With the quality and ratings of Doctor Who backsliding through the mid-1980s, it was a welcome surprise - though an unwelcome one to the BBC executives eager to cancel the show - that the 25th silver anniversary season in 1988 had seen something of a return to form for the show. The season had restored some mystery to the Doctor's character, made the Daleks a force to be reckoned with once again and seen successful experiments with surrealism (in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy), though the season had also wasted the Cybermen. Still, the show seemed to be on the upswing under increasingly confident script editor Andrew Cartmel, and was even holding its own in the ratings war with soap opera Coronation Street.
For the 26th season, Cartmel brought in a promising team. Ben Aaronovitch returned from the previous season's Remembrance of the Daleks to do for UNIT what he'd done for the Daleks, alongside Ian Briggs, the creator of the character of Ace, for one of Ace's most important stories. Newcomers Marc Platt and Rona Munroe also joined the team. The decision had been taken to continue the path taken in Season 25, of making the Doctor darker and more manipulative, whilst querying the mystery of his background. Ace also became the most-fleshed-out companion in the show's history, driving much of the action in three of the four stories in the season and her background and motivations being explored in a way never before seen for the companion role.
Battlefield is a very promising story that never quite takes off. It's a collection of great, sometimes classic, vignettes and individual scenes which don't cohere into a solid whole, built around a very solid premise. The idea here is that, on a parallel Earth in a neighbouring dimension, the legends of King Arthur were real, undertaken by warriors who mixed feudal fighting styles and notions of chivalry with energy weapons and spaceships. The Doctor got involved in their feud, becoming known as the sorcerer Merlin. However, that was also a future Doctor. When the battle between Arthur and Morgaine's forces spills over onto our Earth, the Seventh Doctor doesn't really have a clue what's going on and has to work with clues and messages left by his future self, whilst also just purely winging it.
This creates a nice contrast between this story and Aaronovitch's last one, Remembrance of the Daleks, which had the Doctor as a master manipulator, moving the Daleks and Davros and humans around like chess pieces with no worthwhile opponent. It's also fun seeing UNIT back in the mix, with Nicholas Courtney on excellent form as the Brigadier and Angela Bruce making a fine Brigadier Bambera. It's also great to see UNIT as a genuinely multi-national organisation, with French, Polish and Czech troopers amongst others.
The rest of the cast is exemplary, with Jean Marsh knowing how to make Morgaine sing, chewing the scenery in one scene, being scary in another and being even compassionate in another. One of Aaronovitch's best ideas here is that Morgaine's forces are not "evil" as such, but merely misguided and still following the codes of honourable combat: Morgaine's fury when she learns her son has accidentally desecrated a memorial to fallen soldiers in a churchyard is palpable. Christopher Bowen's Mordred is also solid, and Marcus Gilbert's Ancelyn is great fun, with 200,000 volt charisma (Gilbert went on to play Arthur himself in Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness just three years later). Even the individual UNIT troops are well cast, with Dorota Rae stealing her every scene with a small role as the Brigadier's helicopter pilot. The great worldbuilding and plotting, and excellent casting, is backed up by some nice battle sequences and a great bit of prosthetics work with the Destroyer, easily the best monster of the season (and, in technical terms at least, maybe all of Doctor Who), played with gravity-laden menace by Marek Anton.
Unfortunately, the story just doesn't really come together. There's a bit of panto in the feeling of characters running around, and there's some plotting shortcuts that feel like script placeholders that were never fleshed out (Ancelyn being thrown several hundred feet by a single grenade to fly through the roof of a building to meet the Doctor is unintentionally comical). The ending also feels like it could do with some work, and I go back and forth on whether Aaronovitch's decision to spare a character who was going to be killed off was a good idea or not. Battlefield can be a lot of fun but feels a bit shambolic.
Ghost Light, on the other hand, is Doctor Who at its quietest and most horrifying. A Gothic horror story unfolding in a haunted house that (as usual) is more than it seems, this serial also has a phenomenal cast, great dialogue and a solid premise, with a very well-thought-out theme of evolution and how that factors back into the story, with Ace's character evolution, the evolution of humanity itself, the character of Nimrod (the last surviving Neanderthal) and the atrophying static of the villainous Light all being great ideas.
Unfortunately these ideas are delivered in a very dense script, which should have been a four-parter than than a three-parter, with some ideas under-explored. There's also a lack of clarity in some ideas - realising that "Control" refers to a scientific control group rather than something in charge complete changes the viewer's perception of a character - and precisely how much the Doctor knows about what is going on is left fuzzy.
The absolute standout of the serial is Sophie Aldred as Ace. Her performance in her debut story lacked subtlety, but she improved immensely over Season 25 and this season is knocking it out of the park. Sylvester McCoy is also on top form; both actors played into the cheesy fun of Battlefield but here respond to the Gothic horror and deep-rooted character clashes and excel. It also helps that Platt gives the Seventh Doctor one of his two all-timer pieces of dialogue:
Ace: "Don't you have things you hate?"The Doctor: "I can't stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations - terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls. And then there's unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty."Ace: "Too right."The Doctor: "We all have a world of our own terrors to face."Ace: "I face mine on my own terms!"
Ghost Light - which I remember once calling the In Utero or The Holy Bible of Doctor Who, brilliant but you're not going to be putting it on at parties - is hard work but ultimately rewarding in being a fine piece of horror and a parable about childhood terrors.
The Curse of Fenric is the season highlight and a strong challenger to Remembrance of the Daleks' position as the McCoy story. The story takes the Doctor and Ace to a remote British military base in Northumbria in 1943. A codebreaker is using an advanced machine to break the encryption on the German U-boats, but the Soviet Union has discovered that their erstwhile allies may be on the brink of other, less positive developments and send in a strike team to intervene. There's a strange disagreement between the chief codebreaker and the naval commander going on, and the local vicar is facing a confidence of faith, something that becomes more important than expected.
This is a great story packed with fine performances and nice ideas. Nicholas Parsons was a typical John Nathan-Turner bit of stunt casting, but Parsons was a professional, serious actor long before he was a gameshow host and relishes the chance to show his acting chops here, and his performance is heartbreaking. Dinsdale Landen is suitably gruff as Dr. Judson and Alfred Lynch is memorably haunted as the Viking-obsessed Commander Millington. Tomek Bork is also great as Captain Sorin. The Soviet strike team is also painted with excellent depth, such as them coming from different parts of the USSR, so the Armenian gets mocked by the Russians, and the Cossack is suitably proud of his heritage.
Even better is the way the store coheres together, succeeding where the (very) superficially similar Battlefield fails. The ideas of faith and hope drive the narrative onwards as the Doctor confronts of his most formidable foes, a deadly enemy who can be trapped by the inescapable logic of his own beliefs. The action sequences are solid (even if the timeslot means some punches are pulled), and the makeup for the Haemovores is quite exceptional.
If McCoy and Aldred were outstanding in Ghost Light, they manage to go a step further here. The Seventh Doctor's confidence turning to desperation is brilliantly played by McCoy, and the sequence where he is surrounded by Haemovores and he fends them off by a demonstration of faith - intoning the names of all his companions one by one, knowing he could rely on every single one of them - is superb. But the story really belongs to Aldred as she confronts the trauma of her past in a way she wasn't expecting, falls in love, has her faith tested by possibly her bloodiest story, and emerges stronger for it all.
The story only has a couple of weaknesses: the writing and performances of the two evacuees who fall prey to the Haemovores can be a bit questionable, and the editing is a bit choppy, a result of the story going 15 minutes over time and having to be cut down. The Blu-Ray release incorporates two alternate cuts of the story, both incorporating the extra footage, one in episodic format and a more recent, movie-length version with a totally recut score by original composer Mark Ayres and subtly updated effects. Both cuts are better, clearing up some spotty plotting and adding some more scenes that make the characters resonate better.
Survival is an odd Doctor Who story. After the events of the two preceding stories, Ace decides to lance the boil of her childhood trauma by getting the Doctor to take her home to Perivale so she can check in with her mates. The town turns out to be boring beyond belief, and a much smaller place than Ace remembers. There's a classic Doctor Who mystery - most of Ace's old gang has gone missing and there are cats doing weird things in the neighbourhood - and some interesting guest characters, with the most random being the shopkeepers played by famous-at-the-time comedy double act Hale and Pace. Eventually a link is discerned between Perivale and a dying alien planet, whose inhabitants don't care about their impending demise, only the thrill of the hunt, and the Doctor encounters the Master, now consumed by an alien force.
This isn't as strong a story as the previous two, but that's a high bar. It's instead a lyrical and offbeat tale from Rona Munro, who would make minor history by becoming the only writer to work on Classic Who and Modern Who when she returned ten seasons and twenty-six years (ha!) later to writer The Eaters of Light. The story is simple: the Doctor, Ace and Ace's friends have to escape from the alien planet before it is destroyed, and deal with the planet's ability to "infect" people and make them into hunters. Even the Master isn't hatching some Machiavellian scheme. The result is a very contemporary-feeling story unfolding in youth centres, on housing estates and on suburban back streets, as well as the alien planet. In many respects, the story feels like it aired sixteen months before Rose, not sixteen years. There's a lot of "you can't go home again," ideas floating around here as well as the continuing evolution of Ace's character.
There's a great performance from Anthony Ainley, here appearing as the Master for the very last time, eight years after his first appearance, giving a more measured and subdued performance that is far more menacing than his normal scenery-chewing. Lisa Bowerman is also outstanding as Karra, the main alien character. Bowerman would go on to play companion Bernice Summerfield (the first major, popular companion to debut in non-TV media) in various Doctor Who audio projects up to this very day.
The weaknesses in the story are the Cheetah People, who actually have great prosthetics and makeup, but just look a bit too cuddly, and the Doctor feels a bit inert in the story and too reactive. The finale gag, which has the Doctor escaping from an exploding motorbike, also feels a bit random and shoehorned in for the sake of a big effects piece.
Survival, of course, also holds another special place: it is the final episode of the Classic run of Doctor Who, bringing the show to an end after 26 seasons, 695 episodes (701 including the untransmitted story Shada from Season 17, which has since been finished with animation), 155 serials (156 including Shada), 7 Doctors and (approximately) 26 companions. When the show was written this was not the intent, with planning for a twenty-seventh season, which would have seen the departure of Ace midway through the season before the Doctor's regeneration at the end, in the early stages. It was only during production that rumours of the axe began to swirl, and Andrew Cartmel hurriedly wrote a monologue for Sylvester McCoy to record as a way to bring the entire saga to an end.
"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do."
The twenty-sixth and regrettably final season of Classic Doctor Who (****½) sees the show go out on an impressive high. Battlefield is the weakest link but at least that's fun, and the other three scripts are interesting, thought-provoking, well-made (for the time) and smart.
The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas.
Whatever happened to this guy?
The Doctor Who flame was kept alive in the 1990s through novels, a stage play, comics, audio dramas and an increasingly popular series of VHS video releases of the original show. An attempted 30th anniversary special in 1993 fell apart during pre-production, and was hurriedly replaced by an awful, zero-budget charity episode recorded on the set of soap opera EastEnders. The novels and associated comics and short stories were arguably the key to keeping the light burning, especially as new writers came on board, including a certain Russell T. Davies, an unknown Steven Moffat, and people like Mark Gatiss and Paul Cornell (creator of the aforementioned Bernice Summerfield). But it would take until 2005 for the show to return full-time.
There was one serious attempt to relaunch the show, however, in 1996. The BBC joined forces with Fox to trial a TV movie which could act as a backdoor pilot for a new run. Fox had enjoyed huge success with The X-Files and were eagerly exploring more science fiction and supernatural ideas. They'd just cancelled a space opera called Space: Above and Beyond, and roughly as their Doctor Who special aired, they'd just started shooting a pilot called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, based on a cult movie from a few years earlier (and would provide a template for the eventual return of Doctor Who).
The TV Movie, as it is rather unfortunately called by default, is a fascinating look at the universe where Doctor Who is just another American midlist science fiction show, and not a hugely edifying one. The plot, where the Master tries to use the TARDIS to destroy Earth on the eve of the millennium, is odd, but at least it fits into the established canon, featuring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor before he regenerates into the Eighth, played with winning eccentric energy by Paul McGann. The movie is actually a huge workout for McGann, who has to carry the whole damn thing on his shoulders.
Eric Roberts is divisive as the Master, but I think he does a pretty good job given the mustache-twirling limitations of the character as written. Daphne Ashbrook is also fine as quasi-companion Grace, even if the script seems uncertain about her acceptance of what's going on. She sometimes flips from Scully-ish scepticism to Mulder-style total acceptance in the space of a single scene.
The movie also seems odd in its treatment of the canon: it uses the Seventh Doctor as the lead-in instead of the Fourth, as the BBC themselves had nonsensically suggested (Tom Baker being the best-known Doctor in the USA), and the Master even retains his yellow eyes from Survival, but the Doctor is also suggested to be half-human, something out of keeping with the mythos (and firmly rejected in the 2005 iteration).
The main problem with the TV movie is that it's very ordinary with flat lighting and unremarkable direction. This is Doctor Who if it was the most generic, dull American mid-season replacement show you can imagine. It's not offensively bad, and you can point to McGann and Robert's performances, and a superb TARDIS set, as maybe solid foundations that a regular series could have built on, but ultimately this is the most unforgivable thing Doctor Who can be: boring.
The TV movie got indifferent ratings in the USA, so Fox passed on the chance to do a follow-up, but a startling nine million viewers tuned in for the BBC transmission. Plans by the BBC to commission their own series fell foul of internal politics, and in the event it would be a frankly ludicrous nine years before the show would return full-time, and when it did, it would certainly not be boring.
26.1 - 26.4: Battlefield (***½)
26.5 - 26.7: Ghost Light (****½)
26.8 - 26.11: The Curse of Fenric (****½ or ***** for the extended cut)
26.12 - 26.14: Survival (****)
TVM: The TV Movie (**½)
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