Gallifrey Series IV
I come to Big Finish’s new Gallifrey series from a slightly different angle from most of its listeners. I listened to the first three series several years ago, and was unimpressed – I remember the first series as being moderately entertaining fluff, while the second and third series got so far up their own arsehole they actually succeeded at navel-gazing from the inside, (This may be an unfair judgement. I remember them as being the very definition of fanwank, but it may well be that the attempt to do a fifteen-part epic story was just too ambitious for my own attention span).
But series three of Gallifrey had ended on a cliffhanger – the start of The Time War, with ‘some metal gentlemen’ having infected all of Gallifrey with a virus. And if there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s the Time War. Especially since reading Richard & Alex’s wonderful Fractal History Of The Time War, I’ve been treating the Time War in my head like a gigantic multidimensional puzzle.
The interesting thing about the Time War is that the further one gets from ‘canon’, the more interesting the stories become. The Faction Paradox books are among the best books I’ve ever read, as is Dead Romance (which is slightly more ‘canon’ than the books). The Faction Paradox audios (with officially licensed Doctor Who baddies) and the Eighth Doctor books are good – sometimes very good – but rarely great. And the actual 2005-2009 TV series that established a version of the war as ‘canon’ is, to my mind, pretty much uniformly awful. The Time War/The War/The War In Heaven is as much as anything a war between alternative versions of history, and a history written by the winners and imposed from above is usually far less interesting than the multiple perspectives of the oppressed – would you rather read Homage To Catalonia or a piece of Falangist propaganda?
That’s not to compare Russel Davies to Generalissimo Franco – though I can imagine certain of the more rabid message board denizens emulating the example of the Tilbury dockers – Davies has actually been remarkably good on the issue of ‘canon’, loudly and publicly refusing to use his position of authority (in the minds of the kind of fans who like authorities) to adjudicate on what does and doesn’t ‘count’. For all the faults I find with him, Davies’ view is an inclusive one.
Rather, it’s to argue that those who are looking for certainty and ‘canon’ are limiting themselves unnecessarily (an argument I have made before, of course, in my book Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!). The Daleks as one possible Enemy in the Time War is a decent, though rather obvious, seed for other stories. The Daleks as *the* Enemy, on the other hand, closes off the other possibilities (an incursion of Time Lords from another ‘bottle universe’, the Time Lords themselves in the future/past, a new idea that radically disrupts ossified ways of thinking, the writers of the books themselves, a non-existent threat created purely to give the illusion of conflict, humanity, the vampires/Mal’akh wanting their universe back, the new TV series itself… ).
It might be fun, in fact, to do a few posts here looking at different options as to who or what The Enemy is. I particularly like the war between the Time Lords and The Enemy as the war between the ‘classic’ (small-c conservative, big-L Liberal) and Welsh (New Labour – modern, glossy, “we can brook no criticism, because however bad it is, it’s better than the horrible wilderness years we had before, do you want Thatcher back/the show off the air again?”) series…
But anyway, if we pop out of this digression from a digression from a digression, the Gallifrey audios – like the Big Finish audios generally – are in an odd place when it comes to ‘canon’ for those who care about such things. They’re officially licensed, but have to be approved by the makers of the current show. But at the same time, they can’t make reference to anything in that show. So even though Gary Russell, who is in charge of the Gallifrey series, is also a script editor on the Welsh series, and he has clearly stated (including on the special features for these stories) that he intends the War that happened off-stage between series three and four to be the Time War featured in the TV show, this can’t be stated directly in the stories themselves. This leads to an interesting kind of forced ambiguity being imposed *against* authorial intent.
And whether intentionally or not, this has produced a story where the in-universe and out-of-universe epistemic statuses are mirrored. We have a multiple-universe story (always a very good thing), but one where all the alternate universes travelled to are just that – alternate universes. They exist not as the parallel worlds in, say, Lance Parkin’s Faction Paradox novel Warlords Of Utopia, do – as worlds whose divergences produce results both good (in Parkin’s case, a peace that has lasted millennia, and a flowering of culture and technology) and bad (dictatorship, paedophilia as social norm, slavery). Rather, they exist as wrong turns that could have been taken, lessons that this (or in this case, the main Doctor Who universe) is the best of all possible worlds, with each of these universes being defined as wrong, inferior timelines, and each one diverging in precisely one way, which leads to disaster.
So along with the ‘real’ Romana, Leela and K9, plus the characters Narvin and Braxiatel from earlier stories, we get alternative versions of Romana (both her first and second regenerations), Leela (an articulate, educated fascist torturer, whose distinctly different tones show once and for all that Leela’s rather stilted way of talking is a deliberate acting decision by Louise Jameson, rather than a poor performance), two Sixth Doctors, and more, all in some ways ‘worse’ than the ones we know.
(Sadly there is no alternate K9. John Leeson was the star of the earlier Gallifrey series, with his bitching between the two K9s. Here, there is only one, and he doesn’t get to shine the same way except during his brief promotion to Castellan).
Of the four stories here – which can only be bought as a bundle, though for a very reasonable £30 (£35 if you want the CDs rather than just downloads), by far the best is CD3 – Gallifrey: Annihilation. Oddly, given that Russell was a co-writer, and he’s known for being more obsessed with continuity and fan-wank than most, there are no alternative Doctors or Romanas or whoever (though Lord Prydon *may* be intended to be an alternate Master, given that he’s played by Geoffrey Beevers), and surprisingly/thankfully Katy Manning isn’t playing Jo Grant or Iris Wildthyme, but a female Borussa.
For those of us who like playing games with that sort of thing, in fact, this story could fit quite neatly in with Faction Paradox, as it’s set on a Gallifrey where Rassilon was turned into a vampire by the Great Vampire, and there’s a civil war between the Vampire Gallifreyans and the ‘True Lords’, who never developed time travel but *could* regenerate. This could easily be the timeline from which the Faction’s masks come, and it will be in my ‘personal canon’ from now on. (Also in my ‘personal canon’, these are four of the Nine Homeworlds. No-one said the Nine Homeworlds had to be in *this* timeline – or if they did I don’t remember, which is the same thing).
It’s quite a nice piece of space-opera-Gothic, Beevers makes an appropriately sepulchral vampire, and it’s an entertaining way to spend an hour, though hardly ground-breaking stuff.
The worst, unfortunately, is Justin Richards’ Gallifrey: Disassembled. I say unfortunately, partly because this has the best performances of the bunch (from Louise Jameson as two Leelas, and a great turn by Colin Baker as Lord Burner), and the first half-hour or so is genuinely good, but it soon degenerates into a load of nonsense, with illogical, made-up-on-the-fly rules about what does and doesn’t count as a paradox, hints at Braxiatel being the Doctor’s brother, explanations as to why the Doctor originally left Gallifrey…
When I say that the big turning point in this universe is that Zagreus took the place of The Other in its history, I think that will tell everyone all they need to know (if you don’t know what those words mean, be thankful…)
The other two stories, Gallifrey: Reborn and Gallifrey: Forever, bookend the series quite nicely, providing us with, respectively, the set-up for this four-story series, and a new status quo at the end with Romana and Leela trapped on a Gallifrey which hadn’t yet invented time travel but where Romana’s now president.
Overall, quality-wise this sits somewhere in the middle of Big Finish’s range. Nowhere near a genuine masterpiece like Peri And The Piscon Paradox or some of their other recent triumphs, this still feels like it was created because of someone’s desire to tell the story, and so it’s still above some of the landfill “let’s have the Doctor team up with two companions from different eras, and have them fight the Celestial Toymaker, who’s teamed up with the Zarbi” stuff they do when inspiration fails completely.
You already know if this is the kind of thing you like or not (in fact you probably either ordered it in advance or are never going to hear it), but for the kind of thing it is, it’s well done. And thankfully, either through diktat from above or through taste on the part of Gary Russell, it leaves as many questions about the Time War unanswered at the end as at the beginning.
Destiny Of The Daleks – Or Douglas Adams Was No Robert Holmes
While most people think of Doctor Who‘s different eras in terms of the different actors playing the Doctor – and this is how I’ve broken up my Doctor Who week this week – the show went through far more radical changes when the production team changed, especially the producer/script editor combination. Those two between them would have far more control over the feel of the show than any star could – even Tom Baker, who dominated the show for seven years.
Baker’s tenure as the Doctor was split into three very different eras. His first three years, with Philip Hinchcliffe producing and Robert Holmes as script editor, are widely regarded among the show’s fanbase as the best the series ever had – combining black humour with grand guignol violence, occasionally experimental storytelling, and ‘homages’ to classic adventure fiction from Frankenstein to Fu Manchu. The next few years, which were dominated by producer Graham Williams, were pure pantomime, veering at times closer to the feel of the 1960s Batman series than anything else (they were actually tremendous fun at times, and gained the show its highest ratings). And his final year, after John Nathan-Turner took over as producer, was an attempt to do gothic-tinged ‘mature’ SF, with an air of seriousness and decay over the show.
Baker is the most fondly-remembered of all the Doctors – and on a good day he’s my favourite – and i suspect part of the reason for this is the amount of inventiveness in the show during his period. In the seven years he was the Doctor, he only did two Dalek stories and one Cyberman one (and two of those three were in his first year and had been commissioned by the outgoing team) – the vast majority of his stories were one-off stories featuring new antagonists.
However, Baker’s two Dalek stories do provide a very good baseline for comparison between the relevant production teams. Both were nominally written by Terry Nation. Both were set on the planet of Skaro, featured Tom Baker as the Doctor, featured both Davros and the Daleks, and centred on a stalemated war in which the Doctor ends up embroiled. So comparing the two should put the differences between production teams into sharp relief.
The reason for the similarities is, of course, Terry Nation. Nation was one of the luckiest men ever to have lived – a hack writer who was lucky enough to have the monsters in his script for a new children’s TV show designed by Raymond Cusick with an inventive voice treatment by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, this meant that he had control over all the rights to the Daleks, and could essentially do whatever he wanted.
What he wanted, it seemed, was to essentially churn out the same script every time. Nation had half a dozen… motifs is probably not the best word for them… that he re-used in pretty much every single script he ever wrote. Nazis are bad; diseases that can destroy all life are also bad. Nuclear war, too, is bad. And women sometimes fall over and hurt their ankle. His first couple of Dalek scripts were genuinely good examples of their kind. The rest… weren’t.
Every year or two, Nation would turn in a four- or six-part story featuring the Daleks, usually with a very simple hook (“the one where the Daleks’ guns don’t work”) and featuring all his usual topics, always in the form of a very skimpy first draft, and it would be left to the script editor at the time to turn it into something watchable.
At the time of Tom Baker’s first series, the previous producer and script editor (Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks) had become quite sick of Nation doing this, and had required him to actually hand in a *new* story, which was then passed on to the incoming team of producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes to turn into Genesis Of The Daleks. It still featured every one of Nation’s usual themes, but it had a new plot (telling of the creation of the Daleks), and featured a very strong central character in Davros, the Kaled scientist who created the Daleks – a half-Mengele, half-Strangelove megalomaniac.
How much of the final script Nation can take credit for, and how much is the work of Dicks (who was the script editor most concerned with tight plotting and shared Nation’s obsession with Naziesque villains), Holmes (whose flair for dialogue, wild imagination, and taste for Gothic melodrama pervade the show) and actors Tom Baker and Michael Wisher (who apparently used to sit in the studio canteen together and rework their dialogue into a more pseudo-Shakesperean form) is unclear, but either way, Genesis managed to be a minor masterpiece – overlong and unnecessarily padded, but with many fine moments and some classic ideas.
Baker wouldn’t appear in another Dalek story until 1979 – Hinchcliffe and Holmes disliked the Daleks and didn’t want to rely on old monsters – and when he did, it was in the first story script-edited by a young writer called Douglas Adams. The story in this case was a rehashing of every single cliche Nation plot element, including all the ones mentioned above, with the addition of robotic rivals in a war with the Daleks (an idea Nation had first used in 1964). Apparently large chunks are *also* recycled from Nation’s then-current TV series Blake’s Seven, but having never seen the episodes in question I can’t really comment on that.
However, while Nation is credited as writer, and the plot is certainly Nation-by-numbers, he appears to have had little to do with the final script (as director Ken Grieve puts it on the DVD commentary “He didn’t quite get around to writing the dialogue”), which seems to be mostly the work of Adams and producer Graham Williams, with some contributions by Grieve. The result is a mess – while Adams was one of the finest comic dialogue writers of his generation, he couldn’t really do plot, as anyone who’s read much of his work knows. So what we get is a series of great one-liners, and some wonderful characterisation, laid like a cheap coat of paint on a half-baked plot that they just don’t fit
The performances of the leads help to sell the story – Baker is always watchable, just for the sheer joy he brings to the performance, and he also had the most consistently interesting set of companions (Sarah Jane and Leela both having had actual interesting personalities), but Romana , a fellow Time Lord and the Doctor’s intellectual equal, is the strongest of the lot. This story features the introduction of the second Romana, in a regeneration scene written by Adams, and the chemistry between Lalla Ward, the actress playing her, and Baker is apparent straight away (the two later married briefly, but divorced soon afterwards, and she is currently married to the egregious Richard Dawkins). Aided by some really strong dialogue, the two rise above the workmanlike performances of the rest of the cast (why David Gooderson, the second actor to play Davros, tried to impersonate Michael Wisher but with an added faint Scottish accent, is a question for the ages) and the frankly appaling effects (the Daleks are *very* clearly made of painted wood in this one, and on several occasions the Doctor has to drag Davros about) to make this into a fun romp, and a great piece of children’s TV, but something that really doesn’t even stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Adams would do better work for the show (City Of Death in the same series, which he co-wrote with Williams, is generally regarded as one of the best stories the show ever had, though I’m not hugely impressed with it myself) but Destiny Of The Daleks shows up the difference between a good script editor and a good writer who was himself often in *need* of an editor – Adams was in the wrong job, and left after only one series.
Destiny Of The Daleks is available on a single DVD, but if you want to watch it you’re best off buying the Davros box set (which you can get for £40 from Big Finish’s website), which includes all four of Davros’ other TV appearances (all of which are better than this one) and all the audio adventures of the character (including the superb Davros and the pretty good The Juggernauts). In that context, it’s a nice little bonus, and an enjoyable brainless way to spend an hour and a half. But taken on its own merits, it’s just what it was meant to be – disposable entertainment that was never meant to be seen again after a one-off broadcast in 1979.
leave a comment