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Wokeness, Responsibility and if RTD is problematic - The First Black Doctor and the Meaning of Mavity

Is Russell T Davies a problematic figure? Is he too woke or not aware enough? Is he doing something wrong to illicit negative responses from the conservatives as well as the progressives? Is it something in the programme, something in the marketing or is he doing nothing particularly bad at all? Well, perhaps you and I, faithful reader, can come to some sort of conclusion. Let's find out together as we take a dive into the controversial choices behind RTD2 and the mind of the man behind them.

"The Doctor is the last of their kind - one of the last of their kind - and has never, like, fit in anywhere... and I really relate to that. I felt like there were lots of parallels... I was about two when we left Rwanda, so very, very, very wee... and something that I don't have much memory of. But it's something that has felt like this thing over my head. This thing that's guided my life, that's kind of like informed every aspect of it. It's the reason why my family came to this country. It's the reason for lots of things." - Ncuti Gatwa, DWM 598

Doctor Who's relationship with racial representation is complicated. Fuck that – Doctor Who has a lot of precedent for being racist. The original series is littered with explicitly harmful depictions of race from the pro-slavery parable that was The Ark to the notorious depiction Chinese culture in The Talons of Weng-Chiang and several examples of mindless, mute brutes in the Troughton era. This is before we even get into the less obtuse complexities of white, British actors donning any number of over-the-top costumes, extravagant voices and, frequently, some thick makeup to portray everybody from high priests of the Aztec empire to Egyptian and Syrian sultans. And, of course, there is the most pertinent example of these tendencies in The Celestial Toymaker, which we shall be getting back to shortly.

In the first article of this series, I referenced a video from YouTuber Princess Weekes called Martha Jones Deserved Better (And Other Correct Doctor Who Takes). In this video, Weekes breaks down a number of problematic elements from the revived series and, specifically, RTD's first tenure as showrunner. It is well worth a watch and gets into a lot more detail on these issues than I feel inclined to dismiss here but some of the key points include the problematic use of both Mickey and Martha within the 'disposable-black-love-interest' trope and the broader implications of Martha's relationship with the Doctor as a time travelling companion, for example, the poor optics of the Doctor becoming human and deliberately hiding with Martha in, of all places in the history of universe, pre-WWI England as if that would be a low-key and safe environment for her. These examples are emblematic of his mishandling of black characters across his first five years on the show.

With this in mind, let us fast-forward to the eighth of May 2022. On the day that turned out to be almost exactly two years before his first full season debuted, Rwandan born Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa was announced as the newest actor to portray the eponymous hero in Doctor Who. On Christmas Day 2023, Gatwa made history as the first black leading man in the franchise's history. He is not, as will forever be rightfully and dutifully noted, the first black actor to play the role of the Doctor. That honour goes to Jo Martin's guest appearance in 2020 as the Fugitive Doctor. It will forever remain true, however, that Gatwa is the first black actor to assume the role as the leading man. As he put it himself in Doctor Who Magazine #598; "I'm the first Doctor of colour, fully". Ncuti's time as the Doctor, however long it may reign, will forever be associated with the man who spearheaded his casting – Russell T Davies.

Significantly, RTD2 does not begin with a black Doctor Who. As everybody reading this will know, it begins with the very white David Tennant, standing on a clifftop not wearing his predecessor's clothes. However, this is not to say that the three 60th anniversary specials entirely avoid engaging with race – far from it. I would think it much more reasonable to say that all three of them go to some lengths to be mindful of how characters of non-white and mixed race are depicted.

Let us take a glance at The Star Beast and, given that Donna Noble is particularly relevant to this conversation, I feel obliged to contextualise her two romantic partners from RTD1 and how they illustrate his similarly poor optics. Take her fiancé Lance, portrayed by Don Gilet in The Runaway Bride. He is introduced as a successful and charismatic love interest for Donna. She more or less works for him at H.C. Clements and falls head over heels for him before he reveals himself as a turncoat at around the halfway point. Soon after this, Lance, proving himself to be an irredeemably villainous figure, is killed by the Racnoss. It is perhaps notable to remember that there is nothing at a script level, insofar as Lance's characterisation and implied background, that suggests any specific racial or cultural background. Therefore, it is possible that his being a black man was not a choice made until the casting stage.

Fast forward to The End of Time when we learn of Donna's life since she returned home and discover that she is engaged once again, this time to Shaun Temple, as played by Karl Collins. Shaun returns in The Star Beast alongside Donna and their daughter Rose. In regards to Shaun, there is frankly very little to say because he is a very thinly drawn character. He is a supportive husband and father, he drives a taxi and he has a decent sense of humour. This makes up an exhaustive list of character traits he exhibits. Really, he is less of a supporting character and better resemble a minor role. He only exists as an extension of Donna and Rose's characters and serves to be a convenient mouthpiece for RTD to get out exposition.

Rose, on the other hand, plays a key part in the plot and is pivotal to the conclusion. She is a strong and well-rounded character of mixed race who is essential to the story. That being said, and as the previous entry in this series explores in-depth, her actions in this story and the character herself are intrinsically connected to her trans identity, more so than her racial one. Regarding the supporting cast, it is also worth noting that Ronak Patani, an English-Indian actor, features as UNIT Major Singh. While a small role, it is a positive example of diversity in RTD2's casting and character roles.

Like Lance, Singh is likely an example of 'colour-blind casting', the practice of casting actors of any given race or ethnicity in roles and stories that place no particular emphasis on their respective backgrounds. Bridgerton (2020-present), for a popular example, frequently casts diverse ensembles despite the stories being told making little engagement with the implications of such a choice – Bridgerton is not a series about black people in high societal roles in the 1800s. There is an obvious appeal to this, not least of all the opportunity to cast phenomenal actors in roles they would conventionally be rejected from.

In a similar vein is the notion of 'colour-conscious casting', a similar practice but one that provokes an active dialogue between the casting and content of the work. Hamilton is perhaps one of the the most recognisable works in this vein. Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical features a primarily non-white cast and retells the political history of the United States and the life of Alexander Hamilton. In Miranda's own words, Hamilton is "America then, as told by America now". Miranda's explicit intention here is to present the oppressive, white history of his country through the lens of Black and Latinx culture – being culturally and racially diverse is an essential component of Hamilton's thesis.

There has been criticism of these practices over the years with some black voices proclaiming it a problematic and racist approach. Playwright August Wilson, in 1996, spoke strongly against the practice insisting that "The idea of colorblind casting is the same idea of assimilation that black Americans have been rejecting for the past 380 years. . . . In an effort to spare us the burden of being “affected by an undesirable condition” and as a gesture of benevolence, many whites (like the proponents of colorblind casting) say, 'Oh, I don’t see color.' We want you to see us". This line of criticism has extended to works such as Hamilton, suggesting that the practice perpetuates the belief that white stories and white voices are the ones most valued in Western society. In an article by Emi P. Cummings for The Harvard Crimson, they articulated that "Any moment a white actor adopts the role of a person of color and vice-versa, there is an underlying suggestion all humans navigate their surrounding environments in the same manner. Race and ethnicity are minimized and reduced to negligible factors that can be transferred from person to person. In reality, one’s racial identity is an inalienable entity paramount to how they perceive themselves and are received by others."

So let's get to how colour-conscious casting pertains to Doctor Who for the first time with Wild Blue Yonder. In the cold open for this special, we find ourselves in the year 1666 and English-Indian actor Nathaniel Curtis emerging from his home in period appropriate garb. We quickly learn that Curtis is portraying a significant historical figure; Sir Isaac Newton, a white English man. For many viewers, the choice was received positively but it was not without its criticism. As popular YouTuber JayExci noted on X, "I'm not a rightoid and I'm not mad about it. I just think it's weird to cast someone of a historically inaccurate ethnicity to play a well known historical figure in the same way it would be weird to have a bodybuilder as Churchill or a teenager as current year Trump...It's not a big deal but I really feel there are better ways to achieve representation. Just portray a wider range of historical figures or whatever. One thing I actually did respect the Chibnall era for was finally exploring the history of parts of the world that aren't in Europe".

It is not a coincidence that this is a scene where a notable change happens in-universe. As a consequence of the Doctor and Donna's interaction, Newton fails to attribute the term 'gravity' to his theory of gravitation. Instead, he decides to call it the theory of 'mavitation'. The term 'mavity' then continues to be used in place of 'gravity' in-dialogue for all subsequent Doctor Who episodes to date. Most fans I have seen describe this change as a running joke or plot thread but I think that it has more weight than that. What 'mavity' signifies is the fact that Doctor Who stories are not beholden to the real world. Doctor Who, especially in RTD2, is a fantasy series that can play fast and loose with the established facts of the real world and make sweeping changes to its universe at the drop of a hat. This is also what is being demonstrated with Curtis' casting. He is not the same as the real Isaac Newton. He is different and changed and not beholden to the real world. Mavity is not just a random, ongoing joke but a statement of intent about race and representation in Doctor Who.

And so was the Toymaker. Let's get into this then. In 1966, a four-part Doctor Who serial that came to be known as The Celestial Toymaker aired on the BBC. In the words of Elizabeth Sandifer, from her article The Most Totally Closed Mind (The Celestial Toymaker); "this story is unrepentantly racist". The Toymaker, in his original conception and presentation, is a racist caricature of Chinese people. He is dressed in traditionally Chinese clothes, he is referred to as "the Mandarin"– he is, in Sandifer's words, "a nefarious, evil Chinese man who twists good Victorian children’s culture into sadistic and evil games".

With this in mind, it seems like an all-round terrible idea to revive the character for television in 2023. Like virtually every aspect of the Doctor Who universe, the Toymaker had already made numerous reappearances in expanded media before his return in The Giggle. To some extent, it is easy to see why. Throughout the wilderness years, The Celestial Toymaker serial was held in high regard and the concept of the Toymaker more broadly, an immortal and god-like entity who whiles away the doldrums of his existence by challenging lesser beings to sadistic games, is a really compelling one. These revivals have, for the most part, steered well clear of the 'celestial' connotations as they were onscreen, instead opting for the more cosmic definition of the word; he is the celestial toymaker who sits above us all in the sky.

But RTD is too clever for this. RTD thinks. So, he brings back the Toymaker and drops the racist adjective entirely. A sensible decision but then he goes that step further, the step he continues to take. He steps into the spotlight on an episode of Doctor Who Unleashed. On the issue of racism with the Toymaker, Russell made the following statement;

"I can absolutely guarantee you, on transmission, people will pipe up, saying, in 1966, this was a racist character. And if we haven't acknowledged that in some way, we look ignorant, I'm very, very aware of it, and it's baked into him. And that's part of the reason bringing him back. He's a villain, of course he's going to do terrible things, and that's one of them. I did not want to whitewash the Toymaker then, so I gave him this side of putting on accents. He's a murderer. He's a mass murderer. So, I like the fact there's that very slight thin thread of him playing with race, playing with voices, playing with accents, using it as an attack."

This was an approach I can't imagine many people predicting. Instead of reintroducing the Toymaker with an entirely different characterisation and set of aesthetic qualities, instead of attempting to severe ties with the character's history as a racist caricature, RTD decided to double-down on it and make the Toymaker a racist entity who relishes in cultural appropriation in-text. Now, as per RTD's vision, the 1966 Toymaker was in-fact actively and intentionally racist. He chose to appropriate the Chinese because that is the sort of thing his character is liable to do. There is still an objectionable issue to this approach that some fans have noted, however, which is that, despite the intended reasoning, The Giggle depicts racist acts despite the story itself not actually being about race in any meaningful way at all.

But we should get to the bigger elephant in the room here; the debut of Ncuti Gatwa. Unlike tradition, David Tennant's Fourteenth Doctor does not regenerate into his successor. Instead, RTD introduces a new concept which he called 'bi-generation'. Instead of regenerating, the Doctor splits off into two seperate bodies, one still resembling David Tennant and the second resembling Ncuti Gatwa. In a lot of ways, this is a great idea. In a subtextual and meta sense, the Fourteenth Doctor embodies the BBC Wales version of Doctor Who. He is rundown and burnt out. The return of an old face becomes, not just a turn toward nostalgia but, a signifier of a character and a programme that is too tired to keep moving forward and out of ideas. Gatwa's Doctor is the clean break, free of all of the emotional baggage that the last version of the show had built up over the years. The old version of the show has a definitive ending and is retired for good while the new version races off into the future, entirely unimpeded by the past and ready for new adventures.

This is also a terrible idea and another exercise in poor optics. Intentionally or otherwise, RTD has now created the perfect out for any racists watching the show to never accept Gatwa as part of the fold. As Charles Pulliam-Moore states in his article for The Verge, The new Doctor Who debut felt like a timey-wimey slap to the face, "everything about the way 'The Giggle' brings Fifteen into the picture — from the way he’s left standing in his underwear while Fourteen remains mostly clothed to the implication that the two Doctors will seemingly coexist — makes it seem as if Davies is trying to placate the contingent of fans who don’t want to accept a queer, Black actor playing the Doctor role by keeping Tennant in the mix". RTD has created an entirely plausible read where the Doctor splits off into a queer black man, while the original, the 'proper' Doctor in the eyes of bigots, walks off into the sunset.

Unfortunately, the problems do not end here. As Pulliam-Moore goes on, "The trappings and optics of “The Giggle” also add an unfortunate kind of magical negro quality to Fifteen’s heart-to-heart talks with Fourteen... The concept of a time traveler “doing rehab out of order” certainly sounds cool on the page. But within the episode itself, it frames Fifteen less as his own person living for himself and more as a source of emotional support for Fourteen, who ends up being inspired by Fifteen’s sage wisdom". And all of this in the same episode as the deliberately racist Toymaker.

Ncuti Gatwa made his leading debut in Doctor Who with The Church on Ruby Road. The Christmas special introduces a new leading lady with Millie Gibson and introduced the threat of goblins which received minor backlash for their association with negative Jewish stereotypes. Thankfully, their depiction and the story offered little reason to draw this connection. As for the Doctor himself, the story adopts a distinct colour-blind approach presenting the Doctor, at a script level, with no particularly defined racial subtext. He is safely written as a standard, vaguely defined Doctor archetype that happens to be performed by a black actor.

At the time of writing, we are just shy of two weeks from Ncuti's first season dropping in iPlayer and Disney+. Of the eight episodes, we now know that none of them are written by black authors leaving, to date, the sole black writer of the first mainline black Doctor to be Abi Falase and her novel Eden Rebellion. So, in 2024, we have RTD as the loudest voice and architect of Ncuti Gatwa's era. I suppose that this series of articles exists in this moments as less of a definitive statement and something more like a prolonged literature review in preparation for what RTD2 is really going to be like. RTD has his heart in the right place. He remains a good intentioned and intelligent writer whose ambition often exceeds his abilities. Is there anything inherently bad about saying that racism is something evil people engage with but being disabled is certainly not reserved for them? Not at all. RTD is an excellent writer who means very well. He also sometimes, despite all of this, goes about things in the wrong way.

And I think that that is okay :)

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Wokeness, Responsibility and if RTD is problematic - Rose Noble and Trans Identities in RTD2

Is Russell T. Davies a problematic figure? Is he too woke or not aware enough? Is he doing something wrong to illicit negative responses from the conservatives as well as the progressives? Is it something in the programme, something in the marketing or is he doing nothing particularly bad at all? Well, perhaps you and I, faithful reader, can come to some sort of conclusion. Let's find out together as we take a dive into the controversial choices behind RTD2 and the mind of the man behind them.

“Homophobia and transphobia happens when it’s something you’ve never seen before. You can temper that reaction and change it when you introduce these images to people happily and normally and calmly when they’re young. Then it just becomes normal.” - Russell T Davies, Doctor Who: Unleashed

Yasmin Finney, in the role of Rose Noble, was the cover star of Doctor Who Magazine #591. She became the first trans woman to feature on the front of the magazine, six months before she made her on-screen debut in The Star Beast. The anticipation and mystique regarding Finney's role had been building for some time – twelve months, in fact, since her announcement in May 2022 and the teasing reveal of her character's name. Below her, on the retail version of the magazine, read the text; "RUSSELL T DAVIES ON CASTING ROSE". Indeed, such comments from RTD could be found inside as part of a larger article discussing LGBTQ+ characters from Doctor Who's history. Regarding Rose, RTD wrote the following words;

"We're looking for good actors. That's the most fundamental line. Good acting, gay, straight, in between, whatever, the actor we choose has to be good. That's the only thing that matters. I find myself at the heart of a web - of my own making, okay! - discussing the rights and wrongs of casting, especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ roles. And it's an evolving thing. My stance changes over the years, as I learn more and more. My opinions change, like they're meant to. When I express a preference for casting gay actors in gay roles, some critic will hold up Queer as Folk from 1999 and say, but you cast straight men in that! Yes, I say, and I owe them everything; their bravery allowed me to move forwards, but more significantly, that was 24 years ago. Do you still think the same as 24 years ago? And then they stick their dummies back in their mouths and I think, oh, you do. The joy of casting like this, is in making my own experience richer, and I hope the viewers' too. That's what's brilliant about working with Yasmin Finney - through contact with her, I've witnessed her ideals, her politics, her family, her fights, her triumphs, her life in this world. A life I might never have known. It's a journey and a joy. I love it, and I hope I can do more, more, more."

There is an important moment of self-reflection to be noted here – a direct acknowledgement from RTD that his values, attitudes and opinions in representing the LGBTQ+ is an evolving one. I am inclined to agree with this too. I am not wasting my time attempting to hold the RTD of a quarter of a century ago to the social standards of today. To hold any work or writer up in such a way is, in my opinion, a dangerous and flawed practice that necessitates a form of selective critical thinking to even be viable. Art does not exist in a vacuum and to divorce it of any cultural context is an ignorant and problematic way in which to engage with it. That does not mean you have to like that work or artist. I am not insisting upon you to approve of work that is produced from deeply offensive, ignorant and insensitive places simply because they were made in the past. I am merely agreeing with the school of thought presented by RTD that the individual's and society's moral compasses are constantly evolving beasts and that evolution is reflective in the art that comes out of them. This here is really the thesis of this whole series of articles. Feel free to turn away at this point if you find yourself disagreeing. If you're looking for somebody to validate your feelings that art which you disagree with in some respect is inherently bad, please go and virtue-signal somewhere else.

Today's entry will chronicle the overall handling and reaction to the first openly trans character in televised Doctor Who and how these things are situated in the socio-political climate of 2023. Before we go any further, though, I would like to directly acknowledge a fact that you will likely have noticed which is that these writings are devoting comparatively little space to repeating the views of the 'anti-woke' crowd. This is due to the fact that this crowd offers next to nothing of value to say with any potentially valid criticisms about Rose's characterisation and Finney's performance being, at best, drowned out or, at worst, entirely non-existent. This leaves me with very little to say beyond acknowledging that these people exist and that they are hateful, transphobic bigots and should save a lot of embarrassment embracing their true identity of being fucking morons. What we will do, inevitably, is turn back to the progressive complaints because they are far more interesting to consider than the inane 'You ruined Doctor Who' crowd and much more important.

But this is all still to come. Let's just take a moment to briefly contextualise queerness in Doctor Who as best we can without making that the whole article. Prior to 2005, Doctor Who was an incredibly gay programme. There was no question of it having a mainstream popularity and strong cultural presence throughout the 1960s and 1970s but following its sixteen years sabbatical from a regular television presence, the cult fanbase that remained primarily consisted of queer men*. Queerness in the original run of the show was always a matter of subtext. Indeed, a number of key creators across the show's history were queer identifying including the programme's first director Waris Hussein, writer/director Peter Grimwade and producer John Nathan-Turner. Jordan Shortman has written a terrific article titled A Look at LGBTQI+ Representation in Doctor Who which I strongly encourage you seek out. The article is wonderfully easy to read and excellently acknowledges and explains the relationship between the LGBTQI+ community and Doctor Who. I'll make sure to link it at the bottom of this post.

One of the key examples that Shortman cites is the nature of the Doctor as a character; "From the second televised story, there is a strong sense of justice about the Doctor, doing what’s right; treating all life in the universe with respect has been a large part of the Doctor’s character as well as a driving force for the show, even in times when LGBTQI+ themes couldn’t be included". The suggested asexual nature of the Doctor is also notable for their appeal as a queer icon. Other characters with a strong queer subtext include the companions Turlough and Ace, the latter of which has been confirmed to have a deliberate lesbian subtext in at least one of her serials. Coupled with the decidedly camp nature of the show's production, especially in the 1980s, it is not hard to pinpoint examples of where the show's queer fandom might have been accrued.

Shortman's article crosses the wilderness years and into the revival where one such queer fan, RTD, took over the reigns and ensured that that representation was no longer subtextual. His first series gave us an unabashedly pansexual companion with Captain Jack Harkness, portrayed by an openly gay man in John Barrowman. Jack and the Doctor shared the first ever same-sex kiss in the programme before the character left the show full-time to head up the spin-off series Torchwood where his relationship with Ianto Jones became a defining element of the show's fandom. Obviously we shall return to RTD himself but queer Doctor Who did not end with his initial departure. Steven Moffat, a cis straight man, introduced a similarly roguish, queer icon with part-time companion River Song and recurring allies Madame Vastra and her wife Jenny. Moffat also introduced the show's first openly queer female identifying companions with bisexual Clara Oswald and lesbian Bill Potts. Somewhat more divisive was Chris Chibnall's, also a straight cis man, presentation of a tragic romance between the Doctor and her bisexual companion Yaz.

This brings us to 2023 and the debut of Rose on the 25th of November that year. In DWM #597, RTD and Finney discussed the character in Doctor Who with RTD's opening remarks being;

"You know me, I'm going to make my stuff as modern and as progressive as it can be [and] I thought it was joyous, to get a trans character in there. I thought that'd be a lovely 2023 thing to do. A blast of 2023! It makes you better, makes life richer, and makes the viewing experience better."

Rose’s first scene is, in fact, the first scene of The Star Beast (discounting the expository prologue) and it plays as well as one would hope. We glean something of her character, her interests and interests and her relationship with Donna. I feel obliged to mention that the lowest possible bar is met regarding representation in that the Doctor, our audience surrogate in this scene, does not deride, question or shame her in any way whatsoever. What caused some amount of uproar came in the character’s second scene which takes place outside the family home. Donna and Rose are walking back to the house together and a group of young boys ride past and recognise Rose. The group of them harass her, calling out the following;

LAD: Oi, Jason, you all right? LAD 2: Looking good, Jason! LAD: Give us a kiss, Jay Boy!

Donna responds furiously, later explicitly reaffirming her support and love for her daughter, prompting Rose's exhausted response; "Just leave it". In regards to this scene, Finney detailed in DWM that Russell's scripts "definitely, definitely don't sugarcoat" the trans experience – 'Rose gets some stick from kids at school - when she and Donna are walking home, boys shout some stuff - and that's a part of being trans, especially in high school," She goes on to clarify; "Well, not just in high school. It's the stick we get from everybody. People see an opportunity and take it and love to degrade and embarrass us. But Donna's having none of it, and neither is Rose. I'm proud of that. That's such great writing. And I love the fact that, with both Rose and Elle, it's not like being trans is all there is. There's so much more to Rose than being trans".

Finney revealed even more about the scene in the corresponding episode of Doctor Who: Unleashed; “It did kinda bring back some PTSD for me. Sadly, my high school experience was a lot of bullying and a lot of defending myself and having to put on a brave face”. In the same episode, RTD commented; “Those boys on bikes are watching Doctor Who. So I hope they’ll watch it and think ‘Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do that. Maybe that’s wrong.’ It’s true, that’s part of our audience”. Notably, elsewhere in the same interview, RTD (before disclaiming a trigger warning) refers to Rose by her deadname and specifies that that choice was made because of an etymological link to the Greek word for 'healer'. He defended the decision to include the scene further in The Official Doctor Who Podcast; “To get that across and to get the prejudice that’s being shown towards Rose by those bullies and thugs in the street, we actually have to have a scene of deadnaming. Is that a good thing to do? Is that a wise thing to do? Is that a difficult thing to do? I personally think we should stare into difficult stuff like this, but equally, what a nice easy life I’ve got, and I’m ready to be told otherwise.”

An important thing to understand about RTD as a queer storyteller is his relationship with trauma. When he was eighteen, the world saw the first diagnosis of HIV/AIDS. There is a reason why It's a Sin depicted the brutality and horror of the UK AIDS Crisis with such a palpable sense of tragedy and bitterness. The queer experiences that RTD had when he was at his most impressionable were overwhelmingly loaded with hatred, bigotry, neglect, shame, fear and death. When RTD reinvented the Doctor in 2005, he depicted him as a "lonely god"; somebody who feels like the last man standing after his people are gone, alone in the universe. When it came to Torchwood: Children of Earth, this queer trauma was depicted further when Ianto is killed by a virus leaving Jack to carry on without him. Throughout RTD's career, his representation of queer characters and the queer experience has been informed by tragedy and trauma which he makes no less apparent in his writing of Rose. This begs the question – does this depiction being realistic preclude it from being poor or unnecessary? Would it have been just as strong a choice to simply write a strong character, one who is not bullied or belittled, and they just happen to be trans? This is an opinion that somebody voiced to me in real life after the special aired, a queer man who expressed exhaustion and disappointment with high profile queer representation offering traumatic experiences and defining its characters primarily by their queerness.

Following a scene with Rose's grandmother where she slips on her pronouns ("When I say she looks gorgeous, is that right? I mean, is it sexist? Never said it to him when he was... Oh. Oh, sorry"), Rose befriends The Meep and thinks she forges a connection due to their both feeling isolated and "from another planet". Another suggestion of queer trauma. As the story goes on, Rose becomes the crux of a big reveal which is that the Time Lord brain, the Doctor's brain, that was inherited by Donna in Journey's End passed down into Rose when she was born. It is at this point that the representation becomes... muddled.

When the Doctor reverts Donna's conditioning, one of the trigger words is "binary". At this moment, it is revealed that Rose speaks a different word - "Non-binary". This leads to the following explanation;

DOCTOR: We're binary. DONNA: She's not, because the Doctor's... DOCTOR: ..male... DONNA: ..and female. ROSE: And neither. And more.

There a number of things potentially going on here that are of note. The first is that ongoing queer trauma subtext in RTD's work and this story's suggestion that that is a shared burden. This seems to be a realisation that has evolved in Davies' work over time. It's a Sin, for all its harrowing realism, makes a point of depicting community and friendship as intrinsic to the queer experience. The trauma is still there but it is a shared experience. The three specials RTD wrote from The Star Beast to The Giggle present a new arc for the Doctor which includes his making peace with not needing to be alone. As Donna suggests, in a rather meta-fictional line; "[Y]ou've been given a second chance. You can do things different this time. So why don't you do something completely new, and have some friends?" This theme can be extended to Rose as one of three characters who bears the load of the Doctor's experiences. The Doctor used to carry the weight of his trauma on his shoulders, now he has an opportunity to change and realise that others can take on those burdens with him. Perhaps this might have been what RTD was going for with his use of the term 'non-binary' – Rose saves Donna's life by freeing her from the limitations of binary thinking. It was assumed that she would either embrace her true self and die or live a slightly unhappy life with years of built up repression. Via Rose, we come to realise that there are not only two options.

To my understanding, the problem with this scene insofar as representation is largely rooted in the terminology and potentially an enormous misunderstanding from RTD. As presented, RTD seems to use the term 'non-binary' interchangeably with 'trans'. This is a complicated subject to get into but, so far as I understand it, the two terms are not generally accepted as synonymous. In contemporary queer culture, 'non-binary' is employed as an umbrella term for any identity that sits outside the accepted gender binary (male or female). For example, an individual assigned female at birth who identifies as agender, genderless. Transgender is also an umbrella term and it refers to an individual whose gender identity does not correspond to the one which they were assigned at birth. For example, an individual assigned male at birth who identifies as a woman. If these above definitions are to be taken as wrote, this would suggest that non-binary people may be transgender but not all transgender people are non-binary. These are not strict definitions, of course, but an attempt to better clarify and explain how RTD's use of terminology in The Star Beast is flawed.

This all could have worked better with some very minor changes. As written, it is plausible to infer that RTD's understanding of gender theory has some basis in academia, specifically in the views and opinions of activists and theorists of a closer generation to his. Based on how it is presented in The Star Beast, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that RTD considers the forging of a trans identity as an inherent rejection of the social constructs that are firmly entrenched in our post-colonial lives. Indeed, in Doctor Who: Unleashed, he explicitly remarked that; “It becomes a vital part of the plot that Rose contains the ‘he’ and the ‘she’ and the neither and the both, and that’s a new future. Rose goes beyond words, beyond definitions.”

An example of this relationship with gender can be found from feminist activist Gloria Steinem in a 2015 article for Advocate titled 'Op-ed: On Working Together Over Time' suggested that western society is shifting "away from only the binary boxes of “masculine” or “feminine” and begin[ning] to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression". Prolific gender theorist Judith Butler has expressed agreement with this opinion and offered her own definition of gender as a performative act from the individual rather than a natural reality. To quote BigThink's 2023 article 'Berkeley philosopher Judith Butler’s theory of gender for the 21st century'; "Gender only exists to the extent that it is performed, meaning it is both fluid and capable of evolving beyond history and tradition... It would be a mistake to come up with a single definition of what a woman is. It would be parochial. It would be coming from a very specific perspective. It would be freezing a time and place into a definition and then imposing it on the rest of the world”.

There is nothing inherently problematic or inappropriate about RTD's choice to depict a non-binary character. The problems lie solely in the fact that he did not do this for the larger part of the story's runtime. While Rose never explicitly describes her gender identity or her preferred pronouns, it is strongly suggested throughout The Star Beast that she is female identifying; her family only refer to her with she/her pronouns and repeatedly denote her as their daughter. Instead, the text repeatedly suggests that Rose's identity exists on the established gender binary of male/female making the choice ending a muddled and awkward pill to swallow.

A fan theory that emerged in the wake of this scene was that Rose's trans identity stemmed from her having two people inside of her – the one she was born as and the one she identifies as. I hate this theory and I think that it is quite a transphobic reading of what happens here. There is no need to create a convoluted sci-fi reason for trans people to exist because trans people do exist. If cis people have a hard time comprehending the idea that somebody's assigned gender is not a label that they comfortably align and identify with, then I see no reason to make that reality something that can be hand waved away. Suggesting that transness is because of an alien presence in somebody's brain is not something that I can get behind and the problem is that that read is entirely plausible. Intentionally or otherwise, RTD has written in an 'out' for transphobes to justify and rationalise the character's existence in their own minds. And I very much dislike that.

RTD's trans representation in The Star Beast lead to a mixed reception within the fandom. As fan Emily, @emilyXCVI, remarked on Twitter, "[RTD] absolutely nails it in the first half, Donna & Sylvia’s talk in the kitchen was brilliant. But then the “nonbinary” thing and implying that Rose is trans because of the meta crisis…not so much. I appreciate the sentiment but it could have been framed a lot better". The positive points of praise frequently arose as acclaim for RTD's decision to depict a trans character in such a positive role in a high-profile, BBC programme. As Dr Emily Garside, @EmiGarside, proclaimed; "Russell T Davies truly stood up and said Trans people are beautiful and we love to see it. (The Doctor doesn’t stand for transphobes and neither does the Whoniverse)". Fio Trethewey, @FioTrethewey, was another voice in the fandom that was resoundingly positive; "#DoctorWho was so great last night, a fun romp and well made. Most of all I was so happy to see Donna respect her trans daughter, and help her mother when she was clumsy with the details, just all the good representation. In times we live in right now it’s what we need to see "

The detractors were, however, equally as vocal with many pointing to RTD's comments surrounding the deadnaming scene as problematic. As JaeWrites, @jae_writes_, expressed; “RTD: ‘I didn't want to give transphobes any more ammo by putting David in 13's outfit.’ Also RTD: ‘So I'm just gonna deadname my trans character, make that deadname important to the story, repeat that deadname in interviews, and heavily imply that being trans is a choice.’” Some fans were critical of the choice to share Rose’s deadname in any context, concerned that the detail would only offer ammunition for transphobic fans to be disrespectful to the character when discussing her (this did happen). The harsher critics even compared the depiction to RTD’s earlier character of Lady Cassandra O’Brien from 2005’s The End of the World. The real first openly trans character in televised Doctor Who. The hysterical, vain, arrogant aristocrat was the primary villain of two stories in RTD's original run and was primarily depicted as a large, flat piece of skin in a metal frame. The character claimed to have had more than 700 different cosmetic surgeries. Cassandra mentions that she was born a boy in a throwaway line in her debut story which was intended to play as transphobic comedy. Cassandra blatantly played into the 'deranged transsexual killer' trope and is seemingly killed on-screen at the end of both stories she appears in.

Following The Star Beast's broadcast, RTD appeared on The Official Doctor Who Podcast. The show is hosted by a diverse trio of fans, one of which is Juno Dawson, a trans woman. Dawson first became involved with Doctor Who in a professional capacity in 2017 but made her most high-profile contribution to the franchise to date in 2022 as the lead writer on the first series of Doctor Who: Redacted for BBC Sounds. The ten episode series featured Jodie Whittaker and a host of alumni returning to reprise their roles alongside original character Cleo, a young trans woman. The series was renewed for a second season which aired in 2023, now attracted to the RTD2 version of the programme, but Dawson was replaced as lead writer by prolific Who writer James Goss, a cis man. In the podcast, Dawson praised RTD's writing, especially the deadnaming scene; "There is no point in trying to sugar the pill. Trans people face transphobia". As some fans have been quick to point out, it remains unconfirmed whether Dawson or anybody else close to the production was consulted about their experiences as a trans person during pre-pre-production. As of the time of writing, neither Dawson nor any other trans identifying person has been confirmed in any creative role for seasons one or two.

Two days after The Star Beast aired, the highly publicised trial of Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe commenced. Earlier that year, the pair were arrested on suspicion of murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey. The murder and subsequent trial generated much discussion and attention in the UK press drawing greater attention to the lives of transgender youth in Britain than ever before. In the midst of this event was Doctor Who, as written by a cis gay man, depicting a trans woman in the UK in 2023. Following the broadcast of The Star Beast, the BBC received 144 complaints about its choice to depict a trans character to which the corporation responded; “As regular viewers of Doctor Who will be aware, the show has and will always continue to proudly celebrate diversity and reflect the world we live in. We are always mindful of the content within our episodes.” In 2023, its 60th year since initial broadcast, RTD ensured that Doctor Who, remained connected to the cultural conversation of the UK and its wider world.

But does that necessarily mean that he did it very well?

To be continued in part three; The First Black Doctor and the Meaning of Mavity

*See one of RTD's greatest ever in-jokes in Rose when our titular heroine meets up with Clive to talk about the Doctor and his wife remarks; "She? She's read a website about the Doctor? She's a she?"

A Look at LGBTQI+ Representation in Doctor Who - https://thedoctorwhocompanion.com/2023/06/01/a-look-at-lgbtqi-representation-in-doctor-who/

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A Finely Tuned Response - Frontios, 1984

An analysis of Doctor Who of the early to mid 1980s is, somewhat inevitably, an examination of wasted potential and this is a particularly pertinent point to consider when embarking on a critical look at Frontios. To some extent, Frontios is business as usual for the Peter Davison era. Along with The Awakening, it stands-out for being one of only two stories in the season that is not carrying the weight of an enormous event. It is four episodes long, features a typical Doctor Who monster, slots itself effortlessly into the action-packed militaristic flavour of the Davison era and repurposes the trappings of past base-under-siege serials for good measure. This is probably why it gets such little attention from the fandom on the whole; Frontios is a story conceived to slip under the radar.

But I think that Frontios does anything but be unnoticeable. It is screaming to be noticed because I think that this story, more than any other of the Davison era, is the story of untapped potential. Frontios takes everything that we know about the Davison era, every aspect of it that was working, and offers us a glimpse into an alternate reality where everything else also works just a little bit better still. This is thanks to former script editor Christopher H. Bidmead, one of a handful of writers who could comfortably stake the claim of one of the most underrated in the series' history. Bidmead script edited the show from 1980-1981, the entirety of season eighteen, and is notable for following through with John Nathan-Turner's intention to shift the style of storytelling in Doctor Who away from the high-concept, camp adventure series of the previous regime toward more serious-minded stories that had a basis in real-world science. In Bidmead's own words, "[Doctor Who] exemplified for young viewers the power of scientific thinking to solve problems. Science stretched into fantastic future shapes, yes, but the show had a serious social purpose. It must never be silly, never be mere magic....we tried to build our stories on solid, if fancifully extended, scientific ideas."

It is worth stating the obvious here; this philosophy returns the show to its 1963 roots of being educational as well as entertaining. The result of Bidmead and JNT's collaboration was a run of seven stories that had an entirely unique flavour for the franchise. Stories that were rich in theme and subtext, revelling in the unknown possibilities of bleeding edge theories. Take Warrior's Gate, for example. Taking place in the theoretical zero point between positive and negative space, that serial watches like a surreal, poetic and atmospheric novel that meditates on I-Ching philosophy, exploring notions of action, free-will and entropy. Warrior's Gate is a dense and thoughtful production whose characters and setting all interlink to form a greater thematic whole. A bit over twelve months later, Doctor Who was broadcasting stories like Earthshock.

That sounds a little bit more disingenuous than perhaps it should because Earthshock is not a bad story in and of itself but it is a very different story. The tumultuous production of Warrior's Gate and the overall difficulties of Bidmead's position lead to his resignation at the end of season eighteen. The post would eventually be filled by Eric Saward whose conception of what made for a good Doctor Who story wildly contrasted with Bidmead's. Earthshock proved to be the template, the definitive statement for what his ambitions were with Doctor Who; a thrilling, action-packed adventure with a confident blend of character drama and sci-fi serial antics. To use a low-hanging and easy shorthand example, if Bidmead's Doctor Who could be compared to say a Christopher Nolan film then Saward is somewhat of a Zack Snyder.

But this brings us back to the accusation of wasted potential because I would argue that the Fifth Doctor's era is marked by inconsistency more than it is by abject failure. I find it rather interesting that both JNT/Bidmead Who and JNT/Saward Who make a concerted effort to return the programme to something resembling the original conception of the show but in polar opposite ways. In the latter case, it was a more superficial attempt with the turn back toward an ensemble cast and the attempt at tighter stitching from one serial to the next. Most episodes of the Davison era connect in some direct way to the previous one, even if that connection usually little more than a couple of lines at the top of the episode addressing something from the previous one.

The approach that JNT and Saward were aiming for in these three years together, that of an explosive science-fiction soap-opera, is a perfectly valid take on the programme. It was even an effective one on occasion. The problems with Saward's tenure as script-editor are myriad and deserving of dissecting in a piece more dedicated to him but suffice it to say that what Frontios accomplishes is a case of a serial coming together in spite of its circumstances instead of coming out of them. When Bidmead was invited back as a freelancer for Davison’s third, and final, season, he incidentally offered a tantalising glimpse into the era that might have been if he had stuck around with the show. If nothing else, he reaffirms one thing; wildly creative and conceptual science-fiction stories can work hand-in-hand with serialised, evolving character drama.

In contrast to what one might expect, Frontios can perhaps best be described as Bidmead’s most traditional Doctor Who story. Saward invited him to contribute a pitch for a serial in season twenty-one but on the condition that he was to craft something in the mould of a traditional Doctor-Who-monster-plot. As Bidmead recalled in a 1988 interview for Doctor Who Magazine; "Eric Saward phoned me up and asked me to do ‘Frontios’. They wanted the monster element, which was a struggle because I always hated ‘Doctor Who’ monsters – partly because they tend to look cheap and mainly because they are so limited on dialogue. Dialogue is so important in a low budget show – it creates the whole effect". In so far as being a typical monster story for Doctor Who, the broad strokes of Frontios appear to offer little in the way of innovation. Our trio unexpectedly find themselves among colony of humans in the far future only to quickly discover that an unknown, alien threat is causing colonists to disappear into the planet itself. On one level, perhaps this is disappointing for the staunch season eighteen fans (god forbid those nerds ever out themselves) that Bidmead’s final effort on-screen is such traditional fare but, make no mistake, this is Bidmead all over. Where else would one find a story that revels so much in making the setting a character unto itself, or an active threat in this case. There is an almost primal irrational fear underpinning the horror of Frontios which is that of the Earth dropping from beneath you, consuming you without a trace. It is a great idea and legitimately terrifying at a conceptual level. Frontios is the last hope for humanity, the final place that they can run to and this here is the horror at the end of human existence; what comes for us all when there is nowhere left to run?

Frontios is a story about people being where they shouldn’t which is about as clued-in to the central premise of Doctor Who as one could possibly be; the entire franchise is a story of things being where they shouldn't. I love the Doctor’s initial flat refusal to explore Frontios in any way because “knowledge has its limits”. It is an interesting slice of lore, that never really gets picked up on again, that the Time Lords have a limited scope of the arc of history. Perhaps because pulling on this thread could lend too much credence to the theory that Time Lords are future human beings. After all, is there any particular reason why the Time Lords knowledge has a cut off point that coincides with the near end of humanity? It is an effective shorthand to illustrate the stakes at play here and set the scene for the audience but remains an oddly intriguing nugget of lore too. I would not be surprised if this story directly influenced Russell T Davies when he came to writing Utopia since that story also presents the Doctor as going further than ever before and having the immediate reaction of wanting to leave. In this case, I adore that as soon as the Doctor does land, he immediately launches into helping the humans despite what his rational mind has concluded. It is also a little bit weird that the Doctor’s behaviour ultimately leads to no consequences from the Time Lords. We are told repeatedly that he is forbidden to interfere here and that the time laws do not permit his actions. If Saward were a bit more on his ball, perhaps this could have been the inciting incident that puts the Doctor back on trial two seasons from now as opposed to just…well, nothing really.

Bidmead does not write small scale stories. Even this one, which is relatively small fry in the narrative of this season, is as high stakes as actually destroying the TARDIS. Bidmead claims to have done this to give the Doctor no form of security, have him just as desperate and endangered as the humans. Everything is against the Doctor here which makes for a nice unintentional parallel to The Caves of Androzani (also penned by a former script editor) where the same can be said but he’s just a lot less lucky. What is frustrating is that the script makes really no attempt to explain exactly why or how the TARDIS is destroyed. The Gravis does not even know it is there. The Doctor does have one line about it toward the climax; "It's, er it's been spatially distributed to optimise the, er, the packing efficiency of, er, the real time envelope" which sounds dreadfully like he is making it up. Is he suggesting that the TARDIS folded in on itself in an effort to protect itself from the meteor strike? Or was the meteor strike actually supposed to have splintered it? Surely not that second thing since Tegan and Turlough found it to be largely closed off just moments after landing, I have no idea what is really going on here and have yet to find a clear answer in the text but it is a lovely way to visually illustrate the consequences of the Doctor going behind where he even feels he is permitted to travel.

If there is anything that significantly hurts Frontios then it is the production. While not necessarily cheap, the horrific cliffhanger to part three is realised about as well as it could be, this story is hampered by shoddy direction from Ron Jones and some generally poor design. A lot of the horror that ought to be here is nearly squandered by the way the thing is assembled and that is truly frustrating. There is some god awful acting attempting to ‘lift’ some rubble in episode one. How that made it to screen I will never know. In concept, the Tractators are a deeply disturbing villainous creature with their inhuman features and mental powers to ensnare any victim they choose no matter how hard they run. Their plot to chop up human beings to ensure their machinery works was so freaky that Steven Moffat likely stole it to be much scarier in 2006. Bidmead based the monsters on woodlice and, while that intention extended into the design, the Tractators are the textbook definition of a lumbering “Doctor Who monster”. Practically every moment of action they have in the entire story falls completely flat and the monsters are not even remotely scary. They just look like crap. Apparently Jones hired dancers as he imagined the Tractators to curl up like woodlice, something that Bidmead intended in the script. Visual effects designer Dave Harvard did not get this memo it seems. There is a distinct lack of menace and thrill displayed onscreen here despite what are, really, a perfectly strong set of scripts to work from. It is a real shame.

Thankfully, the production can deliver on Bidmead's well-developed supporting cast and he provides a compelling far-future colony for the TARDIS team to get entangled up with. Range is a much an endearing scientist figure to pair the Doctor up with as Plantagenet and Brazen make an irritating opposing force. It is a decidedly bleak vision of the future; a fascist, totalitarian state. In her analysis of the serial, Elizabeth Sandifer makes the suggestion that Bidmead’s more cerebral, world-building story is constantly under jeopardy by Eric Saward’s stock-standard military story, invading the scenes as an opposing force that tries to stop the story from happening. Whether Bidmead was deliberately poking at Saward's tendencies as a writer remains to be seen but it is a very fun read regardless. Bidmead has cited the 1982 Lebanon War as an influence on his scripts which, as of time of writing this article in March 2024, is an interesting situation to cite. The Lebanon War took place between June 6 1982 and June 5 1985 between the Israel Defence Forces and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The inspiration from the war can certainly be identified in what Frontios would become though it would be absurd too suggest that the story is analogous for the conflict itself. Certainly, the broad strokes of the situation informed the plot but the most significant contribution was an aesthetic one with the serial's war-torn landscape that is clearly suffering from a near constant bombardment that has slowly increased in frequency and intensity over several decades. Indeed, as Range and the Doctor state;

RANGE: Captain Revere assumed that the barrage was some sort of softening up process. Heralding an invasion, he said. DOCTOR: Hmm, someone else thinks this is their territory.

Revere is half-right. Frontios is an invasion story; the humans are the invaders. This flavour of anti-colonial storytelling is not particularly new ground for Doctor Who to tread and would certainly continue to be well-walked although the allegory becomes a little bit murky in this case with the suggestion that the Tractators are not indigenous to Frontios either. Perhaps the situation of two invading forces staking claim to a land that rightfully belongs to neither was ripped straight from the headlines but the absence of a third party makes it a rather more simplistic and less challenging situation to depict. Again, the influence is purely aesthetic. Cutting edge political satire doesn’t seem to be something Bidmead is particularly interested in anyway, regardless of his effectiveness in writing it.

So, we can conclude that the Tractators are likely not indigenous from pretty early on in the story thanks to Turlough who is awarded one of his strongest roles in any story pos-Enlightenment. Following his failed plot to murder the Doctor, the shifty and morally ambiguous nature of Turlough became an aspect of his character that was largely cast aside. Turlough was introduced as an untrustworthy and selfish survivalist whose past life before exile on Earth were primed to make him a greatly compelling member of the TARDIS team moving forward. However, instead of gradually unravelling this mystery and pushing Turlough’s relationship with his “friends” to their furthest extent, the character spent most of his stories was just separated from the Doctor for about half of the runtime to simply complain and look a bit suss from time to time. A lot of potential character work seemed to be abandoned and relegated to these four scripts and his final story, Planet of Fire. This is yet another example of Saward's limits as a script editor and really the most damning one considering part of this period's mission statement was to be a quasi soap-opera.

After laying eyes on the Tractators, we see a new side to Turlough; pure, genuine fear. Our first glimpses at his origins are finally awarded to us when a race memory is unlocked within him that sees him recoil from the action in a catatonic state. He has a primal reaction to the creatures below the surface. Being the only person with knowledge of the monsters, he gradually pulls himself together and returns to help the Doctor. While not especially interesting an arc in itself, this is a rewarding series of events to put Turlough through if you have been following his story since Mawdryn Undead since it seems that only now he has truly embraced being a force for good with the Doctor and not just a traveller in it only for himself. This is all really solid stuff and Mark Strickson does a decent enough job with it. Turlough lamenting that nobody expects anything heroic of him is a really lovely character moment and this story marks a significant turning point for the character that comes too late. This is the kind of on-going melodrama that should have been present in this era the entire time and this particular development for Turlough needed to happen at, at the latest, the end of the last season. Not two stories before his departure. For his active role as a companion to be claimed eight stories into his run (effectively after twenty-eight episodes on the show) is ludicrous. Even more frustratingly, Turlough takes a backseat again in the next story leaving Planet of Fire to race his character to the finish line and it proves once more that the potential for greatness is all there but this was too little too late.

Tegan is the most sidelined of the three which is irritating not only because this would prove to be her penultimate appearance on the show but also because it officially becomes a pattern of the third story now to give her no kind of active role in narrative. The next serial would do that too though it could be argued by design which is a weak defence in the face of a whole season awarding her next to no material. Given where her character was set to go in Resurrection of the Daleks this and the nature of her departing the TARDIS, this would have been a great time to highlight the brutality of the Doctor’s travels and drop her in the midst of some truly awful acts. Long-form story was really not Eric Saward’s strongest skill.

And then we have the Doctor. Three stories away from his own dramatic exit and finally he feels like he has fully come into his own. This is perhaps the most frustrating realisation to grapple with in regards to Bidmead’s leaving the show; the man knows how to write the Doctor. His take on the character sees the frustratingly underdeveloped Fifth Doctor in a fully authoritative role; barking out orders and opinions to whoever he pleases and commanding presence as much as he needs to. This is a character I would have loved to see for three seasons and it pains me that he is only really found here and in Androzani. At the heart of Frontios is a very simple story that about leadership in a decidedly anti-militaristic sort of way. The humans are being driven by the military but lacking in unity as their leadership in Brazen and Plantagenet is a self, arrogant and narrow-minded leadership that dismisses their scientists and the Doctor when he arrives. As we learn about the Tractators, their leadership is flawed too as the creatures are revealed to be naturally passive without the command, being enslaved, by the Gravis. So, we have the Doctor who is driven but understanding. He listens to the facts, he makes measured judgements and he considers the breadth of his actions. The Doctor is the shining example of good leadership in this colony. It is a very simple moral but who ever said that simplicity was a bad thing?

Sandifer made the acute observation in her Warrior's Gate article that "The Doctor that Bidmead wants are the Doctors that [David] Whitaker wrote for – the small and seemingly harmless men who skulked and observed and learned to understand the system before making a single decisive move within it. Not the Doctors of the 70s – big, starring leading men who were the centre of attention and whose charisma and likability drove the entire story". Here we have found ourselves with, frankly, the biggest victim of wasted potential in Peter Davison's run which, obviously is Peter Davison. It is well-documented that part of JNT's strategy in casting Davison was to provide a stark contrast to the scene-stealing Tom Baker. The Fifth Doctor was a less commanding and intrusive presence by design which is all well and good if your target is a more Whitaker-style take on the character. The problem is simply that they missed.

To this day, the Fifth Doctor comes under fire for being a bland incarnation but that is only half of the truth. What fans criticise as blandness is what I would sooner articulate as a lack of definition. The Fifth Doctor as a character was primarily defined by the things that he was not in comparison to the previous four actors instead of the things that he actually was. This Doctor was not old, he was not commanding, he was not infallible, he was not funny, he was not flippant, he was not cruel, he was not Tom Baker – he was not a lot of things and the things that he was varied greatly from one story to the next. Perhaps this is a little unfair since there was at least an intention of who the Fifth Doctor was supposed to be, even if it was not fully realised onscreen. It is at this point that I feel compelled to clarify also that Davison was not at all the problem here. He is an excellent actor who had very strong and compelling instincts of how to play the part, some of which he and JNT agreed on. In 1981, Davison conducted an interview with Radio Times where he made an attempt to outline his vision for the role;

"I’ll be a much younger Dr. Who, and I’ll be wearing a kind of Victorian cricketing outfit to accentuate my youth. I’d like my Doctor to be heroic and resourceful. I feel that, over the years, ‘Doctor Who’ has become less vital, no longer struggling for survival, depending on instant, miraculous solutions to problems. The suspense of ‘Now how’s he going to get out of this tight corner?’ has been missing. I want to restore that. My Doctor will be flawed. He’ll have the best intentions and he will in the end win through, but he will not always act for the best. Sometimes, he’ll even endanger his companions. But I want him to have a sort of reckless innocence."

This is not quite a description of who the Fifth Doctor is not but in terms of being a definitive statement on what he is it is still somewhat lacking. “Heroic and resourceful" are satisfactory descriptors and the suggestion that he has a “reckless innocence” seems to indicate that he is perhaps simply naive. To say that he is flawed is not particularly revealing without actually delving into what the flaws are but this is certainly a start. There is a blueprint here with which to construct a fully-realised character but the one that made it to screen oscillated wildly from seeming compelling to inoffensive to, yes, bland.

Given the revolving door of script-editors during season nineteen's production, it is perhaps not surprising that, despite having some strong stories on the whole, it was not a definitive opening statement for the Fifth Doctor. Castrovalva took the Doctor out of action for most of its runtime and then had him in the post-regenerative non-character state that left him open to hopefully be defined later on down the track. The larger part of season nineteen fails to define him particularly well with Four to Doomsday, Kinda and Black Orchid each shooting for the unassuming observer type but fail to give him any truly distinct character traits nor a particularly engaging role in the narrative. It shows a near complete misunderstanding of the Whitaker-style Doctor depicting him not as a mercurial learner but a passive observer. The Visitation and Time-Flight shift gears from this to am extent presenting something in the mould of Jon Pertwee's Doctor on paper. The former, however, leaves him still largely sidelined by its comedy supporting character and the latter makes the unfortunate misstep of being Time-Flight.

The Fifth Doctor in season nineteen is a character whose role in the story is dictated by the narrative conventions of Doctor Who. His name is in the title, he is a heroic character therefore he will heroically save the day even if the plot could have happily rolled on much the same without his involvement at all. Black Orchid even takes this to the extreme when it, upon stumbling upon an opportunity for some drama when the Doctor comes under suspicion for murder, he gets away with it by taking the supporting cast into the TARDIS and going "See? I'm Doctor Who so I must be innocent". The only story to offer any glimmer of the characterisation and subversion that was promised is Earthshock but even that immature, emotionally unregulated character would never really come back onscreen.

Season twenty seems to bring little else to the table besides his being generally nice but a bit exasperated at times (and it is worth noting that the subpar quality of the scriptwriting in season twenty is what ensured Davison would not sign on beyond his three year contract). The Fifth Doctor's lack of authority too often came as a failing in the storytelling instead of a failing in the character. Take how he fails to command a scene with the Brigadier in Mawdryn Undead or the lack of interest anybody has in him during Warriors of the Deep. Snakedance is really the only serial that took this idea and ran when Christopher Bailey had to the good sense to present a realistic reaction to the Doctor showing up prophesying doom for all and made that escalation most of his role in the story. The problem hit its peak by the time The Five Doctors made it to screen which, of course, made an embarrassing show of what little characterisation the Fifth Doctor was awarded. Standing next to Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee would be difficult for anyone but the Fifth Doctor managed to make it seem impossible.

Part of the problem with the Doctor's lack of definition, of course, stemmed from the approach, or rather the production team's inability to scale the mountain that they had raised for themselves. Having a leading cast as big as four and small as three for all but one of his stories often left the Doctor struggling to command the narrative in any way. It became easy to lean on an archetypical idea of who 'the Doctor' is to make the stories work. This is symptomatic of the broader issue that this production team was not up to the task that they set themselves of introducing a larger cast for a soap-opera style. Darren Mooney, for the m0vie blog, articulated the issue well in his article “Doctor Who?” The Deconstructed Davison Doctor;

"[T]he Fifth Doctor’s era offered a weird funhouse mirror of the [soap-opera] genre. The companions were all given strong archetypal personalities that were designed to play off one another, but without any detail or humanity to round out those archetypes into characterisation. More than that, there was no real sense of progression or character development. None of the companions grew or evolved."

Consequently, this left the most valuable asset for character definition, his relationships to everybody else, severely under-utilised. Again, this was not Eric Saward's strength but, further to that, it was not even his interest. Saward often claimed that the aspect of Doctor Who that compelled him the most were the worlds and characters explored rather than our main ensemble. A perfectly fine stance but not a particularly good focus to take in the most serialised version of the show since it first began.

Something always worth considering when engaging in any form of art criticism is the relationship between artistic intention and audience interpretation. Obviously, the former informs the latter; an artistic work presents evidence and information that is collected and interpreted by the audience. There are a number of ways with which to use this relationship as the basis of a critique. One option is the focus primarily on intention; the artist means for the piece to accomplish X thing and I have assessed the evidence provided to form a conclusion as to why I think it is or is not successful in that endeavour. This option is only viable if that intention has been made clear in some context outside of the actual work itself. Another way to engage is to ignore intention entirely, the death of the author approach; I gathered evidence from the text and interpreted it in this way which I did or did not enjoy for X reasons. Generally speaking, I find that the most insightful and compelling criticism comes from a mixture of both approaches. I find it equally as valuable to glean the context of which the work is made and what the artist is intending to do as I do being able to allow the work to speak to me and take on a life of its own.

In the case of the character of the Doctor between 1982 and 1984, there is a lot to engage with here. As established above, the artistic intention of the Fifth Doctor was deeply confused and underdeveloped. So let us turn to an interpretive reading, the most popular one that has developed among fans over time which is that the story of the Fifth Doctor is tragedy. This reading suggests that this Doctor is a victim of a circumstance, a moral crusader and conventional hero who becomes worn down and killed by the cruel and ruthless universe around him. It is a really compelling take and there is a good amount of evidence to substantiate it. Earthshock is the earliest example where the Doctor’s role in the climax consists primarily of him failing to negotiate with the Cyber-Leader with no option left but to just murder him as he watches his young friend die in an act of heroism he inspired. Then we have Snakedance where his walking into the story doing his typical Doctor thing sees him vilified and antagonised for the larger part of the runtime. Season twenty-one is where the evidence really ramps up. Warriors of the Deep attempts a similar outcome to Earthshock with the Doctor’s lack of authority leading to him enabling a massacre. Frontios sees him literally drawn into a place he shouldn’t be despite his best intentions. Resurrection of the Daleks is such a clusterfuck that it causes Tegan to leave the Doctor altogether and then his simply being on Androzani places him squarely in the middle of events so devastating that everybody there except for Peri winds up dead.

As a reading on his era, this interpretation holds up very well. It is exactly the kind of character development that should have been the crux of Davison's time on the show and is the kind of thing suggested by the publicity and discussions of his character back in 1981. What makes it so frustrating is how much this was not really present in the artistic intent. Yes, the Fifth Doctor was fallible and one of his companions died but this was little more than an aesthetic choice for the larger part of the era. As Sandifer articulated perfectly in her Earthshock analysis;

"What we get [with Adric's death] isn’t drama. It’s the hollow shell of drama – a major character death, a silent credit sequence, a few minutes of horrified and morose main characters at the tail end of this and the start of Time-Flight, and then everybody – the audience included – moves on. It’s not one of the most dramatic sequences of the 1980s. It’s a cheap sham designed to look like drama. It’s a sequence designed to rile up controversy – the exact sort of death scene that would be created by an executive who believes that art should 'soothe, not distract'".

Earthshock was the most important story of the JNT/Saward administration and it makes it also emblematic of a number of things it fails to get right. Adric's death was wasted potential. If the overall arc of the Fifth Doctor's story is a man who has the best intentions but gets beaten down by everything around him, that needs to be in any way at the forefront of his character and his actions in the stories. Eric Saward thought it important to depict violence in a visceral and impactful way which serves the interpretation but was not a calculated move to develop an actual arc.

By the time season twenty-one came around, Davison had hit breaking point with the bland material and an actual character began to emerge. Beginning with this serial, his Doctor finally showed signs of some consistent characterisation. His Doctor had become snarkier and wittier, his occasional emotional outbursts in season nineteen filtering through as a genuine resentment for authority and pig-headedness. As Davison himself stated;

"Frontios was excellent, an extremely well-rounded script that got hold of the way I saw the part of the Doctor, and made his dialogue and actions fit in with this. I enjoyed it because there was really something there to latch onto in rehearsal and make your own. If you like, it had enough there without the actors having to try to embellish a weak storyline."

Thus, this is why Frontios shines so brightly. With some stronger material to play as well in this story through to his final appearance, Davison gets the best chance of his era to actually act. The Doctor is no longer a passive afterthought in the narrative and the season gains a genuine momentum with escalation from one story to the next until the entire narrative structure of Doctor Who breaks down in The Caves of Androzani. Frontios marks the beginning of the Davison era finally starting to land on what really works. We have a Doctor that is genuinely compelling, a very compelling and unique companion in Turlough and a genuinely interesting story that nails the Eric Saward approach to thrilling, action-packed Doctor Who (if only really in the script than actually on-screen). Frontios is really spearheading this last leg of the Davison era and not by mistake.This is a highpoint of season twenty-one and, indeed, of all ‘80s Who. While this is probably Bidmead's weakest script technically (I'd probably watch this over Castrovalva), it demonstrates that old ideas done well still undeniably make for a story that is done really well but it is no surprise that this solid story is consistently overshadowed by the more obviously ambitious milestones of the Davison era. This is the story the Davison era needed but it is a story that just came too late to save it altogether.

A final word: I had no other place to mention this but the Doctor’s line about being a hat person is a little amusing at this point in his life since he hasn’t been seen wearing one for three stories now – he last donned it in The King’s Demons and won’t again until the story after this

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This is why Looms weren’t a horrible idea

So I have a question that has been wondering all day inside my head.

If a Time Lady is pregnant and someone hurts her and she’s forced to regenerate to stay alive, will she regenerate WITH or WITHOUT the baby?? Will the baby regenerate too? And if the sex changes (like 12 to 13) will he still be pregnant or will the womb and the baby be reabsorbed into new body cells?

I don’t need sleep I need answers.

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Wokeness, Responsibility and if RTD is problematic - The Regeneration Question and Davros with Legs

Is Russell T. Davies a problematic figure? Is he too woke or not aware enough? Is he doing something wrong to illicit negative responses from the progressives as well as the conservatives? Is it something in the programme, something in the marketing or is he doing nothing particularly bad at all? Well, perhaps you and I, faithful reader, can come to some sort of conclusion. Let's find out together as we take a dive into the controversial choices behind RTD2 and the mind of the man behind them.

At the end of 2022's The Power of the Doctor, Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor regenerates into her fourteenth body, the same as her tenth incarnation as played by David Tennant. Taken on face value, the scene is innocuous enough. Just a standard regeneration with the surprise appearance of the most popular (sorry Tom) Doctor Who ever for our next story instead of the expected Ncuti Gatwa.

Except, there was something else unusual - the Doctor's clothes regenerated with her. With the sole exception of the very first regeneration (which can be excused as a relic from before the 'rules' were decided upon), this is without precedent* and was clearly supposed to mean something. After all, Russell thinks. He is a clever man and he would never do something as bold as this without there being a reason.

Well, yes. There was a reason but a lot of fans were dismayed to learn that the reason was not built into the narrative but a consequence of real life. In DWM 584, these comments from Davies were published;

“I was certain that I didn’t want David to appear in Jodie’s costume. I think the notion of men dressing in ‘women’s clothes’, the notion of drag, is very delicate. I’m a huge fan of that culture and the dignity of that, it’s truly a valuable thing. But it has to be done with immense thought and respect. With respect to Jodie and her Doctor, I think it can look like mockery when a straight man wears her clothes. To put a great big six-foot Scotsman into them looks like we’re taking the mickey. Also, I guarantee you it’s the only photograph some of the papers would print for the rest of time. If they can play with gender in a sarcastic or critical way, they will.”

Unsurprisingly, this choice became a not insignificant talking point in the fandom in the weeks following. A particularly articulate thread was posted by tess owen’s #1 fan || (i still love you yaz dw), @_mag_lex, on November 10, 2022 summarised the discussion well when she said;

"I don’t understand how DT wearing 13’s outfit is a mockery of drag, given that it’s deliberately and definitively gender-neutral. Anyone who watches and cares about the show understands that. I also don’t understand the logic of pandering to bigots rather than catering to fans [....] You’re telling me that Doctor Who is now scared to push boundaries. That’s what this says to me. But sci fi is all about pushing boundaries. Opening minds. Why are we limited by things like this? I’m so sad."

The stance from RTD does not seem in and of itself confused. He made the decision to avoid showing a man in clothes designed for a woman based on a potential, and what he saw as a likely, media reaction. The mention of tabloids and newspapers is revealing, of course. He is a boomer. Terminology aside, though, I would agree that depicting a man in women's clothes opens the door to ridicule from the anti-woke crowd in a way that not showing it wouldn't. And, yes, they are women's clothes. With all due respect to everybody who claims otherwise, I don't think the refute that Jodie's costume is designed to be genderless really holds any water. The costume designed by Ray Holman and inspired by Jodie Whittaker's suggestion is not inherently feminine but the shape and cut and final choices were made with her, a cis woman, in mind as the wearer.

Now, what does hold some amount of water is the context of the rest of the episode. Approximately 44 minutes before David Tennant appears in his all new costume, Sacha Dhawan's Master can be seen wearing Whittaker's complete costume and he continues to for several minutes following. It is at this juncture where our second comment from Hagan feels appropriate;

"[In reference to David Tennant wearing Jodie Whittaker's costume] Dude's heart's in the right place but his head's in the fucking clouds half the time." - November 10, 2022

What many have noted, Hagan included, is that RTD inadvertently suggests here that the Master, the villain, being seen in clothes intended for someone other than of his assigned gender is perfectly acceptable but to see our leading hero in this way is something to avoid. Without the full context of the quote, we appear to have RTD shying away from doing something opposed to UK's cultural and societal norms regarding gender rather than being openly proud of the juxtaposition; we have just witnessed a gender transition which is another day in the office for our hero.

Then again, if one never came across RTD's comments in the first place, would there be as much reason to be bothered by the decision at all? Certainly, there is the valid feeling of disappointment that would have come from many fans about never seeing Whittaker's male successor in her clothes but, prior to the statement, I saw less of that online than I did excitement. Most viewers seemed to reasonably assume from the way the scene plays out that the choice to regenerate the clothes would have some bearing on the plot in future events. It stands to reason that the Doctor regenerating their clothes and regaining an old face are related. Well, we know now that they were not, at least not on-screen.

They are related in the real world but, alas, in a very perfunctory way. As I am sure RTD was well aware, the clip of Jodie turning back into David was a very popular moment and even named TV Moment of the Year at the Edinburgh TV Awards. Most significantly, the costume from the previous era was not the one seen all over the media.

So, knowing that the costume change would not be addressed in his scripts, RTD addressed it himself in what some might call a flagrant display of moral hubris. Again, the sentiment of 'let's not give queerphobes ammunition' is in no way a problematic one but the optics of forever binding that decision to an episode that makes no display at all of the villain dressed in women's clothes are not so great and a little baffling. It is almost as if RTD had no idea what even went on in the story he was picking up from. As others such as Hagan have pointed out, there is also the notable matter of the Master as written by RTD who was last seen wearing women's clothes in multiple instances during The End of Time. While it his unfair to say his choices in 2009 and choices in 2022 directly reflect each other, it still contributes to an awkward feeling and some bad optics.

RTD refused to give ammunition to queerphobes so he handed the fans a loaded gun and asked them to point it at him. It sounds almost noble but was it truly necessary? He could have said nothing for a much lesser reaction. In that case, nobody would have questioned his equating the art of drag performance with just men in women's clothes. This is the first of several examples in what I am attesting to be 'pre-emptive damage control'; cases of RTD identifying where audiences might have a problem and then going well out of his way to ensure that they don't at the very real risk of drawing attention to problems that may not have even been there in the first place. Or, at least, not in the way that he is envisioning. I am not refuting the suggestion that media outlets would have made jokes out of Tennant in a woman's clothes. That seems like a very real possibility. For RTD, it seems that the potential harm from that outweighed any potential strength that could be gained from depicting it in the first place. Is the best outcome for queer Doctor Who fans the one where the show seems to take no pride in depicting aspects of queer culture or make any attempt to own that choice at all?

A similar situation occurred a little over twelve months later with the premiere of, of all things, a Children in Need sketch. On November 17 2024, Destination: Skaro was broadcast in the UK and, eight days out from RTD2 kicking off proper, it was audience's first glimpse into what might be in store with David Tennant's Fourteenth Doctor and perhaps the general flavour of the era. At time of writing, the latter seems a little too soon to say though the nature of the short obviously lends it to being more comedic than a typic Who episode. Something that did become clear though was that the outspoken, socially-conscious thinking that informed the previous year's regeneration scene showed no signs of disappearing.

Destination: Skaro surprised fans with the unexpected return of Julian Bleach in the role of Davros. The scene took place on the titular planet during the early stages of Dalek development and saw the Doctor accidentally influence the Daleks' design. The short was immediately notable for depicting Davros as fully-abled, not wheelchair bound or in any way disfigured. Prior to any statement from RTD regarding the choice, fans like myself appeared to conclude that this scene must be intended to take place prior to all of Davros' other appearances. Hs debut, Genesis of the Daleks, makes it clear that his chair is a life-support system and the Daleks seen there are all fully designed. So this is a prequel to the 1975 story. Easy enough to accept. But, then, RTD said this in an episode of Doctor Who Unleashed:

"We had long conversations about bringing Davros back, because he's a fantastic character, [but] time and society and culture and taste has moved on. And there's a problem with the Davros of old in that he's a wheelchair user, who is evil. And I had problems with that. And a lot of us on the production team had problems with that, of associating disability with evil. And trust me, there's a very long tradition of this... I say, this is how we see Davros now, this is what he looks like. This is 2023. This is our lens. This is our eye. Things used to be black and white, they're not in black and white anymore, and Davros used to look like that and he looks like this now, and that we are absolutely standing by."

In my opinion, there is little to object to here. Associating disability with villainy is a longstanding, harmful trope of genre fiction and something that Doctor Who has indulged in innumerable times throughout its history. Given that this short was airing within a charity event for disadvantaged youth, the optics of the decision make a lot of sense. It was a good call for RTD to contribute to the conversation about disability in a positive way. For the most part, this alls seemed to go down quite well. What some fans objected to was what was said toward the end of his comments, specifically the suggestion that this is how Davros will be portrayed moving forward.

This was met with a polarised reaction in fans, including those who are wheelchair users. YouTuber Tharries, notable among many things for being one of RTD's inspirations to depict the TARDIS as having a ramp in The Giggle, posted his reaction on November 18, 2023;

"As a disabled Doctor who fan I've always felt somewhat conflicted on Davros as a character, much as I love him he does contribute to the longstanding disabled evil man trope so to see @russelldavies63 address that meant a lot."

Tharries remains an outspoken fan of RTD and strong advocate for disability representation in the show. On the other side, were fans such as Rob Keeley who remarked on November 19, 2023;

"I've been a wheelchair user all my life and a #DoctorWho fan since the 1993 Genesis of the Daleks repeat. I don't find #Davros offensive - he's a great character. What's offensive is treating all disabled people as the same, assuming we all automatically identify with one another."

Mind you, it is probably also worth repeating Keely's review of The Star Beast from November 26 that same year for a more complete context of the man's views;

"True there was nothing very new, I still hate casual bad language in Who and the woke resolution was rubbish, but it still felt like Doctor Who more than anything in a long time."

A common outcry of detractors was that a link was never made between Davros' evil qualities and his being disabled. Dav McKenzie writing for The Spoilist on November 2023 provides an articulate quote mounting this defence but, amusingly, fails to attribute it to anybody;

"Say goodbye to Davros, one of Doctor Who’s most enduring foes. RTD has decided Davros boils down to discrimination against the disabled. He is a war-scarred cripple who is a megalomaniacal genius. His disability does not define or even restrict him as he is one of the most dangerous Doctor Who villains ever. Thanks to RTD though Davros has no injuries and is not in a wheelchair any longer. Goodbye, Davros. We had a good 40 years."

This particular line of defence never sat well with me. It was only in 2015, after all, that we saw Davros as a fully-abled child with no signs of fascist or psychotic tendencies. That depiction leaves one with little room to refute that his path to evil is in entirely unrelated to his disability.

It remains difficult to find a consensus on fan opinion at the best of times but this particular situation seems to remain a huge unknown quantity. Perhaps it will become clearer when Davros next returns to the show, if RTD even intends to do that. What was clear was that Davies wanted to make a statement about disability representation in his Doctor Who, spearhead these values with a new take on Davros right before then debut of new supporting character, Shirley.

And, again, I feel that the same question needs to be asked; would this have been a lot better received if RTD let the work speak for itself? Did he have to make such a definitive statement in Unleashed when we could see in the work that he was making that he had a strong, intelligent disabled character and no longer leaned on disability for villainy? Yes, the statements are inviting conversation and critical thinking which is always good but is RTD just virtue signalling or actually inciting change? Or is he doing both?

To be continued in part two; Rose Noble and Trans Identities in RTD2

*Tom's boots not withstanding

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Wokeness, Responsibility and if RTD is problematic - Introduction

Is Russell T Davies a problematic figure? Is he too woke or not aware enough? Is he doing something wrong to illicit negative responses from the progressives as well as the conservatives? Is it something in the programme, something in the marketing or is he doing nothing particularly bad at all? Well, perhaps you and I, faithful reader, can come to some sort of conclusion. Let's find out together as we take a dive into the controversial choices behind RTD2 and the mind of the man behind them.

There is an extremely telling moment in issue 599 of Doctor Who Magazine in their feature on The Giggle, specifically the climax. On page 18, the magazine printed some conversation between Benjamin Cook, Ncuti Gatwa and Russell T Davies (RTD) which you can read below;

"When you wished for it," Russell asks [Ncuti] now, "there wasn't a part of you thinking, but there's no point, it's not going to happen, because I'm black?" "Never," says Ncuti. "I love that," says Russell. "Because here I am, as a 59-year-old white man, assuming that would weigh heavily on your mind." "Yeah, no, completely," says Ncuti. "When it was announced and everyone was saying, 'He's the first black Doctor!' - that was insane. Slowly I was like, '... ohh." "Yes, it's hard to know what to do with that."

I find this to be a very revealing exchange and an invaluable insight into RTD's mind. RTD thinks. He thinks a lot. It is very clear not only that he thinks a lot and is very conscious of his decisions and responsibilities as a showrunner but also that he wants us to know that. And, you know what, perhaps he is a little too conscious. Perhaps RTD thinks too much.

But of course RTD thinks. He is a writer and a storyteller. He is, in fact, a very good storyteller and, in order to be so, one has to be continuing to engage with new art, meet new people and be connected to the world around them. This is not conjecture, this is how art works; it is a expression and representation of how the artist relates, reflects and responds to the world around them. RTD is a wickedly intelligent, queer man and you need look no further than his own work to see how passionate he has always been about depicting a diverse range of characters and stories that are firmly rooted in the political and social climate of his day. In fact, he explicitly said as much himself in a December 2023 interview for Rolling Stone;

"From my point of view, whatever I make on television, I try to embrace queerness and queer politics and that’s like breathing to me because that’s my world. That’s how I live.”

At the time I am writing (two months away from season one's debuting), RTD's second stint as show runner of Doctor Who, RTD2, as it has come to be known, has proven to be as divisive for longterm fans as his initial tenure, if not more so. No surprises there, of course, but what was unforeseen however, at least by me, was the vocal backlash from the progressive crowd.

Perhaps it shouldn't have been though. After all, we are talking about a sixty year old white cis man. As well researched and intentioned as he may be, the scope of his experiences will inevitably reach their limits regarding gender, sexuality and cultural backgrounds. Even ethically, to hold somebody of quite a different generation to the exact same standards as your own, a significantly younger or potentially older audience member, is a pretty dubious and flawed thing to put into practice.

Still, backlash from the progressives might also have been foreseen if we took more than half a glance at his original time on the show. The quality and impact of representation in 2000s Doctor Who was certainly varied, and something worth discussing in more depth in some other entry. That does not make it any less significant that it was Russell who spearheaded the first openly queer companion, its first black supporting character and then first black companion as well as the oldest leading lady to date. And these things were not simply acts of ticking boxes. Jack Harkness, Mickey Smith, Martha Jones and Donna Noble were strong, fully-realised characters who were regularly recurring across almost five years of television. One of them even led a TV show of his own for half a decade. Combine that with more than a handful of overtly political storylines across the episodes that he produced and you have a revived Doctor Who that is quickly established as one of the most progressive television programmes of its kind in the 2000s.

But mistakes were made, particularly regarding racial background. YouTuber Princess Weekes has made a particularly articulate video outlining RTD's pitfalls in representing black communities in Doctor Who a couple of months ago and I strongly encourage you to go and check that out. This article is not about the 2000s though. This is about the present day and the world surrounding RTD as he re-entered the role of showrunner in 2021. So, in order to contextualise that, let us tackle that frustratingly large elephant in the room; let's briefly discuss how Doctor Who became too woke.

This will be a very short discussion because, of course, this didn't happen. Yet, somehow, this narrative, that Doctor Who has become more occupied with pushing its progressive political agendas than telling compelling stories, is a bizarre claim that has been looming over the series for far too long now. It is a line of thinking that I first remember hearing around 2016 with the announcement of Bill Potts as the first openly lesbian companion. Y'know, because having an openly lesbian character must surely mean the Moff was out of ideas. But it really seemed to become a thorn in the fandom's side in the year following when Jodie Whittaker's casting was revealed. Together with Chris Chibnall's casting of two people-of-colour in his main cast and hiring the most diverse writers the show has ever seen to tell stories that reflect their varied life experiences and backgrounds CLEARLY indicated the show was on a downward spiral. The writing was on the wall*.

Okay, so, let's break this down for a second because obviously Doctor Who of the past seven years has not been too woke. But, even if that were the case, what does that even mean? Well, let's be blunt here, this is a form of cultural appropriation. The usage of 'woke' as a slang term for being attentive to social issues originated in African American Vernacular English. As Marriam-Webster defines it;

"In [African-American Vernacular English], awake is often rendered as woke, as in, 'I was sleeping, but now I’m woke'".

In the mid-2010s, "stay woke" became a watch word in the black community eventually becoming entwined in the BLM movement. The term has since been co-opted by conservatives, in another harmful display of white aggression, as an insulting short-hand for people and works that challenge their comfortably ignorant view of the world in really any way at all.

TLDR; to level the accusation of a television programme being "too aware of social and political injustices", especially a show with as long a history in of engaging with those sorts of ideas as Doctor Who, as if it were some kind of negative is one of the most laughable criticisms that the show has ever seen.

It is actually even more laughable when you consider that one could take less than half a glance at Chibnall's version of the show and realise that it was, in fact, doing remarkably little actual engagement with contemporary social and political issues at all. Hell, 10.96 million people tuned into the first episode of his run to learn that for themselves. But this article is not about Chris Chibnall either. This is about Russell T Davies. The man who walked into the office while Chris Chibnall was still in the job and was revealed as such before Chibnall's final season, the Flux storyline, had even gone to air. As nasty a move this was from BBC, seemingly attempting to sabotage their own show, they knew how big of a deal this was. This is Russell T Davies ! The OG showrunner !! The guy who turned a dead cult TV show into an enormous national, and eventual, international franchise !!! This will be 2008, all over again !!!! RTD was going to save Doctor Who !!!!! Praise be to Russell T !!!!!!

Of course, this did not happen.

It was a pretty dumb call from the conservative crowd to claim RTD was going to swoop in and be their champion. There was truly no reason at all to suspect that he would come back to Doctor Who and not bring his established brand of mindful, inclusive and socially charged writing to the programme. After all, in the years since writing regularly for Doctor Who, Davies produced works like Years and Years and It's a Sin, two incredibly thoughtful though quite different series, the former being a speculative work of science-fiction envisioning the next fifteen years of human history through the eyes of a single family and the latter an intimate and tragic retrospective on the UK AIDS crisis. For a certain crowd of people, this was actually the most appealing aspect of RTD's return. The man was going off the heels of some of his most acclaimed work of all-time, works that spoke to harsh realities of the world we live in and told compelling stories of any number of diverse characters. And, for some people, this was somehow a red flag.

There are longtime fans of a certain generation who have been vocal of RTD's flaws as a social-justice champion from day one. Diamanda Hagan is one such person who comes to mind. I have a great deal of respect for her and her opinions which are often much more articulate and interesting to engage with than my own. If you are unfamiliar, I encourage you seek her out. For the purposes of this article, there are two recent(ish) tweets of hers that I will be citing and the first is as follows;

"[In reference to the polarised reception to The Church on Ruby Road] I continue to be amused by people watching RTD being RTD, now disliking it and thinking that RTD or his work is the one that changed." - December 26, 2023

I would like to use this quote to springboard into a more in-depth discussion of RTD's choices onscreen (strap in, everybody 'cause this'll be more than one post) but, before I do, allow me to note that I find myself only half-agreeing with Hagan's assertion here. Onscreen, Davies' work is distinctly his own. His style has evolved, certainly, insofar as his language and the presentation but the overall package, the flavour and spirit of RTD Who, is much the same as it was from 2005-2010.

But I would insist that something has changed and that something is what Davies is saying behind the scenes and in promo material because, and this is a crucial point, regardless of how 'woke' RTD2 actually is, and we will get into it, he certainly wants you to think that it is. I do not think that this is an out of arrogance or some kind of saviour complex. I don't believe that RTD is sitting at home rubbing his hands and thinking 'hehehe look how progressive everybody thinks I am". No, I think that Russell is drawing attention to how progressive the show is in the media because he genuinely believes in making socially conscious choices and their impact and consequences. He wants audiences to be talking about disability and race and queerness and class and acceptance and bigotry. RTD is asking us to talk about the topics highlighted in his productions.

So, let's do that then....

To be continued in part one; The Regeneration Question and Davros with Legs

*The fact that Chris Chibnall's version of Doctor Who was ultimately lacking in compelling storytelling for most audiences is extremely unfortunate but obviously unrelated to his diverse cast and crew.

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whoreviewswho · 2 months

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me when i'm full of wonder and whimsy

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Almost as crazy for her to have said this during literally her least traumatising adventure ever as it is for the Doctor to not even pretend to care

“...I'm really, really scared, Doctor.”

Silver Nemesis - season 25 - 1988

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And somehow they got away with it while putting the Doctor and Zoe in those glasses

The War Games is such an incredible story; It's difficult to maintain that level of suspense for 10 whole episodes and yet they managed to pull it off beautifully

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By Morning, We Might All Be Dead - Horror of Fang Rock, 1977

Horror of Fang Rock marks a significant turning point in Doctor Who's history which is odd because, insofar as what actually makes it to screen, it would seem reasonable to assume that this serial was just business-as-usual. For the past three years, under the watch of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, Doctor Who had overgone a successful transition from an action-packed, primarily earth-based series into a more macabre, gothic-horror infused programme. Despite this turn away from what was a very successful and family-friendly approach, Doctor Who was suddenly at the height of its popularity with the fourteenth season, that finished airing in April 1977, pulling in ratings of approximately eleven million viewers each week. Tom Baker’s fourth incarnation of the eponymous hero was riding an enormous wave of success but, nonetheless, it was decided that things must come to an end. Following vocal criticism of the series' violent and adult direction, including some infamous comments from Mary Whitehouse, the BBC informed Philip Hinchcliffe, during pre-production season fourteen's final serial, that he would be quietly moved on from Doctor Who. Hinchcliffe was redeployed onto a different, notably less family-oriented, programme in the form of Target, a police drama. Swapping in this place would be the creator of Target and its original producer, one Graham Williams.

Williams took up the reigns under strict instructions to reshape the series into something more palatable for the younger viewers. Under his watch, Doctor Who would undergo a drastic, though steady, series of changes away from gothic horror film-pastiches into something more camp, absurdly comedic but high-concept science-fiction adventure serials. This was the beginning of a period where Douglas Adams would be regularly writing and script-editing for the show. Intentionally or otherwise, this was a tonal and stylistic shift that took place over the entirety of season fifteen and, in my opinion, would not entirely find its feet until Williams’ final season. However, at the very top of his reign is something quite different and a story that feels rather fittingly like a last hurrah to the old guard.

Horror of Fang Rock, if you did not already take the hint, could more than comfortably pass as a Hinchcliffe era Doctor Who. So much is this the case that I frequently stumble across claims that this story was commissioned under his watch even though there is no evidence to suggest such a thing. In fact, it would be impossible. As previously mentioned, Hinchcliffe was made aware of his new assignment before production on The Talons of Weng-Chiang, had even wrapped. All that was set in place for season fifteen while he was still producing were the contracts for our two leading actors and both were negotiated by Williams. Louise Jameson was convinced to sign on for a second year as Leela, despite her difficult working relationship with Tom Baker, on the condition that she would no longer have to wear the uncomfortable brown contact lenses from season fourteen. This stipulation accounts for the somewhat left-field moment in this story's climax where Leela is temporarily blinded only for her sight to return but with different pigments in her eyes. The script does its best to make the scene into a character moment with Leela naively disobeying the Doctor and then asking him to slaughter her when she becomes maimed but it remains a pretty terribly tacked on scene. Tom Baker was unimpressed with Jameson's renewal. Following his insistence to Hinchcliffe and Holmes that he did not need a co-star at all after Elisabeth Sladen's departure, he had grown to dislike Leela as a character finding her too violent and sexually provocative for the programme's audience. Regardless, he signed on for the new season with the suggestion that it would perhaps be his last.

Even though Hinchcliffe had left the series, Robert Holmes remained in his post for the first half of season fifteen and, as such, a very smooth transition can be seen occurring from his sensibilities into that of his successor Anthony Read. For the first story of the season, Holmes called upon his immediate predecessor Terrance Dicks and, aware of the programme's horror sensibilities at that time, offered a script originally entitled The Witch Lords. Later renamed The Vampire Mutation, the scripts were a pastiche of classic Dracula adaptations in the same vein as the previous seasons’ forays into classic literature and cult films such as Frankenstein, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes and so on. However, due to the BBC’s fears of such a production impacting their forthcoming, prestige adaptation of Dracula, the serial was abandoned forcing it from first in production to second and beginning a scramble for a late replacement*.

Horror of Fang Rock was devised after Holmes suggested an historical based around Edwardian lighthouses, citing Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's 1912 poem Flannan Isle as a basis from which begin. Entirely unfamiliar with lighthouse operations of the period, Dicks frequently claimed that this was Holmes’ attempt at a comeuppance for when he was commissioned by Dicks to write 1973's The Time Warrior with no knowledge of feudal English castles. The Flannan Isle poem is based upon a real incident from December 1900, when a supply ship discovered that the three-man lighthouse crew on Eilean Mòr, one of the Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides, had vanished without a trace. Dicks clearly took the basic premise of the poem and the imagery and aesthetic to craft this particular tale. The poem is directly quoted in the serial itself and, yes, it is a very lovely piece of writing that Tom Baker delivers excellently. I do struggle, however, to find a particularly interesting subtextual connection between it and the serial that aired. The story could have actually been Horror on Flannan Isle and nothing would really change which makes me wonder why Dicks just didn't go for that (besides Fang Rock being an obviously more pulpy and memorable title). As is, the poem recital just feels like an unnecessary in-text acknowledgement of Dicks' inspiration.

Given how late a replacement Horror of Fang Rock was, director Paddy Russell had already begun preparing for The Vampire Mutation and was disappointed that the story was abandoned. Russell had already worked on the series thrice before, most recently for season thirteen's Pyramids of Mars, and Fang Rock would prove her final contribution. Russell felt restricted technically and creatively by the lighthouse setting and when scheduling difficulties forced the production to the lesser Pebble Mill Studios, the working environment only became more difficult.

Perhaps it is in part thanks to these tensions, however, that Horror of Fang Rock comes out so well in the wash. This story is dripping with tension and drama. There is an extraordinary claustrophobic quality to the serial that is surely enhanced by the smaller studio space and even more cramped than usual sets. Aside from some occasionally laughable CSO, the disappointingly dodgy model ship and one other awkward effect I'll get to later, Horror of Fang Rock is a stellar production from the costumes to the lighting to the film excerpts to the wonderful score from Dudley Simpson. What Horror of Fang Rock captures better than, dare I say, Pyramids of Mars is a genuine gothic horror flavour. All of the iconography one could expect from such a tale such as foggy nights, ghostly apparitions, grisly deaths and devious characters are all on display here and the story feels incredibly accurate to the era it is calling back to. Horror of Fang Rock has an incredible sense of atmosphere even in the less noticeable choices such as the foghorn which only gets creepier and more intense as the stakes escalate across the story.

None of this is where Horror of Fang Rock excels the most, however. Where this story really shine is in its script, more specifically, in its characters and this is a mightily impressive feat for something assembled in crisis. Despite his closest association with Doctor Who, and his most prolific one, is with the Pertwee era, there is a good case to be made that this is Dicks' tightest script. Every member of this ensemble is wonderfully well-realised, even those with quite little screen-time. Each character feels three-dimensional and distinct from the others. It helps immensely that Dicks' simplistic approach to storytelling stands apart from Holmes' who would have likely shifted focus further away from the cast, relegating them to caricatures rather than characters, and onto the unholy, universe-ending threat. The story begins introducing us to the three keepers; Reuben, Ben and Vince. Immediately, the dynamic between the trio is clear and compelling. We have Reuben as the old hand who is set in his ways and performed excellently by Colin Douglas, Reuben is set in his ways; “In England we have proper customs”. He is a superstitious, sarcastic, racist and arrogant figure. Ben on the other hand, is his counterpoint; embracing the turn of the century. He is all in favour of electric technology, is highly intelligent yet he also carries an air of superiority, quick to boss around his crew mates and scold them. And then there is poor Vince, the naive, new recruit whose innocence and charm serves to make him the most endearing supporting character in this cast by a wide margin.

The beginning of this serial is just excellent. Again, the whole first part is dripping in atmosphere and makes for an incredibly tight watch. Without ever mentioning the year, the setting is made abundantly clear. Fang Rock story offers some wonderful establishing moments such as the philosophical argument between Vince and Reuben that just plays out like a discursive of the period in the best way possible. This is how you can communicate setting and themes in a script in a way that is clear but not insulting to the audience. That being said, Dicks clearly did his research into lighthouses with a pretty blunt, however delightful, dumping of period accurate facts at every opportunity. It is always nice when Doctor Who returns to its educational roots in some way. Dramatically, a lighthouse is a brilliant setting for a thriller like this with its isolated location and limited cast, stranded, allowing for a lot of suspense and discomfort in the plot. On paper, there is little to seperate this from the Troughton era base-under-siege yet the tone and approach just feels a world away. Even on a basic thematic level, this setting also proves a delightfully rich choice. Lighthouses, after all, signify dangerous coasts. They are used to warn off ships and this is exactly what it is used for in the conclusion of this story. Albeit, not for that kind of ship.

When we do meet up with our heroes, we find Tom Baker and Louise Jameson on top form. Funnily enough, though, this serial was criticised by Jameson for doing her character a disservice, even going so far as to suggest that Dicks was writing with Sarah Jane in mind instead of Leela. Thankfully, due to her insistence, the finished product serves her a lot better. Whether it is ultimately down to Dicks, Holmes or mostly Jameson's performance, I think that Leela is written very realised in this story and it produced some of her best moments, such as her beautiful first scene with Vince and really every interaction with Adelaide. Pairing her off with what could almost be a more traditional companion archetype (how different are Adelaide and Victoria?) was a brilliant choice and very effective in selling her uniqueness as a leading lady in Doctor Who.

Behind the scenes, this serial also marked a turn for the better in Jameson and Baker's relationship. After being repeatedly upstaged by her co-star despite it not being what they rehearsed, Jameson confronted Baker about his behaviour. It is no secret that Tom Baker's behaviour throughout the Graham Williams era became something of an ongoing issue and that is no less the case with the second serial he produced. Baker severely clashed with Russell on-set due to the former's lack of respect for his director’s regimented and meticulous practice. Baker also became frustrated at Russell's disinterest in taking suggestions from him to alter the material. The most often repeated anecdote from this conflict recalls an incident where Baker flatly refused to take on Russell's direction and repeatedly entered the scene too early as to remain in shot. Following the difficult final block timing the confrontation between the Doctor and the Rutan, Russell decided she would never return to the show and later cited Tom Baker's "difficult" behaviour as the core reason why;

"Tom Baker was easy to deal with at first, but the part went to his head completely. By the time I did Horror of Fang Rock, he was desperately difficult to work with. His input got totally out of hand. His attitude to his fellow actors was extremely difficult, his attitude to his director was extremely difficult, and his attitude to the crew was extremely difficult. For instance, it was always everybody else’s fault, and never Tom’s. His idea was to have that show to himself. He didn’t want an assistant, and he made their lives hell. Louise Jameson went through hell on that show, and that lady is a very good actress. Fortunately, she’s very tough, and she got a lot of support from everyone else. I found her excellent to work with, but Tom hardly spoke to her, and when he did it was usually something nasty".

Frustratingly, tom Baker's ego was not without reason. The Doctor comes completely alive in this serial thanks to Baker's captivating performance whose sour demeanour on-set manifested as one of the moodiest and most alien performances of his entire run. His performance is electric and he imbues so much presence and awe in every moment he deliberately plants himself in the centre of the frame. The Doctor has any number of charming moments and memorable lines in this serial (“The Malicious Damage Act 1861 covers lighthouses”) but the tone of performance is so distant and bizarre that it leaves him as barely even a comfort for the audience in this unsettling arena, let alone the cast around him. This story shows the Doctor as a fighter for the working class all the way through offering little to no encouragement to the toffs but immediately jumping to the defence of Harker and Vince. Like all of the best stories of this period, Genesis of the Daleks or Pyramids of Mars for notable examples, the Doctor's behaviour goes a long way toward selling the threat. Certainly there is levity and flippancy but those moments of whimsy, for lack of a better term, are complimented by the gravitas and seriousness when dealing with the matter at hand. The villain, the horror and tragedy of the story is never undermined with the humour and is expertly balanced. Horror of Fang Rock also shows that the Doctor is deeply fallible. This is a character who is allowed to make enormous mistakes, such as the chilling moment at the end of episode three when he becomes directly responsible for the situation escalating despite believing he is doing the right thing. It is something that I would have loved to see taken even further in this story and beyond, like how we would eventually get with the Twelfth Doctor. The Doctor's actions are pivotal to the plot changing for the worst and this is one of very few Doctor Who stories where the entire supporting cast is killed. Any form of acknowledgement and reflection from the Doctor about this would have gone a hell of a long way.

In the second episode, three new characters arrive in the form of Palmerdale, Skinsale and Adelaide. A trio of intensely dislikable, greedy, upper class idiots. Palmerdale is an Edwardian socialite attempting to climb above his class, Skinsale a war veteran turned politician and Adelaide who, if she ever worked for me, seems like the most hysterical and witless secretary of all-time. Despite being offered numerous opportunities to perform honourable actions, the three maintain no sense of loyalty to each other, no care for the crew of their ship, frequently betray their selfish morals and sexist values and are obsessed with upholding their respective reputations and statuses of being “honourable” gentlemen and a lady. How laughable. As the story goes on, their behaviour continues to jeopardise the lives of others and, eventually, their own with Palmerdale and Skinsale both being trapped and killed by the creature thanks to their own actions and greedy ambitions.

Again, these characters are just incredibly well-written. There is a stark contrast in the use or language between the lighthouse crew and the gentry that effortlessly illustrates the cultural divide of the period without any dialogue directly acknowledging such a thing. When the toffs do speak to the keepers, they remain emotionally distant, referring to them only in generalities or by their surnames. Compare that to the Doctor and Leela who immediately talk amongst Vince and Reuben as their friends and equals. Horror of Fang Rock showcases the worst of what Edwardian England has to offer from people of all walks of life.

This, naturally, allows for some strong thematic beats to be teased out of these characters. The most blatant, of course, is the previously alluded to parallel between the perceived savage and the supposed enlightened lady. It is the latter of these who is seeking answers in horoscopes and the former who suggests broadening her mind with the world of science and education. Skinsale is an ex-military character and the natural parallel to the alien threat who itself is a scouting soldier. I am sure it is no mistake that the self-proclaimed exemplar of the British military dies in a pathetic scramble to get his hands on some diamonds. Unlike everybody else on the Rock, the Rutan is a perfectly adaptable creature yet it has no individuality. Perhaps Is this fact that makes it such a powerful, concentrated threat and the humans such an emotional, self-defeating rabble. None of the cast, after all, show any signs of being capable to adapt to survive. Save for Leela and the Doctor, everybody in the story is close minded and dies blindly sticking to their principles. Perhaps this is a more deeply cynical notion than Dicks intended to convey. Regardless his story creates a wonderful contrast of the animalistic/tribalistic notion that the Rutan embodies, killing everybody in sight to determine the strength of humanity, versus the supposed civilised qualities of Edwardian ladies and gentlemen who squabble and are selfish and ultimately bring about their own demise. Horror of Fang Rock marks the only appearance to date of the Rutans in Doctor Who, first mentioned in The Time Warrior as the arch-enemy of the Sontarans. I wonder if Dicks chose this threat specifically to subtly rib at Holmes for the difficult assignment. It is a very amusing choice to depict the villain of the stiff, squat and toadish Sontarans as a nebulous, shape-changing jellyfish but it has to be said that the realisation on-screen is less than remarkable. It does not kill the serial but I do think the threat is much more menacing as an unseen, bubbling threat. The special sounds from Dick Mills are decidedly more iconic and frightening than the design and operation of the puppet.

But a ropey monster effect is really the most minor of gripes to have with a Doctor Who story, especially of this period. Horror of Fang Rock is a hell of a good story. The production is remarkable with fantastic characters and a delightfully chilling threat. This is a serial that never fails to suck me in whenever I put it on and remains one of my all-time favourites. Yes, there are some lovely thematic ideas going on here that are deeply rooted in the culture of being English and the traditions of ghost stories and murder mysteries but this is not the core appeal. Let its not kid ourselves into thinking that this is a hidden Kinda or Ghost Light. Terrance Dicks did not do those kinds of Doctor Whos. What he does offer us here, in arguably his sole proper contribution to the Hinchcliffe/Holmes mould is a compelling, expertly structured horror story with just enough meat to it. As the Williams era begins to take shape in the serials following, I do feel a twinge of disappointment that stories of this vein so quickly disappeared from his tenure. The very last gasp of the gothic horror Who would come two stories later with Image of the Fendahl and the Williams era would never again aim for 'scary' as a target goal (by orders of the BBC, for what that disclaimer is worth).

But perhaps this is what the beginning of the new era really needed; a positive affirmation of what the programme had become, demonstrating what it was at that time in as straightforward and effective a manner as possible. From this statement, we can move on and head into new directions. And let us be fair, even if Williams did go for the old-school scares again, could he really have peaked much higher than this?

*The original vampire serial was not entirely abandoned. It finally made its way to screen in 1980 as part of season eighteen, albeit, heavily rewritten and retitled State of Decay.

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whoreviewswho · 2 months

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The fact it’s so out of pocket and that Davison (or anybody else) has no idea what his take is yet just really makes for a strange watch. It’s as rude and cruel as Peri

my favourite part of classic who is in the visitation where five is a massive cunt to everyone the entire time for literally no reason, shouts at nyssa and then has a voice crack so ridiculous it completely undermines any self-importance he was trying to establish

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whoreviewswho · 3 months

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Gratuitous violence, Philip Hinchcliffe and why Mary Whitehouse was right

There are some things, though not many, that the Doctor Who fandom seems to universally agree on. Everybody can agree that the Weeping Angels are a great villain. Everybody seems onboard with the notion that The Caves of Androzani is one of the best stories of all time. Everybody will attest that the Hinchcliffe era is one of the most consistent runs in the whole show.

You can probably see where I am going with this.

Let's take ourselves to 1977, before the beginning of the fifteenth season for Doctor Who. Season fourteen has finished airing in April and it has turned out to be the most popular to date with average ratings of approximately eleven million viewers tuning in each week. Tom Baker’s fourth incarnation of the eponymous hero was riding an enormous wave of success that had slowly climbed during the Pertwee era (seasons ten and eleven were raking in respectable figures of around eight million) and seemed to peaking under the current regime (figures were climbing by a million viewers a year until season fourteen).

You would think it would be in the BBC's interests then to keep this current team of Tom Baker, producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script-editor Robert Holmes together for as long as possible. That would make sense even now. After all, this is the team that gave us two and half seasons of Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen. They introduced Leela, produced Genesis of the Daleks and Pyramids of Mars. This is the era that cemented Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, as the most iconic of the original Doctors and still one of the most iconic of all-time, only rivalled by David Tennant and Matt Smith (to date). Even those who could never name him or know exactly what he looks like will know the silhouette off the floppy hat and long multi-coloured scarf. Doctor Who as produced by Hinchcliffe had become a powerhouse production and left an incredible impact.

However, the other thing that Hinchcliffe's run had had become with the public was controversial. Or, at least, that would seem to be how the BBC felt about it. During the mid to late '70s, the Doctor Who production team were under more fire than ever before from public critics (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the fire of one, extremely vocal critic) for the increasingly horrific tone and excessive violent content deemed unsuitable for Saturday teatime family viewing. Mary Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers and Listener's Association, has gone down in Doctor Who fan history amongst the like of Michael Grade as one of the show's most infamous detractors. Let me make it very clear that there are innumerable reasons to dislike Whitehouse. It is not without reason that The Goodies' response to receiving positive feedback from her about their programme was to craft an entire episode around a grossly unflattering caricature of her. I have no interest in delving any deeper than this into the beliefs of such a person beyond the confines of this silly blue box show but if you are unfamiliar with Whitehouse or only know her from her Doctor Who association, I implore you to undertake your own research to paint as full a picture of her as a human being as you see fit.

I mention all of this to propose the simple conjecture that perhaps, despite my disagreeing with the foundational reasons of why she opposed programmes like Doctor Who (if she had any amount of media literacy, she would have realised that every aspect of Doctor Who was in opposition to her), she was, in fact, onto something. It feels apt to be writing this so close to my posting of my The Invasion review because there is a similar comparison to be drawn between the Troughton era and the Hinchcliffe/Baker years. Both have been held on a pedestal by the fan community at large as shinning examples, golden periods for Doctor Who where the stories were rarely ever so consistently good and their impact is still being felt to this day. In both cases, these things are somewhat true but it is also true that these periods are a lot more flawed than fans are comfortable to admit. Putting aside the very genuine criticism that Hinchcliffe era Who leaned too heavily upon classic literature and genre film pastiche, there remains a misconception that the show's willingness to portray violent and horrific content at this time equates with it being a mature and compelling drama programme. Torchwood should be all of the evidence you need that this is a fallacy.

Doctor Who has always contained violence and action and it almost certainly always will. I do not object to this but it has to be said that an alarming pattern emerged throughout the Hinchcliffe years that, I think, would have proved detrimental to the show had it continued any longer*. From the moment the Hinchcliffe era begins, with season twelve's The Ark in Space, it strikes a markedly different tone of the preceding tenure. The story is moodier and unsettling in a way that the show had not been for quite some time. The combined efforts of the production team's sensibilities with Baker's distant and unpredictable performance pushed the show away from the innate comfort that had come from the later Pertwee years. The Doctor was no longer a paternal, authority figure and the threats had shifted from power-mad conspirators and identifiable systemic threats to Lovecraftian forces of nature. Right from the start, this run establishes itself as leaning into primal horror and physical threats with the serial's threat being a creature that uses human bodies as an incubator. It is a terrifying idea and one that a pre-watershed serial airing on the BBC should not have any business attempting to depict.

But this is still a fantastical horror. Even if the effect did look good, it is still an alien experience. Mercifully, nobody in the real world has had a Wirrn lay eggs in them so the threat becomes a rather soft kind of scare. This is still a fun, for lack of a better word, form of horror and violence. Perhaps Mary Whitehouse agreed with me since her first notable move against the show came a few weeks later with Genesis of the Daleks which she described as "teatime brutality for tots". Season twelve was the last to have pre-production overseen by the outgoing team of producer Barry Letts and script-editor Terrance Dicks. Season thirteen was when the Hinchcliffe/Holmes duo finally found themselves with full creative control. And so, the Hinchcliffe era TRULY begins with the production of Pyramids of Mars (Planet of Evil was produced later though aired before). Now we see where things truly kick off with a distinctly gothic aesthetic, more graphic and realistic violence all in service of a classic film pastiche, The Mummy in this case. Season thirteen closed with The Seeds of Doom, a story Whitehouse strongly objected to; "Strangulation—by hand, by claw, by obscene vegetable matter—is the latest gimmick, sufficiently close up so they get the point. And just for a little variety, show the children how to make a Molotov cocktail".

The violent depictions in Doctor Who were impactful, of course, The backlash is evidence enough of that fact. But was it necessary? After all, is violence not an essential component in the action-adventure serial? Eric Saward, somebody who would receive very similar criticisms several years after this, claimed that "the Doctor is involved in adventures that deal with violent people" and "that if you display violence you should show it for what it is. I don't think you should dwell on it, I don't think it should be gratuitous, but I think that when you do display violence you should show it hurts".

Regardless of how violence was handled in his own tenure as script editor, I am inclined to agree with this sentiment. If violence is to be portrayed in Doctor Who, or any drama, it should come with an impact on the narrative and the characters. The nature of that impact can wildly vary from story to story but the instant that violence is depicted without consequence, it becomes a gratuitous and unnecessary representation. To use an overdone but high-profile example from contemporary media, this is the problem with violence in Batman v Superman, for example. Characters engage in violent acts, the violence is graphic in nature but the impact fails to be felt by the audience because the acts themselves frequently fail to inform or challenge the characters and/or plot moving forward. Violence is essential to action and can be a very useful component of adventurer fiction but it can easily lose its impact and become unnecessary without proper consideration.

It is in this way that I would agree that the violence and horror throughout Hinchcliffe Doctor Who had started to become gratuitous and frequently unnecessary.

Take The Brain of Morbius, for example, which Whitehouse called; "some of the sickest and most horrific material seen on children's television". The character of Solon, as played in the serial by Philip Madoc, is wonderfully drawn. He is a fanatical and cruel sociopath. A malicious and pathetic shell of a man whose arrogance and obsession dominates his every action. I could draft this description from episode one alone. In episode four, he kills his assistant Condo by way of blowing a bloody hole in his chest with a pistol. The moment is certainly gory and it is a tragic end to the story of Condo for him to be killed in this fashion but the act itself, the depiction of a hyperrealistic blood-splatter coming out of this child-like character, ultimately adds very little. Nobody mourns Condo's death, the violence is hardly an escalation given that we know Solon practices dismemberment before the story even begins and it reveals nothing about who he is as a person. All that matters is that Condo tries to stop him and fails. The violent death is simply an aesthetic choice.

So let us get to season fourteen. The one where the final vestige of the Pertwee years, investigative journalist Sarah Jane Smith, leaves the show to be replaced by a savage descendent of humanity's far future. A hunter and killer who travels armed with a knife and poisonous darts whose introduction sees her quickly chased down and hunted for murder. It has surely become clearly by now that yet another year on, the violence in Doctor Who has seen an enthusiastic uptick.

The Deadly Assassin is the story that killed the Hinchcliffe era and epitomises the problem that had emerged with violence in Doctor Who unlike any other. Despite being a political thriller set inside the Time Lord Panopticon, the entire third episode becomes a survivalist thriller seeing our hero shot at, dropped off of cliffs and bombed inside a virtual reality. Functionally, this means that an entire quarter of the serial is a deviation from the main plot into what is thrilling but entirely unnecessary surrealist horror and violence. The action exists simply to generate visual excitement in an otherwise very dialogue-heavy story and the acts of violence themselves never lead to any story developments or impact the Doctor or Goth in any meaningful way when it ends. It also has a walking emaciated corpse for a main villain for no readily justifiable reason. The Deadly Assassin troubled Whitehouse so much that her uproar led to the BBC censoring the third episode's cliffhanger for future broadcasts.

Just as Michael Grade became infamous amongst fans for cancelling Doctor Who, Whitehouse would be similarly reviled for ending the most popular period of Doctor Who. After all, it is on record that it was her continued, vocal criticism that influenced the BBC's decision to move Hinchcliffe on from Doctor Who. After all, who else is there to blame? Her opinion was so highly regarded by the BBC that the Director-General offered a personal apology for how offended she was by The Deadly Assassin. As noted previously, season fourteen saw Doctor Who at the height of its popularity and a cultural phenomenon that was soon to be on a downward trajectory until 2005. I also observed that this particular run as a whole, the three seasons produced by Philip Hinchcliffe, has been revered by Doctor Who fans ever since it ended on the second of April 1977.

Given the decidedly different direction that Doctor Who was taken in when succeeding producer Graham Williams came onboard, it has become one of the big 'what ifs' to speculate on what Hinchcliffe might have done with another year on the show. Big Finish has attempted to answer that question with a handful of unmade scripts from his time being adapted with a full cast and an additional series of dramas whose plots were conceived by him. The answer is that he would have continued to produce very creative and compelling science-fiction adventure serials. No surprises there. Season fifteen saw a drop in viewership of around two million on average and season sixteen dropped even further. Perhaps it would have been great for the show to see Hinchcliffe's vision continue just a bit longer. Perhaps his time was preemptively cut short.

Or perhaps the biggest threat to Hinchcliffe era Who was the Hinchcliffe era itself. Perhaps I sound like a bit of a hater and I can understand that impression coming across but I must insist at this juncture that I do love this period of Doctor Who. I think that the consistency of quality at this time was absurdly good and many of the stories remain among my favourites as top-shelf examples of what Doctor Who is capable of. Like a lot of fans, I also wonder what might have happened if this team stayed on for another year and how different the timeline of the show would be. However, it is undeniable that like the earthbound format and the base-under-siege before it, the violent thriller pastiches would have tun their course with enough time too. In fact, I would argue that they absolutely did. in 1977, Doctor Who was in desperate need for a change, although it probably didn't know it, simply to save itself from becoming a victim of its own success. I shudder to imagine the six-part finale that is even more violent and even more macabre than what had already come before.

Then again, perhaps we don't have to imagine. We do have season twenty-two to know for sure.

*Even in the previous era, violence played a major role. After all, this was the time when Doctor Who was allying himself with the military. This is an important thing to mention though not strictly relevant to what I am talking about here. I will just explain for now that I think this violence serves a different purpose which I might get into in more depth in some later post. Let's just say that I have no doubt that Mary Whitehouse would have found less objection in presenting Mother England as a noble, defensive force than depicting disfigured nazi scientists.

#culture #actors #history #movies #doctor who #fourth doctor #4th doctor #politics #feminism #censorship #violence #children #tv #television #scifi #1970s

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whoreviewswho · 3 months

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As opposed to Colin Baker who has the look of knowing EXACTLY where it's coming from

I think about this comment at the end of every episode now

source

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whoreviewswho · 3 months

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I don't think we give Doctor Who enough credit for being a rare franchise that lets adults be whisked away on a portal fantasy adventure.

In most of these types of stories, you age out of being an appropriate protagonist. But the first two companions were a pair of fully-adult schoolteachers. Now, there's a template of a companion being a woman in her early twenties, but there's still potential for a broader range of ages. Anybody can stumble through that door and be whisked on an adventure--and be traumatized six million ways, sure, but it's nice to be included.

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whoreviewswho · 3 months

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The Ruler of a Dead World - The Invasion, 1968

Is it totally unfair to call Patrick Troughton's time on Doctor Who somewhat of a failure? Let me explain because I do love Troughton's time on the show. I really do. I would be the first to say that, during his run, the series was frequently brimming with creativity and ingenuity. There are some truly incredible stories in there that have really stood the test of time and went on to define so much of what this franchise would become in later years. To call Doctor Who between 1966 and 1969 a complete failure is, obviously, somewhat of a fallacy. As well we know, the series continued for many years beyond this three season run and great swathes of it, even the bits most of us can't see, have proven to be incredibly popular with fans to this day.

However, it is a narrative that I feel has existed even up to within this past decade (at time of writing, of course) that Doctor Who of the late 1960s is untouchable and some of the greatest science-fiction of its time. And, hey, I like the base-under-siege format as much as anyone else but this unwavering, blind praise is the line of thinking that leads one to write stories like Attack of the Cybermen and Cold War. Yes, Troughton Doctor Who could be good and it is popular. It is also true that the stories of this era were repetitive, hastily assembled, frequently overambitious and falling notably short of nine million plus viewership figures of the Hartnell years. The show was under a very real threat of cancellation come the end of Troughton's tenure.

So, by the time of season six, I would say it is more than reasonable to claim that Doctor Who was in somewhat of a creative crisis, commissioning one serial after another that overextended the production team. Just look at how many of Big Finish's Lost Stories range hail from this period. The War Games replaced two entire serials that will never see the light of day. The same is true for the subject of this writing. Doctor Who was in desperate need of some some stability behind the scenes and revitalisation onscreen. That only makes it all the more ironic that the serial tasked with quietly ushering in such a changes started out just as old-hat and formulaic as any story.

One of the most popular, however frequently appearing, monsters of this period was the Cybermen and producer Peter Bryant seemed more than keen to utilise them further in season six with a script commissioned for one of the creatures’ co-creators Kit Pedler before pre-production on their previous story, The Wheel in Space, had even finished. Pedler contributed an initial treatment for Return of the Cybermen and the task of scripting fell to, now, former script-editor Derrick Sherwin who was of the belief he was to shortly be moved on from Doctor Who altogether. Despite Bryant and Sherwin agreeing that Pedler's storyline was ultimately lacking in usable content, the abandonment of another serial, The Dreamspinner, led to Sherwin's serial charging full steam ahead with the not-insignificant task of bolstering it from six episodes to eight.

Really, the production of season six was more like a series of 'not-insignificant tasks' for Derrick Sherwin. After resigning as script editor following the second serial, The Mind Robber, Sherwin ended up serving as an unofficial assistant producer to Peter Bryant for the larger part of the season before being handed the reins completely for the final serial while Bryant was preoccupied with another programme. Sherwin was eventually moved on from Doctor Who but not until partway through production of the following year's season creating a whole host of different problems that are worth getting into the weeds with some other time.

What I will say here about season seven is that I do think that Sherwin successfully revitalised the programme. The radical new approach would see the show transition from a more science-fantasy, adventure serial into something of a more 'realistic', espionage-tinged programme with a harder edge and more complex, mature drama. Sherwin wanted to shake things up by basing the Doctor primarily on contemporary Earth, teaming him up with government scientists and the military to ward off threats both terrestrial and extraterrestrial.

I mention all of this to say that The Invasion is really where this model for the show actually starts. This serial is more or less a backdoor pilot for the Pertwee era and, ironically, perhaps the quintessential earthbound-Who story. The template for the incoming era was established immediately; the Doctor assists the investigations of a militaristic, security agency into a shadowy and seemingly malicious corporation headed by a megalomaniacal corporate leader, in-league with a dangerous force. While the earthbound format did eventually grow stale itself, it was a genuinely bold choice that I really admire the show for making and sticking to for as long as it did. We're yet to see any of the twenty-first century iterations break from convention as strongly as this.

Bryant and Sherwin initially conceived The Invasion as sequel to The Web of Fear and, although a lot of those connections never, made it to screen, this intention is firmly felt. Besides the tonal and aesthetic similarities that can be drawn (really not much difference between Cybermen in the sewers and Yeti in the underground), it could not be more obvious that Isobel and Professor Watkins were intended to be Professor Travers, who is name dropped for what it's worth. After the suggestion to resurrect one of this era's more obscure dated racial stereotypes, Evans, was nixed, that left Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart the only returning player from The Web of Fear. And even that almost didn't happen since Sherwin was wary of casting a creator-owned character* in such a prominent, potentially recurring role. Thankfully for Nicholas Courtney, the role was not replaced and the Colonel was promoted to the rank of Brigadier and now heading up something a little bit more futuristic than the British Army.

It is a strange thing watching original Doctor Who serials as, effectively, films unto themselves as was the norm prior to The Collection sets. Despite this story being filled with intrigue and great plot developments, barely anybody goes into it without thinking "Oh this is the first one with U.N.I.T. where the Cybermen are at St Paul's". The introduction of U.N.I.T. is one of those wonderful moments in the show’s history that has almost certainly never been fully appreciated by fans with any amount of context since. Our first glimpses of the organisation come from the soon-to-be-beloved Corporal Benton, on a stakeout of International Electromatics. When he rounds up the troops to take in the Doctor, it’s a threatening scene. Mysterious armed men taking our heroes hostage. Things get even more unnerving when the Doctor and Jamie are taken abroad an enormous aircraft only to finally be greeted by the man responsible, a friendly face. Nicholas Courtney is captivating from moment one with charm to spare and a tremendous, natural assertion of authority. U.N.I.T. are immediately established as an epic operation, no doubt thanks in part to the Military of Defence contributing to the production. It would really take until Russell T. Davies offered his take on them that we get to see as comic-book worthy a scale as this. They are operating out of a helicarrier, for goodness sake!

But let's get into the plot here, shall we? The investigation of International Electromatics, the largest seller and manufacturer of electronic goods in the world. A company who, over the past five years, have amassed a monopoly on the electronics market. Essentially, they are what Apple Incorporated is become a good forty years early and, really, this is a fantastic angle to take in a Cyberman plot. Just like Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel attested (and a lot less interestingly at that), people will always obsessed with utilising and developing cutting edge technology. This has always played really well with what the Cybermen were introduced as; the worst outcome from humanity’s technophilic obsessions. It’s a prevalent theme from The Tenth Planet that got lost pretty quickly in their subsequent appearances so to see that being built upon even further here is very exciting. As Vaughn himself proclaims; "Uniformity, duplication. My whole empire is based on that principle". What Sherwin brings with this take on the Cybermen is a delightfully strong statement on industry and capitalism, my need to be like you. This is just as scary as, and I think perhaps more interesting than, their previous painting as the uniformed, communist threat (see The Moonbase). It is incredibly frustrating to be a Cybermen fan and see them constantly presented as less than the sum on their parts. They always have the potential to be the most interesting and horrifying monsters in Doctor Who and have only ever lived up to that promise maybe three times?

Speaking of Tobias Vaughn, he is the bridge between the Cybermen and humanity. Perhaps this is somewhat generic and obvious; he is an arrogant fool who thinks he can get the better of his allies to become the ruler of the world. Vaughn is partially cyber-converted with a bullet-proof, metallic chest-plate and augmented strength but his mind has not been altered with any conditioning. Physically and mentally, he is somewhere in-between man and Cyberman. Vaughn, however, is motivated by purely selfish desires and is highly emotional. His plan is to use the force of the Cybermen as an army to take-over, allowing them to mine the planet for resources and then discard of them once he is in command. What he is not aware of is that the “resources” required turn out to be human beings and the Cybermen have their own agenda.

Vaughn is, in some ways, the protagonist of this story as his character goes gonna journey throughout the serial’s from a malicious and calculating leader in complete control of his people and his situation to realising he is a pawn in a larger game who realises that he is dooming humanity. However, his turn to help the Doctor doesn’t come from a place of selflessness but one of hatred. He wants to destroy the Cybermen for humiliating him and still whole-heartedly believes he is destined to rule the world when he meets his timely death. There is perhaps a theme of power throughout this serial, typified by Vaughn’s driven quest to obtain it and the Cybermen’s display of having it. Packer fits into this dynamic as well as somebody who is more than happy to use and abuse the power he possesses. I like that it is the most physically violent and imposing character who is also the most trepidatious of Vaughn’s plans. It says something about just how purely evil the guy really is.

So, the Cybermen are not the stars of this show and are largely related to silent, creepy monsters who lurk in the background with their immense strength. In terms of pure plotting, their function is to really just be an imposing physical threat that can surprise the audience at the end of episode four because their name isn't in the title. Of course, they have some fantastic, scary moments such as the jump scare that seems to kill Packer and the screaming, crazed Cybermen rampaging in the sewers after being overloaded with emotion. The Cybermen are a genuinely frightening presence when they are on-screen in this story, despite how few and far between those appearances actually are. It is worth noting too that the crazed Cyberman poses no threat to our human heroes at all but instead takes on other Cybermen. In their appearances prior to The Invasion, the Cybermen had begun to seem vulnerable to just about anything but this story, thankfully, sees them back in full force. They are impervious to all forms of attack from U.N.I.T., only halted by the effects of bazookas. It is hard to appreciate now what an ingenious idea the Cerebration Mentor was at the time. A weapon that drives the Cybermen mad with the one thing they truly do not possess; emotion. It’s a chilling concept that I wish, in hindsight, were explored a bit further. The Cybermen are the perfect soldiers. They are logical, ruthless and completely cold and here they are in direct opposition of Earth’s best military forces. I love that the first soldier to die is one who retreats in fear. The emotion is irrational and utterly damning.

This story also debuts my favourite look for the Cybermen, as designed by Bobi Bartlett. It is a shame that this is our only proper chance to see it since they would not be seen again save for a smattering of cameos until 1975 where this design was retooled for the worse. The Cyber-Planner returns for its second and final appearance of the classic show (though apparently it is now a Cyber-Director for whatever reason) and it is kind of cool. The dialogue between it and Vaughn is good but I always found the design a bit underwhelming. Why doesn’t it look anything like Cyber-technology besides the need to surprise the audience?

My biggest criticism with this story is how the Doctor factors into it which is ultimately very little. He has an intriguing role towards the start of the serial, impulsively investigating the company. It leads to some lovely moments such as his singling out Vaughn as a man who blinks too infrequently. I also love the scene when he is taken in by U.N.I.T. soldiers and just resigns himself to the situation by sitting on the curb playing cards. It is all very in-character. Once he starts buddying up with U.N.I.T. though, his contributions to events begin to radically wain. Watkins develops the weapon against the Cybermen, Zoe performs the calculations that lead to the Cyber-Fleet’s destruction and U.N.I.T. launch the missiles that stop the megatron bomb. The Doctor’s biggest contribution to events is determining how the Cybermen plan to invade which is information he could easily have sourced from Vaughn anyways. The Doctor ultimately feels very sidelined in his own show and doesn’t seem get a whole lot of screen time. As a pitch for a new direction for the show, it is a little concerning that surrounding the Doctor with other scientists and action men seems to ultimately make him a little redundant. That said, his narrow escape from being shot by the Cybermen is an excellent sequence and his teaming up with Vaughn is used to great effect. The Second Doctor is so richly defined by this point in his tenure and it serves the story immensely that Troughton and Sherwin are both so attuned to the character that, even when is doing nothing, he is always consistently and interestingly characterised. The Doctor also offers some thematic ties throughout the serial with his repeated hatred of machines and unwillingness to conform to the Brigadier’s orders. The Doctor just does as he pleases, whether the powers that be like it or not which is a neat parallel to the uniformity and efficiency that the both U.N.I.T. and the Cybermen cultivate as well as what Vaughn desires from humanity.

The supporting cast are excellent all round. Wendy Padbury and Frazer Hines are allowed ample time to showcase their talents this with several memorable scenes. At one stage this actually could have been Jamie's final appearance as Frazer Hines alerted his superiors of his intention to leave the show well before this serial went into production. He eventually changed his mind a few weeks before filming asking to extend his contract to end alongside Patrick Troughton's. Jamie showcases some of the best that his character has to offer in this serial with impulsive attacks on Vaughn’s men, chauvinistic but brotherly attitudes toward Zoe and Isobel and courageous rescues in spades. It is a real shame he is out of action for the last part because his comic relief would have been the cherry on top of an already wonderful episode. Zoe proves essential to this plot with her aforementioned mathematical skill but is also awarded opportunities to show plenty of character and joy with her glee at confusing a computer into meltdown. Isobel and Captain James feel a lot like they were introduced with the intent to continue into later stories but neither of them ever did. It feels odd really that the quite insignificant Corporal Benton is the character that had a long life beyond this story and not either of them. The pair are serviceable enough and share a fun chemistry. I hope they ran away and got married after the credits for this story rolled.

Part of the Sherwin and Bryant's intent with this story, and moving forward, being set primarily on Earth was to attempt lowering the budgetary constraints but this serial ironically, proved the most expensive yet! It’s worth it though because the large-scale action, masses of extras in U.N.I.T. colours and extensive location work lends an incredibly dynamic, cinematic feel to The Invasion that most serials of its time severely lacked. The pacing his unfortunately lopsided with the third and fourth episodes especially dragging events out tediously (they even have essentially the same cliffhanger) and the themes of the story barely go further than surface level examination. This is not really a methodical, science fiction story for meditating on ideas. Rather, it is an action-packed, espionage thriller for the modern age. It is certainly atypical of its time but holds up as one of the most exciting and memorable serials of the 1960s. The Invasion is quintessential ‘70s Who produced two years early. It is a pilot for a different show and any interesting thematic, subtextual elements that can be teased out are, frankly, a bonus. The interesting conversations surrounding this story are entirely contextual which is by no means a flaw. The premiering of this serial marks the beginning of the end for the Troughton era, a turbulent but no less innovative time for the show that had quickly run out of steam. It feels incredibly fitting, in a meta textual sense, that the most iconic moment from this story, the one that sells the entire earthbound format, sees the Cybermen, THE big bad of the base-under-siege era, on the steps of St. Paul's. It is well worth a watch even if it is ultimately replacing one light, thrill-oriented, popcorn-chomping version of Doctor Who for another.

*Lethbridge-Stewart is owned by the estate of his creators, Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln.

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