‘THE FACE OF EVIL' (TOM BAKER'S DOCTOR WHO)

Written by Chris Boucher
First broadcast Jan 1977
Plot spoilers happen!

“At last we are here. I shall be free of us.”
- Xoanon

When Two Tribes Go To War

As we all now know, this is the one where future companion Leela is found. She’s not fitting in terribly well amid her tribe, the Sevateem. Who seem remarkably similar to the Tribe of Gum way back when, as if savagery hadn’t advanced much in the meantime. There's the same machiavellian power struggles, and so on. In fact the differences only occur when the plot compels them. Not only is their religion different, if equally plot-driven, this becomes more central to the story so they have a shaman to reiterate it. (Rather than just the power struggle over leadership.)

In fact it can feel like they've come back to savagery to complete the quota of colonialist tropes. They missed some last time, such as cargo cults and foreigner-as-divinity. It's useless complaining these aren't really common features of tribal societies. One only ever really happened during a narrow time period in the south Pacific (and some doubt even there that 'cargo cult' is an accurate term) and the other only happened to the Aztecs, who weren't a tribal society but an ancient civilisation.

But they allow us to indulge in infantalisation of primitive peoples. Cargo cults demonstrates them playing at things they don’t understand the way children do. Which is of course required thinking for colonialists, to see other people as our charges. And so people want to believe them, and so here they are.

As from it's early days science fiction aped and echoed colonialist fiction, it's scarcely a surprise that this stuff got absorbed along with everything else. 'Star Trek' did it on less than three times, with 'The Apple', 'Return of the Archons' and 'A Piece Of the Action'. About which Josh Marsfelder says this, and there's not much point me paraphrasing him.

But of course, here there’s a twist. Which, as we all now know equally well, is that the Sevateem and their arch-enemies the Tesh both turn out to be descendants of an original landing party, respectively the Survey team and the Techs. The fact that they've created a cargo cult around their own history is, true enough, a tasty paradox. My favourite moment is when they use a steel panel from the spaceship as a gong, which may well be because they're not mimicking its original purpose but finding their own.

Commentators often talk about this story in terms of its influences, which may be understandable. The Baker era has, up to now, done their take on Frankenstein, on Triffids, on Mummy stories and all the rest. In a way the show hadn’t since the decline of the historicals. But here it’s misplaced. This story may well have had influences, but its not taking a recognised trope out for another spin. Its basis is more the classic science fiction extrapolation of a high concept. Which, as we all know was, What If God Went Mad? (More on Gods going mad later.)

And this may be partly why the story’s so under-rated, normally ranked below Chris Boucher’s other two scripts, ’The Robots of Death’ and ’Image of The Fendahl’ - despite that introduction of fan fave Leela. People aren’t looking at it in quite the right way.

More strangely, those same commentators often overlook what must surely be its biggest influence. Mostly it channels ’Zardoz’, just with Leela taking up the Sean Connery role of the half-naked savage who crosses the threshold to civilisation. (Through a big stone head, even.) There's the same exotic science-fictiony names which turn out to be corruptions of more familiar ones. The evil overlords even have similar names, from the titular Zardoz to Xoanon.

Well, except... ’Zardoz’s theme was civilisation leading to decadence and ennui, and therefore needing the odd bit of prodding by some passing half-naked savage to liven life up a bit. While this goes back to that great SF staple of the division between mental and manual labour. (Seem most clearly in the influential ’Metropolis’.) While the Tesh are ascetically religious, as fixated upon the life of the mind as the Sevateem are on physical prowess. (Their mind control powers should really have extended to telekinetic abilities, allowing them to carry out their daily tasks without sullying their fingers.)

Though while they guard the inevitable sentient super-computer and see themselves as superior to the brute Sevateem, unlike the Eternals of ’Zardoz’ they're ultimately as clueless as to what's really going on. (There's a touch of ’Canticle For Liebowitz’ in their turning science into religious litany.)

An artificial barrier has been constructed by that super-computer to keep the two apart, and the story's largely predicated upon bringing this down. In short, despite the technophobia you might expect, it's not technical development which has placed people on either side of it, the early adaptors versus the stuck-in-the-mud Luddities with their hunting knives and dial-up connections. Xoanon represents a false consciousness which needs throwing off. Social stratification has a social cause.

And if the plot has Leela lead the way, the Sevateem eventually follow. They cross the same physical and psychological barrier as her, they just do it a bit later. Intra-story at least, they make the mental leap of their own accord. The shaman plays a crucial role in overcoming Xoanon, with the Doctor admitting he's underestimated him.

And the name ‘survey team’ suggests they weren't colonising invaders, so would most likely have been of the same scientific bent as those who stayed in the rocket, suggesting this difference wasn’t innate but developed over time. (Which may explain how they're able to carry crossbows, which seem well beyond their general level of development. Perhaps.) But that’s not really the point of the thing.

And this is accomplished by the same thing happening in microcosm – a team-up between the Doctor and Leela. When Leela first encounters the Doctor, she crawls up to his feet. But that turns out to be something of a throw, as they soon shape up into a team. If Leela’s from the Sevateem, the Doctor's not of the Tesh in the same way. It’s that in their cosmology he belongs that side of the barrier, and is more associated with brain work.

But for their team-up to be effective the differences between them need to be overcome. When the Doctor insists on imposing that division of labour, Leela guarding the door as he confronts Xoanon, it becomes cliffhanger time and she needs to rescue him. And just as he teaches her the rudiments of science, at one point he has to uncharacteristically resort to fisticuffs.

So all this could end up with any essentialist difference between the two tribes erased, the sides learning to just get along. That would after all take us back to how things were before this even began. But the story pointedly shows us neither before nor after, it ends with no-one knowing what to do and with everyone arguing. As do many ’Who’ stories, it’s true, such as ‘Power of the Daleks’. But that doesn’t change the basic fact – we don’t see any of this happen, it essentially ends on a freeze frame.

”I’m Not Feeling Myselves Today”

As things progress, we gradually discover Xoanon has some kind of split personality. He later states the split he's created in society is a duplicate of his own mental state, which most commentators take as gospel. But it isn’t at all. You could have written an evil computer who comes unplugged in the end without any of the tribal conflict, or have the two groups separated by some natural force, a gorge or raging river, or a force filed without any sentience behind it. The real split's in the story itself.

In almost a reprise of 'The Ark’, the Doctor caused all this on an earlier visit when he tried to fix the computer. That face of evil, it’s his! This is most obvious in the blatant ’Forbidden Planet’ borrow, where the invisible monster is revealed to have his face, as if it's his rampaging id. (Just his face. But still able to leave footprints.) There’s multiple mirror and fractured screen scenes.

The literal going inside of the Doctor’s head (if in carved form), the appearance of a couch, that most Freudian item of all furniture… these are two heavy hints among many that we should be seeing this as a psychological story. It’s probably unsurprising that the Black Archive book for this was written by a psychologist, Thomas Rodebaugh.

But rather than offer a talking cure the story seems as beset by confusion as Xoanon. The Sevateem believe Xoanon is held prisoner behind the barrier by the Evil One, who the Doctor looks like. Yet when Xoanon talks to the tribe on the cosmic walkie-talkie he has the Doctor's voice. And why, if its too insane and conflicted to even know itself, has it embarked on this human engineering programme in the first place?

Xoanon is really a whole bunch of cultural signifiers for a troubled mind pasted together. (Rodebaugh states politely “Boucher thinks psychologically [but] does not think psychoanalytically, which is a different matter entirely.”) Which shouldn’t be seen as altogether surprising. Professional scriptwriters are more likely to go with what they half-remember on a subject than decide to read the complete works of Freud and Jung before starting on scene one.

Look at ’Face Of Evil’ up close, and the sense of it dissipates. But its like looking at a painting up close, and getting surprised it goes abstract. Stand back, stupid! This isn’t something that’s intended to make sense. Its trying to be stimulating, not polemical. It throws a bunch of stuff at us, and gives us the job of sorting it.

Okay then, let’s get started on that.

So, the Doctor repairs the faulty computer, but in so doing he creates Xoanon, who is modelled on him. And Xoanon could be seen as an abandoned child, both modelling himself on his parent and wanting to establish his own self by breaking away from him. God went mad because of Daddy issues. As the child rebels against parental authority, that control seems not just bad but definitional of evil. To the child, after all, this is the point from where all authority seems to stem. And the solution can seem to be to rid yourself of the parent, allowing you to replace them.

It’s perhaps possible to see the two tribes as a child mind obsessing over sorting, over putting things in their place. Of course the Tesh and Sevateem cannot mix, any more than the land can meet the sky.

And in the one way you could say the story is psychoanalytical, its cool that the super-computer doesn’t just become a life form, its allowed to stay one. In a longstanding Who tradition it doesn't need defeating but curing. To overcome our reliance on our parents and become our own self, the paradox is that we need our parents to help with that. It gets harder when your Dad keeps shooting off. But works out alright in the end.

The rest of this review will be a semiotic analysis of Louse Jameson’s legs.

A Semiotic Analysis Of Louise Jameson’s Legs

Told you.

The Sevateem seem to have one other woman amongst them, whose role seems to be to stop anyone saying Leela's the only woman among them. (Nor do they have any children or old people.) Because of course she’s a blatant example of the nubile savage. The classic version of which is Raquel Welch as Loana in 'One Million Years BC' (1966). Not only does she illustrate that TV Tropes entry, the fur bikini she sports even has its own Wikipedia page. (Even the names are suspiciously similar,  Leela and Loana. But then primitive languages don't use consonants much. Or at least that’s what I was told by Looalla.)

The Nubile Savage’s ability to scour her environment for naturally occurring hair and beauty products is much-mocked. But if it’s effectively a form of fancy dress, the Doctor’s an example too. Closer to the point is the double standard rolled up in the popular term for the sexy companion figure, Something For The Dads. The Mums are presumably in the other room, making everyone’s tea, so let’s not worry. Arguably this is almost the norm with the companion figure. But with her skimpy leathers upping the sexiness, Leela brings it more out in the open. Though there’s more specific things to bring up…

First off, Google-image the term and see how many Nubile Savages are white girls hanging around in black parts of the world. One very common iteration is the Jungle Girl, the female Tarzan. Because after all we wouldn’t want that lechery getting inter-racial, now would we?

Moreover, and put bluntly, the supposition is that primitives will be unconstrained by our social norms and so make for better shags. But at the same time a recurrent feature of the Nubile Savage is her sexual innocence. Unsocialised, with the mind of a child in the body of a woman, she doesn’t know what her parading about in her skimpies does to the rest of us. The number of times she’s made some solitary figure, discovered by some expeditionary party, attest to this. Which of course is about making her unthreatening the same time as sexy.

How much of this applies to Leela? She’s white, and living in a jungle. And she’s isolated from her tribe after the first scene. While this is a family show, so subject to obvious constraints, no mention is made on-screen of her sex appeal despite that being blatantly what she’s there for.

I’ve peppered these reviews with personal recollections of first watching them. But this one’s not quite as charming as a wide-eyed boy having nightmares about Daleks. Leggy Leela’s arrival was for me just at… um, well, the right time. I’ve no idea what my Dad thought of her, but I got to be pretty keen.

What if we were to ask the young me what made him so besotted? There’s little point pretending I‘d have been the same had they made her an Inuit wrapped in furs, instead of what ’Futurama’ would call “a compelling short garment”. But maybe it wasn’t just that…

There was then something of a negative feedback loop between girl characters in popular dramas and boy audience response. There just to give the hero someone to rescue, they spent a lot of time screaming and simpering. A little young for terms such as ‘media construct’, my schoolmates and myself tended to conclude “girls spoil it”. Why not get straight to the fight scene, we reasoned, past that lovey-dovey stuff?

Whereas Leela didn’t simper much, which wasn’t always true of the type. Loana is simultaneously Nubile Savage and Damsel In Distress, her Fay Wray role in the film is to get captured by various kinds of dinosaur, who may well have been queuing up offscreen. Whereas Leela, strong-willed and resourceful, is Savage as much as Nubile. (Or, more accurately, cross-bred her with the Action Girl trope.)

Previous woman companions, such as Liz Shaw, had been given agency by beefing up their brains. Leela might seem to go in the other direction. Her role in terms of plot function is less Liz and more a throwback to Ian, Steven or (another primitive from a fightin’ background) Jamie, sometimes clashing with the Doctor over the use of force.

But while her educational record may have gaps, its also established from the get-go that she’s savvy. Jameson has said she played the character as “very intelligent but uneducated”, and part-based her on a child she knew.)

As said, she soon strikes up a rapport with the Doctor. The story opens with her decrying tribal customs like a one-woman Enlightenment, and getting exiled for her pains. She elects to travel with him. And her rejection of tribal leader status is a more stammering version of how he’s responded on other occasions. (Essentially “you are making a category error here.”) It's strange to read that two endings were deliberately written, to keep their options open with her. You can't imagine the other having worked half as well.

It’s true we have Jameson herself to thank for much of this. While Walsh figured her best response to being cast as Loana was to “strut my stuff”, she became more protective of her character. Frequently given scripts saying “girl companion screams” she’d simply state “Leela doesn’t scream”. From Susan on, the standard pattern for the girl companion was to establish someone as more interesting and then progressively wear them back down to cliche. Jameson didn’t make the feisty Leela up, but she took the character from this story and stuck with her.

I’d like to look back and believe this planted some early seed in my young mind about how different women characters could be depicted. Perhaps to some extent it did. But my reaction at the time was something else…

Jameson’s best-known comment is that what they gave Leela in proactivity, they took away from her in clothes. But what she saw as a trade-off my young mind took as a combination, it was legginess plus knife-wielding which made her sexy. (Leela replaced Sarah-Jane, who didn’t simper much either. But whenever she did anything pro-active I suspect my young mind went ‘honorary boy’.)

The Action Girl overlaps with what, in the terminology of the day, was called a Tomboy – a girl who takes to boy's stuff. You see the same trope at a similar time in Leia's anti-Dale Arden act in 'Star Wars' (1977). The figure’s appealing to young boys partly because it’s a girl coming into your world, doing your things, not asking you to move too much.

Which also exposes the limits. A girl who survives in a boy's world by doing boys' stuff, the Action Girl sidekick doesn't break the presumption that an audience is bad default a male audience. (Quite often she'll be just bad enough to be sexy, hence the hero keeping her in line.) it's also implicit that there's something unorthodox in hers heroics, and with it something kinky.

Rodebaugh states Philip Hinchcliffe, then the producer, thought the character might lead to more girls identifying with her. I’m not sure of this. Emma Peel from ’The Avengers’ had a lot of… well her name was devised as a homonym for ‘Man Appeal’. But I’ve also met not a small amount of women who took her as a kind of role model, even if that wasn’t the original plan. I’m not heard anyone say anything similar over Leela. She was made for the males. And if she did anything progressive, it was to the males.

Further reading: “You could argue that this is the personification of the core divide at the programme's soul at this time. Threatening to destroy the series is the untapped ego of Tom, with the self-reflexive query ‘Who, am I?’ an internal debate over whether or not he's bigger than the programme itself. Nah, not really - but food for thought, innit?”
- Tomb Of the Anorak

Coming soon! Further disruptions in the space-time continuum…

'SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE’ (JON PERTWEE'S DOCTOR WHO)

Written by Robert Holmes 
First broadcast: January 1970 
Plot spoilers: Medium-to-high

”The New Policy”

”No eyes, no hair, just stares...”
”What?”
”Men. Creatures! Made in the factory!”

Some ’Who’ stories, there’s no real doubting which one they are. Take this. It’s the one where the dummies break out the shop windows and run amok. It’s one of the show’s most memorable sequences. Though I’ve never specifically heard it said, I would bet my frilly cuffs that this kicked things off and the script was then written around it.

But then why should that be so iconic? Why should one and a half minutes stand out so much from twenty-six years? (Particularly if you watch it back and realise they could only break that plate glass by having it happen off-screen.)

Perhaps the child psychologist Piaget will know. He conceived of the young mind as animist, progressing from a generalised sense that “all things are conscious”, even the most inanimate objects, through “things that can move are conscious” to what he called the mature view. (“Not everything that moves is necessarily conscious, just look at Ian Levine.”)

Interestingly, he saw the source of this as anxiety, a reaction to what otherwise seemed inexplicable. “It is when some phenomenon appears doubtful, strange and above all frightening that the child credits with a purpose.” (‘A Child’s Conception of the World’, 1929) And the child progresses through these stages not mechanically, like passing exams, but unevenly, shifting back and forth. So the old beliefs linger, overwritten but never truly banished.

Crucially, then, this is less a child’s anxiety than an anxiety rooted in childhood. (Surrealist art, not known for being aimed at an infant audience, often played on it.) So even in the adult that child sense can be re-induced. Which is crucial for a ‘family viewing’ show such as this. How do you appeal to both child and adult at the same time? You allow adults to reconnect to their child fears.

And this animism is all the stronger in the case of things in the image of a human. ’Who’ has already featured animate toys and dolls in ‘The Celestial Toymaker'. (If poorly applied, alas.) And it would frequently return to the trope, for example with the Weeping Angels. Further, Piaget insisted that animism isn’t anthropomorphism; in other words, things are granted sentience, but they continue to merely fulfil their function just as things do. So here the Autons don’t just oppose the shoppers they shoot, they behave in a contrary way to them. They are life and unlife at the same time.

So in a sense this sequence is classic because it's timeless, reversing development, taking adults back to a child perspective. But at the same time there is something very timely about it. And to get there we need to compare it to some near neighbours. The ’Twilight Zone’ episode ’The After Hours’ (1960) essentially takes mannequins as a variant of toys, and tells a Pinocchio tale. While the 1967 'Avengers' episode 'Never, Never Say Die’ focuses on duplicate copies. 'The Avengers' and 'Who' in particular were always exchanging writers and story ideas, so similarities are not so surprising. But instead let’s look at the differences. The 'Avengers' story becomes that spy-fi staple, the bodyswapping farce. Whereas here the focus is on duplication itself – on production.

This is of course not just the first story to feature Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, but the first of the new Earth-based adventures. (The conceit being he’d been sent there by the Time Lords, and told to think about what he'd done.) And if these new direction stories were to become more indebted to the classic BBC series 'Quatermass', they waste little time about it. The alien takeover narrative of 'Quatermass II' is unceremoniously filched in almost its entirety.

And then, more shamelessly still, they borrow to an almost equal degree from the show's own earlier 'Quatermass' homage – 'The War Machines’. To steal not only from another show but your own prior stealing from it – now that's chutzpah.

But the difference lies in the differences. In 'Quatermass II' alien takeover is signified by the familiar trope of a mark, echoing folk tales and witch trials. Here it is a plastic sheen, like spray-tan. One of the first encountered 'humanised Autons' (as opposed to those shock troop shop-front dummies) is a Secretary. And she sports the bland perfection of the Seventies 'dolly bird', recalling the then-familiar phrase “putting my face on”. In fact the closest parallel might be nothing from the list above but ’The Stepford Wives’ (1975, from a 1972 novel), which while more feminist had the same focus on getting replaced by a more perfect version of yourself. (And when you look at the silicon sheen on today’s celebrities, I’m not sure the Autons didn’t win after all. Rylan Clark? Clearly an Auton.)

Simon Reynolds writes that “plastic as a pejorative dated as far back as the Twenties...but it was really in the Sixties that people started using the word to mean fake and superficial.” (’Shock and Awe’,Faber & Faber) Think for example of the 1967 Mothers of Invention track ‘Plastic People’: “She paints her face with plastic goo/ And wrecks her hair with some shampoo”.

Which you might expect. Though their history is longer, in the Seventies plastics were becoming increasingly ubiquitous - to the point where they seemed almost new technology. Notably, the 'Doomwatch' episode 'The Plastic Eaters' hit the screen only a month later. Though, unsurprisingly, 'Who' is less concerned with maintaining scientific caution than using the stuff as a poetic symbol. Just like the Cybermen weren't really about your Auntie getting a replacement hip, the malevolent Autons aren't really about plastic bags replacing paper ones.

So plastic comes to play an almost transmutive role in the story. It becomes the bridge in the once-firm division between man and machine, between metal and flesh. One of the key settings is the Auto Plastics factory, where designer Ransome returns after a business trip. To find everything changed. His presence is now no longer required by his former business partner Hibbert, who has a new and somewhat sinister compatriot in Channing. In general, everyone seems to be behaving very strangely. 'Edge of Destruction’ levels of strangely. They don't shake hands when they do business. He's fobbed off by being told all the changes are down to “the new policy”.

But perhaps the key sequence is the one preceding this, set on the factory floor. It has, as you might expect, similarities to the factory sequence from 'War Machines'. But, again, the differences... That was clearly being undertaken in secret, happened upon by a tramp. Here they are not surreptitiously making robots by night but doll parts by day. After the 'poetic realism' of 'War Machines', this is 'real realism'. It could be documentary footage of a doll factory merely inserted into the episode. It might even be taken for filler.

…except the whole significance of the story is there in that scene. One of Marx's famous dictums was “it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour but the instruments of labour that employ the workman”. This scene is like that sentence turned into a feedback loop. The workers (all women here, despite Charlie's chosen phraseology) are making approximations of human parts with machines. While they themselves work robotically, to the machine's speed, just a replaceable set of parts themselves.

“We're turning over to automation,” explains Channing. “It means we can keep staff down to a minimum.” But of course the meaning of the phrase is not literal. Its not a story about mechanisation resulting in rising unemployment, something in its infancy at the time of transmission. It means a minimum of autonomy. In 'Quatermass II' the manual work still needed to be done by workers, who could scupper the invaders' plans simply by folding their arms. But times change...

It's like lifting up the lid and exposing the workings. You could look at that scene and wonder if, like the Secretary, the workers have been taken over yet. But when you do you come to realise it doesn't really matter. The Autons may win, or the Doctor may defeat them. But whichever way the workers are staying on that production line.

That shop-window-busting scene, where the immaculately attired dummies usurp the somewhat-shabbier-looking shoppers – yes it’s iconic, but it’s not altogether surprising. In a way it’s cachet lies in the fact it’s a moment whose time had come. As the counter culture came to be more subsumed into the mainstream, critiques of consumerism became a staple of the Seventies. But this story goes beyond that. It takes not just consumption but production into its lens. True it only does this incipiently, but its being there at all is noteworthy.

In this way the replacement of mind control (used in both 'Quatermass II' and 'War Machines') by... well... replacement is significant. Notably, Holmes' working title for the story was 'Facsimile'. In this new, plasticated world we all become replaceable. People aren't just done away with but vaporised, made to disappear. (Via the command “total destruction”.) Being surplus to production is analogous to non-existence.

In 'The War Machines', the plan's combination of takeover by mind control (represented by the sentient super-computer in the Post Office Tower) and by robot invasion (represented by the factory) never seemed very joined up. And here the Post Office Tower is essentially replaced by another handy London landmark, the waxwork museum Madame Tussauds. Which makes more sense...

...no really, it does! Well, that symbolic sort of sense anyway. Because it is used as their warehouse of Auton duplicates of the great and the good, the “government types” and military top brass. Because it matters who our betters are. While us proles, we’re essentially mere parts - faceless, interchangeable cogs. We can be replicated by the production line we're working on.

Yet it needs stressing that the critique of production is only incipient. Just as with 'Quatermass II', as with 'War Machines',  as with 'Tenth Planet' or countless other examples, the problem is framed less in terms of our losing our agency than a rather fetishistically individualised sense of the pure self. The Nestene Consciousness, who control the Autons, are bad because they are collective. Ransome becomes suspicious of Hibbert when “you keep saying we”. When Channing later intones “we have no individual identity” we are intended to be chilled.

There's a plethora of telephone scenes, despite the fact that unlike 'War Machines' they have no obvious narrative function. But they're most likely there to underline one early scene where Channing is in a phone booth. Someone impatiently barges in to ask how long he'll be, to discover the receiver is down. We separate beings communicate one-on-one, nodes in an exchange. While the Nestene, a hive mind, pool their thoughts universally by telepathy.

Except of course they possess only the supposed downsides of collectivity – and so they still have leadership! While their consciousness arrives on Earth via meteorites (giving the story it's title) which can then inhabit the Auton shells, its the 'swarm leader' which goes missing – putting their plans on hold until it can be found. “Swarm leader” seems a peculiarly oxymoronic phrase, reminiscent of Kenneth Williams insisting on being called “Citizen Sir” in 'The Black Fingernail'. 

When looking at 'Tenth Planet’, it became obvious that the notion of the Cybermen standing for communism can't really hold up to scrutiny. This story may be firewalled against misinterpretation, but from another direction. Ransome has been away on business, which is carefully specified as in America. Though by the Seventies this had become common, there may be a significance to it.

Particularly back then, America seemed the place where capitalism came from. “The latest thing from America” was a common phrase. Any mention of “the new policy” might stir up Stateside thoughts in people's minds, new business practises shaking up the trusted old ways. Ransome's trip throws us off this wrong scent. (Though my mind goes in another direction. The Nestene’s name always make me think of the notorious Swiss multinational Nestle.)

Because, just like the Cybermen, the Nestene come from neither west nor east, neither left nor right. Not even up, not really. Outer space is not being used as a blind to disguise their actual origins. In a cautionary story, they stand for the future. (The meteorite's calling signals sound almost uncannily prescient of mobile phone rings.) And space stands for the future just fine.

From A Clown To A Dandy

”I couldn't bear the thought of being tied to one planet and one time.” 

If not much has been said about the new Doctor so far, then the story doesn't do much more. He's kept out of the action for almost the first half, as he recovers from his (still unnamed) regeneration. (While Troughton’s first outing got an instalment to itself.) And when he does appear, as perhaps should be expected in a story so indebted to 'War Machines', he's clearly a successor to Hartnell.

Donning the aristocratic signifiers almost as soon a stepping from his sick bed, he 'borrows' his trademark cape and vintage car from... yes, really... a Doctor. Which he promptly drives to UNIT and speaks so imperiously to a sentry you can't help but be reminded of Andrew Mitchell's Plebgate affair. His commanding voice, we don't even need to be shown, gets the job done. In fact, it could be argued he doesn't <i>really</i> behave like the Pertwee Doctor until he's in his posh togs. In his sick bed he feigns derangement as a means to get what he wants, then pulls a face of mischievous-child triumph, a very Troughton trick to pull.

At points he acts less like a hero and more like an aristo who, after losing his heritage, has been thrust unwillingly into a day job. Suddenly he has responsibilities, even the need for a name. At first he tries to evade it by sneaking off, only to find the Tardis disabled.

And herein lies the paradox. For a story about the alienation induced by modern production methods (which in no small way this is), it is all the more bizarre to have a protagonist so steeped in privilege culture. But rather than searching for some intra-story way of getting to grips with this, we are better off seeing it as symptomatic of Seventies culture overall - perhaps even British culture in general. Andrew Hickey has often observed that there is much of George Orwell or Tony Benn in the Doctor, the toff who turned to the proles. This paradox will be turned over again and again by the show. It's the grit that makes the oyster.

The Autons and their replacement/takeover scenario may have been devised to match his regeneration. The Doctor conveniently manages to land not just at the same time as the Nestene's meteorites, but in the same wood. (In the Pertwee era, not only does the Earth reduce to the Home Counties, they can be spanned by stretching out your arms.) His line about his new face being “very flexible, you know” might seem to suggest at some kind of parity. Yet the Autons' replacements ultimately do the opposite of the Doctor, who is the same person only looking different.

However, for all that there's a newfound emphasis on his alien-ness. He's shown to have two hearts, something he's been previously quiet about. But of course this alienness is now required precisely because of the new format – because things are now Earth-bound. However copycat the scripts might get, the Doctor is not Bernard Quatermass the Earth scientist. He's from another world and has at root an inscrutably alien nature. The 'Radio Times' cover which introduced him was keen to show him as some kind of magician.

If this is not the first UNIT story, it's clear UNIT is now being set up to be regular feature. (We're almost explicitly told the Autons will be back for a rematch.) This story went out the same year as yet another Seventies SF show with an alien invasion premise, 'UFO'. While SHADO, UNIT's equivalent, hide behind the cover of a movie studio, their glam fashionista uniforms suggest the cover they've gone in for is quite deep. Nominally SF, 'UFO' overlapped considerably with pop-surreal spy-fi stories, such as 'The Avengers', 'The Man From UNCLE' and Marvel comics' 'Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD'. (Where SNAAC applies, Snappy Acronyms Are Always Compulsory.)

UNIT can't compete with this fashion parade, but they still look a good deal more dashing than that regular army clobber. Of course they have to act the straight man to the Doctor's dandy. But like the plastic they occupy a between-space, not as hidebound as the straight army, but neither as savvy to strangeness as the Doctor. Notably it's Captain Munro from the regulars who gets replaced.

And with UNIT of course the Brigadier is back. This significance of this may be hard to reconstruct from hindsight, as we tend to see his role as effectively beginning here. But while fans frequently complain the new policy of Earth-set stories constrained the show, the contemporary casual viewer – tuning in to a much faster-paced show, with more location shooting and now in glorious technicolour – would have seen it as opening up. 

All those revelations about the Time Lords to top off the last season, now they don't even get mentioned by name. This is built to be a jumping-on moment for new viewers. (Ratings had been falling through Troughton's tenure, and are known to have increased with this story.) Given all this, the Brig's reassuring face becomes one of the very few recurring features, the only person around who would have been able to recognise the old Doctor. (The Tardis is alternately guarded and ferried around like a totem, but we don't see inside it.)

Yet if the Brig is the familiar face, all the audience identification business falls to new companion Liz Shaw. When Hartnell became Troughton they made sure it happened mid-season, with Ben and Polly still around to provide a live commentary. This time it’s a season-opener. Here, as Andrew Hickey comments: “we’re introduced to these vaguely familiar elements as if they’re totally new, through the eyes of new companion Liz Shaw.”

Her introductory scene is all about her, and us, being brought up to speed. But it also tells us about both her importance and her character. Her initial skepticism has to be seen in this light. We're used to encountering the small-minded disbelief of the petty bureaucrat - obsessing over protocol and procedure oblivious to the fact that silver-suited extras are even now over-running High Wycombe. But from Liz, coming so early in the reboot, its a skepticism she expresses for us – and so in her we see it as a sign of intelligence. (Though she doesn't need to worry about those “little blue men”. Everyone she runs into will be green.)

She's clearly been head-hunted by UNIT on her own prowess, though just in case we haven't got it yet the Brigadier states firmly she's “not just a pretty face”. If the Doctor's still a magician, this time he's not handed another mini-skirted assistant. Liz is an actual scientist who does actual science stuff, almost a dummy run for Romana. To think that it was only four years ago when Polly first appeared, and we got almost excited over her being a secretary.

Though 'Quatermass' featured female scientists, despite so much else being sourced from there Liz has no real antecedent. She's more an acknowledgement of shifts in Seventies culture – what was then dubbed “Women's Lib” and we now tend to call second-wave feminism. A wave which had expanded from political and legal campaigning to a general critique of culture, which of course included popular culture. Gloria Steinem’s article <i>’After Black Power, Women’s Liberation’</i> was at this point barely a year old.

A popular TV show keen to expand its audience may have not wanted to seem behind the times, or to cut itself off from a potential female audience. Certainly, like the UNIT uniforms Liz's look seems pitched - tied-back hair but mascara round her eyes. Not too old-world, not too dauntingly modern.

Given all this, when Liz is shown taking to the Doctor straight away the man she's meeting is the man a whole chunk of the fresh audience may be meeting. A mysterious stranger, an alien. All we can be really sure about is that he's brilliant and here to help us. Actually, we can't even be entirely sure he's here to help us.

One of the more unfortunate similarities to 'War Machines' is that the ending is as much of a let-down. Things are essentially solved by the combination of a technomaguffin and overacting. (Androzani calls it “a disappointing ending which fizzles out in a sea of woeful tentacles”, and indeed its a sequence about as infamous as the Autons coming to life is famous.) Seemingly you're only supposed to twig that Channing was an Auton himself right at the end. A natural reaction to which would be “if I'd have known I wasn't supposed to guess that, I'd have tried harder not to”.

Yet overall, while Holmes' previous two efforts ('The Krotons’ and 'The Space Pirates') are not what you would call well-remembered, this has gone on to be a favourite among fandom. Yes, the same fandom which normally so takes against the Pertwee era! Which is perhaps odd, as it very much establishes the new policy rather than provides an exception to its rule. Maybe sometimes its the first time that can be the charm.

Coming soon! Those anomalies in the tempo-spatial sphere persist…

‘THE DOMINATORS’ (PATRICK TROUGHTON’S ‘DOCTOR WHO’)

Written by Norman Ashbury (and definitely not Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, not them, no not at all)
First broadcast: August/ September 1968
Plot spoilers? Officially yes, but I shouldn’t worry

“Shall we destroy? Shall we destroy?”

”Destroy”

“Overall verdict”, says Tomb of the Anorak, “it’s crap”. This is not a popular story. It normally finds itself in a three-way tie for last in the Troughton popularity stakes, with ’The Underwater Menace’ and ’The Space Pirates’. (Respectively, a story I didn’t bother with, and one I won’t be.)

People are keen to point out that the premise is daft, the plot thin, the costumes ludicrous, the ‘deadly’ robots actually weirdly cute, and its all bundled up in a reactionary rant against the peace movement. Even the writers washed their hands of it, insisting it went out under a pseudonym.

Which might seem hard to argue with. Starting with the costumes, I would bet money that the actors were signed up before the first costume fitting. The Dominators are for some reason dressed up as armadillos, in armour so stiff and awkward that when they try moving blockily about they resemble a ’South Park’ animation. For their part, the Dulcians parade about in curtains. And the robots Quarks look like packing crates turned bling but also punk, while also a child gang. The Chumblies were more menacing, frankly. You’re clearly intended to understand what they’re saying, and it’s impossible to work out a word.

One character, Cully, is scripted as a headstrong and impetuous youth - but is played by the most incongruously middle-aged duffer since Bill Hayley. (Actor Arthur Cox was 34 at the time, but in all honestly looks older.) But it’s the reactionary moral, and the virulence which its given, that gets most goats. El Sandifer found it: 

“…an overt attack on the ethical foundations of Doctor Who… an attempt to twist and pervert the show away from what it is and towards something ugly, cruel, and just plain unpleasant. The sheer sickening stench of this story is enough to turn one off the program entirely.”

Yet ’The Daleks’ was an anti-pacifist story too. But as pointed out by approximately everybody, that gave its target their best face. The Thals were as noble and principled, and in their own way brave, as the Dulcians are a ludicrous Aunt Sally inside a curtain. Anyone can knock down a straw man, in fact that’s what they’re made for. (In addition, I suspect most aren’t objecting out of some card-carrying pacifist conviction. The problem is the familiar elision between being anti-war and pacifism, then pacifism with passivity.)

Except, as you may have already guessed, it’s around now that I’m going to say that its the business of ’Doctor Who’ to be absurd. So, while it’s no competitor for ‘Power of the Daleks’ or ‘Web Of Fear’, this is a whole heap better than ‘The Wheel in Space’.

True, the anti-anti-war angle is the second-hardest thing to take. It does feel highly un-’Who’ for the Doctor to be messing so readily with guns and bombs. And while the Sixties peace movement certainly deserved its share of criticisms, none of them are the knee-jerk reactionary reasons doled out here. But I always say, you’re better being ridiculed than ignored. When they try this hard to misrepresent you, you must be doing something right.

More importantly, with this sort of thing they always imagine they’re telling on us. But of course they’re really telling on themselves. And they don’t know that. Which only makes it more telling. As we’ll see later.

I may have had an advantage here, as I knew before watching that this was originally intended as a satire but had those elements edited out. Which was part of the reason why the writers huffily resorted to a pseudonym. (The other part being a squabble over the robot Quarks, imagined as being as marketable as the Daleks in the same hopeful way as I imagine Ana de Armas and matrimony.)

Except of course the satire kind of sticks. It’s a bit like the adage about rock & roll, you can’t clean it up because it’s dirty to begin with. It could even be argued that the insistence all this is played straight just sharpens the satire. With the story as broadcast it would be more than difficult to work out how intentional the comedy is. But certainly none of it is intentional from the point of view of the characters. Which, like a planet filled with straight men, only makes it funnier. Being asked to take this seriously and finding you just can’t, that’s perhaps the best way to watch it.

The tiffs between the two Dominators are especially hilarious. Big Dominator (as I was soon calling him) is forever called off-stage, insisting that in his absence Little Dominator to not do any more of that destroying business. But as soon as he’s out of sight what do you know but some pressing problem rears, which unfortunately can only be resolved by destroying some more stuff. So what’s a poor Dominator to do? Reluctantly he has to give the order again - “destrooooy!”

Only for Big Dominator to return and ask angrily whose been destroying in his house. Hilariously, his objection to all this isn’t anything to do with scruples or even strategy, he just figures it wastes too much power. He may be concerned they’ll run out of 50ps for the meter, it’s not exactly clear. Little Dominator then sulks and seethes, before muttering the passive aggressive “order accepted.” It may be he’s actually a Destroyer, enrolled in the Dominator fleet by clerical error.

But the Dulcian Council, who endlessly debate stuff and occasionally try to decide whether they should maybe be deciding something, are not exactly ept either. Perhaps their attire comes out of the fact that it’s clearly curtains for them, no matter the size of the threat. Their meandering musings seemed absurd to me. And I work for the Council. In fact the whole thing could be summed up as a resistible force meeting an ineffectual object.

So in short the Dominators look and act like a right bunch of prats, and the Dulcians a different bunch of prats. And that’s a vital part of the story. Their respective costumes represent their respective ideologies. They’re absurd because those ideologies are absurd. The Dominators are encased in rigid armour, their movements little more than literally one-track. While, less happily, the Dulcians look remarkably like men in dresses, emasculated and enfeebled. (I did say less happily. This is in fact the hardest thing to take about the story.)

”Destroy!”

But also, forget all this for a moment and try to picture a contemporary satire of the Sixties peace movement. Surely Rada members in wigs saying “hey man” a whole lot. Hopeless hippies, useless youths who won’t fight the godless Commies like they should because they’re too busy lying down and listening to the Grateful Dead. Kids today…

So then why are so many of the Dulcians so bloody old? They’re one of the most gerontocratic societies yet seen on this show. Yes, there’s Cully the reckless youth. But that suggests reckless youth starts at forty. (Like the daft costumes, there’s a way in which the ludicrousness of this helps the story.)

Further, but relatedly, what’s with the Classicism? I mean, it’s pretty hard to miss. They wear togas. Okay, they look like they all wanted to wear togas but had to resort to curtains, but even so… What could that possibly have to do with peacenik hippies, in their kaftans and patched jeans?

And further still… At this stage ’Who’ almost entirely ignores the mechanisation of labour. And this story soon continues the series tradition of humans doing manual labour while machines look on. The Doctor does ask “What would they want Dulcians as slaves for, they've got the Quarks?" But no real interest is paid to this. We’re told the Dulcians don’t do labour, and the Dominators finally decide they’re useless as slaves. (A message from their home world, confirming what we could have told them inside of five minutes.) But if (as is stated) we’re not just seeing some aristocratic caste, if they don’t labour at all, whose keeping them in curtains or maintaining those travel tubes?

Because it keeps up the link between pacifism and passivity. And it effectively fits with our received history of Classicism, where slaves are kept off-stage and invisible. But then the next thing doesn’t…

What about their rote learning? To the point where “better to do nothing than do the wrong thing” is their credo. Which might seem more part of the Dominators’ culture than the Dulcians. This certainly has nothing to do with our received ideas of Classicism, that it was some kind of forerunner of the Enlightenment.

(While watching I was convinced the Dulcians should be seen as the philosophising Greeks and the imperious Dominators as the invading Romans. But it seems the names are all from Latin. Dulcian means “beautiful people”, an early working title.)

Remember the Thals too had classical-sounding names like Ganatus and Antodus, intended to confer gravitas upon them. But unlike them the Dulcians aren’t there to be seen as nobly wrong. Their society is, in its own way, as problematic as the Dominators. It can’t be a peaceful utopia, whose problems unfortunately rear up from outside. It must call those problems down on itself.

And the learning-by-rote is function overriding theme that allows for this, foregrounding that what we’re looking at is a stagnant society. In a twist on Jules Feiffer’s famous gag about the Republicans and Democrats, the Dominators do all the wrong things while the Dulcians don’t do anything. If they’ve seen no wars for thousands of years, they’ve probably just not got round to one.

Because the point we’re supposed to take about these useless hippies is that they aren’t an aberration but a symptom of a wilder malaise. Like children copying and magnifying their parents’ bad habits, they’ve taken on the worst elements of the generation before. The post-war world of peace and prosperity has softened people up, left them insulated from the harsh realities of life, turned decadent by such luxuries as indoor toilets and central heating systems. What they need is some shock therapy before the inevitable next war rolls round. Haisman and Lincoln spent a good deal of their spare time berating the end of national service, would be my guess.

’The Penta Ray Factor’ (July/Aug ’65), a ’Daleks’ comic strip in ’TV21’, is strangely similar. We have a decadent Classicist society who chooses to do nothing when warned of invasion, we have a brash and reckless son of the leader, and so on. (It’s also similar to ’The Trigan Empire’, though preceding it by four months.) Suggesting these themes were in the air. (Wyndham’s ‘Midwich Cuckoos’, as we saw, also dealt with this projected problem.)

There’s two odd things about this. First, much of their earlier ’Web of Fear’ was about the uselessness of a military response to an otherworldly threat. Okay that threat was specifically designated the Weird, rather that a pair of bickering buffoons in cumbersome costumes. But it’s still somewhat bizarre they went from there to here in one script.

But also, this sounds like last weeks moral panic. By time of broadcast (after, for example, the Grosvenor square riots) the Dulcians should have been if anything more like Little Dominator, headstrong and reckless militants, convinced that the world they want is only one explosion away. (Or jump arbitrarily between hopeless space cadets and deranged fanatics, as the Planet People did in ’Quatermass’.) 

But popular culture is never so neat, and the first draft of history normally arrives late. Literally, so here, where the script was commissioned on Jan 2nd ’68 then written over February and March. This was effectively a ’67 story, which just happened to be broadcast to the world of ’68.

”Destrooooy!!!"

If the Doctor taking too readily to guns and bombs seems problematically out of character, his decision to act the part of a dumb local, in order to stay under the radar of the Dominators’ arrogance, seems very Troughton.

”An unintelligent enemy is far less dangerous than an intelligent one, Jamie. Just act stupid. Do you think you can manage that?”

Speaking of Jamie, all the fighting stuff gives him something to do, likening the Quarks to redcoats. True, this mostly takes the form of throwing styrofoam rocks at kids dressed up in packing crates. But he looks happy about it.

While Zoe fares the best. Rather than just being a walking Wikipedia she scores on the gumptionometer. Separating her early on from the Doctor and Jamie takes her out of their shadow, and allows her to be contrasted to the Dulcians. As Cully points out: “She can't be a Dulcian - she has an enquiring mind.” It would have been better not to dress her up as a Dulcian, as the earlier scenes visually contrast her from them. But curtain-covered or not, she gets her moment.

Coming soon! Disruptions in the space-time continuum…

LIBERATE THE FORCES WHICH MATTER BINDS! (A SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

Our next Spotify playlist takes the form of a winter ritual. The opening 23 Skidoo track is from the album ’The Culling is Coming’, which came with bespoke ceremonies for Winter, Summer and Autumn. Presumably because you can get through Spring by yourself. Things then carry on in similar vein…

Mostly, this is tracks to trance you out rather than have you listen to them. Never a bad thing in my book. And of course the primary purpose of a Winter playlist is to take you out of the fact that its currently Winter. If it doesn’t work for you, then your entry fee will be refunded in full.

The title may well come from ’Invention For Destruction’, a Czech animated version of ’20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’. Or somewhere else. Who can say?

23 Skidoo: G-2 Contemplation (Part 1 - A Winter Ritual)
The Sabres Of Paradise: Duke Of Earlsfield
Fuck Buttons Race You to My Bedroom / Spirit Rise
Bowery Electric: Slow Thrills
Silver Moth: Hello Doom
MONO: Halcyon (Beautiful Days)