‘BATTLEFIELD' (SYLVESTER McCOY'S DOCTOR WHO)

First broadcast: September 1989
Writer: Ben Aaronovitch 
What witchery is this? Plot spoilers reside below, beware unwary surfer!

“Any advanced form of technology many not necessarily make much sense."
- Arthur C Clarke
(or at least it was something like that)

”Infamy, infamy...”

Given the cod-heightened dialogue that crops up throughout this Arthurian storyline, it would be tempting to start with the celebrated quote “infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!” 'Battlefield' is infamous for being the 'Who' story with the worst-ever viewing figures, and credited by many as less another nail in the show's coffin than the lid slamming down. Tomb of the Anorak is not alone in dismissing it as “the worst Doctor Who story of all time”. Yet, all told, it induces not a negative so much as a polarising reaction. Few are they who would uncritically defend it. But other views are available. As Jack Graham puts it “as so often in this era, there are superb ideas under a surface mess”.

And haven't we been here before? It's almost like the show is going out the way it came in. As with, say, 'The Web Planet’ or any other from a number of Hartnell episodes you spend half the time wanting to like this a whole lot more than you really do. Or possibly wishing there was some way for you to ingest it, absorb its themes and concepts, which didn't involve the often-tedious business of having to sit through the bloody thing. While, and unlike 'Web Planet', you spend the other half wishing you didn't like it at all so you could in good conscience just switch it off.

A large part of the problem is the wearily leaden direction. It lacks… well, what it really lacks is direction, which is a bit of a problem where direction’s concerned. Take the scene where the villainous Morgaine (below), invading our reality, comes across a war memorial in a church. Realising humans are perhaps not entirely the base brutes she's imagined, she orders her knights to stand and pay their respects. Then, running into the Brigadier, she tells him the occasion is not a time for fight. (“I wish you know that I bear you no malice… but when next we meet I shall kill you.”) But it's filmed about as prosaically as his earlier visit to the Garden Centre.

Those yet to have the pleasure of this story might say we should be trained to look past this sort of thing by now, that we should focus on the wood being suggested rather than the trees actually stood in front of us. But the execution really is too terrible to ignore, at a time when you might think TV was improving at least a little. 'Back to the Hartnell era' is not much by way of a compliment. Some scenes would embarrass a fan reconstruction, let alone an actually broadcast story. And worse, like looking a painting through a crappy distorting lens, it distorts the underlying theme.

Which, not terribly surprisingly given the title, is war. By tradition, something 'Who' tends to be a little skeptical about. Yet, to quote Owen A Stinger, “if anything, the directing... belittles the act of war, showing it to be a fun game for arrogant swaggerers.”

Consequently the story often feels like the archeological dig it's partly set in, the trawling through mud can feel endless but reveals the occasional jewel. For example, there's the Knealish emphasis on history seeping through into the present via place names. The Gore Crow Hotel (below) is lingered over by the camera but never remarked upon by the characters, which just lets it marinade into the overall atmosphere. It's like the way an actual sleepy Sussex town can be called Battle. The garden of England is a graveyard to wars past, we drive our cruise-control cars over the bones of the dead.

The Doctor being equated to Merlin might sound merely hackneyed. But making Merlin a future Doctor, so the Doctor himself becomes a pawn in his own game... that's much more involving stuff. By essentially splitting the Doctor role it inoculates against the standard McCoy-era problem that the Doctor is too alien, too remote. Which he is, but at the very same time he's reduced to the role the rest of us usually take up – trying to figure out what the Doctor has been up to this time. (“I could have given myself more warning,” he grumbles.)

It also necessitates his tactic of throwing himself into situations by acting as much like the Doctor as possible – a task he takes to with relish. (“Go!” he cries at one point, “before I unleash a terrible something upon you!”) And they stick to the conceit that the Merlin Doctor (so to speak) remains an off-stage mystery, where narrative conventions might seem to insist on a last-minute showing.

And despite the near-total inability to endow the trans-dimensional nobles with any genuine gravitas, at points the story somehow still manages to creatively contrast them with the contemporary and everyday. This is used humorously, but applied som thickly that the initial juxtaposition eventually erodes. Perhaps the most obvious moment of this is when Ace rises from the lake clutching Excalibur, to unceremonially shove it into the mitts of the nearest noble. As he pontificates actorly on the significance of the moment, she cuts him short - “That's what I said, Shakespeare.”

In this way, and much like the Hartnell era, the story seems almost self-inoculated against its own cheapskateness. The nobles hail from a parallel dimension “sideways in time”, and we've already seen the significance of that term for the Hartnell era. In short they come from somewhere so distant that its unframeable, that there isn't much point in worrying about it. What matters about them is what they signify.

Blasted By the Past 

Yet, however ill-served by the production, the story itself is pretty cockeyed. Like something found in an archeological dig, it comes up bent and broken with bits missing. What, we feel entitled to ask, is supposed to be going on? Lots of stuff gets alluded to without ever really being picked up. Morgana's near-constant feuding with her son Mordred suggest the younger generation are about to break free from her insistence upon etiquette among tyrants, but this doesn't really go anywhere.

There's also the suggestion that the Doctor isn't just playing at being Merlin, that he won't at some future point stick on a false beard and start saying “thee” a lot, but is Merlin – he belongs with the other-worldly nobles, not with us. This does often look like the Doctor at his most manipulative, at one point hypnotising the locals into leaving. Which doesn't really get taken up.

But then neither does he convince as the humanitarian voice of peace. There's a nice scene where two swordsmen parry, and fling each other back, for the Doctor to stroll through the ensuing gap. But his declammatory “no battle here” rhetoric, delivered in the middle of a battle, ultimately allows us to have our cool lazer-gun swordfights and eat them. (Okay, they're not actually very cool-looking. The point still stands.)

Still, if you have to squint pretty squintily in order to make sense of things, you can sort of do it. One of the main things the Arthurian characters represent is the past. Their reawakening/reappearance (whichever its supposed to be) threatens us with being trapped in their world of cyclic time, in endless round of war and conflict – those battle-commemorating place names come to life, reasserting their spells, memorials becoming predictions.

Critics of the story say Morgana doesn't demonstrate much of a clearly defined masterplan. But that's because she doesn't have one. She just wants to renew her perpetual conflict with Arthur. Their lives are based around each other more than most couples. The near-future setting, as well as being an in-joke on fandom's UNIT dating controversy, suggests what we are fighting for is literally the right to a future – the establishment of linear time.

There's an association made between Excalibur, the demonic Destroyer and the nuclear warhead – even if the story slings them together so inelegantly. It's never quite explained why the warhead gets stuck. But let's imagine it gets held near Excalibur, the sword having some magic attraction over it the same way it works on the scabbard on the hotel wall. Which establishes some innate equivalence between the two weapons, totems of might in the two different worlds.

While, when we first meet the Destroyer (above), he's presented as a kept demon of Morgana, as if representing her most destructive impulses - her warrior instincts unchecked by her warrior's code. She fears him even as she holds him. The original concept was of a man in a business suit who grew more demonic as he grew more powerful, as events in the story went more his way. She threatens to others that she'll release him, even though she knows to do so would be to unleash total destruction. So she parades him, as a deterrent, ultimately as a bluff. And if you haven't yet seen where this is going, remember at the time of broadcast the Cold War was still a live concern.

But those pointy fingernails of hers become forced. Effectively, they're forced twice and she takes the opposite courses of action – releasing the Destroyer, then refusing to press the button. Which doesn't really make much sense. Well, maybe a little if 're still willing to squint. If we see the Destroyer as representing her unchecked ego, as part of her, and the warhead as the depersonalised results of this. A chain of logic which progressively removes the human element and with it ramps up the destructiveness.

And what accelerates that chain better than technology, than modernity? We've become better at killing and worse at everything else. The Doctor breaks the chain by pointing it out, causing even Morgana to be repelled by evoking the mass, indiscriminate slaughter the bomb will bring. As Rob Matthews says, her “almost romantic notion of war has no place in a world like ours, a world where death has indeed gone mad.” (Notably, a working title for the script was 'Nightfall'.)

But of course Morgana's just a construct, devised purely so this can be said to her. The Doctor's the protagonist of a TV show, he's really talking to us. So why do we need to be told this? Because we must transcend her cyclic world of recurrent warfare – its become a necessity. Like the Destroyer the missile's something too powerful to be held in check by any code. We can change our ways or we can die. Hence the character who would have been the most noble of all these nobles, Arthur, is dead before events even begin. His ethics, though genuine, are now untenable. (Though why he's also sending a distress signal is another loose plot thread to add to the tangle.)

Which sounds not just an oddly conservative moral, but (like so many such) one based on a nostalgic haze rather than solid ground. They're praising the past, when they said they came to bury it. Even after they told us the past and warfare were effectively interchangeable concepts. Were there past chiefs who refused to take up iron weapons, gunpowder, cannonballs and all the rest, because they looked a bit too nasty? We wouldn't know because they would have been crushed beneath the boots of history, but it seems unlikely and besides it doesn't matter much. It might have worked better if “sideways in time” had been the parallel dimension of myth, Morgana stepping from the Avalon of the 'medievalist romance' section of one of those bookshops with rainbows painted on the front – only to be confronted by base reality. But that's not what happens on the screen.

Besides, out of the hamfisted way the three symbols are squashed together, the worst is the way the warhead is dumped into the story. It equates so easily with the liberal anti-nuclear agenda of the era, images generated by pressure groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament which showed missiles stuck incongruously onto the rustic English countryside. (Pete Kennard's post-Constable montage, below, was an at-least-witty take on the theme.)

Nuclear weapons were seen as an aberration grafted onto an otherwise civilised society, like a thorn somehow stuck in our collective paws, rather than the logical outcome of a whole set of political and military alliances. That way, we could reject the conclusion without having to change our working out. The Doctor makes the usual uniform-baiting comments about UNIT, but its never suggested the missile really comes from them. They just happen to be guarding it. They're all presented as headstrong but ultimately stout-hearted types.

(The multi-ethic 'rainbow coalition' nature of UNIT, most epitomised by new Brigadier, Bambera being black, suggests we should be looking respectfully upon them. The story may intend us to visualise a multi-ethnic future, which just happens to mostly present itself through UNIT. The whole presence of Shou Young seems designed around giving Ace a politically correct friendship, her only other role seems to be to own a car. But come out mostly through UNIT is what it does.)

And speaking of Brigadiers...

The Brig Is Back (Long Live the Brig)

The story is perhaps best remembered for the final appearance of the original Brigadier - Lethbridge-Stewart. And indeed the old chap is the main thing it handles right. He's often seen as merely a straight man to the Doctor, an echo of Colonel Breen's “slide-rule mind” in 'Quatermass' - something for the Doctor to take his creative tangents from. Yet here they don't even meet until the third episode. His return from retirement, if woefully stretched out, is essential to his story arc. Initially he's so busy among his begonias he won't even answer the Brig-phone - “I don't care if it's the King!” (Which it sort of is, of course.) He's even been replaced by Brigadier Bambera, who wastes no time pointing this out. It's as if Bilbo had again left the Shire for 'Lord of the Rings', rather than delegating to Frodo. His gun is the ring he elects to carry once more.

Arthur may be dead, but its the Brigadier who's the real Arthur, the old warrior reappearing to save the day. And he can do it, reappear from his own personal Camelot deep in the garden of England, precisely because he is real. He's not conjured from dry ice and glowing globes like some others you could mention, he just got a phone call and a lift. He's gone from professional soldier to volunteer reserve.

And he's not just Arthur. In his final confrontation with the Destroyer, he's asked scornfully “can this world do no better than you as their champion?”, and replies calmly “Probably. I just do the best I can.” People rightly commend this exchange, as one of the moments that get to the heart of the show. But perhaps what's significant is that its something the Doctor, the ultimate gentleman amateur could have said, but doesn't. The Doctor becomes too associated with the nobles here, doors opening obediently at the sound of his voice. Someone else has to take up his champion-of-the-little-people role.

So the Brigadier knocks him out, to take his place in taking down the Destroyer. In a story about the importance of change, the necessity of linear time, we see a recurring character in a new light. And in a story telling us we need to put the old ways behind us, that's exactly what he was doing. He was never a warrior at heart, it was a role he could hang up like his uniform. But when the phone rang he was equally willing to die if need be.

...which makes it all the more annoying that they rolled back from their original decision. His death is less foreshadowed than pre-announced. The whole scene is played as intended, then inexplicably at the end of it he lives. Marvel comics have never been crasser. And just think, if they had stuck to their intent, we'd have escaped all that Cyber-Brig business in 'Death in Heaven'.

There's a telling scene where Bessie (the vintage car loved by the Pertwee Doctor) is reintroduced. Ace laughs at its antiquity, only to find it's been revved up and can fly by at superspeed. The story ends with her excitedly taking a trip in it.

...which seems to sum up the way we're supposed to see this. It may look like the old show, it may have no better production values, but there's a whole lot more going on under the hood if you care to look. Unfortunately the argument's not much more effective than the special effects used to convey this. You need patience, diligence and a very forgiving temperament to get there - and not everyone's an archaeologist. The casual viewers who tried ten minutes of it then shook their heads and switched over, they can't really be blamed. There are superb ideas under this surface mess, even if they don’t really come in an assemblable order. 

But at the very heart of it all is a dead King, inside a spaceship that's going nowhere. The Brigadier doesn't die. But he should. And with the theme of breaking the cycle and moving on, at times it feels like the show is straining to put itself out of its own misery.

…which may be an apt time to say that this will the last of my *’Who’* reviews. Thanks to those who read them.