(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on August 12, 2001.)
Well, I obviously took quite a long hiatus to get to the end of this one; unfortunately, I think some of this was engendered by the novel itself. I found myself agreeing with both sides of the debate over this novel; on the one hand, I agreed that it was an intruiging experiment in bringing elements from a different genre to the world of Doctor Who, while on the other hand, I agreed that it was repetitive and slow. On the whole, I'd have to say that its structural flaws outweigh its innovations in approach.
The biggest problem with Rags is that it doesn't progress forwards, rather it simply trawls along sideways until it reaches a certain point. Very little happens in the novel; to sum up the plot would be to repeat over and over, "The band and its followers move to a new town. People get killed. The band and its followers move to a new town. People get killed. The band..." until finally, the band and its followers move to the last town, and the Doctor lectures the evil creature until its followers turn on it and seal it up in a big rock. Needless to say, plotwise, this is not sparkling work.
Stylistically, it borrows heavily from the "splatterpunk" sub-genre of horror, which uses vivid and evocative images of violence, gore, and repulsiveness to create a horror reaction that isn't so much terror as it is reflexive revulsion; the scenes of the singer spewing maggots from his mouth, or the descriptions of the policemen being torn apart by the band's followers are perfect examples. Unfortunately, though, with nothing else but these images to sustain the narrative, the sheer repetitiveness destroys their power. (The same is also true for the descriptions of the band's music; there is an inherent difficulty in conveying music in a print medium, and ultimately, reading "They played a hateful tune" in umpteen variations grew tiresome by the end.)
In addition, the book suffers from "EDA Syndrome" the Doctor does sod-all through the course of the narrative, and spends large portions of it imprisoned and filled with self-doubt. Seen it, done it, been there, bought the T-shirt.
I had high hopes at the beginning of Rags... the author does have a vivid prose style, and some scenes still stand out in the mind. Ultimately, though, the story is a hollow shell, and while it looks interesting, there's nothing there to lend it weight.
Thursday, June 12, 2014
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Retrospective: Russell T Davies
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on September 25, 2003. Which should explain a lot.)
By the later stages of the Virgin New Adventures, word had spread far beyond the fan community about its quality and willing to take risks. Authors with friends and connections at the BBC, such as Ben Aaronovitch and Mark Gatiss, had communicated the enjoyment of writing for the range to other authors who'd not yet done a novel. Presumably it was this that attracted Russell T Davies, an award-winning TV dramatist, to write his novel Damaged Goods for the line. Whatever the reason, he brought a powerful intensity and a darkly different sensibility to the series.
Davies' previous work included the soap opera 'Revelations', and one can easily spot a "soap opera" influence on the novel; not in the pejorative sense it's usually used in, of cheap melodrama and endless shock revelations, but in a setting of all-too-human people, each concealing a life-time's worth of secrets and interacting with each other in a toxic cat's cradle of lies, anger, love, sorrow, and hatred. The Doctor beautifully describes the Quadrant, the housing settlement that forms the setting of Damaged Goods, as "76 fortresses", and Davies makes it seem as though he's worked out a complete life's story for each of those fortresses' inhabitants.
That's not to say that he ignores the science fiction elements of Doctor Who, though. Damaged Goods ties in quite well with the psi-powers arc it's a part of, neatly bridging The Death of Art and So Vile A Sin, even if the Brotherhood themselves play a small part. It also ties in with Gallifreyan history and legend in a way that neatly betrays Davies as a closet Doctor Who fan; no other could know not just about the War against the vampires, but also about the different colleges of Gallifreyan society as well (and the cameo by an ancestor of Benny is just the icing on the cake.) It all ties together with its human elements in a glorious tragedy that tears at the heartstrings.
But to laud the plot and characterization is to ignore Davies' true strength, his ability to generate atmosphere. When I say "glorious tragedy", I mean it; Damaged Goods generates an atmosphere of suffocating horror, despair, and dread so profound that when you finally do stop reading, it feels almost like you're surfacing. This is a book you could drown in, and it doesn't let up for even a moment.
I feel sure that Russell T Davies won't write for the range again; after all, he must have had opportunities in the almost seven years since Damaged Goods has been published. That's unfortunate, since his one novel for the range was a genuine triumph, a powerful and brilliant piece right down to its perfectly apt title. He's exactly the kind of author who needs to be invited back for a repeat performance; even if his follow-up is only half as good, it'd still be impressive.
By the later stages of the Virgin New Adventures, word had spread far beyond the fan community about its quality and willing to take risks. Authors with friends and connections at the BBC, such as Ben Aaronovitch and Mark Gatiss, had communicated the enjoyment of writing for the range to other authors who'd not yet done a novel. Presumably it was this that attracted Russell T Davies, an award-winning TV dramatist, to write his novel Damaged Goods for the line. Whatever the reason, he brought a powerful intensity and a darkly different sensibility to the series.
Davies' previous work included the soap opera 'Revelations', and one can easily spot a "soap opera" influence on the novel; not in the pejorative sense it's usually used in, of cheap melodrama and endless shock revelations, but in a setting of all-too-human people, each concealing a life-time's worth of secrets and interacting with each other in a toxic cat's cradle of lies, anger, love, sorrow, and hatred. The Doctor beautifully describes the Quadrant, the housing settlement that forms the setting of Damaged Goods, as "76 fortresses", and Davies makes it seem as though he's worked out a complete life's story for each of those fortresses' inhabitants.
That's not to say that he ignores the science fiction elements of Doctor Who, though. Damaged Goods ties in quite well with the psi-powers arc it's a part of, neatly bridging The Death of Art and So Vile A Sin, even if the Brotherhood themselves play a small part. It also ties in with Gallifreyan history and legend in a way that neatly betrays Davies as a closet Doctor Who fan; no other could know not just about the War against the vampires, but also about the different colleges of Gallifreyan society as well (and the cameo by an ancestor of Benny is just the icing on the cake.) It all ties together with its human elements in a glorious tragedy that tears at the heartstrings.
But to laud the plot and characterization is to ignore Davies' true strength, his ability to generate atmosphere. When I say "glorious tragedy", I mean it; Damaged Goods generates an atmosphere of suffocating horror, despair, and dread so profound that when you finally do stop reading, it feels almost like you're surfacing. This is a book you could drown in, and it doesn't let up for even a moment.
I feel sure that Russell T Davies won't write for the range again; after all, he must have had opportunities in the almost seven years since Damaged Goods has been published. That's unfortunate, since his one novel for the range was a genuine triumph, a powerful and brilliant piece right down to its perfectly apt title. He's exactly the kind of author who needs to be invited back for a repeat performance; even if his follow-up is only half as good, it'd still be impressive.
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Capsule Review: Fearmonger
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on October 15, 2003.)
A pretty strong audio, with an absolutely corking beginning (the DJ suddenly looking up and finding the Doctor sitting in on his call-in show), and an absolutely ripping ending, and several good bits in between. There's a bit of a muddle towards the middle, with people switching sides every five minutes and perhaps one too many speeches about the New Britannia Party being bad (although I do think it funny that for the whole audio, the Doctor's saying how he can't do anything about the NBP because they're a human problem, and humans have to deal with them... only to, at the end, cut them off at the knees and leave them to the mob); however, Sylvester gets some choice speeches, and shows why he's probably the best Doctor for the audios. (It's Sylv or Colin. Depends on the script and my mood, really.)
A pretty strong audio, with an absolutely corking beginning (the DJ suddenly looking up and finding the Doctor sitting in on his call-in show), and an absolutely ripping ending, and several good bits in between. There's a bit of a muddle towards the middle, with people switching sides every five minutes and perhaps one too many speeches about the New Britannia Party being bad (although I do think it funny that for the whole audio, the Doctor's saying how he can't do anything about the NBP because they're a human problem, and humans have to deal with them... only to, at the end, cut them off at the knees and leave them to the mob); however, Sylvester gets some choice speeches, and shows why he's probably the best Doctor for the audios. (It's Sylv or Colin. Depends on the script and my mood, really.)
Monday, June 9, 2014
The Rescue
In a way, "The Rescue" is impressive precisely because it doesn't know what it can't do. Doctor Who, in its classic incarnation, is never going to be able to pull off really big action set-pieces...at least, not in a way that will look convincing to modern audiences. It could be argued that contemporary audiences in 1964 weren't expecting a convincing and realistic depiction of a pitched battle between two groups of aliens, one of them utterly inhuman, as the clocked ticked down to nuclear annihilation...well, presumably nuclear annihilation, although it should be noted that everyone who wasn't a Dalek had already taken anti-radiation drugs...but the point is, we're not a 1964 audience. The final battle in this episode looks amateurish. Charmingly amateurish to some, frustratingly amateurish to others, but it looks like people trying to do an action movie on a stage play budget.
But in a way, that's the brilliance of Doctor Who. John Nathan-Turner trotted the phrase out to justify his low budgets and cheap effects and wobbly sets, but he was right. The memory does cheat. The story we remember is never quite the one we saw, especially when we were children, and usually that's to its benefit. As the details fade away a bit under the relentless onslaught of what we wanted the ending to be, the shaky sets become the sturdy walls of an alien citadel. The twee Thals trying to push around the expensive Dalek props without breaking them become a last-ditch desperate assault against invincible robot overlords. The story we saw becomes the story we remember, echoing larger and larger in our memories until it becomes myth.
In that light, it's not surprising that Doctor Who never really did learn the lesson of "The Rescue". It should have learned that it can't do massive action set-pieces, that it needs to be small and intellectual and cerebral and focus on little character moments. Instead, Doctor Who decided it could be amazing and spectacular and it never stopped trying its big, crazy ideas, whether it could make them look convincing or not. And we got acid lakes and ant people and Dalek factories and the siege of Troy and Time Destructors and a million million memories, each one perfect...even if we sometimes go back to the series and feel just a tiny bit cheated.
Which is all a very polite way of saying that the final episode of 'The Daleks' isn't that good. The countdown to nuclear death feels flat and unthreatening, despite Hartnell's best efforts to raise the moment through strategic outrage (in some ways, this is the first episode where we see the Doctor behave like the Doctor we're familiar with, as he rages at the Daleks' decision to murder the Thals as a matter of moral principle and not mere self-interest). The fight scene is choreographed badly, and gives the impression that the Daleks were always one stumble away from destroying their own power source and wiping themselves out. And the moment at the end, where the Dalek begs for mercy and the Doctor spurns him with "Even if I wanted to, I couldn't," feels tone-deaf and out of place with the series as it would come to be. The Daleks of the first few episodes, who were more paranoid that evil, could have begged for mercy. The Daleks of "The Rescue" had earned their demise.
Still, the amazing thing about it is that it was tried. At this point, the series' only flaw was that it was too ambitious. And better that than the alternative.
But in a way, that's the brilliance of Doctor Who. John Nathan-Turner trotted the phrase out to justify his low budgets and cheap effects and wobbly sets, but he was right. The memory does cheat. The story we remember is never quite the one we saw, especially when we were children, and usually that's to its benefit. As the details fade away a bit under the relentless onslaught of what we wanted the ending to be, the shaky sets become the sturdy walls of an alien citadel. The twee Thals trying to push around the expensive Dalek props without breaking them become a last-ditch desperate assault against invincible robot overlords. The story we saw becomes the story we remember, echoing larger and larger in our memories until it becomes myth.
In that light, it's not surprising that Doctor Who never really did learn the lesson of "The Rescue". It should have learned that it can't do massive action set-pieces, that it needs to be small and intellectual and cerebral and focus on little character moments. Instead, Doctor Who decided it could be amazing and spectacular and it never stopped trying its big, crazy ideas, whether it could make them look convincing or not. And we got acid lakes and ant people and Dalek factories and the siege of Troy and Time Destructors and a million million memories, each one perfect...even if we sometimes go back to the series and feel just a tiny bit cheated.
Which is all a very polite way of saying that the final episode of 'The Daleks' isn't that good. The countdown to nuclear death feels flat and unthreatening, despite Hartnell's best efforts to raise the moment through strategic outrage (in some ways, this is the first episode where we see the Doctor behave like the Doctor we're familiar with, as he rages at the Daleks' decision to murder the Thals as a matter of moral principle and not mere self-interest). The fight scene is choreographed badly, and gives the impression that the Daleks were always one stumble away from destroying their own power source and wiping themselves out. And the moment at the end, where the Dalek begs for mercy and the Doctor spurns him with "Even if I wanted to, I couldn't," feels tone-deaf and out of place with the series as it would come to be. The Daleks of the first few episodes, who were more paranoid that evil, could have begged for mercy. The Daleks of "The Rescue" had earned their demise.
Still, the amazing thing about it is that it was tried. At this point, the series' only flaw was that it was too ambitious. And better that than the alternative.
Retrospective: David A. McIntee
(Originally posted to the Doctor Who Ratings Guide on May 29, 2003.)
David A. McIntee has never been an author I've been personally fond of. In fact, on more than one occasion, I've singled him out as particularly worthy of disdain among Doctor Who authors, using him as an example of a "bad" writer for the series. In fact, as I realized after reading his complete library (White Darkness, First Frontier, Sanctuary, Lords of the Storm, The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, The Dark Path, The Face of the Enemy, Mission: Impractical, The Wages of Sin, Autumn Mist, Bullet Time), McIntee has a lot to recommend him as a writer of Doctor Who...just not as a writer of Doctor Who novels.
I think the problem is that he's working in the wrong medium. His ideas and plots are actually quite clever and innovative when you describe them -- First Frontier, to cite one example at random, would have been a wonderful TV episode, re-invigorating the stale and cartoonish Master into a genuinely ruthless and menacing villain and playing with fifties sci-fi ambience to boot. (At this point, I should add the caveat that McIntee would do well to write for that Doctor Who series with an unlimited budget that we've all imagined.) He's also a meticulous and careful researcher, thoroughly grounding all of his stories in period history (with the obvious exception of Mission: Impractical.) When you summarize any McIntee book, it sounds like a great idea.
But when you read them, it's an entirely different story. McIntee's writing style is something akin to being drowned in porridge -- it's good, healthy stuff, but it's not meant to be taken in all at once, and you certainly want to spice it up with something. He uses very little humor in his novels, and what humor he does use is of the "dry" variety; stylistically, his novels almost read like a police deposition of their events. It doesn't help that he has a certain sameness to each scene within the novel; every scene must begin with a meticulous description of the area in which it's set, like he's writing a supplement for a role-playing game and needs to make sure his players know what they're walking into. Again, in a television show this wouldn't be a problem, because the visuals don't get described, but in prose, it drags down the story. Ditto with his action sequences -- McIntee loves martial arts, space battles, and gunfights, but those are exactly the things that don't translate well to prose, and his style of describing them as though he's putting down a report for the cops doesn't help matters.
His characterization would also be aided in a different medium -- with actors speaking the lines, they'd be able to add their own nuances, making his dialogue a little more "user-friendly". As it is, the Doctor comes off as so generic as to make the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Second, and Seventh seem exactly alike, and even Ace and Benny wind up feeling flat. His own characters come out of the realm of "movie stock characters", which again wouldn't be so bad with actors inhabiting them. (It also doesn't help that McIntee seems to have a blood-lust regarding the population of his novels; if he wrote a cop movie, every single member of the force would be One Day From Retirement. He apparently wanted to kill off Barbara and Sam in addition to his bumping off Dibber and possibly Sarah Jane, but luckily wiser heads prevailed.)
He did make some good additions to the Who mythos, though; the Tzun, the alien race that form the Doctor Who equivalent to the Greys and appear in four of his novels in some form, make an interesting change from the snarling thugs that usually try to conquer the Earth. Nobody else made use of them, but they do have a certain dry charm to them that epitomizes McIntee's work.
And, of course, no retrospective of McIntee would be complete without discussing the Master -- his first novel, White Darkness, featured a red herring in the form of a character named LeMaitre who was older than he seemed, but it wasn't long before we got the genuine article, and it seemed sometimes like all of the effort in characterization that should have been spread throughout his novel went instead into the Master. His trilogy of Master novels (The Dark Path, The Face of the Enemy, and First Frontier) redefine the melodramatic and one-dimensional villain of the television series into a ruthless, brilliant, calculating enemy worthy of the Doctor's opposition. When McIntee wrote the Master, you had a sense that he might win, which was most welcome given the character's tendency to degenerate into "Nuzzink in ze vorld can schtop me now!" cartoonishness.
On the whole, I do think that McIntee has more talent than I've given him credit for, and that he's an intelligent and innovative writer who probably has more to contribute to the range. I just don't think I could stand to read another of his books anytime soon.
David A. McIntee has never been an author I've been personally fond of. In fact, on more than one occasion, I've singled him out as particularly worthy of disdain among Doctor Who authors, using him as an example of a "bad" writer for the series. In fact, as I realized after reading his complete library (White Darkness, First Frontier, Sanctuary, Lords of the Storm, The Shadow of Weng-Chiang, The Dark Path, The Face of the Enemy, Mission: Impractical, The Wages of Sin, Autumn Mist, Bullet Time), McIntee has a lot to recommend him as a writer of Doctor Who...just not as a writer of Doctor Who novels.
I think the problem is that he's working in the wrong medium. His ideas and plots are actually quite clever and innovative when you describe them -- First Frontier, to cite one example at random, would have been a wonderful TV episode, re-invigorating the stale and cartoonish Master into a genuinely ruthless and menacing villain and playing with fifties sci-fi ambience to boot. (At this point, I should add the caveat that McIntee would do well to write for that Doctor Who series with an unlimited budget that we've all imagined.) He's also a meticulous and careful researcher, thoroughly grounding all of his stories in period history (with the obvious exception of Mission: Impractical.) When you summarize any McIntee book, it sounds like a great idea.
But when you read them, it's an entirely different story. McIntee's writing style is something akin to being drowned in porridge -- it's good, healthy stuff, but it's not meant to be taken in all at once, and you certainly want to spice it up with something. He uses very little humor in his novels, and what humor he does use is of the "dry" variety; stylistically, his novels almost read like a police deposition of their events. It doesn't help that he has a certain sameness to each scene within the novel; every scene must begin with a meticulous description of the area in which it's set, like he's writing a supplement for a role-playing game and needs to make sure his players know what they're walking into. Again, in a television show this wouldn't be a problem, because the visuals don't get described, but in prose, it drags down the story. Ditto with his action sequences -- McIntee loves martial arts, space battles, and gunfights, but those are exactly the things that don't translate well to prose, and his style of describing them as though he's putting down a report for the cops doesn't help matters.
His characterization would also be aided in a different medium -- with actors speaking the lines, they'd be able to add their own nuances, making his dialogue a little more "user-friendly". As it is, the Doctor comes off as so generic as to make the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Second, and Seventh seem exactly alike, and even Ace and Benny wind up feeling flat. His own characters come out of the realm of "movie stock characters", which again wouldn't be so bad with actors inhabiting them. (It also doesn't help that McIntee seems to have a blood-lust regarding the population of his novels; if he wrote a cop movie, every single member of the force would be One Day From Retirement. He apparently wanted to kill off Barbara and Sam in addition to his bumping off Dibber and possibly Sarah Jane, but luckily wiser heads prevailed.)
He did make some good additions to the Who mythos, though; the Tzun, the alien race that form the Doctor Who equivalent to the Greys and appear in four of his novels in some form, make an interesting change from the snarling thugs that usually try to conquer the Earth. Nobody else made use of them, but they do have a certain dry charm to them that epitomizes McIntee's work.
And, of course, no retrospective of McIntee would be complete without discussing the Master -- his first novel, White Darkness, featured a red herring in the form of a character named LeMaitre who was older than he seemed, but it wasn't long before we got the genuine article, and it seemed sometimes like all of the effort in characterization that should have been spread throughout his novel went instead into the Master. His trilogy of Master novels (The Dark Path, The Face of the Enemy, and First Frontier) redefine the melodramatic and one-dimensional villain of the television series into a ruthless, brilliant, calculating enemy worthy of the Doctor's opposition. When McIntee wrote the Master, you had a sense that he might win, which was most welcome given the character's tendency to degenerate into "Nuzzink in ze vorld can schtop me now!" cartoonishness.
On the whole, I do think that McIntee has more talent than I've given him credit for, and that he's an intelligent and innovative writer who probably has more to contribute to the range. I just don't think I could stand to read another of his books anytime soon.
Friday, June 6, 2014
The Ordeal
It was bound to happen sooner or later. I mean, nobody's ever made a television series without a duff episode or two, and every seven-parter has its share of padding here and there. It just so happens that this is the episode where all of the padding went, and a good share of the awful acting as well. We've had a lovely run of great, tense sequences with lots of intelligent moral dilemmas and real intense emotions, and we'll get those things again. It's just one utterly missable episode, after all. Not so terrible in the scheme of things.
But it is utterly missable. It's a complete stall; the Doctor's group sits around for most of the episode playing ineffectual pranks on the Daleks before getting captured, while Ian's party wanders around in a series of caves running into literal as well as figurative dead ends. As for the Daleks, the only thing they manage to achieve in thirty minutes of screen time is figuring out that it wouldn't be very exciting if the heroes had only twenty-three days to stop them from wiping out all life on the planet. Oh, and they get a scene where they just straight up do Nazi salutes and announce that tomorrow belongs to them. Terry Nation's thirty-three year long analogy begins here, folks.
Perhaps the episode wouldn't have been so bad if Marcus Hammond had made a better job of his performance as Antodus. The whole tension of the episode, at least on paper, revolves around Antodus' slow, inexorable nervous breakdown that threatens to undermine the success of Ian's expedition. (It should be noted that even on paper, this isn't particularly enthralling, because Antodus is never entrusted with any particular responsibility with which he could fail and cause danger to the others. He more or less hangs out at the back whining, and the primary danger seems to be that they could at any moment lose a bit of the deadweight slowing them down. The only way Nation can contrive even a small amount of danger is to literally tie Ian to Antodus and make his dead weight a concrete threat instead of merely a metaphor.)
But even with its other flaws, Hammond's performance drags the whole thing down. His plea to Ganatus to turn back, which should be a total breakdown into quivering panic, sounds more like he's advising that they're all out of cucumber sandwiches and it may just be time to retire to the clubhouse for gin and tonics before the weather gets too bally rough to get in another round of croquet. He has no urgency, no fear, and no real character in the scene, and as a result you're utterly uninvested in whether he succeeds or not. And if Antodus, the one potentially interesting aspect of the episode, fails...well, you're not left with much to work with. It says a lot that even the cardboard Dalek standees couldn't lower the previous episode to this story's level.
(But wow, did they try.)
But it is utterly missable. It's a complete stall; the Doctor's group sits around for most of the episode playing ineffectual pranks on the Daleks before getting captured, while Ian's party wanders around in a series of caves running into literal as well as figurative dead ends. As for the Daleks, the only thing they manage to achieve in thirty minutes of screen time is figuring out that it wouldn't be very exciting if the heroes had only twenty-three days to stop them from wiping out all life on the planet. Oh, and they get a scene where they just straight up do Nazi salutes and announce that tomorrow belongs to them. Terry Nation's thirty-three year long analogy begins here, folks.
Perhaps the episode wouldn't have been so bad if Marcus Hammond had made a better job of his performance as Antodus. The whole tension of the episode, at least on paper, revolves around Antodus' slow, inexorable nervous breakdown that threatens to undermine the success of Ian's expedition. (It should be noted that even on paper, this isn't particularly enthralling, because Antodus is never entrusted with any particular responsibility with which he could fail and cause danger to the others. He more or less hangs out at the back whining, and the primary danger seems to be that they could at any moment lose a bit of the deadweight slowing them down. The only way Nation can contrive even a small amount of danger is to literally tie Ian to Antodus and make his dead weight a concrete threat instead of merely a metaphor.)
But even with its other flaws, Hammond's performance drags the whole thing down. His plea to Ganatus to turn back, which should be a total breakdown into quivering panic, sounds more like he's advising that they're all out of cucumber sandwiches and it may just be time to retire to the clubhouse for gin and tonics before the weather gets too bally rough to get in another round of croquet. He has no urgency, no fear, and no real character in the scene, and as a result you're utterly uninvested in whether he succeeds or not. And if Antodus, the one potentially interesting aspect of the episode, fails...well, you're not left with much to work with. It says a lot that even the cardboard Dalek standees couldn't lower the previous episode to this story's level.
(But wow, did they try.)
The Expedition
As with "The Dead Planet", this is an episode that's much more about the decisions that everyone makes in the episode, and the rationales behind them, than it is about the events. Not much actually happens here, any more than it did in "The Dead Planet"; the majority of the episode centers on whether or not the Thals will help the Doctor and his friends. More importantly, it centers on whether they have the right to convince the Thals to fight and die in order to rescue the Doctor from his own stupidity. The scene where Ian, Susan, the Doctor and Barbara argue about whether they should convince the Thals to go to war is really startling for a number of reasons.
The first is the way it shows a new side of Barbara. After only nine episodes, she's really established herself as the moral center of the group, and so it's shocking to hear her take the harshly pragmatic tack of pointing out that they can't spend the rest of their lives trapped in a petrified jungle with the Thals waiting for the Daleks to kill them. When Ian points out that she's being selfish, and she doesn't disagree, it's a side of her that we've not yet seen. (And it's also clever of the show to resist having "sides". This fight is the Doctor and Barbara against Ian with Susan as the mediator. We've previously seen the Doctor and Susan as a pair, and Ian and Barbara as another pair, but now we're forced to reexamine everything we know about the group.)
The second is the emotional intensity Ian brings to the scene. Again, you don't get companions like this anymore. He's seething with frustration at the situation he's in, knowing that he's about to ask people to die for him. "What victory are you going to show these people when most of them have been killed, eh? A fluid link? Is this what you're going to hold up to them and say, 'Thank you very much! This is what you fought and died for!'?" It's a brutal, scathing indictment, delivered with amazing passion. (Again, I hate to keep bringing up the Aaru version, but the same scene as done by Roy Castle and Peter Cushing has absolutely no dramatic tension. It's also telling that there's no deliberation on the part of the Thals afterward in the film, whereas in the televised version their decision is the centerpoint of the episode.)
And the third is that the Daleks are right. In the scene immediately preceding this one, the Daleks are watching the TARDIS crew with the Thals, and they say that the logical assumption is that the two groups will try to kill the Daleks. And it's completely true. The Daleks' paranoia and fear of all non-Dalek lifeforms, at this crucial juncture in their history before they became monsters, is absolutely proved true. It's really quite chilling, and carries some horrifying implications for later stories. Would the Daleks really be so aggressive if the Time Lords hadn't kept trying to unhappen their very existence?
But then there's the defining moment for the Daleks, the one that I talked about in the essay on "The Survivors". So far, they've been monsters that don't know they're monsters. But in this episode, they find out. They distribute the anti-radiation drugs, thrilled at the idea that they can finally escape their metal shells and their sterile city. Their five hundred-year long ordeal is over and things can return to normal. Even the Thals, their long-feared enemies, are within striking range, and the war can finally end...
And like Rappacini's daughter, the cure is poison to them. The radiation they had assumed was toxic is now their lifeblood. They can only survive on a dead world. What is survival to all other lifeforms in the universe is anathema to them, and they are damned to skulk inside their metal shells forever. Is it any wonder that their next move is to utterly lose their shit and set off a neutron bomb that will wipe out every living being on the planet that isn't a Dalek? For them, this is the point of no return. If they must be monsters, then they will be fucking effective ones, at least.
This is the moment where the Daleks are truly born. And because the Doctor really doesn't become the character we know him to be until he has some monsters to fight, you could argue that this is when Doctor Who is truly born as well.
The first is the way it shows a new side of Barbara. After only nine episodes, she's really established herself as the moral center of the group, and so it's shocking to hear her take the harshly pragmatic tack of pointing out that they can't spend the rest of their lives trapped in a petrified jungle with the Thals waiting for the Daleks to kill them. When Ian points out that she's being selfish, and she doesn't disagree, it's a side of her that we've not yet seen. (And it's also clever of the show to resist having "sides". This fight is the Doctor and Barbara against Ian with Susan as the mediator. We've previously seen the Doctor and Susan as a pair, and Ian and Barbara as another pair, but now we're forced to reexamine everything we know about the group.)
The second is the emotional intensity Ian brings to the scene. Again, you don't get companions like this anymore. He's seething with frustration at the situation he's in, knowing that he's about to ask people to die for him. "What victory are you going to show these people when most of them have been killed, eh? A fluid link? Is this what you're going to hold up to them and say, 'Thank you very much! This is what you fought and died for!'?" It's a brutal, scathing indictment, delivered with amazing passion. (Again, I hate to keep bringing up the Aaru version, but the same scene as done by Roy Castle and Peter Cushing has absolutely no dramatic tension. It's also telling that there's no deliberation on the part of the Thals afterward in the film, whereas in the televised version their decision is the centerpoint of the episode.)
And the third is that the Daleks are right. In the scene immediately preceding this one, the Daleks are watching the TARDIS crew with the Thals, and they say that the logical assumption is that the two groups will try to kill the Daleks. And it's completely true. The Daleks' paranoia and fear of all non-Dalek lifeforms, at this crucial juncture in their history before they became monsters, is absolutely proved true. It's really quite chilling, and carries some horrifying implications for later stories. Would the Daleks really be so aggressive if the Time Lords hadn't kept trying to unhappen their very existence?
But then there's the defining moment for the Daleks, the one that I talked about in the essay on "The Survivors". So far, they've been monsters that don't know they're monsters. But in this episode, they find out. They distribute the anti-radiation drugs, thrilled at the idea that they can finally escape their metal shells and their sterile city. Their five hundred-year long ordeal is over and things can return to normal. Even the Thals, their long-feared enemies, are within striking range, and the war can finally end...
And like Rappacini's daughter, the cure is poison to them. The radiation they had assumed was toxic is now their lifeblood. They can only survive on a dead world. What is survival to all other lifeforms in the universe is anathema to them, and they are damned to skulk inside their metal shells forever. Is it any wonder that their next move is to utterly lose their shit and set off a neutron bomb that will wipe out every living being on the planet that isn't a Dalek? For them, this is the point of no return. If they must be monsters, then they will be fucking effective ones, at least.
This is the moment where the Daleks are truly born. And because the Doctor really doesn't become the character we know him to be until he has some monsters to fight, you could argue that this is when Doctor Who is truly born as well.
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