WhoThrough: Doctor Who Season Eight

The ongoing series meets a villain who’ll go on and on.

When my wife and I married in 2014, we started watching Doctor Who in order, one story a week. Five and a half years later we finished and started again. These are a combination of my scattershot notes from the first and second WhoThroughs.

TERROR OF THE AUTONS

Is this the first time the show uses the know iconography to get a “wow” – the Master’s TARDIS arriving has no dialogue to explain, we just get it. (Though the show later seems unaware of how exciting it is to see someone walk into a TARDIS and cut to the interior.) Love the Doctor not being able to sack Jo – he’s never had to do that before! Time Lord in bowler hat screams “working at the whims of the establishment”. Episode one is very abrupt – Jo getting to the factory, the Doctor knowing it’s a bomb, etc. Pertwee, wrongly, plays the ‘operation’ on the doll entirely straight. New Autons design is more sinister. With the central UNIT hub, the show does well to expand onto another new set every week; keeps a sense of production value and momentum. A lot of UNIT soldiers have died, not to mention that final ‘death by soldier’ fake out, yet the Doctor is “looking forward” to seeing the Master again.

I do worry that Pertwee improvising songs has become a clearance headache since. Thrilling early confidence in effects – gags with smoke, green screen to levitate people and fake locations – including using them for humour rather than just plot. Jo’s reaction coming out of hypnosis is genuinely upsetting. FFS, another mute black strongman.

The “Tubby Rolands”/club moment is insane – the Doctor starts an argument because a man has urgent information, then tries to trump the man’s rank to win that argument, even though it’s intel the Doctor wants. It’s misjudged plot blocking and feels like star ego rather than anyone’s preferred scripting. Given the events of Spearhead from Space it’s crazy nobody assumes the doll is an animate killer, since that’s literally the Nestine’s whole thing. (Which the Doctor even articulates right after the doll attacks Jo!) Episode 4 puts no music on the air strike or the bus load of plastic killers emerging to fight UNIT, both of which could use the push for tension.

The Master is astonishingly fully formed, right down to his last minute change of loyalty and escape. But then they had practiced this role a lot in the show before getting here – it’s been a bit of a theme to spot photo-Masters in the WhoThrough.

I find myself appreciating the remastered version with FX quite a bit. The doll works, though I never minded the uncanny nature of the man-in-suit version. Compositing improvements obviously help. Maybe the octopus would have been better as an outline than a full render – it’s the one thing that feels like a stylistic clash.

THE MIND OF EVIL

Episode one ending on the Doctor in danger again – and Pertwee plays the fear this time without so much gurning – and it feels like this is an under-acknowledged aspect of the Pertwee era, peril for the Doctor as often as the companion. The prison material is strongly played as real, earthy and uncomfortable – very different from the playful feel of UNIT. Though the Doctor’s CCTV arrival at the prison is shot on film, complete with black frame borders. Having four consecutive cliffhangers be basically ‘the Keller machine attacks’ suggests something of a structural problem – especially when we’ve got the prison being taken over, a missile stolen and the Master’s involvement revealed.

Weird, wonderful tension with Major Cosworth, the overkeen planner of incursions – followed by Benton returning, with sweet amusement from the Brig and a genuine concern for the missing Yates. Best writing yet of the UNIT family. Doctor/Master is full of respect and compassion, so much more complex than it could be – Master bids him good luck as he takes on the machine! Air goes out of things in episode six, with UNIT cocky about catching the Master, and the Doctor vaguely brooding about the Keller machine, and the missile being neutralised since it can be remotely detonated. Forcing harmless Barnham to stand in front of the machine is as emotionally nasty as what was done to him in the first place. Creature looks great, and suddenly seems akin to a Dalek. Jo’s sadness over Barnham is heartbreaking – companion as emotional North again.

Suspicion of Chinese from the off is awfully icky. Does the American delegate’s fear of a dragon make him, rather than the show, racist? (Turned out it was the show.) Funny scene in episode three where the prison Doctor acts just as demanding-but-hamstrung as the Doctor, and gets called “Doctor” in the same exasperated way. And then we get the Master driving along and he turns off his radio, which was implied to be playing his evil theme. Love the Doctor undercutting stock villain shtick: “I’d love to stay and watch” / “Well why don’t you, then?” The Master’s fear of a cackling Doctor is basically how he presents himself TO the Doctor every time.

THE CLAWS OF AXOS

Shouldn’t this be called The Tentacles/Tendrils of Axos, since those are the bits that seem especially dangerous? Why do the Americans want the Master so badly? Part one cliffhanger would work better if we hadn’t already seen the monsters at the start. Style is so brutally abstract, impressionistic. The jump to the to reactor base is bizarrely jarring – Doctor goes from under guard to CUT analysing the Axonite. Master’s “…and destroy all life on Earth” got a huge laugh, very ‘Mom, you promised!’

The Bill vs Bill fight is incredibly well planned and executed, and hints at the old need for a male companion. (Meanwhile poor Jo is being dismissed, ignored and patronised.) Bizarre use of the photo blow-up TARDIS wall to create a corridor before its interior doors. Doctor faking a betrayal and breaking his companion’s heart is something we’ll get more used to with later incarnations! Nice that the final episode turned so much on the Master, double-cross and getting the TARDIS working, but it left the Axons as silent monsters to kill.

Just realising that story titles by now are much more in the style of episode titles from the past than the simpler story titles – you can’t really use The Arc or whatever when we’ll eventually get other arcs. (Colony in Space kinda makes this point over again.) It would do the ship scenes a huge power of good if the sound of clonky footsteps on a set could be dubbed with squishy, organic noises. Attempts to criticise xenophobia early on quickly turn to mush when the Axons are revealed as duplicitous and that gets tied to their true form being ‘not humanoid’.

COLONY IN SPACE

Hugely struck by the opening, Time Lords at home, like viewers of the show. Jo gets an iconic “bigger inside than out” then reveals her fear – she signed on for Earth adventures, space is a big leap. Hard to feel tension in early eps when the time lords promised something juicier. The interesting layers of the primitive society feels like it’s arrived late since the Master has shown up – would have made the earlier squabbles more interesting. Shouldn’t have used the Time Lords, make it a one-off trip the Doctor achieves with a fresh circuit that burns out, returning as happened in Axon. The Master’s filing cabinets! The original Jammie Dodger button! The Doctor doesn’t even look at the screen of planetary systems as the Master makes his offer; stone cold refusal.

To get stuck with the photo wall of the TARDIS for Jo’s first time inside is a real shame, underwhelming. Strong opener, with the Doctor working on the mystery of the crops and also going Sherlock Holmes on the giant lizard murders. Horrible treatment of the natives – even Jo thinks the colonists should carry on without acknowledging it’s not their planet – and the Doctor’s happy to discuss destroying any local dangerous animals. Ultimately it’s about two factions who came to take the world from its inhabitants and somehow we pick one of those sides.

Was episode two created to spin out the story? The same cliffhanger only now the Doctor has met the people behind it. The image of Jo being held under one arm while the miner shoots at an escaping prisoner beside a bomb in a cave of primitive alien ruins is a full-on action tableau you’d think was impossible to really shoot for studio TV – it’s like the cover of a trash-but-fun SF novel.

The Master forged umpteen documents – which takes a lot of research of systems and precise material – rather than just kill the adjudicator and take his stuff. Nobody’s surprised by the inside of the Master’s TARDIS because it already looks like a spaceship – ‘It’s the same dimensions on the inside!’ It’s notable that the show now talks about “the people who exiled you” like it’s the character’s origin story, not unlike the Time War that opened the modern show.

The doomsday weapon doesn’t come to the Doctor’s real attention until episode six, and isn’t used for tension before that. There really was no point to the Time Lords being in this, and it actively harms the story as you wait for the Master to show up, the weapon to come into play – we’re too far ahead of the Doctor.

THE DAEMONS

The opening is an attempt to build atmosphere unlike almost any the show has done. All the horror stylings. Smart use of stock footage, weather, light, sound. Why, it’s almost like the producer wrote it knowing what could be done. Also spooky: the copper with a rock!

First Doc/Jo scene wonderfully on-point. (Weirdly voice activation would explain Bessie’s movements better.) Fab use of TV crew, even acknowledging that bits are pre-recorded. Canny insight showing a presenter with a clever guest who doesn’t realise the questions are being asked for the viewer’s benefit. The Doctor being the authority-less weirdo in a pub of normals is a scene well past due.

This is maybe the perfect place for the Master, all Christopher Lee in Doctor Strange robes. The frozen Doctor is hugely unsettling. Tricking the villagers with his “magic” is as good, and as well set-up, a sequence as the show has ever done. This is arguably the ideal UNIT story, in that they’re so utterly out of their depth and inappropriate to the challenge. The ‘hole in the barrier’ effect looks really good

A lot of the plot is just about separating characters – keeping the Brig out, stopping the Doctor seeing the Master, getting lost on roads, explaining science to UNIT’s Osgood. Cliffhangers tend to be about the Doctor in peril, and in one glorious case the Master. There’s a weird commitment to trying out Benton and Yates as a double act, various together and carrying plots separately, which doesn’t work, but it’s a fun experiment. Feels like Letts noticed the Jo-Mike chemistry and wrote into it for the first time.

The way this story opens the door for every bit of earth magic and myth to have an alien/scientific origin is enormous. So, so much follows from this.

Check out the WhoThroughs for Season One, Season Two, Season Three, Season Four, Season Five, Season Six and Season Seven.