WhoThrough: Doctor Who Season Ten

The ongoing series goes back to Doctors One and Two, the Daleks and the Master.

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.

THE THREE DOCTORS

Starts very like a regular story, almost determinedly. It’s the run into the TARDIS, and calling the Time Lords when everything changes, that feels different. “We can’t spare anyone” is an utter nonsense reason for adding other Doctors to the story. And is a few aliens surrounding UNIT is paltry cause.

Baker and Martin are a good fit for doing a big special — images and hugeness and laughs. Pertwee gets Troughton’s “When I say run”, and Benton’s reaction to the TARDIS is jolly postmodern. Arrival of Second Doctor is begun by addressing his iconography: recorder, changed TARDIS. Odd that the first Doctor is the one with the big SF nonsense answers. Someone once said “to add progress add a character” — exactly how Troughton works. To create tension the Brig is forced to be ignorant and unreasonable — not his usual patter, despite reputation.

Plot fixates on the Doctor, he’s the target — a rare thing away from Daleks and a shift in the show’s POV .Tricky episode two, postponing the same ending as episode one. Benton as companion is a canny bit of tidying, but misses how fun combining companions might be. (And adding a First companion would have helped make that Doctor’s presence feel felt.) Lovely moment where Omega overlaps Two’s attempts to lie. The singularity looks kinda like the Doctor’s scar on Trenzalore.

Not sure what it means that the First Doctor appears in black and white to the Time Lords, but colour within the TARDIS.

CARNIVAL OF MONSTERS

The Doctor hiding from travellers on the boat seems very atypical — they can pass as passengers quite easily (and do easily pass as stowaways). The first repeat of on-board chatter is wonderfully understated — just cut to and let play. Anticipation as we realise where the TARDIS landed versus when that fact is actually revealed is fab. Jo praising the Doctor for her own lateral-thinking idea is knowing commentary on their usual interactions.

The glimpse of a Cyberman and mention of Daleks creates unfortunate expectations. “Everlasting power cells, that’s why the company went out of business” is almost Douglas Adams is its satirical SF playfulness. (Likewise Vorg promising nothing political in his act.) When the Doctor shins down his rope the compositing makes the Drashig appear much too small in relation to him. Drashigs again look small as they attack the real world in ep 4. The Doctor flirting with Shirma amidst doing a table-turning, angry speech is Pertwee at his best.

That the Doctor once campaigned agains miniscopes feels like a glimpse of his adolescence — an idealist long before he fled Gallifrey. (The Pertwee Doctor’s backstory is more sociable, with both unseen historical trips and the Time Lords, than the literal one we’ve seen where he’s only begun adventuring since An Unearthly Child and the Time Lords don’t show up until The War Games. So it might not be the intent to have it be a pre-TARDIS event, but…well, it feels like a youngster’s campaign.)

FRONTIER IN SPACE

This came out a year after Conquest fo the Planet of the Apes, which used the same imagery of humanoid apes running around on brutalist architecture. Why does the Master always quote Earth writers and songs, doesn’t Gallifrey have anyone worth banging on about? Jo’s great is this one, especially when warding off the Master’s hypnosis.

Dialogue is being delivered at a hell of a clip — maybe explaining why there’s so much of ep one re-included at the start of ep two. Four locking-ups in two episodes is going some cell-wise, even for the Doctor. Superimposed mind scans feel very modern. Actual prison seems like a great new setting for the Doctor, and it really works — a surprise after umpteen lockings-up in three eps. The Master reading a list of trumped-up charges in front of the Doctor is divine trolling. The hidden file in the shoe is close to an utter cheat — sure it was around in the last story, but Jo’s the escapologist and why would the Doctor be given his clothes back when everyone’s in prison garb?

Jo and the Doctor talking history, waffling to cover their actions, is joyously playful — Jo’s ceaseless chatter especially. In fact ep 4 being a near three-hander with Doc, Master and Jo is just a blast. Extraordinary how much the last episode feels like a regeneration — Doctor stumbling sickly into the TARDIS, companion there to witness…and Pertwee did just beat the other Doctors for number of series as star.

Love the massive telly screen in episode one, and the way we pull out from it without wobble is extraordinary for the time. That and the FaceTime calls feel very modern. It would help if the “changing” spaceships looked actually different each time. It’s quite hard to get a cliffhanger out of “stowaways!” after we’ve already been locked up and shot in one episode. The threat of mind probes doesn’t really work since we’re told they’re painless and would blatantly solve all the misunderstandings.

Williams using the racist term “Dragons” when attacked, even though he’s working with one of them to end a war he started, is horrible, canny truth couched in Who terms.

PLANET OF THE DALEKS

The sudden reversion to Nation-fi — all silly killer plants, “space medicine” qualifications and TARDIS mechanical failures — is jarring. The Thals are pretty trigger happy for a team of pacifists, blasting at animals who haven’t even attacked. Wester becoming visible after his death is oddly affecting. Nation undermines his creations, having them be easily shoved around and blinded by blankets. And he keeps writing Jo like she’s faced the Daleks before. Women show up for battle without thinking of their menfolk’s emotions — yup, Terry’s back!

Reveal of Dalek by spray-can at the end of ep one is gorgeous, though the invisible Dalek idea goes utterly nowhere thereafter. The Daleks bombarding the planet with lethal bacteria sounds incredibly nasty. The liquid ice is splendidly rendered and really unsettling — just a shame it only drenches Daleks by accident rather than intent. The show suffers for a lack of wide/model shots.

The smallness of the production — few models, no budget to show Daleks explode, grey and black colour schemes — feels like a mistake when it’s Pertwee’s first non-Earth battle with them. The Doctor’s episode six speech about not glamorising war, then Jo purposefully not going off with a bloke, feel wonderfully Mission Statement-y…and likely nothing to do with Nation.

The way this starts — Doctor hurt, a Master story compounded by Daleks — feels like a regeneration story. For all the last story was meant to segue into this one, the Daleks’ scheme here is clearly entirely irrelevant to the war they were trying to start previously. I like that the Spirodons speak in whispers, that’s oddly fitting for an invisible species.

The Daleks only disabling the ‘up’ function on the lifts, allowing escaped prisoners to only go down, is absolute drivel. A Dalek walking around with a drawing in its sucker like a kid after a good day with the crayons is…not adding to their menace. Separating Jo from almost everyone for three and a half episodes is a total waste of a charismatic lead in favour of more tedious Thals. “Your being here might be the very reason the Daleks win” might be the most dickish thing we’ve ever heard from a ‘heroic’ character. Can everyone please stop saying “shaft”?!

There’s literally nobody interesting for the Doctor to talk to for six episodes. And mostly nobody at all for Jo. The best stuff is her and Wester the Spirodon. How do you make such a big deal of invisibility and then not use it in the finale at all? And what was the point of calling the Time Lords?

THE GREEN DEATH

The Doctor, Brigadier and Jo all go to the same place for different reasons (again), which is a desperately drawn-out process for starting the story. Doing Jo on Earth and the Doctor on Metabelis III, having a properly generic adventure without specifics, in parallel is a welcome widening of the show’s grammar. As is the writing that cross-cuts with matching, or call-response, phrases.

I love BOSS’s voice, arrogant and sardonic, loads of lovely attitude. Must everything UNIT faces be bulletproof? Do we need the brainwashing stuff when people can be made to obey orders through persuasion/blackmail? Nice to see Mike Yates getting to do something else. The exploding of the mine makes me realise the Brig’s murder of the Silurians would work in this episode’s place as the reason the Doctor elects to sod off away from Earth.

I love it when Pertwee plays undercover parts, as per the milkman here, and he’s having proper fun as the cleaning woman. The RAF ‘air strike’ turns out to be a bloke chucking grenades out of a helicopter. When the Professor looks to have died in the bombing it’s very affecting, despite how badly he treats Jo. (A gruffness that feels less on the page than acted by people trying not to lean into their real-life chemistry.)

BOSS being a computer serves no actual purpose, and actually it might as well have been the Master behind this, all hypnosis and infiltrating a big business. That last tear from Stevens is touching — in fact between that, Mike’s upset at missing out on Jo and the Brig noticing, and the Doctor’s spoken goodbye (episode one) and unspoken pain (episode six) this is maybe the most emotionally articulate episode of Who so far.

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