A Change of Identity

I'm honestly not sure whether it's the production team being particularly aggressive in trying to sideline Susan in this episode, or whether Carole Ann Ford is just at the point where she's willing to commit suicide-by-cop in order to get out of doing any more of this story, but she is practically ludicrous in her devotion to being a wet lump of nothing in "A Change of Identity". Having already decided in the previous episode that escaping from the jail cell is far too icky to deal with, she's now giving up on their one-in-a-million free ticket out of having her head chopped off because she's got a bit of a headache. Thankfully, new characters Jules and Jean are here to literally drag her back into the plot.

Apart from Susan's now-total devotion to uselessness, this episode feels like it's really firing on all cylinders. Spooner's style of storytelling finally reaps some real rewards once the jail cell is left behind and characters can get properly embroiled into the plot; Susan and Barbara (but mostly Barbara) get embroiled in a good old-fashioned Pimpernel pastiche, while Ian gets to escape from jail and go trotting off on his English spy subplot. Lemaitre gets to be sinister and suspicious in a way that really should combine with his name to make you think that he's the Master in disguise (oh, come on! I can't be the only one who thinks that!) And the Doctor...

Arguably, this is the moment where the Doctor becomes the Doctor proper. I know that other people will point to 'The Edge of Destruction', where he finally softens towards his companions, or at some point in 'The Daleks' or 'The Sensorites' when he helps save planets for the first time, but Spooner finally adds a key element that's been missing from the character that will come to be indispensable. The scene where the Doctor wanders into a tailor's shop, and through a bit of puckish bluff comes out as a provincial official fully prepared to use his forged credentials to throw his borrowed authority around in order to wrongfoot authority figures who throw their weight around, well...it's the entire Troughton era for a start. It's a tried and tested standard of the series all the way up until the psychic paper makes it virtually effortless, and Hartnell nails it so well on his first try that you can understand exactly why that is. The way his face remains stern while his eyes twinkle with mischief just sells every moment of his deception, both at the tailor and in the prison. There's something so natural about seeing the Doctor bluff his way into the halls of power, all the while giggling at the absurdity of it all, that it really feels like the show has come home.

And of course, bluffing his way into authority carries with it the constant threat of discovery, and embroils himself deeper into events...while bringing him face to face with one of the great architects of events. Yep, that's exactly how the series comes to work from now on. This is where Spooner comes into his own, and where his influence on the series and its protagonist begins to be felt most clearly.

Guests of Madame Guillotine

I'm not going to say that Dennis Spooner isn't an immensely talented and influential writer who really transformed Doctor Who from the slightly staid, educational series that it started out as into the adventure series it became. It's not an argument you can seriously make. But I will go so far as to say that there are weaknesses to his approach, and "Guests of Madame Guillotine" serves to highlight them.

Because like I said about the previous episode, Spooner's approach is to take us out of Historical Revolutionary France and into Storybook Revolutionary France. We're no longer sourcing our material from the history books; we're sourcing from 'A Tale of Two Cities' and 'The Scarlet Pimpernel'. The heroes are wandering through the tropes associated with this era, rather than its lived experience. Now to a certain extent, that's a very intelligent move, and it's part of the reason that Spooner's scripts always feel so modern--characters in most stories now are aware of the tropes of the stories they're in, and consciously exploit or avoid them on a frequent basis. Stories like 'Cabin in the Woods' and 'Scream' do this all the time--it's just a feature that comes fitted as standard now, because the audience is so steeped in awareness of the structure and forms of drama that it seems unrealistic to have a character in a story do the expected thing when it doesn't benefit them. Spooner is basically inventing postmodern television about forty years early.

But the problem with this is that once you've committed to that decision, you have to embrace it. If the characters are consciously intended to be characters in a story, aware of its tropes and embracing the structures and forms of drama, then you have to actually embrace the structures and forms of a drama. Which means that if the main characters get locked up in a filthy, miserable jail cell in the middle of the Reign of Terror...they have to escape with ludicrous ease, because that's characters in adventure stories do. They just do. A prison cell is a narrative device to stitch two plot threads together in a story like this, not a serious impediment or threat to the heroes.

But this is a six-parter, and a six-parter in Doctor Who usually has at least one stretch of time-filling. The trick is to conceal it. 'Marco Polo' concealed it with local color and historical detail, but Spooner has consciously jettisoned that approach. And as yet, he hasn't quite figured out what to replace it with. So we get an episode that's pretty much a full-length stall (which isn't helped by the fact that Ian's only appearance in this episode is in a couple of pre-filmed inserts, a la Bela Lugosi in 'Plan 9 From Outer Space'. And yes, that particular comparison is deliberate. And no, it's not intended as a compliment.)

The only bit of actual plot in the entire episode is Webster's dying confession to Ian. Everything else is an exercise in killing time until the end credits run; Susan and Barbara dig a tunnel only to give up when it gets hard, and the Doctor spends the entire episode walking to Paris, with the exception of a brief and pointless sequence where he apparently beats a man to death with a shovel. These are things that should be handled by a montage, or better yet a dissolve to the next plot point, but instead they're shown in detail. The Lucarotti model could get away with that, because it was at least making a pretense at realism. You could justify spending a whole episode in a grotty jail cell, with Susan despondent and Barbara trying to cheer her up, because it's the sort of thing that really happened to people in jail cells and they really did get miserable and desperate and terrified. They even try to reference their imprisonment in 'An Unearthly Child', but the atmosphere is light-years away.

This is storybook jail, now. Storybook jails exist only as a place to leave. Which means that this episode, in the Spooner model, doesn't need to happen. As he gets used to the style of television he's creating, he'll come to realize that, but for right now, the longeurs of the plot are all too exposed. Which leaves us just as frustrated and trapped for most of this episode as the characters themselves.

A Land of Fear

This is, of course, the first episode to be credited to Dennis Spooner, who will go on to be a major creative force on the series. It's safe to say that the difference is immediately noticeable--the previous historicals, with the exception of Coburn's opening script (which is not so much a historical as a prehistorical anyway) were all by the same gentleman, John Lucarotti, who took a view that the essence of the historical was, well...history. 'Marco Polo' and 'The Aztecs' felt very much like stories that could not have been told at any other time or place; 'Marco Polo' centers on Marco Polo and his efforts to return to Venice to the point where he gets the concluding swordfight against the villain, while 'The Aztecs' keyed in on the clash of values between the 20th century European viewpoint espoused by Barbara and that of the Aztec civilization. Even when Lucarotti wasn't being out-and-out educational, he still focused his writing on the importance of the setting to events.

Whereas here, Spooner is already making it clear that he's less interested in history as a series of events as an aesthetic. The Reign of Terror is important to 'The Reign of Terror', but it's important as a setting and a collection of tropes. It's a backdrop for the latest exciting adventures of the Doctor and his companions, a collection of snarling peasants and sniveling aristocrats and mentions of Madame Guillotine. The fiction of the French Revolution is almost as important as the fact, which explains why it's episode one and we're already getting Rouvray as a sort of pseudo-Pimpernel. (Only a much less effective one. "They seek him here, they shoot him there, he lies on the floor and bleeds everywhere!")

The change is evident in the efficiency of the scripts--as an evocation of a time, a place and a specific culture, "A Land of Fear" is nowhere near as solid as "The Roof of the World" and "The Temple of Evil"...but as a mechanism for getting the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara separated and into a series of entertaining predicaments, it's lightning-quick and brutally effective. The pace of this episode even by modern standards, and it's no surprise that many of its tropes were still used decades later. (Set "A Land of Fear" next to Part One of 'The Visitation', and it's like looking at twins.)

It's more than just the pacing, it's the attitude as well. 'Marco Polo' and 'The Aztecs' got the main cast into period garb as well, but there's nothing quite as charming as the way the cast upends the trunk full of costumes and gleefully plays dress-up. The previous stories also had their hints that Ian and Barbara might be on their way home, but never played with such rueful comedy as here. (And it's worth noting that Spooner's first script is also the first point where Ian and Barbara admit, if only to each other, that they're not exactly disappointed at the thought of continuing their journey on the TARDIS.)

If you did want to make a bit of a complaint, it's hard to ignore that this approach is a bit of "does what it says on the tin"; the downside of valuing the setting more as a backdrop for the Doctor's adventures is that, well, it reduces the setting to a backdrop for the Doctor's adventures. It's no wonder the pure historical starts becoming less important from here on out--if the Doctor is just doing "Doctory" things in a variety of settings, then surely it's hard to argue that it's not more fun to include monsters and aliens in among the famous historical figures, right?

It's also the point at which you really start to understand just why Carole Anne Ford wanted to ditch the show. There are a lot of scenes in "A Land of Fear" where she just stands there staring at the camera while everyone else is talking. She makes the most of her lines, and certainly gives her all when the script gives her something to do, but it's really noticeable here that the writers just aren't as interested in her as they are in the other characters. She's still got fourteen episodes to go, but the writing is on the wall--all Susan seems to be good for anymore is to shout "Grandfather!" at the episode break. And the production team is starting to realize that pretty much anyone can fill that part.

Well, metaphorically at least.

A Desperate Venture

They've been trying very hard to do interesting things with this story, but "A Desperate Venture" is really where the flaws of the opening two episodes come back full circle to hit the ending where it lives. "Strangers in Space" and "The Unwilling Warriors" tried to make the Sensorites into figures of menace, and it kind of fell flat because the Sensorites aren't very scary. The next few episodes worked much better because it made the majority of the Sensorites into sympathetic figures, and made the evil Sensorites into cunning plotters who schemed to bring about the Doctor's downfall without direct confrontation.

But here we're back to the Sensorites as figures of menace, and it just doesn't work. When they threaten Carol, it's hard not to wonder why she doesn't just shout loudly at them until they writhe on the floor in agony and then kick them a few times. Or honestly, she could just skip to the kicking--Ilona Rogers is a good head taller than her supposed captors, and it's hard not to watch the scene without wondering why she doesn't just give them a good smack and walk right back out. (Which is more or less how John resolves the sub-plot a few scenes later.)

This leaves the human survivors as the source of any remaining tension (unless you count the supposedly perplexing issue of how they can prove that the City Administrator was responsible based only on Carol's eyewitness testimony and the countless other clues he left behind, or the gripping question of where the hell Barbara got her tan in space). And they can't hold up their end, because they're pathetic. I mean that in the literal sense; they are figures of pathos, gaunt and delusional figures who look like they're about one meal away from dying of starvation without the heroes having to lift a finger to stop them. William Russell and William Hartnell try to salvage the scene by playing it as though they're more concerned for the men's welfare than for their own survival, but this episode is ultimately a series of anti-climaxes.

It could possibly have been salvaged by a different director--the new series would have played up the pathos of the survivors as sad, ultimately broken figures. Or a different take on the survivors could have played up the horror...if they'd been genuinely scary, mad in a sense other than they were, the terrors of being lost in the aqueduct could have felt real and tangible. But at this point, the story tries for pathos and terror and a happy ending all in the same half-hour span, and it fails at pretty much all of them. (Yes, even the happy ending--the Doctor and Susan don't even bother saying goodbye to the First Elder, or John and Carol for that matter. Instead, the Doctor gets a final scene of pointless dickery to set up a next episode that will drop that particular plotline like a hot potato.)

Even with all that, this sets up a lot of tropes that will be used well later. The series comes to love exactly the same sort of reveal that happens here--'The Enemy of the World', for example, uses the subterranean society in the same way that "A Desperate Venture" uses the human survivors. We don't ever get quite so many non-humanoids again as we do here, but the Doctor curing a "plague" and being seen off by the grateful benevolent leader and the cute couple that found true love over the course of four to six episodes is par for the course. Even the secretly-plotting snake in the grass (or worm in the apple) becomes fitted as standard into a lot of episodes. 'The Sensorites', as a whole, is a really good example of the kind of thing Doctor Who does. It's just not exactly an example that's really good.

Kidnap

I know this is going to sound strange, but this episode is really starting to remind me of "The Aztecs".

No, seriously. The City Administrator is very much in the same position as Tlotoxl--he sees himself as an embodiment of the values of his society, defending it against frauds and interlopers. As his plans to remove the contamination they represent fails, he grows increasingly desperate and is forced to do things that directly contravene those values in a purported effort to uphold them. At every turn, cognitive dissonance makes him rationalize the increasingly terrible decisions he's making (both moral and practical) as necessary to put things right.

In this case, of course, he descends further than Tlotoxl ever did. Tlotoxl only had Ixta stun Autloc; here, the City Administrator's flunky commits murder. But the same desperation that drove Tlotoxl and that has driven the City Administrator to this point drives him to what's actually a pretty brilliant set of improvisational moves. He at first attempts to frame the Doctor for the murder; then, when that fails, he frames his own flunky, uses the action as a means of improving his standing with the First Elder, then breaks his flunky back out of jail to aid him in the next step of his plan. It's actually a pretty slick trick, to the point where the Doctor, Ian and Susan's instant trust of him just seems a bit overdone and clunky instead of an act of pure stupidity and authorial fiat.

By the way, it's worth mentioning (since I feel like I have to say something about this sooner or later during this story and this is the penultimate episode) that I really couldn't tell you which one of the Sensorites is Peter Glaze without resorting to Wikipedia. (It doesn't help that the credits just call him "Third". I understand that none of them have names, but couldn't you at least credit him by rank? Oh, I suppose they change rank at least twice in the story, don't they.) Everyone who's British makes a huge deal about how Peter Glaze is in it, and how it's a big blow to the story's credibility, and how they keep expecting him to break out his loveable catchphrase from the children's series "Crackerjack!" (said catchphrase being, of course, "Crackerjack!" I guess you had to be there.) But to Americans, he's just one of the guys in suits.

I think that in some ways, this is a general benefit from not being British; we don't have these instinctive associations. We can see Beryl Reid and Nigel Plaskitt and Roy Skelton (well, hear Roy Skelton) and not immediately get thrown out of the story by remembering their other non-dramatic roles. It helps a bit if we can focus on people like Peter Glaze as characters rather than actors. Um...for those reading this who happen to be in the British Isles, maybe this helps. You know how you can watch Laurence Fishburne in 'The Matrix' without immediately thinking of him as Cowboy curtis in "Pee-Wee's Playhouse"? Yeah, it's like that only in reverse.

A Race Against Death

This one leaves me genuinely torn. On the one hand, let's face it--this is the episode where the Sensorites seem to pick up the Idiot Ball and really run with it. In order for the Doctor to be the hero of the story, he has to make a lot of deductions that have utterly eluded the Sensorites in a very short span of time. He figures out that the water is toxic because Ian was the only one who drank from it; he figures out that the poisoning only happens in one district at a time, and that the reservoirs and not the aqueduct must be the cause. He tests the water, he finds the antidote, and he figures out that the fact that the aqueduct is shrouded in darkness and full of things making loud noises is not a coincidence, but a ruse to drive the Sensorites away. For him to do all this in the course of a half-hour (even with the aid of a "SCIENCE!" montage) makes the Sensorites look foolish indeed.

And then there's the City Administrator. Not only has he irrationally seized on the idea that the Doctor is EVIL! and must be stopped, but his logic involves believing that the Doctor has entered into an elaborate ruse to distribute poison to people who are dying anyway for Reasons. Oh yes, and if he gets into his TARDIS, he'll come back with a fleet of spacecraft and soldiers to enslave the entire planet. And the City's Administrator's grand plan, his big, shocking, utterly twisty scheme with which he will undo the EVIL Doctor...hinges on realizing that all the Sensorites look alike without their sashes. This seems like one of the most crazy dumb plans in the history of Doctor Who, an unopposed sprint to the end zone of stupidity with the Idiot Ball grasped firmly in both hands.

And yet...

The real truth is that people don't always react sensibly in a crisis. They don't always do the expected thing, they don't always act in a reasonable fashion, and they sometimes fall victim to blind spots in their perception of the process. Of course the Sensorites don't think it's the water--they tested the water and found it to be free of contamination. They didn't think to retest it, or test it at different locations, because they assumed that it was a natural phenomenon and thus a consistent one. The Doctor's breakthrough is in the way he reframes the problem by considering deliberate intent, allowing the scientists to find a solution. And of course, since he's assuming that someone's trying to poison the water supply, all of the seemingly disconnected events at the aqueduct fit an obvious pattern to him. (His decision to wander alone and unarmed into a situation where saboteurs are trying to kill thousands of people, on the other hand, could be a pretty big grab at the Idiot Ball.)

And the City Administrator's actions...while they don't make sense, they don't make sense in a very sensible way. His fears of an army of humans coming to enslave the populace and exploit all the natural resources is, let's face it, not exactly without justification given our history and the fact that the last two groups of people to come to the planet have wanted to enslave the populace and exploit all the natural resources. Once you start with that fear in your heart, it's easy to let paranoia carry you into developing all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories that don't make sense. Xenophobia and cognitive dissonance do most of the work once you start with the baseline assumption that any human-like being hides hatred in their closed and suspicious minds.

And yes, the idea of impersonating the Second Elder by stealing his sash is presented absurdly ("I had never thought of that!") but his later explanation makes it sound better. He's not just saying that all the Sensorites look alike; he's saying that all but a few Sensorites have never seen their leaders close at hand, and that they're used to obeying the symbols of office more than the individuals. It's no different from dressing up as a sergeant and expecting to be able to boss around privates. When you stop trying to think of it as a story and start trying to think of it as the realistic response of a society undergoing a crisis (actually two crises, one cultural and one of public health) it starts to feel surprisingly textured and intelligent. The characters might be idiots, but they're idiots for genuine and realistic reasons, not writerly fiat. Basically, they're Idiots without any Balls.

No, wait...

Hidden Danger

Wow. I think this episode may contain the single worst scene in Doctor Who history.

When Susan makes the somewhat reckless decision to entrust herself to the Sensorites, the Doctor and Ian and Barbara go after her. Does the Doctor try to convince her to discuss the issue rationally instead of making a unilateral decision? Does he express his concern for her safety? Does he buggery. The Doctor treats her like a cranky toddler who needs a time out, shouting at her in a horribly condescending and patronizing fashion. Honestly, it feels like the only reason he stops shy of spanking her and making her stand in the corner is that Susan folds so quickly on the one independent decision she's made since the start of the series that it makes you feel like she's been browbeaten to the point where she's afraid to make choices of her own. Anyone who thinks the Doctor is an arrogant, rude, sexist git to his companions in the new series needs to watch this scene, so at least they'll know he's mellowed some.

Other than that, this episode is surprisingly good. I mean, it pretty much does mark the end of any kind of menace the Sensorites have...once the Doctor defeats an enemy by turning down the lights and collecting the weapons they dropped in sheer blind panic over being in the darkness, you have to admit that they're probably never going to reach "iconic monster" status. But it's also where they start being treated like actual characters, which is a vast improvement and something Doctor Who has never really done often enough. Non-human aliens usually get relegated to "spooky spooky scary scary" status, but here the Sensorites are given a government, a society, and even some political intrigue to deal with.

And the political intrigue is actually intriguing. You have the First Elder, who wants to open up his society to outsiders; you have the Second Elder, who's doubtful about the idea but who's willing to work within the system to express those doubts. And you have the City Administrator, who's a straight-up xenophobe willing to undermine his own leader and the underlying structure of his society to "preserve" it from the alien freaks, and who's recruiting others to his cause. That's some pretty decent depth for a show that usually depicts alien cultures as "despotic tyrants" and "heroic rebels". Oh, and there's a plague going on that's been stymieing their efforts to cure it and decimating their citizenry. (And which doesn't strike the Elders, which may go some way to explaining why the City Administrator's not feeling too charitable towards them.) Admittedly, "mysterious plague" tends to come fitted as standard in Doctor Who stories, but still, it's some welcome complexity in a story that's been struggling to fill its six parts.

Oh, and Stephen Dartnell continues to impress as John, and Ilona Rogers gets in a good scene as Carol, and we're finally rid of Maitland and his plywood performance. Yes, this is picking up nicely even before Ian collapses at the episode's end. Doesn't mean I don't want to give the Doctor a good slap, but I still think they're finally hitting some kind of stride.