Day 4361: Mysteries of Doctor Who #24: Who Died and Made the Dalek Emperor God?

Sunday:

Everything about the seminal Dalek story "Dalek" tells us that THAT Dalek has to die at the end. It cannot live with itself. It has started to have FEELINGS. It has started to CHANGE. And if you CHANGE from being the supreme life-form, then you're turning into something that must be exterminated.

But, on the OTHER fluffy foot, it don't half explain away a lot of COINCIDENCES if the Emperor who fell through time to escape the Time War and the one solitary Dalek who fell through time to escape the Time War are one and the same Dalek.

For ONE Dalek to "fall through time" and escape the Time War is a mythic and poignant reflection of the Doctor's own plight: one Dalek, one Time Lord. For one MORE Dalek to fall through time seems like CARELESSNESS, as Lady Bracknell might put it. AND for one of those Daleks to be the Emperor... it's a coincidence too far.

The TRUTH of the end of "Dalek" depends on the Dalek killing itself. Given the opportunity to say “I told you you would make a good Dalek”, the Emperor does not do so, nor does he address Rose directly at any time, and you would expect the Dalek from “Dalek” to do that.

But the first ever (cough cough Russell says so) Doctor Who season finale (cough cough Barry Letts and the Dæmons doesn't count. Or Barry Letts and all the other ones. Or The Final End of the Daleks. Or The Chucking Away The Key To Time. Or The Universe Being Eaten By Entropy. Or…) "THE PARTING OF THE WAYS" just makes so much more SENSE if the last Dalek and the Emperor Dalek are the SAME Dalek that maybe that's what we should be allowed to assume.

Not least because a Dalek Emperor obsessed with early Twenty-First Century reality games would make SO much more sense if he was also the Dalek who absorbed all of the Internet while busting out of Mr van Statten's Metaltron cage.

But the idea of RELIGION ought to be as ALIEN to the Daleks as Anne Robinson, and yet the "BAD DOGGIE" Daleks have gotten that ol' time worship in a BAD way.


It seems surprising, with titles like "Genesis", "Resurrection" and "Revelation", that we haven't encountered Dalek Religion before.

It's not like Doctor Who doesn't DO "god".

You may note that the first "lost" Doctor Who story (i.e. written but NOT used) was "The Masters of Luxor" – which is all about religion. And religious confrontations were central to several of the early "historicals": "The Aztecs", "The Crusades" and "The Massacre" all look at the impact of religion on political conflicts, though thankfully Dr Who never makes any crushingly banal remarks about one or other religion being RIGHT or – worse – TRUE. (Let us just gloss over any implications from the already-dreadful "Planet of the Dead", shall we?)

The series benefits very strongly from the Buddhist input of Mr Barry Letts during his time as producer, cleverly camouflaged by Uncle Terry's rather more secular desire to tell a decent adventure story. The camouflage is actually IMPORTANT, because it stops the message becoming too preachy (something the then lead's soliloquies rarely avoid!). Interestingly, this period is "book-ended" with a couple of "When Buddhists Go BAD"-type stories: the first of the two Yeti stories with Mr Dr Mighty Trout features zen-powered robot baddies and festering corruption in the heart of a Buddhist temple, while the swansong for Mr Dr Twerpee sees Buddhist demons coming to life in a "meditation centre". And we'll come back to those spiders in a minute.

Meanwhile, religion is also very central to Mr Philip "von" Hinchcliffe's conception of the series. Along with lashings of Hammer Horror. But this is BAD religion as the series moves to place itself more overtly on the side of SCIENCE and SCEPTICISM and against SUPERSTITION.

This is where we see the start of a strong Doctor Who trope: the cult of stupid humans – The Brotherhood of Demnos, the Tribe of Tesh, or the Tong of the Black Scorpion, say, not to mention the Trogs of the Underworld or those nitwits in "The Stones of Blood" – who are fooled into believing an ALIEN or MAD COMPUTER or TIME TRAVELLER is a deity.

And the Doctor will take down "gods" from Sutekh to the Ragnarok 'n' roll band with the solid implication that (a) they are FAKES and (b) people who've fallen under their thrall are at best DUPES and at worst, actually EVIL too.
Plus there's the possibility that Mr the White Guardian, assuming we ever actually meet him, is god. Or possibly a mental derangement. (see "Mystery #12: Who sends the Doctor after the Key to Time.")

Alien-wise, though, we just don't get a lot of religious practise.

Merely to pick on the Doctor Who aliens who actually HAVE cultures: the Sontarans, Ice Warriors, and Silurians (yes, I KNOW they're not strictly ALIENS) all appear to have godless cultures. Or at least ones where their gods do not crop up in day to day use. The Draconians don't either until they get one, retrospectively, in "The Satan Pit". Nor do the Axons, Zygons, Kraals, Krynoids, Kraags, or Kinda (though they, at least, have good reason to be wary…). Neither do the Terileptils, who take the time to build gaudy androids but not a belief system. While if the Tractators worship anything, it's the Gravis. And the idea of the logical Cybermen doing anything so emotional as "faith" ought to be ridiculous (although "ridiculous" seems to be standard operating procedure for the Cybermen half the time).

On the other fluffy foot, the Eight-Legs of Metebelis III (I said we'd come back to them) DO seem to have a genuine religious devotion to their "Great One" (who at least TRIES to make herself omnipotent!) while, going right back to the Mr Dr Billy era again, the Menoptera of "The Web Planet" have their temples of light while the Zarbi have some kind of relationship with the pretty-nearly-all-powerful Animus. Maybe it's something to do with SPIDERS.

And interestingly the OGRONS – of all people! – have a "god" in the form of the rarely-seen "Giant Ogron Bollock Monster" [see "Mystery #21: Frontier in Space… What Happened Next?"]. "Interestingly" because of course this is IN a Dalek story!

(There's also something IRONIC about the ARCH-CAPITALIST Sil being a RARE theist with his appeals to the Great God Morgo.)

As for the Time Lords... the evidence is MIXED. On screen, we never get a HINT of religion, unless the Dark Tower of Rassilon counts (in the sense that they have SOME sort of ritual for burial [as do the Morestrans]). But the books have presented us with both the idea of Time Lord gods – Death, Time, etc – AND that the Time Lords may BE gods, or at least are seen as gods or godlike – see "Faction Paradox: The Book of the War" and everything connected with it.

In a way, the DOCTOR WHO FANS turned the Time Lords into gods before the series ever thought of doing it, and hence the OUTRAGE at "The Deadly Assassin" lifting the curtain on them, as it were.

Of course the idea that Dr Who himself IS god, or "a" god, is one that has only had a noticeable push in the post-2005 stories. Aside from a brief flirtation with casting the Doctor as the DEVIL in "The Face of Evil", the idea that Dr Who actually "was god" was first seeded in the Andrew Cartmel years but, of course, producer John Nathan-Turner vetoed coming out and SAYING any such thing. That didn't stop the notion worming its way through a number of "New Adventures" – there's one particularly lovely scene where one character, who believes the Doctor to be a wizard, mocks Ace for accepting him as "an alien" with "technology" as if that EXPLAINS him. All of which leads to all that "lonely god" shtick from the year five billion and then with crushing inevitability to the Mister Moffster and the anti-Doctor "religion" of the Silence (and taking for granted that he can pull random powers out of his fluffy bottom).

So we seem to have a bit of a DIVIDE between HUMANS – who DO do religion, but religion is BAD, except maybe Buddhism except when that goes bad too, but we only take a pop at made-up cults and certainly never the "big two" – and ALIENS who don't do religion at all unless it's to dupe some poor saps who are usually human.

So why would the DALEKS suddenly go all "worship him, worship him"?

To be fair, it's not IMPOSSIBLE that Dalek religion has been there all along. The CULTURAL aspects of Dalek society usually get LOST in among all the running away and getting exterminated. We have, for example, only glimpsed Dalek POETRY and Dalek OPERA in a couple of "New Adventures" books. Truly too broad and too deep for the small screen. But they DO have a sense of AESTHETICS (whatever they may say to the Cybermen in "Doomsday"), even if their spaceship design tends to be pretty straight out of the Nineteen Fifties (by way of the Big Book of Pie Dishes. Mmm, pie), and their cities are largely EXPRESSIONIST structures in METAL, rather like their casings (Tellytubby-era New Dalek Paradigm not included, obviously). There’s even a statue in their very first story. It’s by the lift. Then down it.

The nearest to a Dalek religious experience, though, comes in Big Fish spin-off series "I Davros". This is a bit of a train wreck, in spite of the always-excellent Terry Molloy's best efforts, because doing "I Claudius of the Daleks" with a cast of four was never, ever going to work even if the scripts didn't end up exterminated under the weight of clichés. And the "twist" ending is SO BAD, so CACK-HANDEDLY MISCONCEIVED that you will want a go with the Brigadier's Brain Rubbers.

But... there is ONE bit in there where Mr Davros reveals to his new BFF Nyder the "Book of Predictions", written in the extinct tongue of the Dals. The last line says "...and on that day, men (Dals) will become as gods (Dal-eks)".

I will give them some credit for that: that rather nicely explains Mr Davros' state of mind when he decides to call his Mark III travel machine a "Dalek" and where he got the name FROM – AND why he is so shocked to hear Mr Dr Tom call it a Dalek before anyone's been told.

And, of course, it DOES segue nicely into Mad Dave's MOST FAMOUSEST soliloquy:

"Yes, I WOULD do it! That power would set me up above the GODS!"

Which tells us that at least the IDEA of "gods" exists inside of Davros's microwaved noodle.

(And, incidentally, reminds me that, similarly, Chessene O' the Franzine Grig – aka Servalan au Bacofoil – also put herself up to be up among the gods so the Androgums or the Third Zone have 'em, too.)

Sure, it's a very SIDEYWAYS bit of the canon, but it does very much fit with everything we already know about the Daleks. They've ALWAYS had a bit of a GOD COMPLEX – they’re always shouting about being the SUPREME BEINGS – and of course they are actually IMMORTAL.

Seriously, there are several stories – several of them from the Big Fish audio people, it's true, but it is at least IMPLICIT in "The Power of the Daleks" and also Davros' survival in "Destiny of the Daleks", and then "Resurrection of the Daleks" before he as good as comes out and SAYS it in "Revelation of the Daleks" – that Daleks are actually IMMORTAL. That is, they can live forever, barring accidents. And by "accidents" we usually mean "Acts of Ka Faraq Gatri" or, as you can probably guess, "the one that is called the Doc-Tor".

(Of course, that means we have to cast a sideways glance at Reproduction of the Daleks. The idea of Dalek SNOGGAGE is almost literally UNTHINKABLE, but fortunately the clues seem to add up to them all being CLONED from an original genetic bank, specifically the first bunch of Daleks that Mr Davros unleashes in "Genesis...". But NOT the NEW and IMPROVED versions living in the incubation room (who get EXPLODED). "The Parting of the Ways" itself implies that Daleks are grown from single cells, as does "Journey's End", and the failed genetic experiments in "Daleks in Manhattan" show that the Cult of Skaro at least TRIED cloning themselves but something went wrong – so there are either limits to the process OR (and more likely) the Cult's SPECIAL BREEDING includes something to stop them making more of themselves. After all, more THINKING Daleks was what got the Emperor into trouble in "Evil...")

So there's a good chance that Mr Davros programmed his Daleks to think of themselves as a race of GODS. And actually, a whole SPECIES that thinks it's Sutekh would go a ways to explaining the "let's kill everything in the Universe" attitude.

But why would OTHER "gods" start worshipping one of their own, no matter HOW big his casing?

Of course, the OBVIOUS answer is that these are NOT really Daleks.

THESE "Daleks" are actually made from HUMANS (something Mr Davros first tried in "Revelation of the Daleks"). So in a way this is REALLY another "cult of gullible dumb humans who have been convinced by a MAD, ALIEN, TIME TRAVELLER that it is GOD."

Because they used to be US, and are now LITERALLY our afterlife! The Emperor even SAYS it will be his HEAVEN – and he's got his saucer all full of CHOIRS of the departed praising him. The NUTTER. Let's hope they don't SING!

And it's hardly news that the EMPEROR would think he is god.

He already thinks he comes from a RACE of gods and then on top of that to be the ONLY SURVIVOR (whether or not the Emperor is the Dalek who met Rose near Salt Lake City) of a War that annihilates every other possible candidate for godhood...


To get all META-TEXTUAL for a minute, the Daleks ALREADY exist as a representation of ONE idea, namely INTOLERANCE, or more blatantly RACISM. Bringing in RELIGION too would make them a literally MIXED METAPHOR.

Where Mr Russell gets away with this in the new series is because real-world events have MOVED ON. The ultimate icon of intolerance USED to be the fascist war machine represented by LITERAL fascist war machines. But in our post-September 11th World, the new intolerance is the religious fundamentalist. So the Daleks MOVE with the TIMES and get religion.

Add to this the twist that these Daleks are really Human, and we get the subtle satire that religion has mentally and physically deformed them into MONSTERS.


So where did the Daleks GET the idea of religion?

Well, YOU try finding yourself in Utah and plug "supreme beings of the universe" into Google and see what happens!

Day 3959: Mysteries of Doctor Who #23: Why Does "Pyramids of Mars" Take Place in ENGLAND?

Thursday:



Here is me, kneeling before Sutekh!

Dust? Anyone?

"Pyramids of Mars" is one of the MOST famously SCARY episodes of Doctor Who, and one of the (very few) stories where Dr Woo takes down a GOD!

However, even though this story is an EPIC contest between two aliens with god-like powers – Sutekh the Destroyer in his pyramid in Egypt; and Horus from his pyramid on Mars – some people feel it necessary to point out that Sutekh cannot rise from his chair and Horus is slightly dead. So neither of them is coming to England any time soon. Which makes it a BIT odd that the bulk of the action takes place at Sir Mick Jagger's place in the Home Counties.

Of course, some people say that that the last episode is a bit of a let-down, and a bit of a knock-off of "Death to the Dustbins", but look: you are PROMISED a PYRAMID. And MARS. And that is what you get! And if a few MDF flats in a studio aren't good enough for you, then just you wait for the CGI ultimate edition!

Mind you, these are the same sort of people who don't like it that Sutekh is ultimately killed by the Doctor saying something clever about the time difference and using a bit of the TARDIS console. Which means that they have missed the WHOLE POINT.

Sutekh is a GOD and works by MAGIC. Doctor Woo is a TIME LORD and uses SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY.

And "Pyramids of Mars" is, basically, where SCIENCE tells RELIGION to FLUFF OFF!

(REALLY, as Daddy Alex will cleverly explain, this is all going to kick off NEXT season, with stories like "Masque of Mandragora" and "The Face of Evil" really laying on the "Dark Religion" theme, and also the techno-cults of "The Hand of Fear" and "Robots of Death" not to mention "That Thing with the Time Lords", but it all starts here with the evil Egyptian god of death and chaos getting his!)

Sutekh escapes by WISHING very hard and the Eye of Horus blows up. But this is the Time Lords' universe now, so little things like the law of propagation of electromagnetic radiation at the speed of light and relativity making lightspeed a universal constant are in play. And they TRUMP Sutekh's magic powers.

Finally to (TIME) RAM the point home, the Doctor uses a MACHINE (and not just ANY machine but HIS machine) to defeat Sutekh's MAGIC CABINET. And then literally kills the immortal with TIME.

It's not THAT subtle a reading of the we-can-hardly-call-it-subtext to say that, unlike the preceding Twerpee era, where magic, the devil, Atlantis, the Age of Aquarius and all that New Age jazz turned out to be LITERALLY REAL, the "story" of "Pyramids of Mars" is that science beats religion, end of.



Of course, what is REALLY interesting about this story is way that it handles TIME.

For starters, this story, broadcast in 1975, had Sarah Jane Smith stating quite boldly that she was from 1980. NOT "the 1970s" or 1975; clearly 1980.

We've done UNIT dating before, but to take it at a gallop: the UNIT era started out set a good DECADE into the future – with British Space Programmes and no end of HUGE not to mention DOOMED science-energy projects – but over the years this was quietly downgraded to just "the day after tomorrow" if that, with only a touch of video-conferencing to suggest it wasn't completely contemporary. And after his regeneration, Dr Woo has made it pretty clear that the UNIT era is over, to the extent that the immediately previous story-but-one, "Terror of the Zygons", is very much the valedictory UNIT outing.

So it's positively WEIRD of Sarah to be re-establishing herself as the girl of tomorrow. And we're already messing with the audience's heads when it comes to what TIME means to people. Sarah's from "our time", but now she's also from "the future" and she's in "the past". Are we confused yet?

But then there is that memorable scene where – having already cued us up to remember the works of Mr H G Wells – Dr Woo takes us to visit Sarah's 1980 and, as expected, the world has been destroyed. Only THIS wasteland is not the result of Thatcherism but the dust left behind by a vengeful Sutekh getting on with his day job of being "the Destroyer".

Now in part this is the ultimate in "show, don't tell": Sutekh is the ONLY Doctor Who villain EVER who actually SUCCEEDS; he definitively gets to Destroy the World™. Okay, so Dr Woo takes us back to 1911 and defeats him afterwards, but even that takes the SLAUGHTER of the whole of the rest of the cast (except for Ahmed the Egyptian porter – who Uncle Terry gets to finish off in the novelisation). And for a while there, Sutekh actually WON.

Spare a thought, incidentally, for Ernie Clements, the poacher. It costs him his life, but he saves the World. Having witnessed the brutal murder of Dr Warlock, he sets out to avenge the man, not realising that the murderer is the dead body of Professor Scarman. But his simple determination not to allow the killer to kill again, manages to save the Doctor, Sarah Jane and Scarman's brother Lawrence by distracting the undead Prof at the crucial moment. And hence he saves the World.

They do say that History repeats itself, first as tragedy then as comedy, but in Ernie's case the REVERSE is true. We see him run into Sutekh's deflection barrier TWICE: the first time he bounces off it is played as a big JOKE. But the SECOND time… with the mummies closing in… what seemed FUNNY becomes totally TERRIFYING!

And of course none of this is NECESSARY; the unlucky poacher is really only there so that Dr Woo can get hold of some explosives in part three! Mind you, his man-trap-sized rabbit traps ARE a bit on the BIG side!

What "Pyramids of Mars" is telling us, almost uniquely among Doctor Who stories although it's never actually contradicted either, is that the future and the past are CONTINGENT. That is to say, History past and future exists in one form until Dr Woo begins to MEDDLE. But once he has STARTED to interfere with events, he can no longer count on them working out as he used to know that they would just because "history" says they should. Even if his own past – via the agency of his travelling companions – DEPENDS on events working out according to "known" history.

For example, Sarah Jane's very EXISTENCE becomes PARADOXICAL once she sees that without finishing the adventure she doesn't have a world to have come from. This is a bit like Schrodinger's cat-monster in the box: Sarah Jane is both alive AND never existed until the experiment/adventure is completed. Only thanks to Dr Woo's Time Lord Powers™ she is allowed a sneak peek inside the box to see what her alternatives are!

More interesting, perhaps, is the often overlooked OPENING. After a bit in Egypt where Professor Scarman UNWISELY ignores the "Beware of the God" sign (translated by Ahmed as "aiiii, no!") and trespasses on Sutekh's grass with fatal consequences, the start of the story see Dr Woo and Sarah Jane travelling in the TARDIS and discussing dresses and mid-life crises, when suddenly Sutekh knocks a dirty great hole through the ship.

Now if Sutekh can punch a hole in an indestructible time machine at a range of who knows how many millions of light years never mind who can guess how far into the future – the Doc and Sarah are on their way home from the Planet of Evil in the story, er, "Planet of Evil" set on the edge of the universe in the space year thirty-seven thousand and change, (to a Morestran value of 37,166), and although they are ALLEGEDLY heading for UNIT HQ, there's NO indication that they are ANYWHERE near Earth let alone 1911 at the time – if Sutekh can do that, then there's no reason why he couldn't just destroy the Eye of Horus from the comfort of his own tomb.

Which he obviously can't do so obviously he shouldn't be able to puncture the Doctor's timeship either!

I mean, ultimately he DOES destroy the Eye with "mind power", but remember, he needs to get the late Professor Scarman NEAR to the thing to explode it in episode four because he's using the departed prof's zombie as a way to get around the effects of his imprisonment.

After all, kind of the whole POINT of the Eye of Horus is that it is STOPPING Sutekh doing this sort of astral projection shtick. It wouldn't be much good at stopping him destroying the world if it didn't!

Notice too that the Sutekh that Sarah sees in the TARDIS does not have his HAT on – she sees the Typhonian beast face, but he only appears that way AFTER the Eye of Horus is destroyed and he is at last able to rise from his chair (the Hand of Horus notwithstanding).

All of which SUGGEST that the Sutekh we see in the opening scene is actually… Sutekh AFTER HE HAS ALREADY ESCAPED.

Dr Woo even SAYS that he is tracing the mental projection to its source, which just HAPPENS to be the priory in 1911 that is on the site that will one day be UNIT headquarters.

In other words, the entire story APPEARS to begin with Sutekh escaping and Dr Woo going back in time to prevent that from having happened.

Who says the Grand Moff introduced the ontological paradox into Doctor Who, eh?

"Something is interfering with Time," he says to Mr Lawrence Scarman, "and that's MY job!"

This, as the Doctor himself might say, is intensely interesting. Sutekh ISN'T interfering in time; if Sutekh could time travel he wouldn't get stuck in the Doctor's space-time trap at the end. No, HISTORY says that Sutekh should never have been released: if he had been then Sarah Jane would never have existed, and SHE does so HE wasn't.

That may be the significance of Sutekh's appearance in the TARDIS being seen by Sarah Jane, not the Doctor. She says that "whatever it was, it was totally malevolent". Now to be FAIR, Mr Sutekh does rather RADIATE EVIL. But maybe it goes deeper than that and Best Friend Sarah is sensing at what Mr Larry might call a "biodata" level that Sutekh's timeline is totally inimical to her own.

(Plus she's dressed as a Victorian "sensitive" at the time; you can't get more mediumistic that that!)

So HISTORY has CHANGED. The interference in Time is Sutekh having got out at all, and that is why the Doctor – in his new "I walk in eternity" Time Lord duty mode – has gone back in time to change things back again.

Let me reiterate: something or someone has CHANGED HISTORY to release Sutekh. And we don't find out who!

Never mind "who blew up the TARDIS" at the end of season thirty one…

and when ARE they going to answer that question, that's what I want to know! (Clue: they aren't!)

…THAT's the REAL mystery!

There is – hat tip Daddy Alex – one POSSIBLE explanation…

Could it be that the REASON Dr Woo is going all broody (and falls into a year-long SULK) is BECAUSE his Time Lord Spidey-sense is telling him that there's an ontological paradox about.

Can Dr Woo sense the future? Well, next year, in "That One That Rewrites Everything We Thought We Knew", the same author is going to state definitively that precognitive visions of the future are impossible… in a story that HINGES on the Doctor receiving a precognitive vision! And THAT one's a TRAP too!

But, if you remember, the ontological or PREDESTINATION paradox is the one that SEEMS like it's allowable logically (it happens because it happens) BUT is the one that says there is NO FREE WILL. Essentially, Dr Woo knowing something's going to happen means he HAS to go and MAKE it happen. And since the Doctor has always stood for FREE WILL over DESTINY that would be BOUND to put him in a STROP.

Yet if "Pyramids of Mars" is telling us that History is CONTINGENT – and over and over again that is EXACTLY what it is telling us… even the supposed "padding" in part four is telling us this: consider the logic puzzle of the two guardians: they have fixed destinies, one must always tell the truth, one must always lie, whereas the Doctor has reason and choice on his side and he wins – if History is contingent on our decisions, then Dr Woo's big decision at the start is CHANGING HISTORY.

Superficially – not to mention meta-textually – he is choosing between returning to UNIT HQ and his larger destiny. Except that his "larger destiny" actually MEANS returning to UNIT HQ (or site thereof) because that's where Sutekh is waiting for him.

But as soon as that decision is on the table, History – future AND past – becomes contingent on it, and THAT is what lets Sutekh out!



In a story that is ABOUT the contrast between making choices and "destiny" then the conflict between the Doctor and Sutekh is INEVITABLE.

LIFE, in a universe with FREE WILL means CHOICES even though they come with RISKS. Sutekh wants NO RISKS and NO CHOICES.

Anyone who, by this point, is still thinking that Sutekh is a badly motivated villain who is "bad" just because he likes being "bad" is STILL missing the point: Sutekh is DESTINY INCARNATE, that's what gods ARE. Here he explicitly wants to deny any choice to anyone in the universe – and Bob Holmes is not even trying to be subtle when he equates this 100% with DEATH.

(But see also Mr the White Guardian's threat in "The Ribos Operation".)

Saying that Destiny doesn't have a motive is as silly as saying GRAVITY doesn't have a motive. And YES, you can defy gravity too.

"Your evil is my good" isn't JUST a cool line to excuse being the baddie; it's a statement that Sutekh and the Doctor are OPPOSITES. And again, see how those contrasts are REITERATED throughout the story, whether it is the lying/truthful guardians or the two Scarman brothers or even the (slightly stereotyped) contrast of "superstitious" Egypt with "enlightened", "rational" England…



Oh, that reminds me, I'm supposed to be explaining something!

So anyway, Sutekh's initial plan, of course, before he gets his frozen-in-place hands on a time capsule, is to build and then fire a war rocket at the Pyramid of Mars. Or rather, use "pyramid power" to transpose his war, er, pyramid with its target.

At which point those people turn up again to complain about the Sutekh being buried with all the equipment he needs in order to escape.

Except of course he ISN'T.

There is NO indication that ANY of the materials for the war rocket are actually IN the pyramid tomb with ol' Suuty.

The only things we can definitively say ARE from the tomb in Egypt are three mummy-shaped servitor robots (with matching slave relay ring accessory) and four canopic jars which form a force field (though these are almost certainly salvaged from the prison itself, probably designed to keep curious archaeologists from breaking in – either Sutekh has managed to tamper with them or the whoever who let him out did; this interference may explain how Dr Woo is able to easily disarm them too).

Actually, the exact number of Mummies is another thing that is STRANGE.

Obviously there are three of them 'cos there are three costumes and they're played by Mr Nick Burnell, Mr Melvyn Bedford and Mr Kevin Selway.

EXCEPT… when he sends them after poacher Ernie we clearly see TWO of them lumbering after him into the grounds but there are still TWO of them inside to drag away the body of cultist Namin.

In fact, it gets WORSE, because later on he has a quick tele-conference with Sutekh and the boss tells him not to let pursuit of the humans slow down building the rocket. So the late Scarman says he will recall TWO of the servitors from the hunt. But there are STILL TWO more who finally get poor old Ernie and then smash up the lodge at the end of part two. Which means there must be at least SIX of the buggers.

Plus the two with gold-wrap accessories doubling as servitors of Horus on Mars.

Clearly Sutekh's relationship with MATHEMATICS is as dodgy as his relationship with SCIENCE!

Anyway, it is far more likely that Sutekh has had to have the components of his war rocket manufactured for him.

And then it's MUCH easier to have all of his war rocket parts manufactured in England and delivered to Stargroves care of Ibrahim Namin than order them from Egypt in the days before Amazon Prime. That way, you only have to arrange for four sarcophaguses (three mummies and one space-time tunnel) to be shipped "home". We can assume that the Priory had its own crazy self-playing organ, though presumably Sutekh had to lay on the hot and cold running cultist.

And THAT is why he is using Professor Scarman's home in England as his main base of operations. Because England in 1911 is at the centre of a huge industrialised Empire. And Egypt is NOT.

PS:

"Pyramids of Mars" is available as an extra-feature on "The Scary Jane Adventures" season four, which means that it is the first "Classic" Doctor Who adventure to be available on Blu-Ray. Woo.

Unfortunately, it is presented in STANDARD DEFINITION rather than upscaled to HIGH DEFINITION and also in a rather nasty STRETCHED-TO-FIT widescreen. AND being a Blu-Ray already you can't fix this with the player controls.

So all in all I'd recommend sticking to the rather spiffy DVD edition.
.

Day 3317: Mysteries of Doctor Who #22: How Many Limbs Does Alpha Centauri Have?

Saturday:

Twelve.

Centauri, the funny-shaped Federation Ambassador to Peladon, is described as an hermaphrodite hexapod. That means he/she/it walks on six legs. But we can clearly SEE six more tentacle-like arms waving gaily out the front.

The rest is simple maths.

Of course in a completely different TV series, Londo Mollari, the funny-shaped Centauri Ambassador to Babylon 5, lets slip that the Centauri there have six prehensile, er, tentacles, sticking out the front too. And along with their four other limbs that must make them very nearly related to Alpha.

Though that probably makes Alpha even RUDER than she/he/it looks!

Actually, the fact that we can’t SEE the six feet on the floor, leads to the assumption that rather than being naked under that fetching yellow shower-curtain, Centauri is ACTUALLY wearing a floor-length dress with a bit of a ruff at ankle height. He/she/it likes a bit of rough, says Daddy. It’s green a tight collar. So it’s like the Centauri equivalent of a flesh-coloured roll-neck pullover. Very Nineteen Seventies!

Why not check out Daddy Alex's preview, and then go and see for yourself!


.

Day 3206: MYSTERIES OF DOCTOR WHO #21: Frontier in Space… What Happened Next?

Sunday:


If the answer is "Planet of the Daleks" there's something wrong with the QUESTION!

Let us look at what has been going on: Space… the final frontier… these are the voyages of Dr Woo in a space-going prison flown by Mr the Master.

"Frontier in Space" is Mr Mac "the incredible" Hulke's contribution to the all-singing, all-dancing (well occasionally, during "Carnival of Monsters") Tenth Anniversary of Doctor Who, and is also the first half of an EPIC twelve episode cross-over adventure that sees the Master and the Daleks team up to actually not meet the Cybermen for contractual reasons.

…available now on DVD under an exciting "Dalek War" wrapper!

This double-story celebration of the series' greatest villains is a twelve-part homage to the mighty "The Daleks' Master Plan", Mr Dr Billy's great adventure that also took place over the course of twelve weeks, and likewise features a Dalek scheme to conquer the galaxy, this time with added beardy villainy, making this actually: "The Master's Dalek Plan".


Then as now, the "epic" was split into two distinct halves: one part written by Mr Terry National Lottery and the other by someone who could actually write. Er. The DIFFERENCE is that last time, Mr Terry came up with a title, some character names and the mystery space elephant element Terrynationerum later shortened to Tarranium before handing it all in a manila envelope to the series script editor and jumping into a taxi for Heathrow. THIS time, Mr Terry insisted on writing it all himself. Which he did… in 1963 when it was called "The Daleks". Still, you couldn't get DVDs in those days so a "remake" in colour was actually a rather SMART way for new viewers to see what they missed back in the beginning. (Also available as, er, "The Beginning".)

What I'm trying to say is this: "Frontier in Space" is actually really good. REALLY good. Especially if you watch it one episode at a time. Certainly it entails Dr Woo being locked up in a whole succession of prison cells, but it's actually all rather clever the way that it escalates the sense of galactic threat: first he's just put in a cell on a space freighter that's come under attack; then he's locked up on Earth; then he's locked up on the MOON; then he's handed over to Mr the Master… and locked up; then he's locked up by the alien Draconians; and THEN he's locked up on the Ogron planet and it turns out that the DALEKS are in charge! The President of Earth, the Emperor of Draconia, the Master, the Earth-Minbari War, er… all sorts of huge characters and huge politics are cleverly presented to us as Dr Woo struggles to get ANYONE to listen to him. Meanwhile Jo Jo Grant finally proves herself when her pluck resists the Master's hypno-powers.

All of this build-up leaves you as tightly wound as a spring, expecting a big, big, BIG conclusion.

And then you get Planet of the Daleks. I'm just saying.

But SERIOUSLY, at the end of part six, there's a bit of a MYSTERY as to what is going on. Dr Woo has used Mr the Master's own "fear box" to escape from his (most recent) prison cell, he has freed Earth leader General Williams and the Crown Prince of Draconia and seen that they escape but on trying to get back to the TARDIS (stolen in part one by the Ogrons) he runs into the Master and a large group of his gorilla-like hench-lifeforms. Mr the Master pulls a gun and SHOOTS Dr Woo…

What, as they say, happened next?

Well, what we ACTUALLY see is that Mr the Master is suddenly gone, the Ogrons are scattered and a sobbing Jo Jo – now armed with Mr the Master's gun – is dragging Dr Woo into the TARDIS.

What is MISSING is clearly the intervention of the Ogron Eater, a being known – for reasons I am too young and fluffy to understand – as the "Giant Ogron Bollock Monster". We've seen it once, in the distance, attacking one of Mister the Master's goons. Mr General Williams describes it as a large, aggressive reptile, which suggests that either HE has never seen a large aggressive reptile (unlikely; he's stood next to the Draconian Prince) or the DESIGNER wasn't paying attention.

We see another, or rather a huge mural of it, in the Ogron's shrine, and it's clearly SUPPOSED to be establishing something for a big reveal at the end… Chekhov's Giant Ogron Bollock Monster if you will… but that reveal never comes. Probably because Jo Jo turning into an enormous hairy testicle was considered UNBROADCASTABLE. (This IS thirty years before TORCHWOOD, remember.)

But that's clearly what was SUPPOSED to happen: with Dr Woo out for the count, Jo Jo grabs the "fear box" and turns on. SOMETHING appears, terrifying the Ogrons setting them running. Mr the Master is knocked flying; Jo Jo gets hold of his pistol; and he does a runner. The rest you know.

Well THAT was easy… for an encore I shall prove that BLACK is WHITE… or rather in COLOUR these days (and the restored episode three of Planet of the Daleks actually look really good, especially – to daddy's surprise – the ICE tunnels, where you would have thought black and white pretty much covered it, but in fact they look much better, with a kind of depth to the polystyrene set that the B&W flattens and deadens. Well done all round; hope they have the cash for the other episodes that need colour restored.)

But what is actually WRONG with Planet of the Daleks?

Well, actually, there's a list as long as my rather magnificent nose… starting with the TARDIS air supply, and "infected by the fungoids"; via some of Dr Woo's most patronising lectures ever; via some of Jo Jo's truly astonishing stealth in Dalek control (there's a Dalek looking RIGHT AT HER when she slips out of her hidey-hole) not to mention her hiding the Thals' explosives BEHIND A FROND; via some of the WORST space-dialogue in the history of this part of the space-galaxy(!); via some of the most WOEFUL glowing-eyes-in-the-jungle effects you ever did see outside of a Scooby Doo cartoon; via all the random invisible aliens, space-plagues, countdowns and other Flash Gordon plot coupons Mr Terry so loves to use; through to a conclusion involving literally dozens of tricky-action Dalek toys and a gallon of wallpaper paste that just cannot be described in polite company!

But what is ACTUALLY actually wrong with it is that it's NOT parts seven to twelve of the promised epic.

Let's flash back to "The Daleks Master Plan" again. With Mr Terry writing – or rather NOT-so-very-much writing – the first half, they could let Mr Spennis Dooner write what he wanted for the huge impressive conclusion and director Mr Dougie "Colonel" Camfield and script editor Mr Donald "this is" Tosh could make up what they wanted so long as they finished where he started.

This time out, Mr Mac writes a tremendous political thriller building up to the outbreak of all-out war with the Daleks poised to sweep in and conquer what's left of the galaxy and Dr Woo calling on the Time Lords themselves to intervene… and then Mr Terry writes an ordinary six-parter where Dr Woo is SURPRISED to find that there are Daleks on this Planet.

There's nothing to connect this to the bigger picture that we've just spent a month-and-a-half developing; this adventure is essentially self-contained and almost "small scale", with the big picture further undermined by the underwhelming revelation that the greatest Dalek army ever assembled (subject to Time War revision) consists of a mere ten THOUSAND of the metal menaces. Ten MILLION maybe, would be a threat to the galaxy – though it would make the concluding Icecano-gunking even more improbable a method of stopping 'em – but ten thousand? With Earth, Draconia, Sirius III and IV mentioned in "Frontier in Space" ALONE, that's only twenty-five hundred per planet (assuming the Ogron world can be counted as "under control" already!).

I know "one Dalek is capable of exterminating ALL!!!!" but really!

Half the problem is having the Thals in it AT ALL. Apart from anything else it makes doing Dalek history a REAL pain, as this bunch of wet warriors REMEMBER the events of "The Daleks", a story that finishes with, er, the death of all the Daleks.

The Thals come from the Planet Skaro, and have only recently (it's now the Twenty-Sixth Century) developed space flight. The Daleks ALSO come from the Planet Skaro – yes, that's the REAL "planet of the Daleks" – and have had space flight since at least the Twenty-Second Century when they invade the Earth (in, er, "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"). That's a technological head-start of at least FOUR HUNDRED YEARS.

It's not IMPOSSIBLE to imagine a planet with two competing civilisations each developing space travel… like Russialand and Americaland did in the 1950s and 1960s. But NOT if one of those civilisations is the DALEKS. That would be the "exterminate all other species" Daleks. Even if they have no sentimental reason to re-colonise their homeworld, wouldn't they at least have used their MASSIVE space superiority to BOMB the Thals into extinction FROM ORBIT?

(…like they ACTUALLY do to Earth in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" and, well, Spiridon in, frankly, "Planet of the Daleks"!)

The solution is obvious: the party who have crashed on the "Planet of the Daleks" should NOT be Thals. In fact, they should be a party of humans and Draconians – following on from the end of "Frontier in Space", the Earth Empire and the Draconians should have allied themselves and sent out a force of scouts to search for the real enemy of both sides, now revealed to be the Daleks. Then, rather than references to "mythical figures" of Susan and Ian and Barbara it is Dr Woo's PERSONAL knowledge of Mr General Williams and Mr the Draconian Crown Prince that gets him in the team's good books.

This doesn't just tie IN with "Frontier in Space", but also ties UP the loose ends at the end – it neatly tells us that the Prince and the General DID escape, and that the Earth-Draconia War is OFF. By giving us a threat of ten (cough cough) million Daleks, enough to smash the Empires even if they DO unite, then the story gets bigger and becomes a vital race to give the new alliance a fighting chance.

Oh, and if the Dalek War has already started, then you can have the scout ships being SHOT DOWN by Dalek Saucers, rather than crashing. TWICE. (In the story as shown, we have to assume that the Thals have discovered space FLIGHT but not space LANDING; even then, it's an GINORMOUS coincidence that both rockets crash in the same small area of a rather large planet!)

You can even change the concluding moral homily from:

"when you tell your people this story, don't GLORIFY it; don't make it as an exciting space adventure in six weekly episodes…er…"

to:

"we haven't won the war; we haven't even won the first battle; we've just given ourselves a fighting chance…"

and by this you can imply that this is a small, but vital, skirmish part of a much larger, much broader history, consistent with the view from "Frontier in Space". (Plus get rid of more ghastly patronisation!)


Of course if you really, actually, desperately NEED to have the Thals in it… well, there's a solution to that too: you set the "Planet of the Daleks" actually ON the planet of the Daleks, namely Skaro, and the "random invisible aliens" turn out to be none other than the THALS themselves!

It would actually make more SENSE than that the Spiridons… er, Spiridonians… er, Spiridon-people have evolved/developed invisibility for no apparent (sorry, pun) reason.

The PEACE-LOVING Thals on a planet full of murderous (not to mention, post "The Daleks", vengeful and really quite p…ed off) pepperpots would need to find a way of staying hidden, and we already know that they have had some rather, er, peculiar evolution not to mention an affinity with drugs that affect radiation. Acquiring the ability to "fold" light around themselves would be a positive requirement and, frankly, not MUCH weirder than anything else that happens on Skaro.

It could also explain why Thal scientist Mr Codal knows what an "anti-reflecting light wave" might be!

Now, all you need to do is make sure that the designer doesn't install Dalek control panels with buttons that can only be worked if you have fingers (and not, say, sink plungers) and you're away!

PS:

Doctor Who's tenth anniversary came in the middle of the five year period when the series was produced by Mr Barry Letts, and we have heard from Mr Andrew and Mr Will that, sadly, he has passed away.


Mr Barry took over when Doctor Who was a series that had very nearly been cancelled at the end of the Black and White era, and along with his charismatic star, Mr Jon Pertwee, he turned it around and made it once again a National Institution.

Ideas and icons of the series introduced in his era have lasted through to today: okay, it's true that UNIT and Autons were ACTUALLY invented just before he took over, but they are closely associated with the show that he made, and you cannot deny him the creation of Mr the Master. The very shape of Doctor Who's future history, Earth's Empire, and its deep past, the Silurian legacy, were founded in these years, and even poorly regarded stories, such as "The Time Monster" (which, like "The Dæmons" before and "The Green Death" and "Planet of the Spiders" after, he covertly co-wrote), have left a legacy of powerful images, such as the god-like Chronovores or the TARDISes inside one another, which have influenced fans ever since, not least the great big lovely Welsh fan who – at least until Christmas – currently runs the show.

But more than that, the series that he inherited had become a shadow of the cutting-edge drama in space and time first developed by Ms Verity Lambert and Mr Sydney Newman, reduced to, a lot of the time, chasing monsters up and down corridors. Mr Barry put some HEART back into the series, introducing a thread of stories – like "The Curse of Peladon" or "The Green Death" – that were ABOUT something, and by having other stories – like "The Mind of Evil" and "Day of the Daleks" – play out against topical concerns about a possible World War Part III.

"Satire" today is often seen as just mocking and mickey-taking, particularly of those in power or the public eye, and we've rather lost the more important element of taking a critical view of society, even trying to correct it. It used to be the duty of the BBC to INFORM as well as to ENTERTAIN: Mr Barry clearly thought that that meant getting people to THINK, and that is a praise-worthy effort in itself.

I'm not going to say "rest in peace" because Mr Barry was a Buddhist. I'm not sure whether "come back soon" is appropriate either. Daddy Alex met him on several occasions and apparently he was lovely. Thank you Mr Barry.


.

Day 3183: Mysteries of Doctor Who #20: How Do the Macra Evolve?

Friday:


One thing that everyone knows about the Macra: the First Rule of Macra Club is that there is no such thing as Macra Club.


Dr Woo meets the Macra twice (or is it MORE than twice…?): the first time is when he is Mr Dr Pat and he and his friends Polly and Ben and Jamie visit "the Colony"; and the last time is when he is Mr Dr David and he and his friend Martha visit the New Earth.

So what exactly ARE these creepy-crawly creatures, emblematic of Sixties mind-control paranoia and Noughties nostalgia, that definitely don't exist?



We'll start at the end. Literally, the End: The End of the World.

Of all the silly things in Mr Tat and Mr Larry's "About Time", the idea that a special effect achieved in 1966 not being the same as a special effect achieved in 2005 is a GOOD reason for saying that the End of the World in "The Ark" is faked and not the same as the End of the World in "The End of the World" is… certainly one.

Let's look at the STORY: in "The Ark", the Earth gets exploded and the humans take all their stuff (and their chums the Monoids) and move to the distant planet Refusis to set up a new Earth; in "The End of the World" the Earth gets exploded and in "New Earth" the humans have taken all their stuff (and their chums the cat people) and moved to a distant planet which they call New Earth. Hmmm, could this be the SAME story?

But there's MORE. Travelling down to the planet Refusis, Mr Dr Billy finds that it is already inhabited by the disembodied voices of the Refusians. Meanwhile, in "Gridlock", travelling down into the depths of New Earth, Mr Dr David discovers that the planet is already inhabited by giant crab monsters, the hideous insect-arthropods called Macra, that he first met when he was Mr Dr Pat in "The Macra Terror" (unsurprisingly).

Almost everyone describes them as CRAB-LIKE. I mean have you SEEN them! (Answer: no, obviously not, see Rule One.)

Not that Doctor Who is SHY of playing with GIANT CREEPY-CRAWLIES, whether they are butterflies and ants ("The Web Planet"), maggots and flies ("The Green Death"), spiders ("Planet of the…well take a guess"), woodlice ("Frontios"), slugs ("The Twin Dilemma"), termites ("Valhalla") or wasps ("The Unicorn and the… oh, you got it").

So if you DID see Macra it might not be THAT surprising. (Please report yourself for mental de-processing afterwards, though.)

They tend to appear for CLIFF-HANGERS, usually putting the peril on a companion in New Zealand censor trims, though you get a better look through the car-fumes in "Gridlock". They have large crabby claws and big glowey eyes on stalks; they look like they've got tough shells too, in a single rounded section on the Macra's back, like a crab's, and not segmented like a lobster, but – when they DO move – they tend to lumber forwards and backwards, rather than sideways or crabwise. So maybe they're like some other sort of crustaceans, like a prawn maybe… hold onto that thought!

THESE Macra in "Gridlock", though, are all huge and mindless, whereas Dr David says they used to be SMART. (So presumably the Macra in "The Macra Terror" WERE smart… but we'll discuss that later!)

On the other fluffy foot, the Refusians are ALL smarts and no body. Do you see where I'm going here?

No? Well how about some more evidence: in "The Ark" the Refusian voice is portrayed by Mr Richard Beale; in "The Macra Terror" the Macra's propaganda voice is portrayed by, yes, Mr Richard Beale.

Could this plumy voice be what the Macra actually SOUND like? Perhaps their translator device comes from Hollywood and is pre-programmed with "the Evil voice".

So, if that's the case, could the voice on Refusis actually BE a Macra or, more accurately, an EVOLVED Macra that has left its big crabby body behind? And if the Macra DID evolve into Star Trek aliens with ways too mysterious to understand™, did they LITERALLY leave their big crabby bodies behind to feed on passing traffic and get enormous?

The idea that the Macra's intelligence does not ENTIRELY reside inside their lumbering carapaces might seem a bit RECHERCHÉ but it's not COMPLETELY out of keeping with their first appearance, where they exercise a Control over humans that seems entirely at odds with their monstrous forms, and entirely too delicate for their Big Claws.


Of course, it's not impossible that they're supposed to be some sort of titanic LOUSE, bloodsuckers preying on the underbelly of the Colony, which would be a different sort of "crabs" (EWWWW!!!!)


So are the Macra CRABS or INSECTS? Well, in "The Macra Terror", escaped LOONY / last sane-person in the Colony Mr Medok is the first to describe them (episode 1 scene 14):

"They move at night, in the dark. And look horrible. Creatures...like giant insects."

Best friend Polly gets to scream at one in episode two, but then has to try and describe it to brainwashed Ben who is ever so much in denial (episode 2, scene 8):

"I saw it! A huge face, like an insect, or a giant crab. It was horrible and it was looking at us and... and... and it had claws!"

By the conclusion, Mr the Pilot, Chief Red-Coat in the Holiday Camp-like Colony's hierarchy, also gets an eyeful of Macra when Dr Woo shows him who is in Control – and who is IN control – leading him to utter the infamous cry of:

"The Colony is in the hands of grotesque insects!"

Even though even if they ARE insects they certainly don't have HANDS!

Which begs the question: how exactly ARE the Macra in Control, anyway? They never really seem to DO anything other than gulp their special GAS and menace people with their Big Claws. Are they even intelligent?

(And as an aside, Mr Larry and Mr Tat also offer up the possibility that they are the NATIVES of the Colony planet, and that it is the humans who have driven them underground, making it even meaner that they get blown up at the end!)

However, Mr Russell sweeps these objections aside with a single line of Retcon in "Gridlock" when Mr Dr David describes them as a "scourge of this galaxy" and having an empire "built on human slaves".

So the Macra definitely ARE smart, and they definitely ARE behind the Colony's enslavement. Probably they have HYPNOTIC mind powers™ with which to take over gullible humans and control them into installing fiddly, not-very-claw-friendly things like nerve-circuits.

Mind Powers would, of course, tie in with an ability to evolve onto a new and non-corporeal plane, given two or three billion years of not-being-exploded-by-the-Doctor in which to do it.

But what sort of Holiday Camp would have a nasty infestation of insects? Certainly not this one, where all the clothes are laundered every day, and everyone gets a brainwashing every night.

Maybe they are another sort of BUG altogether. Dr Woo also describes them as like GERMS (episode 4, scene 16) and Mr the Pilot too asks if they are some form of monstrous BACTERIA (episode 4, scene 20) but then in the same line he thinks that they might be insects, again.

Isn't Dr Woo being METAPHORICAL about this, though? In a characteristically brief piece, er, pieces, Daddy Alex diagnoses the Macra condition:

"The Doctor treats them as if they are the Colony’s psychosis made manifest, and in that way they remain effective. Though they’re not able to do much except by insinuation – ironic, as they’re probably the physically largest monsters in the series to that point – that’s the whole point of the story, as they’re aided by the Colony not wanting their ideas or comfortable way of life challenged. The Macra are an idea: they’re the personification of the Colony’s problems, which is why there really are no such things as Macra."

So, the Macra are a DISEASE that is also an IDEA, but at the same time they are also great big monsters with CLAWS that breathe a special GAS.

That's completely PREPOSTEROUS… and also the premise of "The Invisible Enemy". I told you to hold onto that Prawn thought!

"The Invisible Enemy" would have been the MOST embarrassing story ever for Mr Dr Tom, if they hadn't broadcast "Underworld" three months later. It is, on the other fluffy foot, also the story that brings together the IRONIC… I mean ICONIC team of (as Daddy Alex puts it) "man in scarf, woman in leather bikini, and tin dog". But that's not important right now.

The POINT is that in "The Invisible Enemy", Dr Woo runs into a NOETIC (meaning made of ideas) virus called the Virus. First it gets into the TARDIS and then it infects Dr Woo's brain. (And at this point it is interesting to note that Macra mind-control is reinforced, while the Colony sleeps, by means of "nerve-circuits", suggesting something that is a MIX of technological and ORGANIC.)

Because Mr Dr Tom's brain is WEIRD, the Virus is able to cross the "mind-brain interface" and achieve a kind of prawny physical existence. And then, by hijacking the Doctor's Relative Dimensional Plot Hole Stabiliser, it gets itself blown up to enormous size. Before Leela* blows it up to even more enormous, but somewhat more diffuse, size thanks to an explosive combination of its preferred atmosphere mixed well with oxygen and run!

(*Actually Dr Woo does this, but it WAS Leela's idea, no matter what HE might say!)

But what if, what IF, not all of the giant-sized virus eggs get scrambled in the explosion?

And one other piece of evidence: paying a spot visit to the inside of his own head, Dr Woo ends up debating against the Virus for his very life. Like you do. He protests that it has no right to carry out its plans, not just because it is an evil invader but because it is acting against the natural order of things.

The Virus's proper place, argues the Doctor, is in the microscopic universe of bacteria, but it wants to invade the macroscopic universe too – the Macra-universe, you might say.


Is this going to get our TIMING in a knot, though? When fixing a date for "The Macra Terror", people tend to put it in the "Earth colonies" era, between the Dalek Invasion of Earth and the Earth Empire. So that's basically the Twenty-Third and Twenty-Fourth Centuries, along with stories like "The Space Pirates", "The Androids of Tara", "Vengeance on Varos" and, um, "Colony in Space" (well sort of).

But if the Macra in "The Macra Terror" are descended from the Virus, then the Colony would have to exist after the year Five Thousand, when Dr Woo definitively dates "The Invisible Enemy" to be set.

Yet surely this isn't a problem. Leela herself comes from a "lost colony" in the far future, and Dr Woo describes the year Five Thousand as "the time of your ancestors". And Mr the Pilot says that the Colony was "…settled from the Earth planet many CENTURIES ago". MANY centuries. "Many" sounds like more than a Millennium rather than less. Is eight centuries "many"? Could be; is "two"? Almost certainly not.

Dr Woo ALSO describes 5000 AD as "the year of the Great Break-out, when humanity went leapfrogging across the solar system on their way to the stars… ". A NEW wave of human colonialism is about to break across the galaxy, in spite of – or maybe BECAUSE of – the fact that there's supposed to be an Ice Age ("The Ice Warriors") and a scientific Dark Age ("The Talons of Weng Chiang") going on back home. Actually, the Kilbracken Cloning technique and the Zygma time experiments are all of a piece with an era where grotesque and ridiculous experiments trade real science for the carnival tent. Under those circumstances, the SMARTEST people on the planet will be looking to get OFF on any ship going, leaving the Earth to descend into its frozen neo-feudalism. Perhaps the Colony is founded by people leaving the Earth in the Break-out.

And, because it DOES all tie in – no REALLY! – if you were a super-evolved disease that feeds on INTELLIGENCE, you'd definitely want to be on those rocket ships with 'em.

The Doctor says that people in the year Fiver Thousand are “…waiting to spread across the galaxy like a tidal wave… or a disease.”

That's clearly an in-story reference, flagging up presence of the Virus, but it's also a more general point as well saying that humans carry their diseases WITH THEM. So you might think that some of those Colony ships that end up refuelling on Titan could pick up one or two surviving Macra and carry them out to the stars to infect new planets with them.

Therefore, is it completely unreasonable to think that "The Invisible Enemy" is an unwitting PREQUEL to "The Macra Terror"?

"The Invisible Enemy" has its own (deniable for copyright reasons) prequel as well, of course: "Fear Itself", the actually-surprisingly-good last adventure for Mr Dr Paul in the BBC Books range, actually a Past Doctor Adventure set in a gap in their own Eighth Doctor Adventures range. Obviously this was WAY past the point where the spin-off books desperately needed a new television series, though fortunately also after the point when Mr Russell was already writing one!

"Fear Itself", for the many millions of Doctor Who viewers who probably missed that one, reveals that for countless Millenniums the atmosphere of Jupiter was a battleground between two viruses, artificially engineered by aliens as weapons and nicknamed by the Doctor as "Fear" and "Loathing". Yes, it's Fear and Loathing in Los Atmosphere. Human scientists, studying Jupiter's weather, accidentally create a computer-virus version of the "Fear" virus and accelerate its evolution by millions of years to the point where it gets smart enough to join forces with its organic counterpart and try and take over. The Doctor manages to rescue everybody and leaves Fear and Loathing to take care of each other, but (like all true-hearted Macra stories) it ends with a great big explosion (don't mention "Gridlock", Daddy Alex!) and maybe, maybe some of the Fear virus gets blasted out of Jupiter's atmosphere to wind up in space on the way to what will one day be slightly off the beaten tracks of the Titan shuttle run…

…which is where the Virus gets picked up in "The Invisible Enemy".


So the Macra begin as a computer-simulation of a sentient idea based on an alien biological weapon. They evolve themselves into a virus, infect the Doctor, blow themselves up to Macro size, join the humans' Great Breakout, infest Colonies across the galaxy, crawl all over them, build an empire, lose an empire, and spend a billion years doing a little light gardening to make Rufusis all nice and tidy. And then they get an ark-ship-load of dress-wearing human refugees (and their elephants) land on top them just at the point where they've evolved BACK into ideas with superior mind-powers again.

This, as I am sure you know, is also the life cycle of a Liberal Democrat policy paper!

Welcome to Conference; Happy Seaside holidays, everybody!

Cue Dance of the Macra!



.

Day 3150: Mysteries of Doctor Who #19: How does the Brigadier manage to retire from UNIT before he joins it? Yes, it's the "UNIT dating" one.

Sunday:


"UNIT dating"*: it's the continuity niggle SO egregious that it has even crept into the programme's own dialogue (in "The Sontaran Stratagem", if you must know) and even Dr Woo himself cannot tell you whether his adventures with UNIT took place in the 1970s or the 1980s.

There just ISN'T a solution to keep EVERYONE happy; the evidence all contradicts itself.

But there's no avoiding it and, with the BBC releasing the Black Guardian trilogy on DVD, this is as good a time as any to sort it out once and for all.

Daddy Alex's advice: back away now!




All right, for those of you still with us, the story so far…

The very first UNIT story, well UNIT-ish, in that it introduced us to the Brigadier, even though he was only COLONEL Lethbridge-Stewart on that occasion, was "The Web of Fear".

Now, in "The Web of Fear", Dr Woo, Jamie and Victoria arrive in a mysteriously deserted London but fortunately they meet someone they know: Professor Travers, along with his daughter Anne. They previously met the Prof in Tibet in the adventure with "The Abominable Snowmen" which was three stories ago for them but rather longer for Prof Travers, in fact he says (episode two, scene nine):

"Why that's... that's over... forty years ago!"

Two scenes later, and while Victoria is explaining their time machine to her, Ms Anne clarifies further:

"And you met him - when was it you said? In 1935? In Tibet?"

So, the earliest possible dating for "The Web of Fear" is 1975 (and probably later).

The NEXT story, where we are introduced to UNIT properly, is "The Invasion" where now-Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart refers (episode two, scene eight) to the business with the Yetis in the underground: "Must be... four years ago now."

Which means that "The Invasion" has an earliest possible date of 1979.

Jumping ahead to "Planet of the Spiders", the Brigadier tells Sarah Jane (episode six, scene twenty-nine):

"One time I didn't see him for months. And what's more, when he did turn up, he had a new face…"

which suggests a gap of "months" between "The Invasion" and "Spearhead from Space" (though in itself that's odd, referring to a gap of "months" when the Doctor's immediately preceding absence was of "years").

The clues become a little thinner on the ground after this: "The Mind of Evil" suggests that the Master has spent a year masquerading as Emil Keller, giving an unexpected twelve-month gap between the first two stories of season eight; "The Dæmons" takes place on a May Day; "The Day of the Daleks" on a 13th of September.

Generally we can assume that they DO take place in the same SEQUENCE as we see them broadcast – "The Mind of Evil" has to follow "Terror of the Autons" as the Doctor has the Master's dematerialisation circuit; "The Sea Devils" has to come after the Master's capture in "The Dæmons" and so on.

The place where there IS a little doubt, at least Mr Tat thinks they might be better the other way around, is between whether "The Ambassadors of Death" or "Inferno" comes first or second. But we have to accept that "Ambassadors" is the first, because of the Doctor's remaining p'ed off with the Brig for blowing up the Silurians. Nor can, I'm afraid, "Colony in Space" where Dr Woo takes Jojo on a daytrip in the TARDIS take place before Mr the master fixes it for him in "The Claws of Axos".

Although whether Mr the Master experiences them in the SAME order is another question entirely! In a LOT of ways it would make LOADS more sense if he experienced "Colony in Space" FIRST – having stolen the Time Lords' files on the Doomsday Weapon, why waste time with Nestenes and Axons and Mind Parasides (oh my!) – and only THEN came after Dr Woo on Earth for REVENGE. Unfortunately, he recognises Ms Grant, so that one's up the swanny too.

Could we take a clue from POLITICS? The British Government during Dr Woo's exile is, er, rather peculiar to say the least. Mainly because no one in the Doctor Who production office knows the difference between a Permanent Secretary and a Secretary of State. Or a Secretary from the Typing Pool, either, in all probability.

We DO however, get a couple of glimpses of who is Prime Monster: in "The Green Death", the Brigadier gets a top level spanking from the Ecology Secretary, who hands him over to "Jeremy", who many people assume to be Liberal Leader Mr Jeremy Thorpe. Then, in "Terror of the Zygons", the Brig addresses the First Lord of the Treasury as "Ma'am". Which, in spite of what we now know about la Thorpe, probably does NOT refer to Dame Jeremy. In spite of all too many fanboys bending over backwards to suggest that "Ma'am" is Our Shirl (Tom Baker) or possibly Ms Barbara Castle (Tower of London) in a Labour Government of the mid Seventies, it's just too, too prescient of Queen Maggie, Prime Monster from 1979, elected after all those Labour energy projects (Wenley Moor, Stahlman's Gas Drill, Nuton Power Station and so on) go a bit TOO White Heat of Technology and explode.

Anyway, eventually Dr Woo rescues the Time Lords from Mr Omega, regenerates and finally leaves the UNIT era behind. But not without a final tantalising clue:

During their terrifying adventure with Sutekh, Last of the Osirans, in "Pyramids of Mars", Sarah Jane suggests just nipping off because they KNOW the World isn't going to end in 1911, no matter what Mr Sutekh wants. So Dr Woo dials up the space year 1980 – and remember that this was shown in 1975 so that's five years into the future even then – and shows them a future Earth blasted to flinders.

"But I'm from 1980" says Sarah rather plaintively. And anachronistically.

And not long after that though the Doctor leaves Sarah Jane behind (in Aberdeen, as it turns out) and loses all contact with Earth of the present, near-present or UNIT era-whenever. His next chums, Leela and K-9 both come from the future, the tin dog from the year 5000 and Leela from even further, and then Lady Romana, the Time Traveller's wife, comes from Gallifrey.

The next time we meet anyone REMOTELY local it's Ms Tegan Jovanka and she is as absolutely contemporary as its possible to be – to the extent that "Four to Doomsday" establishes that she first enters the TARDIS on 28 February 1981, which is the date of broadcast of episode one of "Logopolis" when indeed she first enters the TARDIS.

All back in synch until the 20th Anniversary Year, and the story "Mawdryn Undead".

Here Dr Woo arrives at a dead posh public school and is surprised to find that Ian Chesterton couldn't make it, so the maths class is being taken by a retired Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, amnesiac fist class. And it's 1983.

Worse, troublesome Tegan has gotten translated in time and winds up in the year of Mrs the Queen's Silver Jubilee, 1977, and meets… well who do you think? And he's already retired then!

So, it's 1977 and the Brig has retired from UNIT at least two years before he founds it.

Has, perhaps, Mr the Black Guardian been messing with TIME?




Understandably, a LOT of Doctor Woo fans have been quite upset by this contradiction for some time, and often go to ludicrous lengths to assert that their version, and only their version, of the Doctor's history is the right one.

The MOST barking of them try to "re-date" "Mawdryn Undead", perhaps moving the bunting to 1982 to make it the Royal Wedding rather than the Jubilee. That is obviously nuts.

The other extreme is to say that since "Mawdryn Undead" RELIES on the dating in a way that "The Invasion" really doesn't, that it must be the dating of "The Invasion" that is ignorable, and all the UNIT stories are actually set in the year they were broadcast, "The Invasion" falling back to 1969, "Spearhead from Space" being 1970 and so on, allowing the Brigadier to retire after 1976's "The Android Invasion" or "The Seeds of Doom" where he is said to be in Geneva.

Now there ARE a lot of incidental things that you COULD use to suggest a contemporary date for UNIT adventures. There are, for example, no CARS to be seen that are manufactured later than the date of filming (unless you count the Whomobile… no?), and the registration numbers are a giveaway too. Classically, there are price labels in pounds shillings and pence in "Spearhead from Space" and the taxi fare to the Ministry of Science is "three and six" in "…and the Silurians" which would make them both pre-Decimalisation. And you COULD choose to date the stories by the haircuts and fashion sense. Though of course that would mean that you should insist on dating "The Long Game" (clearly dated to 200,000 AD), New Earth (clearly dated to 5,000,000,103 AD) and Utopia (clearly dated to 100,000,000,000,000 AD) all to take place in 2006.

CLEARLY the production team couldn't INVENT next year's model cars nor next season's fashions, and as often as not they just forgot or never realised the need to cover up or disguise the more blatant "now-isms".

But you can tell that they had an INTENTION of a "near-future" setting, and they included the odd little thing to be slightly startling to say "this is not quite today": usually it's a VIDEO TELEPHONE. Though casually tossing in a population of eight million for London or suggesting that the Prime Monster is a woman are other classic examples.

The PROBLEM was that the production teams CHANGED, and so just how FAR into the future that intention lay changed too.

The initial UNIT conception by Mr Peter Bryant and Mr Derrick Sherwin was for TEN years into the future, hence all that dating in "The Invasion", and hence the stories in season seven that they commissioned (even if they didn't end up PRODUCING them) having HUGE leaps forward in technology, like experimental fusion reactors built under Wenley Moor or a British Space Programme that has landed on Mars (using Quatermass IV rockets, no doubt).

But then the team that takes over are Mr Barry Letts and Mr Terrance Versatile Disks who are much more cautious, even "conservative" about how many days-after-tomorrow this is, and we drop the dating hints and technology things become a little bit less removed from the present day.

When Messrs Hinchcliffe and Holmes take charge they want to start throwing out little hints and clues that unsettle the audience, so the business with the "original" console room, the rules about regenerations and THOSE faces in "The Brain of Morbius" are all of a piece with the unexpected suggestion that Sarah is actually from five years into the future.

Ultimately the series falls into the hands of the pairing of Producer Mr John Nathan-Turner and script editor Mr Eric Wayward, and the thought is that UNIT is part of the programme's HISTORY, and so they set UNIT and the Brigadier's retirement in the relative past. Even Mr Wayward has since admitted that this was a cock-up.


So you are left with CHOICES:

Present Day +10 years:
Agrees the dating of "The Invasion" (and arguably "Battlefield", broadcast 1989, set – at least according to the novel – in 1999)

Present Day + 5 years:
Agrees the "I'm from 1980" dating of Sarah Jane (and arguably this is what the new series adopted when the Cyberman head in Mr Van Statten's museum in "Dalek" was labelled "London Sewer, 1975")

Present Day +1
Agrees the dating of "Mawdryn Undead" (at a pinch) (and arguably makes sense of the fashion statements, if not the non-regulation UNIT haircuts).

Basically, they're sort of in the future. A bit. Pick one and accept that you are WRONG when watching some stories.


Not satisfied with that? Oh, all right, how about this:

Perhaps, Mr the Black Guardian HAS been messing with time.

What draws him to Brendon School in 1983 in the first place? Why draw the Doctor and Mawdryn into collision in THIS particular time and place? Why, of all the aliens on Earth (yes, there are LOTS, we know that from Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures) why pick weaselly Turlough?

Maybe it's because this is a WEAK SPOT in space and time, a place where the Black Guardian CAN do the sort of mucking about needed to set up his nya-ha-ha-ha-haaa plots. And if it IS a weak spot in time, the most logical cause of that is… the Brigadier himself. We know that the story is going to see him temporally duplicated. But Mr Black Hat arrives before that… so, what if it's more complicated still?

What if the 1977 Brigadier who is "retired" and working at Brendon Accademy for Bullying Backward Boys is ALREADY temporally duplicated!

Just suppose that, after "The Seeds of Doom" when we last hear of him, there is an UNSEEN adventure for the Brig when he ends up getting SENT BACK in TIME.

Arriving in the 1970s, the FIRST thing that he would do is contact the DOCTOR.

And the Doctor would say: "My dear fellow, I can't possibly help you. Don't you remember, the Time Lords have stranded me here! And you talking to me like this risks the most awful PARADOX, not to mention the Time Lords adding penalty time to my Exile. I suggest you go and lose yourself somewhere until you catch up with the time you came from. Good bye!"

This would explain why when we find him he is doing something so utterly unexpected as being a teacher in a boys school: it's as out of the way and unlikely to bump into himself as he can think of.

When Dr Woo asks him how long ago he left the army, the Brigadier tells him "seven years ago". But AT THE TIME, the Brig is suffering from AMNESIA and the Doc has yet to break through Alistair's mental block with sepia-tinted flashbacks.

Now looked at like that, it doesn't MATTER whether the UNIT stories (or at least some of the later ones) ARE set in the 1980s; there is no contradiction because the 1977 date does not give us an upper limit on the year that the Brig retires.

Problem solved!

Now, perhaps someone can explain why the Doctor thought it was a good idea to post Sarah Jane a K-9 in-a-box three years before he met her!



*no, I'm NOT going to make the joke about Mr Mike Yates and Ms Jojo Grant.

Anyway, he ends up with Sergeant Osgood, as all true-hearted fans of "Happy Ending" know.


.

Day 2992: Mysteries of Doctor Who #18: Do the Cybermen have invisible planets?

Wednesday:


Because on the face of it, they certainly seem to.

Planet #1: Mondas, aka Blowy-uppy-world.

Mondas, I don't like Mondas, I'm going to burn the whole planet down. Though, ironically, that's what they try to do to Telos, and only blow up Mondas by mistake.

In "The Tenth Planet", astronomers from Earth SUDDENLY spot a ruddy great planet barrelling down on us. Now, even though this was set in the DISTANT FUTURE of, er, 1986, and therefore before Mr Lembit had got all shouty about asteroids, a planet the size of Earth (which, by definition, Earth's TWIN planet would be) ought to be visible for millions of kilometres. You know, like Mars and Venus are. And yet this comes as a total surprise to people who are running a SPACE PROGRAMME and therefore jolly well ought to know. Flying a rocket isn't just Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre, you know.

And yet somehow, Mondas just "appears" from nowhere.

Planet #2: Telos, aka Freezer Empire (catchy advert: "Mum's Gone to Telos")

Although Dr Who returns there in the DISTANT, er, PRESENT DAY of 1985 for the "Attack of the Cybermen", the Cybermen's home from home – or rather tomb from tomb – is first visited in "The Mummy". Er, what? No, you see, "The Tomb of the Cybermen" is basically a retelling of the Mummy legend, with Telos as the Egyptian desert and Cyber-control as the lost pyramid. The hieroglyphs, sorry "logic-symbols", are the big give away. Oh, and the lumbering Undead rising from the tomb to exact their curse on whomsoever should disturb their eternal slumber. Anyway, this, in and of itself, relies on Telos being a "lost planet", somehow difficult to find. Invisible even.

But then to compound that, there's the evidence that Telos is actually IN our own Solar System. To reprise the whole Planet 14 debate: all of the mighty Trout, Mr Dr Pat's, adventures with the Cybermen are set in the Solar System and in the 21st Century (or late 20th), and all of them make it pretty clear that the Cybermen do NOT have interstellar technology and desperately need to conquer the Earth as their only hope of survival. Well, they all do so long as you accept the allowances you have to make if you're to make ANY sense of that one written by Mr David "I wouldn't know the difference between a Galaxy and a Finger of Fudge" Whitaker. Given that going cryo is their very-last-throw-of-the-dice option, that would suggest that the oh-so-difficult-to-find Telos is right here in the Solar System. Which would have to make it even more difficult to detect.

So ARE they invisible?

Well, there IS another possible explanation, although it's a bit "Star Trek".

The alternative is that there is some kind of WORMHOLE near to where the Earth orbits the Sun. And Mondas fell through it.

This isn't QUITE as unlikely as it sounds, at least not in the Doctor Woo universe. There's at least one occasion when a pretty ordinary Earth spaceship (i.e. one of the ones that THAT stock-footage from NASA can double for) manages to accidentally get lost in another star system. Admittedly that's "The Android Invasion" aka "The One with the Spoiler in the Title" (or more precisely "The One with the Spoiler in the Title that doesn't have Daleks in it"). Nor is it unknown for planets to apparently wander in and out of the Solar System – Voga in "Revenge of the Cybermen", Vulcan in "Power of the Daleks", arguably the Moon in "…and the Silurians" – so there's a least a chance that trans-galactic billiards is on the cards.

And of course, the whole of Torchwood is based on the idea that there is this space-time rift to anywhere that just happens to have a back door in Cardiff.

Actually, the Torchwood Rift (or GIANT ANTI-PLOTHOLE as it is called) ought to be a tiny wee crack in the Universe (what with the Gelth specifically NOT able to come through in numbers) rather than the bleedin' enormous demon-disgorging dimensional doorway that it is used as whenever the plot calls for it to be the Hellmouth this week, but N E Waaaaaay.

It's been put forwards by others that the REASON the Earth keeps getting invaded in the 1970s and/or 1980s (your UNIT-dating mileage may vary) is because there is some STRATEGIC value to the planet beyond the prettiness of its oceans and the nice view towards Alpha Centauri. A convenient hyper-space by-pass to the Oseidon system (or wherever) would certainly be that.

Mondas popping back thorough the rift would satisfy the "suddenly appearing from nowhere" criterion that "The Tenth Planet" sets up; and if Telos is at the other end of the rift, especially if the other end isn't fixed (yes, just like that one with the Ferengi) then that would make it the "lost city/planet/tomb" for which Professor Parry's team had to scour the universe. (Even though they seem ill-equipped to scour a BATHTUB!)

But that's not really "drifting to the edge of space" is it. It's rather more "blimey, where did the sun go?" and "where's parallel Professor Richard to tell us that WE'VE moved and not all these new planets" to be honest.

No, the wormhole explanation won't do.

Instead, let's pretend that the Cybermen behave logically like they claim they do (but DON'T!) and look at this that way.

This whole problem starts with Mondas becoming increasingly uninhabitable as it drifts away from the Sun. The Mondassians have got time and technology on their side, but otherwise they're more STUFFED than I am.

We know that their EVENTUAL solution was to turn themselves into friends of Dorothy. (OK, so the straw cybermen and the cowardly cat-monster Mondassians were even less successful…) But what else might they have considered?

Well, large scale INSULATION of the planet might be a good idea. Your main needs are to keep the atmosphere in and to keep it warm: what you want is some sort of dome over much if not all of the planet, an artificial sky that is reflective on the inside to retain as much heat as possible and is totally black on the outside to absorb any warming sunlight that manages to fall upon it.

Entirely as a BY-PRODUCT of that technology, you've built a great big NINJA COSTUME for your planet, rendering it difficult if not impossible to see.

Of course, returning to the environs of the Earth, such a shroud would result in the REVERSE problem, runaway global warming. And we already know that Mondas suffers from overheating. The Cybermen would need to pretty quickly disassemble their planetary blanket… hence apparently materialising out of nowhere!

That's Mondas explained… what about Telos?

Well, ask yourself about the native Telosians, the Cryons who we meet in "Attack of the Cybermen", a species so evolved for sub-zero conditions that they VAPORISE at room temperature. And yet, humans appear able to wander about on the surface of their home planet without instantly turning to popsicles. So, what, the Cryons invented the freezer BEFORE they evolved? It seems a little unlikely. Obviously, something has happened to CHANGE their planet – and what more obvious a change than the invasion of the Cybermen.

Actually, even this doesn't really make total sense. We're supposed to believe that the Cybermen invaded Telos to take advantage of the Tombs… so the giant fridges must have been there before them… so they can't have been built BECAUSE of the Cybermen. But let's take a little CREATIVE licence. Say the Cybermen invade Telos just because. After all, it's a planet and their own world, Mondas, is currently on an apparently one-way trip to deep space doom. But the Telosian weather is routinely what we call "a bit nippy" or even "quite brisk". And yet fortunately the Cybermen just HAPPEN to HAVE the technology to hand for exactly these circumstances: they adapt same techniques they used on Mondas and set about adjusting the Telosian climate to be a bit more to their liking. And, as the temperature rises, the Cryons are forced to build refrigerated cities just to survive the Global Warming.

In this sense, Telos is twin-of-terraformed into a planet with Earth-like surface conditions (and quarries) encased in a black light-absorbing suit making it vanish. The only way to detect it would be by calculating the effect that its gravity has on the surrounding system… enter the Brotherhood of Logicians with their "mass intelligence" able to put in the thousands of man hours of calculations needed to locate the lost planet.

On the other fluffy foot, ASTROLOGY rather than astronomy would be more in keeping with the whole "ancient curse" vibes. And the Cybermen ARE the astrologers of the Doctor Who Universe.

After all, their plans begin with the movement of the planets ("The Tenth Planet"), before progressing to the Moon ("The Moonbase"), a nova in another galaxy(!)… oh all right, meteorites ("The Wheel in Space"), a planet of gold ("Revenge of the Cybermen") and finally turning into a falling star themselves ("Earthshock"), even if they wind up chasing a "magic comet" ("Silly Nemesis").

Of course an INVISIBLE planet would turn an astrological chart to gibberish… if it wasn't gibberish ALREADY! Maybe that is why all of the Cybermen's schemes go wrong.

"Your Stars for Today. Telos: a tall/short dark/fair young/old stranger will be important to your plans. Maybe don't bother going out."



.

Day 2916: Mysteries of Doctor Who #17: Is Kylie a Conker?

Christmas Day:


Isn't it ODD how many aliens in Doctor Who look just like human beans? Some people say it is because the Doctor's people, the Time Lords, made the other species evolve that way; some people say that it's to do with the pattern they made in the Universal morphic fields; some people say Just be grateful we don't get wrinkly rubber noses like they do on Star Trek…

For example, the people of the Planet Sto aboard Max Capricorn's doomed space liner Titanic.

(Incidentally, since they're all far from home does that make everyone on board Sto Aways? Okay, never mind that.)

The funny thing is, we've seen a bunch of tourists on their way to visit the Earth before: the Navarino coach tour to 1950's Disneyland that comes to grief (in so many more ways than one) in "Delta and the Bannerpersons".

In their natural form, the Navarinos are purple blobby things, slightly like upright caterpillars, but with pointy heads and stubby arms. It is not unreasonable to suppose that such folks might STAND OUT slightly, especially in one of Earth's more, shall we say, conservative decades.

Fortunately, they have to hand a "transformation arch" that handily disguises them as an assortment of British character actors who've raided the BBC costume department.

Could the people of Sto have taken a similar precaution?

Well, take a look at Bannakaffalatta. Just take a LOOK at him! But nobody on the ship blinks an eyelid. Clearly, he's not in any way UNUSUAL on Sto. Well actually, he IS unusual, but it's because he's a closet CYBORG, not because he's bright red and spiky! But equally there aren't any OTHER aliens of any description on the ship, so he OUGHT to stand out. It's a "dog that didn't bark in the night" observation, but perhaps it because as far as everyone else is concerned he DOESN'T stand out.

Maybe, maybe, he's not unusual because EVERYONE on Sto looks like that.

What if, in fact, the passengers and crew on the Titanic all look like that as well?

Perhaps Mr B has taken advantage of the option NOT to transform himself to cover up the fact that the process doesn't work on Cyborgs.

Actually, there are a couple of things that count against this theory: first, there's his NAME: Bannakaffalatta. It's just not the same as all the other Sto people's names: Astrid Peth, Alonzo Frame, Foon van Hoff and the rest. They're all a little bit… Earth-like. And his really isn't; it's a "comedy alien name". Like the one Mr Russell is always deriding: "Planet Zog". In the Doctor Who scheme of things (in which the scale of things as large as planets, where hugeness allows for a VARIETY of cultures, is never properly taken into consideration) it suggests he's MORE alien than they are. And second, there's Mr Max Capricorn, who (never mind the sheer redundancy of transformation-arching himself, or for that matter his portraits and corporate videos) is definitely much MORE cyborg than little Bannakaffalatta, but does not have a Conker-head on top of his box.

Still, it's rather ENTERTAINING to think of everyone on planet Sto running around looking like the little red spiky guy, and it would certainly teach Dr Who a lesson for making eyes at another blonde.

When, after all, she's really a Red Head.

PS

I have a TANGERINE in my STOCKING!

Elephant’s Treasure

What? What?! WHAT!?!

Dragon’s Christmas

Merry Christmas, everyone!


.

Day 2771: Mysteries of Doctor Who #16: Is he MORE than just a Time Lord?

Saturday:


"In the end, Doctor, you are JUST another Time Lord," says Mr Davros.

"Oh Davros… I am far more than JUST another Time Lord," replies Mr Dr Sylv.

Or rather he doesn't because that exchange was cut from their confrontation over the Hand of Omega, and yet somehow EVERYONE manages to know about it anyway.

Nowadays, Mr Dr David will tell you that he is "…not just a Time Lord. I'm the LAST of the Time Lords." But does that make him "more" or is there something more to it?

What exactly was that mythical exchange supposed to mean?

Followers of the Cartmel Master Plan would tell you that this is one of a series of hints – along with what mad Lady Peinforte didn't say in "Silly Nemesis", and what evil Mr Fenric alludes to in "The Curse of Fenric" – that Dr Who has a mysterious SECRET in his past, possibly related to when Mr Rassilon and Mr Omega first invented Time Travel.

Later, Mr Russell Gary would use the novel of the sensational TV movie staring Mr Dr Paul (aka "Time Waits for No Man") to suggest that by "more than a Time Lord" Dr Who had meant "half human".

Later still, Mr Russell Davies apparently nixed THAT idea with "Journey's End" saying there's NEVER been a half-human half-Time Lord before.

But just looking at the series, there is SOME evidence that he really is MORE than the other ordinary Time Lords.

It's worth pointing out that Dr Who does have some "Time Lord super-powers" anyway, even if you don't count the amazing bigger-on-the-inside space-time machine: speed-reading (as seen in "City of Death" and "Rose", and implied by Susan in "An Unearthly Child"); the ability to mimic other's voices ("The Celestial Toymaker", "Masque of Mandragora", probably "The Invasion of Time" and the Master does it all the time too, notably imitating the Brigadier in "The Time Monster"); hooting really loud to shatter glass ("The Power of Kroll"); and (more plausibly for a TIME Lord) immunity to certain out-of-whack-ness in the time-fields (as in "The Time Monster" and "Invasion of the Dinosaurs").

The Doctor and the Master both demonstrate hypnotism to varying degrees and proficiencies, so that MIGHT be a Time Lord power or it MIGHT be a learned skill. Both of them can hypnotise other Time Lords, too.

But there IS one distinct occasion when Dr Who gets a definite "power up", plus another that is a bit of a maybe. Added to which there is the all-important question whether there is more to him than perhaps even HE knows.

The indisputable one is that in "The Invasion of Time". Dr Who is joined to the Matrix, the Time Lord's collection of all knowledge and Keanu-movie archive.

There's no question about it, Mr Gold Usher makes it explicit that you can't be UNCONNECTED from the Matrix afterwards, so we have to assume that even when he seems to lose his memory at the end of the story, Dr Who remains wired in to near omniscient knowledge. And this would rather make sense of a lot of the times when he's a total know-it-all from now on, most particularly the "narrows it down" scene with Mr Dr Christopher in "World War III" – because he is accessing the second-hand knowledge of the Matrix rather than stuff he knows himself.

If you want to take this a step further, Mr Lance Parkin's range-finishing Eighth Doctor novel "The Gallifrey Chronicles" says that when his home planet got the FOOM treatment, all the contents of the Matrix were bundled up and safely stored between the Doctor's EARS. It's semi-implicit that he downloaded it all again later, but you don't have to read it that way; it could all still be there.


The next occasion to consider is the conclusion of "Enlightenment".

Ahh, you may say, but Dr Who turns it down (just like he turned down the power of Mr Azal in "The Dæmons" and will turn down immortality when Mr Rassilon offers it to him in "The Five Doctors" though Mr Rassilon may be taking the michael by that point). Well it is TRUE that he turns down a lump of glowey stuff that Mr White and Mr Black Hat are offering him.

BUT, Turlough also turns down a bit of Enlightenment, a big diamond, when it gets offered to him. Turning it down gets Mr Black Hat off his case (and indeed melts all the buttons on his flame-proof nightie). And then Dr Who says that enlightenment WASN'T the diamond; it was the CHOICE.

So, at least implicitly, Dr Who did get Enlightenment at the end of that story when HE got the choice over the glowey stuff.

You can add this to other occasions when he has "grown" in a Buddhist way: quite recently in "Snakedance" he gained the insight to defeat the mental Mara; and of course his entire third regeneration is a great big Buddhist parable, with all the bells and whistles and spiders.

As well as the Guardians, Dr Who has encountered a LOT of other god-like beings on his travels, from the Toymaker and the Animus via Sutekh the Destroyer (these days, bringer of milk to all humans), through to the Beast. With the exception of Mr Azal (turned down) though, he rarely risks benefiting from the encounter, unless he picked up tips on dusting from Sutekh while held in a brain lock. (Mind you, his hypnotism DOES improve after this: witness Best Friend Sarah, Mr Henry Gordon Jago and Ms Rodan all put under the 'fluence with barely more than a hard stare!) By the time he gets to the Gods of Ragnarok and Mr Fenric, though, he's knocking them back with aplomb, so either he's getting used to it or he HAS got more powerful since the early days.

One possible piece of evidence to point to is "The Deadly Assassin".

Plugged into the Matrix, playing a life-or-death computer game against traitorous Time Lord Chancellor Goth, Dr Who gets "killed" when hanging off a cliff by only his scarf and a Samurai-disguised Goth chops his scarf in two. It is all over for Dr Who! And then he manages to come back again. Coordinator Engin, monitoring from the APC control room, remarks that Dr Who must have "extraordinary reserves of Artron energy."

"Four to Doomsday" reveals that the TARDIS is powered by Artron energy, and it's long been assumed that it is therefore a kind of Time Lord brain juice.

Dr Who therefore has more of this than other Time Lords.

It's possible that this is natural to him – we see his mental force drained in "The Savages" (or we would if the BBC hadn't "savaged" the recordings) and it's a lot more than a grunt-level human. Which doesn't tell us a lot. But then when he's Mr Dr Pat he turns the tables on the Great Intelligence and in "The Web of Fear" has a go at draining THAT. We know that Jamie pulls the plug too soon, but we don't know how much (if any) Great Intelligence Dr Who gains in the meantime.

Having said that, the newer episodes, "Dalek" and "Army of Ghosts" talk of time travellers soaking up Arton energy as a "background radiation", harmless but one that the Daleks can use to feed off.

This is quite clever as it suggests that Dr Who's "extraordinary reserves" have been built up because of his many, many years of travelling; most ordinary Time Lords rarely leave the safety of Gallifrey and so do not have the same amount stored up.

A case of travel literally broadening the mind.

This is similar to the way that in "City of Death" he is able to detect the "crack in time" caused by Scarlioni, the Count, and his half-working time machine when his time-slip is showing. There, Dr Who says that it's because he's crossed the time lines so often, again implying it's a sense or sensitivity – like the time-sensitivity that becomes important in "Warrior's Gate" – that no ordinary Time Lord would have. Ms Romana, who is with him at the time, does appear to confirm that she senses much less than he does.

And on a similar track, "The Invasion of Time" sees him better able to thwart the mind-reading powers of the invading Vardans than senior Time Lords like Chancellor Borusa because he's had lots of EXPERIENCE in the big bad world and can confuse them with his muddled and eclectic thoughts. What's for tea?

In extremis, Mr Mad Larry Miles's "Alien Bodies" suggests taking this to the ludicrous limit with the implication that by the time he finally snuffs it, Dr Who will be so chock full of magic powers from building up experience points that even his BODY is going to be a SUPER-WEAPON in the Time Lords' future War.

On the other fluffy foot, there IS an occasion when Dr Who's mind-power is shown to be LESS than another Time Lord's. It is in "The Brain of Morbius", when Mr Morbius totally wins the mind-bending contest. In fact Dr Who is only still breathing at the end because Mr Morbius's head-case goes bang-pop!

Mind you, any ordinary Time Lord would just DIE after the brain-wrangling that Morbius gives him. But Dr Who is given a dose of the Elixir of Life and recovers. You COULD argue that that is another definite upgrade, though the rest of the story implies that the effects of the Elixir are temporary… or at least the immortality upgrade is. It's not IMPOSSIBLE that Dr Who does gain other benefits from having had a swig of the good stuff.

Of course "…Morbius" is the story that also presents us with the "eight earlier Doctors". "Lungbarrow" – as I have previously explained – chooses to explain these faces by suggesting that they belong to the mysterious figure called "The Other" who helped Mr Rassilon back in the beginning. This implies that Dr Who is special because he is the reincarnation of this strange person who isn't even from Gallifrey at all!


Some commentators have pointed out that after these faces are revealed, Dr Who begins his change to something "more than just a Time Lord", quickly rising to President of Gallifrey and discovering previously hidden knowledge of the Guardians, the Fendahl, the Great Vampires and other ancient powers and evils.

A simpler explanation though – and one of my favourite fan retcons – might be that Dr Who's past has been CONCEALED for some reason not yet known. After all it is hardly uncommon for Time Lord history to be, shall we say, edited for the greater good. The Time Lord's have no knowledge of The Master, for example, because he has simply removed his Biog Data Extract from the records.

This of course would mean that in reality, unknown to himself or the Time Lords, Mr Dr Tom is the TWELFTH Doctor, not the FOURTH and Mr Dr Peter the THIRTEEN and LAST.

As further evidence, the dying Mr Dr Peter seems uncertain that he CAN regenerate – "feels different this time" he says. And poor Mr Dr Colin is VERY confused at still being ALIVE when he becomes Doctor.

Then, remembering that Mr the Valeyard is said to come from "between your twelfth and final incarnations", this might tie him in to the mysterious Watcher – who in this counting scheme is also an intermediary figure between these two personas. Perhaps Dr Who is split, like a nasty Star Trek transporter accident, into white and black versions of himself during that particular regeneration crisis. (An effect which might tie in PSYCHOLOGICALLY with one interpretation of The Key to Time stories.)

That would then make rather more sense of Mr the Valeyard's desire to posses the Doctor's remaining regenerations. If Mr Dr Colin, rather than being sixth is in fact at the start of an UNEXPECTED new regenerative cycle, then taking his regenerations represents an entire lifetime to Mr the Valeyard rather than a paradoxical possession of the lives he's had once already.



To sum it up, then: Dr Who IS more than just another Time Lord: he's got all the knowledge of the Matrix; he's probably gained Enlightenment (several times over); his travels have boosted his Artron energy and made him sensitive to the timelines; he may actually be immortal and even if he isn't he seems to have had more lives than he's allowed.

But the MOST important thing is that Dr Who has been hanging around for ages with HUMANS, and good ones at that. They've clearly been a GOOD INFLUENCE on him too. Nowadays he is much less likely to drop a big rock on a wounded caveman's head and much more likely to use his faith in them to hold off Haemovore attack. Or to snog their brains out at any opportunity.