Review: The Doctors Are In

(Crossposted to Mightygodking.com.)

Full disclosure: I've known Graeme Burk and Robert Smith? through a variety of online Doctor Who fan communities since the series was an obscure line of novels carrying on in the wake of the cancelled TV show. I have attended conventions with them, I'm big fans of them as people as well as authors, and I have been commissioned on occasion by Robert for essays in one book or another. (Including the recently released Outside In 2, by ATB Publishing, where I wax opinionated on "The Christmas Invasion". You know, if you're interested in that sort of thing.) The point is, I am probably magnificently biased when it comes to the recently released 'The Doctors Are In: The Essential and Unofficial Guide to Doctor Who's Greatest Time Lord'.

That said, it's tremendous fun to read. It's not an episode guide, because goodness knows we are spoilt for choice when it comes to that. (Including one by Burk and Smith?, as it happens.) It's also not a history of the program, because again, there are plenty of great ones out there. Instead, this is a book of critical analysis--the authors take a look at the various facets of the Doctor's magnificently complex personality, embroidered by thirteen actors and dozens of writers, directors and producers over the years, and try to figure out just what makes him tick. Is he a brooding and melancholy survivor of unimaginable devastation? A cold, alien wanderer in the fourth dimension? A puckish sprite who revels in making mischief for the wicked? (Um, yes to all of the above. Sorry, spoilers!)

Naturally, with fifty years of stories to mine for material, there are a wealth of interpretations to draw upon, and a wealth of conclusions to come to. That's where the book shines, really; Burk and Smith? are among those rare people who can disagree completely and totally and not get upset about it. Over the course of the book, they clash over topics from "Does 'Genesis of the Daleks' really live up to its reputation?" to "Was the Third Doctor too cozy with UNIT?" to "Was Matt Smith prone to trying to punch up a bad script by flailing his arms and shouting a lot?" And impressively enough, their answers are always well-reasoned and informative even when they disagree. Even more impressively, they disagree profoundly for much of the book and the tone is still light-hearted and humorous.

Is it essential reading? Well, it does serve as a basic reference guide to the series--Burk and Smith? do give a potted history of the making of the series as they discuss each Doctor, there's a list of recommended viewing that will certainly serve as a good place to start, and the back of the book contains a list of resources if you want to know more. But I will admit (as do they, in the back of the book) that there are other books out there that serve as a more comprehensive guide to the history of the show both in front of and behind the cameras. This is intended as light reading, not as reference material.

In other words, if you already have one of a dozen or so episode guides, behind the scenes books, or reference manuals on Doctor Who, this probably isn't going to tell you anything you don't already know. But if you're the sort of person who already has episode guides, behind-the-scenes books and reference manuals on Doctor Who, you're probably the sort of person who appreciates reading one that's well-written, entertaining and far from merely a dusty compilation of facts about the series. If that's the case (whether you own all those other books or not, really) you will get a lot of enjoyment out of 'The Doctors Are In'.

Review: Doctor Who: The Scripts - The Masters of Luxor

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how to review 'The Masters of Luxor'. I mean, this is basically a discussion of a historical curiosity, a first draft of a script that wasn't deemed good enough to warrant a second draft, made for a production whose style of drama is now sitting comfortably at fifty-one years out of date. Is it even worth it to discuss the quality here? Does it even make sense to try?

In case the answer is "yes", I can say that 'The Masters of Luxor' as published isn't very good. There's a lot of random conjecture that turns out to be absolutely right for no reason beyond the writer having no real mechanism to deliver exposition about the dead, silent city and its robotic inhabitants. There's not much action over the six episodes, there's a lot of discussion about religion that seems weird and out of place as well as slow and talky, and the Perfect One is simply not very exciting as an adversary. There's some nice atmosphere at points, but it's really nothing that the city in 'The Daleks' didn't do better. Oh, and although the dialogue would certainly have been rewritten further in later drafts (and was rewritten for the script book already, according to the afterword) it still sounds clunky and not particularly like any of the regulars. Basically, it's not hard to see how they went a different direction after this.

But again, the quality isn't necessarily what we look at with this one. It's interesting to read it not because it's good, but because it demonstrates the thought processes of the people working on the series at the time. They knew they wanted to contrast the first "science fiction" episode of the series with the "historical" they'd already done, and their mental focus was obviously on the potential for sterility and inhumanity inherent in science. The unseen Masters of Luxor had gone down a path of eugenics, which wasn't (yet) a component of the Daleks' evil, but both of them shared the notion of a world where science gone mad had led to a world on the brink of death, and a city that was a scientific paradise with nobody left to live in it.

The discarded humanity is personified in both stories; in 'The Daleks', it's the Thals who skulk outside of the abandoned city, scarred by memories of a century-old war. In 'The Masters of Luxor', it's Tabon, who abandoned himself to exile and suspended animation rather than face the consequences of his experimentation. The Thals, of course, are just as responsible for the Daleks (in the original story, at least) as Tabon was for the Perfect One, but their ancestors' aggression and violence is downplayed to the point where the act of resuming the war against their old enemies is seen as a positive act and not a resumption of a campaign of genocide. Perhaps the production team weren't quite ready for Tabon's guilt, or perhaps they simply wanted more sympathetic characters? It's hard to sympathize with anyone outside of the regular cast in 'The Masters of Luxor', and Tabon's self-sacrifice seems more to be his just desserts than a tragic comeuppance.

Or honestly, it could have just been practical concerns. There are a lot of freaking robot costumes in this one, far more than the number of Daleks that appear on-screen. The TARDIS flies, something it did rarely in the Classic Series, and of course the story ends with the entire city exploding. It might very well have been judged unworkable in light of their budgetary concerns. (At the very least, 'The Daleks' stretched out the sets and costumes over an extra episode.)

Ultimately, we may never know exactly what caused this script to be rejected in favor of Nation's story, but I think we can answer one question. In the introduction, John McElroy asks, "In a universe of infinite possibilities, there are of course worlds in which [Masters] was the second story--I wonder if Doctor Who is still running there?" Based on this script, I'm guessing not.

An Important Message About "Genesis of the Daleks"

I would like to set this down here, so that every single time I hear somebody say, "Oh my gosh, the Doctor killed those monsters, that's not the Doctor I know, this scriptwriter/script-editor/producer/showrunner clearly doesn't get 'Doctor Who', because the Doctor I remember would never kill anyone in cold blood like that, not even the Daleks, remember the scene in "Genesis of the Daleks" where he stood there outside the Dalek hatcheries, wondering "Do I have the right?", it was such a classic scene, the essence of 'Doctor Who', and Tom Baker was the definitive Doctor, and he wouldn't kill, so clearly this isn't proper 'Doctor Who', it's so sad that they're making such a lazy slapdash parody of my favorite series, it's a shambles..."

I can point out that in Part Six of "Genesis of the Daleks", the Doctor realizes that he made a horrible mistake in not blowing up the hatchery when he had the chance. He goes back in there, he hooks the explosives back up, and (with the help of a clumsy Dalek) he does blow up the hatchery. It's not due to the Doctor's compassion that the Daleks survived, it's due to their persistence and inhuman determination to survive. The Doctor's "out of their evil must come something good" speech at the end isn't a summation of his moral decision, it's just an attempt to put a cheerful front up after failing at what he tried to do. Which was, again, to wipe out the Daleks. He didn't make the decision lightly, but that was his decision. Anyone who thinks that the Doctor wouldn't do that simply wasn't paying attention.