Whomosexuality 2: Planet of Fire

I discovered a few months ago that I'd never actually seen Planet of Fire. And if you don't mind the (literally?) smouldering homo-eroticism it's actually surprisingly good.

Peri - who with the possible honest exception of Leela is the only bona fide sexiful TARDIS girl - does literally seem to have gone to Greece on an archaeological expedition composed entirely of gay guys. I mean, "Kurt" and "Howard"? Really? And then they find an "intriguing" underwater dildo. Clearly the poor lass is recovering from a breakup and wanted to take a break from the cheerleader squad with the "safe" boys. Did Yankee passports really look like that though? Bit weird if they didn't! It's hardly adding anything to Peri's character to show that she's "well-travelled". And what sort of person leafs through her passport like that anyway? There's also something mildly problematic about the script's requiring Nicola to flounder about like a wilting violet when in actual fact she clearly is absolutely fit as a fiddle.

Turlough meanwhile has never been camper. "Doctor, you're showing off!" But his indignant "Earthlings!" when he sees Peri pretending to drown does seem to suggest a lingering taste for heterosexuality - except that he does also wear budgie-smugglers under his hot short shorts. (You know - just in case!) Actually why is Strickson still playing Turlough as camp and weird and nerdy? (Does one have to ask?) Surely by this time Turlough should be one of the good guys? "If you're holding back anything that might help the Master, our friendship is at an end. I know we only became friends in the first place because you were trying to kill me, but I do have limits." (One is reminded though that back in the 1980s a macho hero's "brother" could just as easily be his boyfriend IRL.)

Peter Davison does at least keep the Doctor in character - a glass of water and absent-mindedly paying with alien currency is oddly true to form even for his most "normal" of Doctors. Later on we even get the half-moon specs back again. Yes, I know it was the youngest actor at the time to play the part over-compensating, but surely kooky uncool fogeydom - as with Matt Smith's tweeds and bow-ties - is part and parcel of what the Doctor and Doctor Who are all about? And surely only a Time Lord could get away with a waistcoat like that on holiday!

Peter Wyngarde meanwhile ought by rights to be an object lesson in why you shouldn't have "proper" actors in Doctor Who. (In the apocryphal but immortal words of Lord Olivier, "I'm too fucking grand.") But in fact he goes to show how a competent actor can make a sound concept work even in the most unpromising of productions. Yes, there's a real problem that unless you listen to the dialogue (duh!) there's no obvious distinction between Sarn and Earth. (They both look like Lanzarote.) But in truth most of the time the special effects are used sparingly enough for them to have held up over the years. (Admittedly the running around stuff with the miniature Master would work better with Kay Harker in The Box of Delights later that year.)

Then of course there's the plot! Logar = Loki, as in the Norse god of fire? Nice! ("What does he look like, this fire-lord? I mean, what does he look like naked?") And the first non-sexy female in the entire story is literally a sceptic Karen. (I wonder how this will work out...) Of course by this time Doctor Who was in its twenty-first year, so for any long-term viewer there would by now have been a teeny growing sense of been there, done that. Sarn? Sounds like Karn! Is that life-giving sacred flame not just a little bit too familiar? The whole "the Doctor comes from <insert deity's name here>" has been a thing in Doctor Who since literally the Stone Age in literally the series' first serial. And of course there's something fundamentally silly about science-fiction encouraging scepticism about "organised religion" - as if a genre that permits space wizards and time travel can really have a problem with a straightforward philosophical proposition like the existence of God.

Alas, by the time Turlough reveals that he's deposed ancien regime in exile (very cool - albeit second generation!) it feels a bit late in the day to do anything "interesting" with the character. And the very eccentric solicitor on Chancery Lane sounds like a genuine piece of Doctor Who whimsy. So why didn't we hear more about him ever? (Presumably he was the one who got young Master Turlough packed off to Brendon in the first place!) Mind you, the people of Trion do use Arabic numerals, and they send their exiled princelings to English public schools. Wouldn't you say that's quite eccentric?

Whomosexuality

John Nathan-Turner took over Doctor Who in the 1980s, he made it much too gay much too quickly, he alienated the kiddies (and, more to the point, their parents) and, over a period of about ten years, he squeezed the life out of it completely.

At least, that's one point of view. The alternative line, in the man's defence, would be to say that he kept the show alive long past the point when TV cultural entropy should by rights have finished it off once and for all. But perhaps we'll never know.

In any case, JN-T's first season as producer kicks off with a very slow boring "brainy" story that is overly padded with pseudo-science and backstory. It continues with a slightly more normal and enjoyable story that is almost devoid of any backstory of any sort, scientific or otherwise. (It's important to the set-up that the Doctor has been to Tigella before. But we learn precisely nothing about Meglos.) Both stories though are fairly devoid of likable characters and both end very abruptly. 

Full Circle therefore feels like the first "proper" Doctor Who story of the JN-T era, with proper monsters, proper characters, a proper mystery, and so on. But it's also very much the first story of the "new" Who era that the new producer was clearly aiming for - and in fact in retrospect it's pretty much proto-NuWho. Tom and Lalla and K9 and the TARDIS are all still there from the Douglas Adams "era" (albeit with a slightly different "look"), but the show itself feels quite different, with a slicker, more self-confident (some might say slightly too self-satisfied) air.

For one thing, by Full Circle the series feels more invested in its own mythology, no longer merely raiding it for ideas or contexts (e.g. in Shada). So now Romana is being recalled to Gallifrey, we hear that the Doctor "lost" his "battle" with the Time Lords, Gallifrey looks very much as we last saw it in The Invasion of Time, and so on. It's to a writer's credit when he can move freely in another author's imaginary universe without having to warp it unnecessarily for the sake of his own story, and now suddenly for the first time the "Whoniverse" has started to feel genuine. Did the Time Lords really need a forgotten prison planet? Did they really need enemies like the Black Guardian - or even the Fendahl, for that matter? Whereas recalling Romana is definitely the sort of thing they would do, and if that leads to the TARDIS shooting off into a different pocket universe - which we later discover was probably created to trap not just an old enemy of the Time Lords but (Tolkien-style!) their Great Enemy - then so be it! The point (again, Tolkien-style!) is that world-building works when the imaginary world comes first and then the stories emerge not just in it but from it. 

The other thing the series is now invested in in a way that it hasn't been for a long time is characters. Most new Doctors used to get potentially disposable male companions in their first seasons almost just to be going on with - in case the new Doctor wasn't quite "physical" enough to be the hero. (Action man Jon Pertwee was the exception that proved the rule.) But Peter Davison was destined to get a veritable team of supporting characters, one of whom was of course going to be the new young male. What was unfortunate of course was that just as he was trying to make the show more "grown-up", with the supposedly brainier scripts (and scrapping K9), JN-T screwed up by simultaneously trying to make it quite artificially more child-friendly and ending up with a slightly weird homoerotic mess. (Gays may like children's TV series - and children themselves, for that matter. But the actual children aren't necessarily going to be too impressed with visuals of men going swimming in skimpy loincloths.)

Because Alzarius's Gomorrah People are not great, by any stretch of the imagination. Why do they steal river fruit, for example, when they could presumably much more easily pick their own? It's a smaller detail than "Who is Meglos?" or even "Why exactly did the Argolins and the Foamasi go to war against each other?" But it could still have done with a bit of explaining. Adric's unlikability meanwhile is clearly deliberate. (He's supposed to be "edgy".) But we don't really see enough of his soul for it to work. He's dickish but we don't know why, but presumably because adult writers just tend to think of teenagers as being dickish. Which is definitely an odd thing to do in a TV-show supposedly aimed at "young adults"!

And the plot of course is still fairly rubbish. The characters flit to and fro as per usual, and the fact that they're now doing it by TARDIS doesn't help. Nor, for that matter, does the lamp-shading (in the story's title, no less!) of their at one point literally going round and round in circles! Where it does shine though, as science fiction as much as anything else, is with its central, character-centred sociological insight. George Baker indeed feels like the first proper actor playing the first real character we've seen in Doctor Who for quite a while. 

State of Decay on the other hand feels like a throwback to an earlier era of Doctor Who, and in many ways it is. And oddly enough that's actually a Good Thing. As such, slap in the middle of this "new"-style season, it has a gloriously old-school feel to it. There's dear old Terrance on the DVD extras, spinning his old time wisdom about the changeless character of Doctor Who, and his writing is a very welcome reminder of what proper backstories used to be like. After Morbius had riffed on Frankenstein and after Fang Rock had done the same with Who Goes There?, doing an alien version of Dracula was a very logical next step for Dicks in his exploration (or exploitation, if you like) of the "classic" horror genre. And somehow his story doesn't feel out of place.

Then of course there's Warriors' Gate, which looks weird and feels weird because it's supposed to be weird, and arguably its lack of backstory is for once acceptable as part-and-parcel of its mysterious appeal. (And yes, sometimes that works, as it does in Ghost Light. And sometimes, as in The Greatest Show, it doesn't.) But then The Keeper of Traken is a genuinely appealing premise that's been butchered into fitting into the usual Doctor Who to-and-fro format, and its pseudo-science certainly can't stretch nearly far enough to cover all its Tolkien-eque elements.

The best news about Traken (albeit sad, in context) is that it's the one story in which Tom and Matthew absolutely shine together. Contrary to collective fan memories, Tom is not grumpy and aloof but (for the first time!) warm and even avuncular to his young male companion. After six years in the role, Baker was a dog that was clearly quite capable of learning new tricks. His brother-sister relationship with Sarah Jane was glorious, his attitude to Leela was explicitly teacher-pupil, and after the whacky flirty alien "thing" he had going on with Romana it's surprisingly painful in retrospect to note the beginnings of an authentic man-boy relationship that was then suddenly cut short by the Fourth Doctor's regeneration into Peter Davison.

Finally Logopolis sums up the whole season quite perfectly - visually (and aurally!) appealing, but with a huge mass of altogether unfinished confusion under the surface. Characters pop up and then become best friends with hardly any explanation, the science wouldn't cover a postage stamp, and the plot is at times quite bizarre. Never mind who the Watcher is. Why does the Doctor want to measure a police box? Why does he think landing the TARDIS in the River Thames will flush out the Master, who he knows has his own TARDIS? How does doing maths change reality, let alone stop the universe from cooling down? And why does that cooling down make people (and constellations) disappear? And how does beaming a message from a 20th century Earth radio telescope (and can one even do that?) keep a CVE open?

Nyssa and Tegan's off-on relationship with the TARDIS obviously prefigured that of the Matt Smith companions. (And why not? It worked for the Brigadier and UNIT - sort of!) But in real life it also led directly to the slightly sinister and in fact deeply unpleasant - not to mention dramatically highly questionable - decision to kill off Adric. (Once it had become the done thing for companions to go and come back whenever their actors' agents felt like it, the only way for JN-T to be sure he'd never see Matthew Waterhouse again was to have his character blown to little bits.) But was this bit of gay spite foreseen from the outset? It's difficult to say for certain. There was no "showrunner" in those days - just what Sydney Newman would have valued as a "creative tension" relationship between producer and script editor.

What is clear though is that the show's second big reboot at the beginning of the 1980s - with higher production values, more cerebral scripts, a tighter mythos and a larger cast - was superficially more radical than Jon Pertwee's "real world" colour relaunch at the beginning of the '70s. But it would turn out to be a much wobblier structure than anyone (with the possible exception of Tom himself!) could have thought at the time.

Why does anyone create anything?

Doctor Who: The Cartmel Legacy

It's been said recently (and with some justification!) that the recent rebooting of Doctor Who's backstory in Auntie's latest (and wokest yet) series of her sometime top show was little more than an attempt to revive the old so-called "Cartmel Masterplan". And yes, there is a very obvious sense in which as the current 21st-century version of Doctor Who flags with viewers (albeit not so much with the critics) it is not just making the same mistakes as its 20th-century predecessor (i.e. alienating its core audience, being too on-the-nose with its leftist politics, changing but not in a good way, etc.) but also reaching for the same solutions (i.e. trying to inject a bit more magic into the mythos, not to mention some morally questionable attempts at "darkness" and ham-fisted stabs at social realism).

So how long actually is a generation? It's an important enough question in Doctor Who, and the Doctor's own answer of "twenty-five years" (in Four to Doomsday, if you don't believe me) is one that for a long time I've used subconsciously as a rule of thumb. Looking back over Doctor Who at the (finally!) respectable age of fifty, it was startling quite how easily the division between "old" Who and "new" Who became a generational one. What was startling about it though was quite how old "new" Who really was.

The truth of course is that far from being a twenty-first century phenomenon, the "new" version of Doctor Who that we know today in the shape of the post-2005 TV-series was very clearly conceived in the last few years of the pre-1989 one. Though it may come as a shock to some, the "modern" version of Doctor Who is to a large extent the Sylv McCoy/Andrew Cartmel-version (or, to put it yet another way, the Cartmel/Ben Aaronovitch/Marc Platt-version). Or at any rate it was up until Peter Capaldi's ill-advised passing on of the torch to the Lady Doctor, but then since I have never watched Jodie Whittaker's take on the Time Lord (and have no desire to either) I'll let that slide.

To put it another way, to a large extent it was Sylvester McCoy's Doctor who was the turning-point - the half-way house between the Edwardian Doctor of old and the hip, cool, "modern" space Gandalf we know today, between the TV-plays of yesterday that used to go out in time for tea and the slick mini feature films that nowadays get broadcast in the early-evening slot. He's an oddly mid-Atlantic figure too, stuck halfway between the nonchalant tea-and-crumpets Britishness of the first half-a-dozen Doctors and the gun-toting, finger-wagging Americanism of the 2000s bunch.

Indeed, even things that we now think of as being standard, such as the Doctor speaking really quickly and being vaguely manic, were inventions of the McCoy era. Before Sophie Aldred, the female companion was there to look pretty and to scream. Ace was genuinely the first one who didn't. The broad, subtle story-arc as a concept never really existed before Fenric*, but in the RTD and Moffat eras it was part of the very fabric of the show. And perhaps most importantly there emerged the idea of the Doctor as not just a mythological hero - or at any rate as a Merlin/Odin figure - but as a comic-book superhero-type one at that.

The character of the Doctor has of course always been evolving. William Hartnell gave us the serious scientist/aloof sage with the mischievous inner child, and in fact in doing so laid down most of the groundwork for his successors. Patrick Troughton added the idea that the Doctor was funny. Jon Pertwee added the action man (in part because, thanks to budget cuts, the male companion character had by his time been ditched by the producers). Tom Baker cobbled on the idea that the Doctor should be slightly crazy. Peter Davison's Doctor saw an ill-advised attempt to strip away the Doctor's darker, alien side and make him "nicer", and Colin Baker's saw an even more cack-handed attempt to make him "nastier" again. But it was Sylvester McCoy, who carefully and deliberately modeled himself on the Troughton Doctor but with aspects of Hartnell and Tom Baker thrown in for good measure, who went on to redefine the role of the Doctor was that of the actual protagonist.

He didn't do it alone, of course, and in fact he did it much less than the modern Whovian race memory relates. Just as popular mythology remembers William Hartnell's Doctor as "grumpy" and "crotchety" (when in fact he was perfectly likable in a surprisingly childlike, giggly sort of way), and just as according to media cliches we all watched Doctor Who from behind the sofa (when in fact we watched it with our noses pressed against the screen, drinking in every magical moment), so it's become an established assumption that in every story of the Seventh Doctor's era the Doctor knows everything that's going on from the outset and he's always playing some sinister psychological chess-match at his companions' expense. In reality, of course, the manipulative Seventh Doctor only really arrived on the scene in Remembrance of the Daleks, which worked well enough for him to re-emerge in Silver Nemesis - albeit belatedly, as it's inferred that in that story he's really only following through on a plot that he originally set up in his second incarnation. After that, with the one genuine exception of Fenric, all of the Sylvester McCoy stories proceed in pretty much the same way Doctor Who stories always used to: by and large, the Doctor and Ace arrive in the middle of a mysterious situation and then set about investigating and sorting things out. There are a couple of Seventh Doctor stories such as Dragonfire and The Happiness Patrol where the Doctor has heard about strange things going on somewhere and wants to find out more. Ghost Light even slightly deconstructs this in that when the TARDIS materialises at Gabriel Chase the Doctor knows where they are but hasn't told Ace, but then by the end of 'Part One' Ace has found out where they are, and then thereafter until the story's climax she actually knows more than the Doctor does. But the fundamental dramatic principle remains the same.

Despite these quibbles though, the point stands that before 1988 the Doctor was always very much the catalyst in his adventures, as he had originally been intended to be by Sydney Newman back in 1963. From 1988 onward though he started actively to take charge of the stories. Looking back, that was a big change, and it was Cartmel and his team who did it. And so when confronting the Daleks in 1963 (in 1988), the Cybermen in 1988 (same year), and Fenric in 1943 (in 1989), the Doctor was very much the man with a plan, leading the action from the word go in a way that he never had before, not just with a trick up his sleeve but with a veritable "masterplan" that he would only allow the viewer (and, by extension, his companion) to see bit by bit. He set out to defeat his enemies from the start, and when he did so he showed an uncompromising ruthlessness that had never been seen before.

It would have been unthinkable for any Doctor before McCoy, for example, to win the day by blowing up an entire planet (Thals and all, by implication!), let alone deliberately† committing genocide - much less follow this up by talking his arch-enemy into committing suicide, or go on intentionally to break his companion's faith in him. But since 2005 the writers have been quite comfortable with the idea of the Doctor being bad-ass, not to mention functioning on a higher, more epic moral scale than his human companions. Back in the 1970s it was the Doctor who acted as a civilising nay "moralising" influence on his companions††, but by the late 1980s, although ostensibly the Doctor disapproved of Ace's constant resorts to violence, as often as not it was he who would call on her firepower to blow up Daleks, spaceships and even an archaeological dig when the greater good required it. By the time the Tennant Doctor was finally reunited with UNIT it was taken as standard practice for the Doctor to turn children into warriors.

In many ways then Russell T Davies himself just picked up where the authors of the Cartmel Masterplan left off, and this should of course come as no surprise. The reason why Davies's Ninth Doctor seems so much more like the Seventh Doctor than like any of his predecessors is probably because Davies had already written for Doctor Who for the Seventh Doctor (in his otherwise forgettable novel Damaged Goods). Sophie Aldred herself notes in the commentary on the DVD release of Survival that the tower blocks and council estates in 'Part Three' of that story directly influenced the setting of Rose sixteen years later. More importantly, Rose is very much Spearhead from Space for the post-Fenric generation: the Doctor knows exactly who the enemy is before he even appears on screen (it's the Nestene Consciousness) and exactly how he's going to defeat it (with a magic trick he's had up his sleeve the whole time, in a manner that would become all too familiar during Rusty Davies's tenure on the show).

So what caused the change? In my opinion the real pivot was surely Cartmel and his gang's new awareness of science-fiction lore generally and their interest in American comic-books in particular. Before Cartmel, most of the sci-fi stories in Doctor Who were determinedly British, whether they were fantasy versions of the the British Empire (Frontier in Space, and in fact all stories about the Earth "empire") or the Second World War (The Dalek Invasion of Earth) or pompous little disquisitions on anti-colonialism (The Sensorites, The Mutants, Kinda, etc.). Knock-off versions of Alien tended to be the exception (Dragonfire) rather than the rule. And with the notable exception of Chris Boucher's dual homage to Asimov's robots and Frank Herbert's Dune in Robots of Death, American science-fiction rarely got a look-in.

But then the comic-book geeks arrived and changed everything. The Time War was something of a hackneyed cliche long before the TV-series came back. Indeed the first Doctor Who time war in real life (and for all we know in the Whoniverse itself) appeared in one of the "back-up" comic-strips in Doctor Who Weekly - written, as it happens, by a little known scribbler geek called Alan Moore. More to the point though, it was the Time War that helped to complete the final transformation of the Doctor into the comic-book superhero that Cartmel and chums had seemingly wanted him to be all along. From the Ka Faraq Gatri to Time's Champion to the Destroyer of Worlds (etc. etc.), by the time David Tennant's Doctor eventually took his long overdue bow we had surely had too much of a Good Thing.Yes, it's exciting for the Doctor to have a "darker side". But the real Doctor is the eternal child rebel and runaway. He's not effing Superman.

One's hope towards the end of the Moffat era was that what with Auntie's inevitable budget cuts the Capaldi Doctor might end up being a bit more old school than maybe some of the Internet's Tennant-fanciers were used to. My view at the time in fact was that if you want the Doctor to be a geeky, swaggering, sarcastic teenage heart-throb then it's probably Peter Parker you should be fantasising about rather than a thousand-year-old Gallifreyan. After a generation's worth of comic-book exploits it was time for the Doctor to grow up a bit - and go back to being a children's character again. Alas, it wasn't to be! Capaldi's attempt at playing the Doctor as a lovable curmudgeon was arguably more successful than Colin Baker's, but those who predicted that, just as Rose was the new Spearhead from Space and Tennant was the new Tom (etc.), Capaldi would inherit Colin's short straw as the "screw-up" Doctor, ended up being more right than they could possibly have known. There was in the end something of an inevitability about Whittaker's bringing NuWho full circle (to coin a phrase) and pulling in the worst viewing figures since Battlefield 'Part One'.

For what it's worth, I suspect Whittaker will be the last TV Doctor we'll be seeing for some time, and any plans Auntie has for a brown-skinned version of David Tennant (which actually wouldn't be the worst idea in the universe) will come to nothing. After that, bar a possible 60th anniversary reunion special, it's unlikely there'll be much Doctor Who on British telly ever again.

And if anyone asks they'll blame Boris.

*The nearest attempt at a "subtle" story-arc before Fenric was of course Season 18's "entropy theme", though in practice it was a bit too subtle and the idea didn't catch on. Stories that just happen to segue into each other (all the stories between Planet of the Spiders and Planet of Evil, say) don't really count as arcs (much as one would love to make a pun about The Arc in Space), nor indeed do clumsy attempts to turn whole seasons into long-running serials (Seasons 16 and 23 being the prime offenders).
†The Trial of a Time Lord notwithstanding!
††The Doctor's infamous attempt to murder a sick cave man in 'The Forest of Fear' notwithstanding!