puzzle out. To go straight from the planet Dulkis to The Land of Fiction, we might have spent so much time reeling at the contrast that we wouldn’t have taken part in Ling’s little parlour games at all. There’s a fierce logic to all of this, even if it’s in a framework Doctor Who has never used before. That Jamie loses his face and becomes played by another actor is bonkers – but it’s only as a result of the Doctor fudging the sort of puzzle the average child would have been used to from the filler pages of the Doctor Who Annual. The same thing’s true for the picture-writing game, or the forest of words – what’s striking about all this is that it’s actually very familiar. That’s the intention, of course. We don’t yet know that Bernard Horsfall is Gulliver (and he’s still credited as “The Stranger”), but sharp sixties kids might yet spot the references. The clockwork soldiers, once we see them in their full glory, should be utterly recognisable. (David Maloney realises this, of course, and reveals them very cleverly. We see first only their marching feet, looking a bit ungainly admittedly, but nothing compared to what we saw of the Quarks a couple of weeks ago. And then the first view we get of those painted toy faces is a throwaway shot on one of the Master’s screens – so that as an audience we should be wondering, “Did I just see what I thought I saw”? Finally, as they surround the Doctor and his chums, we see the key in the back, and we understand at last.
So, brilliantly, if episode one just dropped us into chaos, episode two is more subtly subversive by parading on the screen things that seem endearingly commonplace but in entirely the wrong setting. It’s not a million miles from giving Yeti guns and sticking them in the London Underground. And it might just be because Frazer Hines caught chicken pox, but to have a situation where Jamie is replaced by another actor altogether is part of that – even our trusted friends don’t look right any more. Hamish Wilson is rather brilliant for two very good reasons – firstly, that he looks and sounds nothing like Hines, and secondly, that his performance nonetheless is eerily similar. He’s got Hines’ mannerisms down to a tee, the diffident head toss back at the Doctor. What’s lovely is that Wilson plays Jamie as if we ought to like him and trust him just as always – he may look different, but he’s our same Highlander friend, isn
’t he? – and we can’t. He’s sinister, simply because he assumes he isn’t. It’s very clever.
I love the children too, who are unsmiling and threatening. And the wistful way that Troughton wishes he believed in wishing wells: it’s a note of gentle sadness in a story about imagination run insane, and his performance does so much to anchor the episode and give us something to relate to.
T: Once Zoe has fallen down the hole, and Jamie has been shot in the face by a Redcoat, it’s Troughton who leads us through this crazy world – and he does so with the perfect mix of curiosity, fear and comic frustration. It’s delightful and terribly funny how he’s both guilty and haughty about Jamie’s face-off, and is very slow to admit his own culpability in it. After the ordeal he experienced in the previous episode, the Doctor is back to his old self.
Jamie, on the other hand, is anything but. Wilson’s main strength is the instant rapport he seems to have picked up with both Troughton and Padbury – he’s laudably bold in being very familiar with them, and it helps sell the fact that this is our Jamie despite the deeper voice and different accent. (Perhaps there was, just out of shot, a still of the vocal chords the Doctor had to choose from.) What little we do see of Frazer Hines is odd, actually – whatever Jamie’s confusion about a voice recording in The Wheel in Space, he’s been a pretty modern sort of fellow for most of his tenure, and has seemed relatively unfazed by most technology and more literate than your average Jacobite. So it’s shocking here, when the first thing he does upon seeing a Redcoat is to pull a knife and try to butcher him. It’s a stark reminder that our loveable rogue of a companion is inured to the blood and guts of battle. And it’s even odder that he throws a fair few words the Redcoat’s way rather than just sneaking up on him – as Jamie should know, this isn’t the most advisable way to engage in combat with someone with a big gun.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 63
