He was Biff in Back to the Future.

The Prisoner was set in Portmeiron (ha!). The Secret Agent - OLD episodes - is being shown on a broadcast channel - Charge! TV - as Danger Man (which may have been its original title). They also show (OLD!) Avengers - ones with Honor Blackman.

Have not seen tonight's yet - will use it for workout tomorrow. But I just realized what has been bugging me about this new doctor. She's NICE. The Doctor has mostly been good - with some very dark exceptions. But I don't remember any version of the Doctor who was nice. I'm not sure you could even say that about the fifth doctor.

I agree with this. The Fifth Doctor spent a lot of his time being not so much nice as tetchy, a side effect of having to travel through space and time with Adric and Tegan. The Second and Seventh Doctors were avuncular at times (notably the Second Doctor comforting Victoria about her father's death in the middle of Tomb of the Cybermen), but I wouldn't call them nice (especially the Seventh).

I'm fine with the idea of a nice Doctor in and of itself - one of the strengths of Doctor Who's format is that it can reinvent and explore options - but not if it makes her ineffectual as well. Particularly glaring in Arachnids in the UK, where she just lets Ed Sheeran walk. (I feel like there's an earlier draft of that ep with a different conclusion, given his "I'm exposed!" bout of scenery-chewing.) She was more effective both last week and this week, though last week included some problematic elements. (Side note: one thing I didn't notice about the resolution was that Kerblamazon was going to shut down for a month, but the staff were only going to receive two weeks' pay over that time.) Up till then, though - and really I'd include Kerblam! in this - she's made a habit of achieving only limited victories.

That's a closer point of comparison with the Fifth Doctor. When he took on the role, DW had spent twelve very successful years headed by Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker - both of whom were really characters first and actors second. (Extremely good at it, but still.) Peter Davison was quite the contrast - less attention-grabbing, less fuelled by leading-man charisma. More like the Second Doctor - he didn't just walk into a situation and take charge, he seemed to prefer to remain unnoticed while he worked things out. That could work well. I think Frontios shows him at his best; Caves of Androzani, which takes him out of his comfort zone, is regarded as one of the best adventures of all time.

However, these seem to be almost in spite of the production team. The script editor of the time seemed to be more taken with the villains and all too frequently showed up this Doctor as being insufficiently ruthless for a violent universe. Resurrection of the Daleks has a traumatised Tegan leaving at the end, unable to cope with all the death anymore. (And has the Doctor threatening to gun down Davros before vacillating. Nothing wrong with refusing to shoot him; but the initial threat makes him look weak.) Warriors of the Deep ends with the Doctor in a base, surrounded by the corpses of all the humans and the monsters who'd attacked them, impotently wishing there had been another way. And of course Earthshock saw, for the first time in 16 years, the death of a companion. (To raucous approval, but still.) Two of those were written by the script editor. Seems pretty much to have been his actual vision of what Doctor Who should be. (Lots of pretty brutal violence that the Doctor is often powerless to stop.)

I'm guessing you're not a fan of Adric. Though I confess to saying "Oh, yay" when he went boom.

Not so much, no, though here I was thinking more about general audience reaction. One does feel a bit sorry for the actor (Matthew Waterhouse) - it was almost his first TV gig and he didn't really have the chops for it (it was one of only three TV roles he ever did). Aside from that, the production team couldn't agree on what the character should be - he started as an Artful Dodger concept, but morphed into an obnoxious maths swot. (His lowest point was Four to Doomsday, where the writers opted to have him decide that the frog-shaped alien tyrant on his way to place the Earth under his totalitarian rule was making some good points. And that girls were just not very bright, and kind of icky.) That said, I don't think he did himself any favours - pretty much all his coworkers are pretty scathing towards him in commentaries and interviews, which suggests he didn't build up much goodwill. (Lalla Ward in particular is utterly and hilariously savage about him.)

However, I still rate his adventures above average, and for his first three (the E-Space trilogy), I think the character worked pretty well. His acting wasn't inspired, but it wasn't a drag either. He really gets lambasted for his time with the Fifth Doctor (at which point he'd been on the show longer than any of his coworkers). Previous post, I covered the script editor, Eric Saward, and his apparent wish to be making Apocalypse Now in space. At the same time, the producer, John Nathan-Turner, was trying to make Eastenders in space, which was wildly incompatible and worked out just about as well.

This has some relevance for the current season. JNT decided that for the Fifth Doctor, they should get back to having three companions, like the show had at the start; and they should use the larger cast to generate interpersonal conflicts and dramas, as in a soap opera. Now, I don't think this is a bad idea. Russell T. Davies showed that you could make this work with Rose and her family. But JNT, unlike almost all his predecessors (and successors), had no scriptwriting experience. And Saward clearly wasn't the guy to do interpersonal drama. As a result, you got a crew who just mostly seemed to be irritable with each other for no particular reason, or fighting over completely artificial issues (e.g. fascism: yes or no?).

With, ultimately, no good reason for the expanded cast, they took turns at being sidelined. (The nadir, possibly, was Terminus, where two companions spent a couple of whole episodes trapped in the airducts, with zero effect on the actual plot.) Which brings us to this season, with three companions again, and the soapie idea. If you are actually planning to do something with the character relationships, then I'm in for a four-person crew. To date I think this season is a bit lopsided. The deal between Graham and Ryan gets a fair bit of airtime, but the other possibilities are still rather loose.

But at least there's no Adric.

And now, a brief interlude inspired by last week's ep:

Q: Why doesn't the sonic screwdriver work on witches?
A: Because... they're... made of wood?

heh.

It Takes You Away: I kind of loved it. I enjoyed the different settings, Ribbons was delightful, the Norwegian Gothic was creepy enough for Ryan to nope on out of there (my Ryan, not the character). I do have quibbles, the ending was a bit rushed and the exposition dumps were particularly dumpy. But this ep really felt like it was doing Doctor Who and doing it well.

One of Doctor Who's great strengths is that it can do virtually any kind of story. It's done westerns, fairy tales, superheroes, Méliès-style head trips, Bond movies, courtroom drama, French farce, Greek myth, Shakespearean tragedy, political satire, social commentary, and more space opera, period drama and Gothic horror than you can poke a sonic at. And then they started pastiching not just genres but specific stories, anything from Frankenstein to Jason and the Argonauts to Murder on the Orient Express. And somewhere along the way, they also realised they could also use this trick to stitch different genres together. Which is what you get here. The cabin in the woods, the Antizone tunnels and the Solitract's universe are all from wildly different stories playing by different rules. I'm a big fan of Doctor Who doing this kind of thing (assuming it's done well), if only because it's particularly well-suited to do so.

I thought Whittaker's Doctor really worked in this story. In particular, I felt this ep showed the limits of her niceness. It starts in the cottage, where she shows great concern for Hanne, before deliberately keeping her in the dark with the message she writes out for Ryan. That was Seventh Doctor-level manipulation. And once in the Solitract universe, she wasn't inclined to sugar-coat things. "She's not your wife! She's furniture with a pulse." is pretty blunt. And she then was quite ruthless in working on the Solitract to sever the relationships, almost seducing Erik's wife away from him, right in front of him. Conversely, the key to 'winning' this adventure was precisely her ability to empathise with - well, a talking frog puppet on a chair. I wouldn't say she's the only Docgtor who could've convinced the Solitract both that she was its friend and she had to leave, but I do thinkshe could do it better than any of the others. This ep added some interesting texture to her main character traits. A couple of other notes. Thought this was kind of hilarious:

Ribbons: Bird is lunch. Maybe codger is tea.
Graham: Who are you calling a codger? It's you who stinks of his own wee.
Ribbons: That's not my wee.

Reminded me of Death to Smoochy. ("Scuse if I smell like piss. You know how it is.")

Also, they wrung a bit of emotional complexity out of the Doctor's wall-writing. ("Assume her dad is dead. Keep her safe. Find out who else can take care of her.") First, putting Hanne's situation so bluntly, and making Ryan responsible for it. And then when her deadbeat dad returns and is confronted with it. (One fumble in this ep, and part of why the ending seemed rushed: Hanne's dad had abandoned her for days, allowed her to think he'd been taken, terrorised her to keep her in the house. That goes beyond a bereaved father struggling with a tendency towards neglect. The ep seems aware of this at points, but should really have addressed it at the end.)

I have a couple of other thoughts, which delve into history, but that's for another post.

Ok, let's talk history. This is not the first time that Doctor Who has done this plot. (Specifically, the final part – a powerful entity who is trapped alone inside another universe, which they can shape as they please; seeks to have the Doctor stay to keep them company forever.) But it was very different. For this we go back to the Third Doctor, and the show's tenth anniversary.

Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor was charismatic and talented; but the scriptwriters were running out of ideas. (e.g. in season 5, all but one adventure was a variation on the base under siege setting.) When he decided to leave after three years, ratings were poor, and the show faced cancellation. In fact, the only reason it wasn't was because production of the new show they tapped to replace it ran into trouble. The BBC agreed to one more year while they teed up another option. The showrunners decided this called for drastic action, and they basically blew up the whole premise of Doctor Who. Jon Pertwee's Third Doctor was going to be an Avengers-style action man. All of time and space was shelved; the time Lords stranded him on Earth with a broken TARDIS. The scruffy anarchist who brought down governments instead joined a shadowy military organisation and became a staunch defender of the status quo.

It was hugely popular with audiences, especially once they added Jo Grant as his companion and the Master as his nemesis, and the show was reprieved. It was less popular with the new showrunners, who chafed at being restricted to present-day Earth. (There's a story that one writer complained the only options for Earth stories were mad scientist or alien invasion. The script editor, Terrance Dicks, responded by coming up with the Silurians, a now-displaced native race that had been masters of the planet before us. So, three options.)

After three seasons they were ready to do something about it. This was also the show's tenth year on the air, and they resolved to open with some event television, the show's first (unless you count the Christmas episode in The Daleks' Master Plan). Back came the Time Lords, a figure from Gallifrey's past, the universe in peril, but the big draw was right there in the adventure's title: The Three Doctors. They brought back William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton to reprise their roles. They found regeneration's second trick: for the first time, three Doctors would share the stage.

Or that was the plan at least. Even when in the role, Hartnell's health had been failing (a large part of why he was replaced). By now, he was simply too unwell to do so. he still appears - on the TARDIS' monitor, propped up in a chair and reading advice from cue cards. (As a child, of course, I noticed none of this.) He still steals the show when he's on screen (so to speak). It was Hartnell's last acting role of any kind before his death two years later. He'd been the Doctor for 137 episodes of the show.

That left Pertwee and Troughton to handle the action. That was prickly - Pertwee felt threatened having Troughton back, and was frustrated with Troughton's habit of ad libbing lines. (Troughton was much more the experienced actor; Pertwee's background was in light entertainment.) But eventually they sorted it out, with I think a bit of ego-stroking.

On to the plot, and hopefully the semblance of an actual point. In the story, the Time Lords' energy is being drained through a black hole, while alien creatures are beamed from it to seek the Doctor. The desperate Time Lords break the First Law of Time to unite the Doctor with his past incarnations to fight the threat. It turns out to be the work of Omega, a legendary figure from Gallifrey's past. It was he who engineered the energy source for the Time Lords' time travel (working with Rassilon), but he got caught in the gears, so to speak, and trapped in an anti-matter universe. Now he seeks revenge on the Time Lords who he feels abandoned him, and wants the Doctor to take his place – to sustain the anti-matter universe so he can return to ours. Once he discovers that his body has faded away, leaving only his will (and he is thus unable to leave), he instead demands the Doctor(s) remain to keep him company for eternity. The Doctors defeat him when they discover the Second Doctor's recorder had fallen into the TARDIS' inner workings. When they'd all crossed over, Omega was able to basically convert them to anti-matter, preventing an explosion. But the recorder, caught in temporal stasis, was not converted. They trick him into removing it from its stasis field and scarper in the TARDIS as the pocket universe explodes. The grateful Time Lords lift the Doctor's exile, leaving him free once again to roam the universe in his big blue box.

So there are some obvious parallels with It Takes You Away. What interests me are the differences. Omega is partly a tragic figure, but also clearly a megalomaniac, a danger and an enemy. The only appropriate response is to defeat him. Some dialogue, as he wallows in self-pity for his imprisonment:

The Doctor: "All my life I've known of you and honoured you as our greatest hero."
Omega: "A hero? I should have been a god!"

Captain Logic is not driving his tugboat. But 40 years later, that's no longer good enough. The Solitract isn't evil. Defeating it isn't a matter of overpowering it, not even of tricking it; in fact, the idea that the Doctor is tricking it is explicitly rejected. Rather, it's about finding the right emotional response. It's an adversary of sorts, but it's not hostile. The entire tone of that part of the story is worlds away from the Third Doctor's era. It's much lower key, lower stakes, but greater emotional complexity.

One of the reasons I love this show is that the Doctor wins through cleverness before violence. Overall, you'd have to say it's got better at that over time.