Written by John Lucarotti & Donald Tosh
Ye olde Plot Spoilers abound!
“I wish I understood what was going on.”
- Steven
The Shadow Land
It’s easy enough to talk about Old and New Who, handily separated as they are by a fifteen year buffer zone. But, as I hope this series of posts has proven, there’s also an Old and New Hartnell. Old Hartnell could have gone out under the alternate title ‘Schoolteachers in Space’, as decent sorts Ian and Barbara grappled post-war concerns with undisguised theatricality. While New Hartnell marked the point even the BBC couldn’t ignore the onset of the Sixties, and could be called ‘Getting Far Out With Time Travelling Grand-dad’.
And the disappearance of those school teachers at the half-way mark does make a pretty good marker. But only from a high-level view. On an episode-by-episode basis this show is anything but neat and tidy; it advances, reverses and sometimes goes sideways… actually, there’s quite a lot of sideways. Rather than traversing these two poles, its more like it’s in a state of perpetual tension between them. Sometimes it seems to touch both at once. Take that classic credit sequence. Is it a New Music composition for the masses, or early spacey psychedelia?
And really, how could it be otherwise? The first draft of history is always going to be messy, extemporised and even self-contradictory. Too many take a mechanistic approach to popular culture. (“Well of course this is what a popular broadcast media would be producing for the masses in February 1966”.) In general, when you see things as being simple, they’re not actually the simple part of that equation.
So, after ‘The Time Meddler’ should really have broken the mould of the historical and jumped up and down on the bits, after ‘The Myth Makers’ cocked a snook at classism, we get one of the most high-minded historicals of all. It’s even by John Lucarotti, who effectively coined the genre with ‘Marco Polo’ then came up with it’s high-point in ‘The Aztecs’. (At least sort of, more on that coming up.)
In many ways it’s like a return to those years. It covers grand events yet has a very human scale, where details like places to sleep the night assume an importance. The four episodes map neatly to four days. And, unusually, it has no cliffhangers. Episodes end on a dramatic moment but then start up again from somewhere else, like chapters in a novel. (Which isn’t Old Hartnell, as the cliffhangers were a feature from the start. But it feels more Old than New.)
And it has more peculiar features….
- Historicals are normally given unique settings. They’re not quite on the level of those ’Beano’ cartoons which assumed Italy had signs reading ‘Italy’ hammered into every available bit of ground and the leaning tower of Pisa was viewable from every location. But ‘The Romans’ say, has a different setting to ‘The Aztecs’, a difference you can take in at a glance. This is set several hundred years before ‘Reign of Terror’, but the teeming, narrow streets of Paris are essentially the same. (Though admittedly, this being another lost story, we only have a few stills by which to judge this.)
- Added to which, ‘Reign of Terror’ was based around a notable date. Every schoolchild will have heard of the French Revolution. But the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day? True, the Doctor tells us this is a notable date. But that's because we need the Doctor to tell us it’s a notable date.
- This was written by Lucarotti, but then heavily and rather speedily rewritten by Donald Tosh while Script Editor. Which is presumably why the story is so circumlocutory, and riddled with gaps, inconsistencies and blind alleys.
(Braver souls than I have tried to list all these. Let’s pick just one example, the Doctor finds the scientist Preslin in his shop. But when Steven arrives shortly after, we’re told Preslin was arrested two years ago and is presumed dead. You can of course write a handwave for any of this. But you’ll be waving your hands a lot here.)
- This is another story where holidaying Hartnell was absent for a full episode. Quite inexplicably, for a story where he plays two characters! (More of which anon.)
- They’re there to pick up a girl. To keep to the formula line-up, and having carelessly failed to do so in the previous story, they are obliged to find a new female companion.
But like ’Hamlet’… well, a little bit like ’Hamlet’ the story finds ways to turn these necessities and impediments into virtues.
First the setting… ‘Reign of Terror’ was at heart an adventure story in period clothing, which occasionally bumped into a historical figure. ‘The Massacre’ is more a tale of intrigue, weighted with plots, betrayals and code-names. We’re told one character would “cross-question his own shadow,” which would seem wise behaviour around here.
Inside which Steven, separated from the Doctor for almost the entirety, becomes a kind of Hitchcockian protagonist; a befuddled everyman, an innocent abroad, knowing neither the mores nor the geography of Paris, just hoping to blunder on the right thing to do. So while all those strange plot ellipses can frustrate, at the same time they make us feel as Steven does.
Steven falls in with the Protestants as swiftly as Ian and Barbara did with the Royalists. The assumption is clearly that the Church-of-England-attending audience will recognise the Catholics as the bad guys. But while the story holds to this, it also paints everything in shades of grey. The Protestants are more commonly called the Huguenots, a historically accurate but less familiar term, which distances them from us a little.
The Huguenot Gaston first defends Anne, a runaway servant from her Catholic masters, saying she should be free to choose her own destiny. But he soon admits that to him “she’s just a servant, a chance to bait a Catholic.” His compatriot Nicholas admits “many of our followers are just as bad” as the Catholic mobs.
This is realpolitik, with less word actually about religion than ‘The Crusades’. The Huguenot plan is not for religious tolerance but war with Spain. It’s simply assumed countries will war with one another, it’s just a matter of which ones. We’re told “Kings are recognised only by the power they wield” and this King is a playboy, easily distracted while his mother wields real power. At one point she dares him to arrest her, to make him realise he cannot.
The Doctor Doubled
In the story’s best-know element, the Abbot is a double for the Doctor. Which proves to be the story engine. In yet another bizarre feature the Doctor disappears from the drama before the Abbot appears, then doesn’t return until after he’s gone.
Steven quickly assumes the Abbot is the Doctor, working to undermine the Catholic plot from within - so continually attempts to reach him. The story feeds us clues so we might believe he is right, then pulls the rug from us. It would be a neat twist, except it manufactures so many clues you figure something must be up.
And not all this misdirection turns out to be justified. The story lays on the Abbot’s villainous reputation, even making him end the first episode like he’s the monster of the week. Yet he proves a terrible bungler, to the point he arouses his co-conspirator’s suspicions. This would only make sense were he really the Doctor, yet he’s not.
Also, just before he vanishes the Doctor talks of going to see the Abbot, despite Preslin’s warning. Yet this goes unexplained, as - stranger still - does the Doctor’s entire disappearance. He can’t even have spent the time discussing microbes with Preslin, as there’s a short scene showing he left. This leaves a huge Doctor-shaped hole in the story.
Yet if the Doctor's not the Abbot, beyond the plot twist what can be made of this? Both have titles for names. (And this isn’t the first time the Doctor’s been set against a religiously named figure, though the Abbot is not similar to the Monk.) However the Abbot’s is obviously religious, while the Doctor is specified as “a doctor of science”. Here he’s the early Hartnell, taking interest only in scientific questions, staying out of events where he can. While Preslin, seen fleeing Paris prior to the Abbot’s arrival, comments “he hates us all” he seems to mean scientists not Huguenots.
In fact, while the story finds only shades of grey between Catholics and Protestants, science is shown as more important than both. However, that doesn’t make this an anti-religious story as such, where religion is seem as mere superstition in ecclesiastical clothing. The approach to religion is more abstemious, as if it’s medicine. Catholicism is too much religion, as indulged in by hot-headed Latins. Protestantism is for cooler heads. (Historically, to escape persecution the Huguenots often fled here, compounding the narrative they were really honorary Brits.)
When Generations Clash
Steven’s siding with the Huguenots mostly takes the form of hanging out with other impetuous youths, chiefly in taverns. He flies around Paris, gets in sword fights and flees bloodthirsty mobs, all to no avail. He spends much of his time finding out about an assassination attempt which he rushes to prevent. He then fails, but the attempt itself goes on to fail through sheer happenstance. (Which almost feels like the story in microcosm.)
All this time he assumes the Doctor is equally at work in the story, just at different points to him and more successfully. Yet he’s not. We cut away to older, wiser heads, but the Doctor meets none of them. His counsel is effectively “better not to appear in this one at all”.
And the Doctor’s refusal to help Anne escape the massacre crystallises this and leads to the story’s best-known scene - Steven’s confrontation with him. The Doctor’s stance is almost a reprise of ‘The Aztecs’: “I cannot change the course of history, you know that.” Yet Steven’s response is definitely not Barbara’s. In fact this is the point where Old and New Hartnell clash most clearly in the whole era. She is the dutiful schoolteacher hoping to bring up her charges proper. He is the headstrong Sixties youth, as much as the Xerons in ‘The Space Museum’, what he wanted was his mates to come along. He rails against the remoteness of scientific enquiry while lives hang in the balance. (“If your researches have so little regard for human life then I want no part of it.”)
And much like the Xerons in ‘Space Museum’, I was reminded of my own adolescence. I’d have essentially similar arguments with my parents; them convinced the problems of the world were simply intractable, me that they could be thrown off by sheer strength of personality. (I expect I also stormed off then slunk back.)
But there’s also contrasts to New Who. Another time, I compared conceptions of time in the old and revived show, where the same questions receive opposing answers. And notably this is almost exactly the same debate as the Doctor has with Donna in ‘Fires of Pompeii’. Donna pleads “Just someone. Please. Not the whole town. Just save someone.” Except that time the Doctor concurs.
But the “just someone” defence is actually a form of tokenism, a performative gesture so you can feel better about yourself. Ironically, it was best exposed elsewhere in New Who, in ‘Boom Town’: “You let one go… Every now and then, a little victim’s spared… And that’s how you live with yourself.” Which again suggests the more sophisticated new show is actually more willing to indulge in feelgood sentiment than the old.
Yet we can track this back and find the flaw in Steven’s stance. In a mass killing he’s only really bothered about one person purely because he spent more time with her. The value of a human life can be measured in screen time. Even Nicholas, who gave Steven shelter when he needed it, is forgotten. And we’re implicated in this. An orphan, someone who notices and seeks to repay kindness, if we’ve spotted the signs Anne was being set up as the new companion. We thought we’d see more of her.
If everybody says this is the memorable scene of the story, everybody then complains that it reneges on itself in order to re-establish the series formula. At this point ‘The Massacre’ well and truly massacres itself. With the lucky coincidence of Anne’s descendent Dodo showing up just there and then, there’s only one semi-defence. The Doctor is as reminded of Susan, who she looks and sounds nothing like, as Steven is of Anne. It suggests both men, now at something of a low ebb, are at a point where they see in her what they want.
All true. Yet El Sandifer is just as right to say there was no way out of that but to backtrack. The only other option would be to fade out on the Doctor alone in the Tardis, mumbling to himself, and the series to have ended in 1966. A series formula will always be both motor and straight-jacket, something which will happen in ’Who’ again and again.
‘The Massacre’ is that rare thing, a historical over-rated by fans. Compounded to all those elisions and blind alleys it’s really a story without a core. There’s some literally inconsequential running around, then when it finally seems building up to something the Doctor shows up like the shopkeeper in ‘Mr. Benn’ and they’re off. It’s not really a match for ‘The Aztecs’ or ‘The Crusades’. But there’s something strangely compelling about watching Old and New Hartnell trying to sit on the same chair. The result is another great Hartnell oddity like ‘Web Planet’ or ‘Space Museum’ where unhinged invention not only cohabits with the lacklustre, it makes the two seem inextricable.
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