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On the Sontarans, a leftover point. It’s worth comparing the Sontarans with Joe Haldeman’s Forever War, about a millennia long war between humans and an alien race of clones called the Taureans. The war so completely shapes and redefines human society, that ultimately, humanity becomes a cloned race themselves. I’m not sure that the Forever War inspired the Sontarans. The dating seems wrong. But it seems that the ideas were floating out there at the time.

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@phaseshift

Astute comments and very interesting. I am wrestling with legacy. I mean, with Daleks, for instance, it’s really impossible to separate them from their legacy. For all the great monsters, there’s a body of appearances which span decades or multiple Doctors, there’s a continuous wrestling of new writers with ‘what do these guys mean’ and perhaps a simple issue of what do we do with them.

It seems to me that a monster can be created with really distinctive iconic qualities. Qualities that make you want to come back to them, and get them more stories. But once the monster is established, does it retain those iconic qualities.

Are Daleks or Cybermen or Sontarans uniquely themselves in every story they inhabit, are they so distinctive in each story, that you couldn’t simply switch them out with one of the others, or some other utterly generic made up monster? And if they’re not that distinctive in some of these stories, if they end up as generic monsters in stories, how much mojo do they retain? Do they import mojo into those stories based on their previous history?
Do they get it back in further stories? Is a first appearance as defining as a last? Do we look at an overall gestalt? Surely the fact that they keep on coming back, and may well keep on levelling up or accumulating mythology counts for something? What about repeat appearances where they don’t level up or add mythology?

Forgive me. You may have the impression I’m speaking with authoritative certainty. If I was, I’d probably do it as a blog. I’m actually thinking out loud, without much certainty.

I started off with ‘what archetypal or iconic symbolic aspects’ make a monster great. But then, the more I thought of it, the more I waded into a swamp of visual impacts and motifs, which took me into the countryside of costume design and the limitations and advantages, and then recurrent stories, legacies, etc.

I find I am almost at sea. I might come across as a philosopher pontificating pompously, imperiously declaring pronouncements. But really, I’m a man on a little boat in a stormy sea getting tossed around, and trying to find a place to grip onto to make sense of it all.

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Now, let’s look at the third great monster – and arguably, the Classic series only produced three.

The Sontarans. Okay – terrific costume. It beats the cybermen like a rented mule, it’s beautifully simple. No ornaments, no accouterments, just a simple space/soldier uniform. It’s got appropriate padding, but it doesn’t impede movement at all. Even better, the headpiece allows for full visibility for the actor, there’s very little restriction of the field of vision. A Sontaran costume allows an actor almost complete freedom. No worries about stumbling over furniture. You can even ’emote’ which I’m told that actors are fond of doing (although I’ve heard a good shot of antibiotics will clear that up).

The most novel aspect of the Sontaran costume is the headpiece, a profoundly thick necked potato headed headpiece. The early version had nasty eyebrow and chin hairs. This kind of fit in with their backstory of being heavy gravity worlders. But it also fit in with their metaphorical origin – they were a race of soldiers, they were based on an exaggeration of a notion of the bull necked thick headed warrior, the muscle whose head sits on a thick, thick neck. In short, they were a soldier race, who where an exaggeration of the notion of the soldier.

Robert Holmes created a whole backstory for the Sontarans, an eternal war with the Rutans, a race of clones, a kind of Spartan civilization that had devoted itself completely to warfare.

This was in the chill period of the cold war and of the youth movement. 1974-75, the origin period of the Sontarans was a period of social confrontation. On the one hand, there were the cold warriors from the 50’s and 60’s, now into their third or fourth decade. On the other side was social upheaval, détente, the fall of Nixon, the fall of Vietnam, the peace movement, the emergence of china as a third force, etc. There were a lot of people who were saying that the cold war, or the eternal war, the state of armed terror between two superpowers… that was a bad idea. I think the Sontarans really were inspired by that cultural moment.

So why did they go on to become the third great monster, in a field littered with also-rans: The Quarks, the Yeti, the Ice Warriors, etc. etc. Why did they succeed, when deliberate attempts to create the new daleks failed?

My cynical answer is that the costume because it was relatively cheap, doable and offered a lot of freedom, made them easy. The Sontarans had five appearances in the classic series – The Time Warrior, the Sontaran Experiment, the Invasion of Time, the Two Doctors, and Jim’ll Fix It. They also had some major pseudo appearances – Shakedown, Mindgame, Mindgame Trilogy. And they’ve made it into Nu Who.

There’s some evidence that their ‘motif’ wavered. The Invasion of Time or the Two Doctors didn’t intrinsically require Sontarans. Their mythos was not in play. They could have been subbed out by any suitably bad monsters.

The Sontaran experiment, I think, is very much in Holmes mold. It’s pretty much a throwaway serial. But the Sontaran feels true. Not particularly sadistic or malicious, but not at all kind, he’s just a soldier doing his job, which is conducting field examinations on humans by torturing them to death. Tom Baker has this wonderful shtick where he unstrings the Sontaran by telling him that he’s wasted his time on inferior servants and hasn’t actually tested the humans at all. You can just see the Sontaran mentally kicking himself and swearing over wasted time.

But then you get to the Invasion of Time, and it’s less persuasive.

There’s a trope called ‘villain decay’ which explains how the tough world beater at its first appearance can slowly lose its distinctiveness and menace and simply become a generic and rather unimpressive villain. It’s familiarity.

I think that in the later part of the classic series, the Sontarans suffered that. I mean look at the Two Doctors. The Sontarans are supposed to be a clone race, that’s part of their shtick. But they’re different sizes? I think that perhaps because their costumes offered opportunity.

The pseudo-stories and the new series actually try to be more faithful to the Sontaran motif. It’s interesting, because we are far removed from the particular cultural fulcrum of their creation.

But perhaps that distance from the cultural fulcrum is why the Sontarans are such a distant third. There’s enough there to keep them in the game. But not enough to get them star billing?

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One thing with cybermen is that they suffer the slow-monster syndrome. The costumes are relatively workable. The Cybermen body suits do not unduly restrict movement. There’s a full range of motion, and with allowances, it is possible to move fast and precisely with them. The hands are about as flexible and dexterous as hands that are encased in rigid gauntlets. Compare that to the lego hands of the Ice Warriors. So they can do more. The problem with the cybermen however is that the costume helmets limit their visibility. So they can’t move freely, for fear of tripping over furniture, bumping into things and each other.

So typically, the Cybermen move slowly and carefully over distance. In close quarters, they can move pretty quickly, or in doing things like marches in formation. This kind of works to their advantage a bit, in that it gives the cybermen a stiff, deliberate, even implacable quality that’s consistent with their motif as robotically enhanced people.

I think perhaps the limitation on movement probably lead to the development of the great cybermen ‘money shot’ – you know the one? Where they just burst out of a wall, or capsule or something, and step forward, like a very calm and determined silver hulk. It wasn’t part of Tenth Planet, but it was an Iconic image for Tomb, and variations of it showed up repeatedly after that.

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Or were the Borg just a rethinking of the Cybermen? Nu-who’s single big innovation with the Cybermen is the suggestion that after conversion, you might still be yourself down there, trapped, deep down, helpless, a prisoner of your cyber-circuitry.

There’s also that Matt Smith episode set far in the future where the Cybermen were such a threat that they obliterated whole sectors of space, and where even a cyberman relic was infectious. That’s such an extreme far flung take on the cybermen that really… they’re barely cybermen.

Of course, it’s the same thing with Daleks. Both Daleks and Cybermen have, in their extreme incarnations, gone nanotechnology, which means that both are now infectious transformative life forms. But it also ignores a lot of the potentials of nanotech. Nanotech based monsters are so peculiar a thing, that I’d suggest that they shouldn’t have bothered.

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Bear with me, I’m just trying to work out ideas.

Let’s try Cybermen. The second place monsters. They haven’t done as well as Daleks. But let’s dig in and see what they’re made of.

One thing that strikes me about the Cybermen is that their appearance and fortunes have changed dramatically through their incarnations. Strictly speaking, there have been four principle Cybermen designs: 1) The Tenth Planet cybermen, with their cloth faces and codpiece guns. 2) The Tomb Cybermen under Troughton, that show up in Tomb of the Cybermen, Moonbase, and Wheel in Space. 3) The Waffle-Head Cybermen, who showed up in the Invasion, then proceeded to skip Pertwee and bother Baker, Davison, Baker and McCoy. 4) The Cybus Tin-Can Men, the modern armoured Iconic design.

Visually, the Cybermen look like men in monster suits. There’s no effort to get away from that. Indeed, the Cybermen motif is that they are men in those suits, simply men who have been cyber-colonized or rebuilt or upgraded. So maybe that kind of works for the concept.

What’s always consistently struck me about most of the cybermen incarnations is that really… they’re a cheap build. Think about it – some silver overalls, a helmet, throw some vaccuum tubing on and get a helmet and there you go. The design crew has been pretty honest that the waffle head bodies were simply flight suits painted silver. Flight suits are cheap! And hell, those chest units – in a lot of the classic serials, it’s painfully obvious that the chest units aren’t affixed to their bodies, but just hanging there like gigantic medallions.

Well, comparatively. You look, for instance at the Ice Warrior costume, and that’s a huge expensive costume. That crocodile scaled body, that elaborate carapace, the mix of articulation, helmet and armor… that will run up the budget and takes time to build. On the other hand, a cyberman? Assuming you’ve got a helmet mold – twenty minutes with some spare parts and some silver paint and bob’s your uncle. Want two? Well.. their mojo is that they all look the same.

Is this a reason why the Cybermen were so popular? That the costumes were cheap. I think that had something to do with it. One advantage of a fast, cheap, easy build is that you can have a lot of them. That’s important for a show on a budget. Look at Daleks – they were expensive builds, initially, they only built four of them, and just recycled them over and over, adding new ones and swapping out parts as they wore out, they literally amortized. Ice warriors or Yeti, were only used a couple of times and were expensive builds.

But surely the BBC was not such a whore. I mean, they wouldn’t select their monsters on the basis of cheapness, would they? Probably not. But there’s a key to a really cheap fast build, that is… you can do a lot of them. Seeds of Death, you might not be able to afford a lot of Ice Warriors, but in Tomb or in Invasion, you can afford an entire army of them – basically as long as the budget for extras holds out.

And that does provide a cachet. There’s less need to ‘hide’ and ‘shuffle and jive’ your few costumes to try and make it look more like a multitude. You can actually have several. One of the consistent visual traits of the Cybermen is that they show up as an army, there are several of them, and that gives them a kind of implacable force quality. An individual monster, well, you throw rocks at it, or jab it with a pointed stick, or you run away. But a formation of a dozen… what do you do? It helps to make them scary or intimidating.

There’s other subtle visual elements that add to their formidability, that are associated with their concept. They’re by far the most organized and militaristic of the monsters. They move and operate collectively, they have formations, command structures. That adds to their use in numbers and makes them serious.

Then there’s the neutrality of their masks. Early monsters – Bela Lugosi’s robot, or Paul Blaisdell’s creations were festooned with fangs and scowls to make them look scarier. In contrast, the face of a cyberman is entirely neutral. It is very clearly a simplified human face – eyes, a mouth. But not scowling, not happy, not animated or purposeful – simply blank and neutral. Even when they’re attacking, their expressions are blandly neutral. This was used very effectively in the Terminator movies, where the Terminators get torn up, or tear into each other, without any signs of pain or rage – devastation, with absolutely indifferent expressions. I’d suggest that the lack of emote for the cybermen is an early version of this, and that it was subtly effective.

Of course, the show’s producers might not have picked up on this, because there was an effort with the waffle heads to emote – the transparent chin pieces to allow the subliminal effect of the mouth moving, and David Bank’s sometimes pompous performance as Cyber Leader in the later Classic years might undercut this. It wouldn’t be the first time that a show undercut its monster by not understanding what worked about it.

In terms of their stories and trajectory, the Cybermen have never been as much of a threat as the Daleks. They don’t just lose, in the 10th Planet, their entire world dies – ouch! In Revenge of the Cybermen, they’re revealed to have lost the great cyber war and are reduced to scattered remnants hiding out. Where the Daleks can be seen to be levelling up as a greater and greater threat over the show’s history, the Cybermen tend to flounder. They often come across as a bit pathetic. They lose their planet, they have to go into hibernation, they lose their war, they’re basically hard done by. They’re around, but they don’t achieve the menace of the Daleks. Hell, within classic canon, they’ve not even mastered Time Travel like the Daleks.

What about the underlying concept of the Cybermen? I think that’s evolved a little bit over the years, and I don’t know how well it’s actually been followed through. The Daleks started out with a pretty straightforward motif ‘space nazi’s’ and ‘hysterical personalities’.

The Cybermen initially represented Kit Pedlar’s extrapolation of humanity losing its human-ness through continuous replacement, men devolving literally to robots. That’s weird and disturbing, and I don’t think it’s ever been fully explored. In part because you would need much more of an internal monologue of personal disintegration and replacement than a visual story could show.

I think that de-emphasized rapidly, and a slightly different motif emerged – the Cybermen as a force of colonization. They don’t want to conquer you, they want to colonize you, to convert and take over you. And in doing so, they eradicate everything that’s you and turn you into a kind of army ant, a faceless drone, neutral, obedient, implacable. It’s a silver plated ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ motif – and that’s actually quite powerful. I think that the cybermen, classic and new, are at their best when they dwell on this.

“We don’t want to kill you Dave, we just want to make you like us, and in the process, we’ll just throw away everything that makes you Dave. So I suppose you’ll be dead in all the ways you care about. But you’ll be alive in the ways that we care about. And that’s all that matters.”
Whoa! That’s some creepy and disturbing shit.

That’s also not in the 10th Planet, but it does show up a little bit in Tomb, and more forcefully in Wheel and Moonbase. It’s lost altogether in Revenge. One of the reasons I love Attack of the Cybermen is that it really gets right what is scary and disturbing about Cybermen, deliberate conversions, with failed conversions doing slave labour, their absolute lack of affect when torturing or attacking, their indifference to harm – visually and conceptually, they were right on. Whatever issues or problems the story may have had, they got the Cybermen right.

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I think that Daleks in the new series manage to hold their place as the pre-eminent monsters for a few of these reasons. One of the biggest is historical provenance – they’re as Iconic as the blue police box. But having established them as essential, there’s a strong impulse to try and take them seriously, to treat them with respect and awe. There have been lousy Dalek stories in the new series – Daleks in Manhattan, or the New paradigm stuff, but there have also been strong ones. I think that even if their physical form has lost a lot of its potential and we’ve gotten used to it, it’s still got a kind of appealing toyetic quality. What’s most interesting about the Daleks is that they’re creatures of pure hatred – that got established early on, and they’ve never wavered from that. Or if they’ve wavered, they’re keeping close to that baseline.

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On successful monsters, I’m still kicking that one around. Let’s take Daleks. Why were Daleks successful? Why are Daleks successful now? Is it still the same reasons? Let me try and list them out:

1) Daleks were a ‘kinetic’ monster – that is, in an era when most monsters moved slowly, when they plodded forward carefully, when they swung widedly and loosely, when they were clearly men in suits and the men had to move carefully and vaguely because they could hardly see out of heavy costumes… Daleks were fast, gliding around smoothly at will, they were precise in swinging their guns and eyestalks, they did not roar or mumble but screech in precise ways. They were extraordinarily lively, particularly for the limitations of black and white TV. That probably expired as costumes and costume technology got better – but a good kinetic monster design held its popularity for a long time.

2) They were physically scary – at the time – they were clearly highly stylized individual versions of Tanks, with Turrets, Chassis, Guns. WWII was recent, the Korean and Suez conflicts were even more recent, the cold war with its massed waiting tank armies was even more recent. The Tank was the most terrifying land weapon around, and the Daleks were an individualized, one man, sci fi version. They also looked completely unlike a man in the suit. They lacked human features altogether, and so headed straight to uncanny valley. That’s much less effective these days, although their history allows them to retain some of it.

3) They were not scary! This is sort of a counterintuitive one. But part of Dalek Mania was that as monsters went, they were fun and easy to imitate. Just stick your arms out stiffly before you and warble ‘exterminate!’ They had all these rounded surfaces, their dome, the bulb of their eye stalk, the chassis and all those bumps. People like round things – animals with short round faces are considered cute, it’s part of our biological wiring. Along with the creepy scary qualities, the daleks also had weirdly cuddly attractive qualities, both wrapped up in the same package. That fact that they were both at once is pretty unique, only the Yeti really pull that trick, although in some ways the Cybermen and Sontarans have a bit of it. I think that this quality remains on some subliminal level – they’re quite goofy and old fashioned, but still kind of cute.

4) They were semantically disturbing – the Daleks were Nazi’s, pretty much straight out from their first appearance. They were paranoid, hostile, dishonest, genocidal. Their voices were replete with hysteria, an unreasoning terror and hatred of the ‘other.

5) They had a hell of a run of good stories – the original Daleks, Dalek Invasion, Masterplan, Genesis, Remembrance, Power, Evil, Resurrection. There were bad Dalek stories, and poor Dalek moments. Revelation and the Chase were pretty tosh. Planet of the Daleks and Day of the Daleks were ho hum. But still, they had a really solid set of classic and near classic stories, a body of topnotch work that sustained them when other qualities began to fade. Basically, Daleks had such a body of work, so many really good stories, so well established that when the series rebooted – they kept getting excellent stories under Ecclestone and Tenant.

6) Levelling up/Avoiding Decay – a recurrent problem for any threat is familiarity. Familiarity breeds content. A universe beater in the first appearance is often a lot less scary second time around. We know who they are, we know what they can do, and they’ve been beaten once. By the time of the fifth or sixth appearance, they’ve had their asses kicked pretty consistently, so what’s to be scared of. Often the writing gets pretty perfunctory. The Daleks, on the other hand, have been consistently good at levelling up – in their first appearance, they were just assholes confined to their city, relying on static electricity. Second appearance, they devastated earth. Third appearance they’d mastered Time Travel. Fourth appearance, they were a full fledged space empire. They’re the guys who waxed the Time Lords in the Time War. By the Tenant period, they’re stealing and assembling planets into a giant Universe-destroying Gun, or invading from interdimensional space. In short, they kept on levelling up. It wasn’t always consistent. They kind of stalled out a bit under Pertwee. And there’s the embarrassing scene where a teenage girl beat one to death with a baseball bat in Remembrance, and there’s some embarrassing wobbles in the Chase, etc. But by and large, they’ve been taken seriously because they got steadily more serious.

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@bluesqueakpip My memory played me false, you are entirely correct:

ANCELYN: Merlin. Against all hope.
(Doris sighs as the Brigadier takes off in the helicopter.)
SHOU: Merlin?
ACE: You’ve got it wrong, mate. This is the Doctor.
(Ancelyn removes his plate armour to reveal chain mail.)
ANCELYN: Oh, he has many faces, but in my reckoning, he is Merlin.
DOCTOR: You recognise my face, then?
ANCELYN: No, not your aspect, but your manner that betrays you. Do you not ride the ship of time? Does it not deceive the senses being larger within than out? Merlin, cease these games and tell me truly, is this the time?

MORDRED: Mother, Merlin is here.
MORGAINE: Yes, I can feel his presence.
MORDRED: He has a new countenance.
MORGAINE: He has worn many faces. Merlin, hear me.

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@bluesqueakpip That’s quite an interesting notion. That the Doctor is still growing into his form.

I’ll double check on the Battlefield reference.

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I haven’t watched the episode by the way. I am currently tied up with family matters and travelling. I think I’ll wait until just before the second part. In the meantime…

The little I’ve seen of the Ghost reminds me of the Whispermen from the ‘….of he Doctor’

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@bluesqueakpip Thank you for the compliment. I have to say, however, that I have no idea how the Merlin reference in Battlefield fit into the Cartmel Masterplan. It seems clear that ‘Merlin’ was the Sylvester McCoy Doctor, I mean, that’s the only inference that I can make based on the fact that they physically recognize him and his voice print matches. The story suggests either an alternate universe version or a future adventure. I’m inclined to the future adventure. But really, it only ties to the Cartmel Masterplan in that the Doctor is, once again, more than he appears.

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I don’t know that it’s simply just fear. But there has to be an underlying archetypal notion.

For the Daleks, well… They’re Nazi’s. Literally. They were created as obvious space Nazi’s in 1963, creatures of hate, the ultimate supremacists, plotting genocide at any cost. What’s kept the Daleks going is the purity of their hatred.

For the Cybermen – it’s the loss of humanity, of human essence replaced. And probably cheap as hell, at least the classic series versions.

The Master – easy, the Dark mirror of the Doctor.

The Rani – a less successfully defined Dark mirror.

The Silence – a primordial terror. Similar to the Angels. Both of them represent the thing that gets you when you’re not looking, and the only way to keep it at bay is to watch it. They’re crystallized fears of the unknown.

The Sontarans – Abstract, but they’re the forever war, the eternal cold war, the military ethos distilled. They’re almost nuanced in their concept. Also, costumes are easy to fabricate, and allow freedom and visibility to the actors.

The Yeti – the terror of animalistic power, really, they’re like grizzly bears.

Are there even ten? Let’s see: Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, Master, Silence, Weeping Angels… then the pickings thin out rapidly. ‘So so’ would be the Yeti, Great Intelligence, Ice Warriors, Rani, at least in terms of repeat appearances. How about that kid in the gas mask with Ecclestone – majorly hard to forget.

In terms of sheer power – The Beast, Sutekh of the Osirans, the Fendah, the Daemons, the Toymaker.

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I should sleep on it too.

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I mean seriously, what makes a good Doctor Who villain?

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@purofilion Hmmm top ten enemies? I think I’d have to think of something interesting to say about them. Might be good for a blog post. I’ll think about it. For enemies, I think two big criteria – 1) Ability to achieve the effect; 2) Some existential/thematic/mythic quality.

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@purofilion More seriously, I haven’t had good luck with books, and that’s really what it comes down to. So be it. I’m happy enough trying to promote the works of fans more dedicated and talented than myself, and maybe shedding a little insight and epiphany on obscure corners of the Whoniverse. I’d like to think, for instance, that some of my comments about Daleks gave an insight into their historical reception. Anyhoo. I suspect I’m going to miss the next episode, which is a shame, because the word is very good so far.

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@purofilion God, I’m embarrassed to say this. But I just make it all up. I have no idea what I’m talking about.

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@mudlark I suspect that Sarf goes by Msssssssssssss

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@jphamlore How’s this:

<quote>The initial studio session for City Of Death was held in BBC Television Centre Studio 3 on May 21st and 22nd. The first day was devoted to scenes in the café and in the modern art museum. Since late April, Adams had been in touch with famed comedian John Cleese about appearing as one of the art critics. Cleese and Adams had worked together on Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and also knew each other through Cleese’s fellow Python, Graham Chapman. As it happened, Cleese was available for Serial 5H’s first recording block, since he would be at BBC Television Centre working on the final episode of Fawlty Towers. Adams suggested that the other critic could be played by Alan Coren, a regular panellist on The News Quiz and an editor for the humorous Punch magazine. Cleese was agreeable to this, and suggested Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett (who had both shot to stardom in the stage revue Beyond The Fringe) as alternatives. In the event, the second critic was played by Eleanor Bron, a popular satirist who had been the first female castmember of the long-running Cambridge Footlights revue.</quote>

http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/5h.html

As to the second, Terry Nation initially insisted on control over the property, from very early on. He didn’t insist on being the only writer – Milton Subotsky and David Whittaker were credited with the movie screenplays. But then again, he did write the Curse of the Daleks stage play back in 1965. He let go of the Daleks fairly early, Troughton’s first Dalek story was credited to another writer, as was Pertwee’s. Nation wrote the Daleks, Invasion Earth, the Chase, Masterplan, Planet of the Daleks, Death to the Daleks, and Genesis of the Daleks. But other writers were doing Daleks as early as Troughton. Nation did retain a veto over scripts, and this was sometimes a pain in the ass, when he moved to Hollywood for the 80’s, he took a long time to review and approve scripts. That script approval was real – in Wheel in Space he vetoed a Cyberman Dalek team up and he was pretty aggressive as late as the 1980’s and Remembrance and Resurrection. I suspect his estate is more interested in cash than in ego.

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If you want to go for the Doctor as a uniquely cosmic being, there’s certainly evidence for that in both the classic and new series. The earliest story that seems to be the Hartnell era, Third season serial, ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ where Hartnell’s Doctor confronts the Toymaker, a reality shaping god like being with apparently Q-level powers. Not only does the Doctor confront and beat the Toymaker at his own game, but the story establishes that this wasn’t even his first go round with the Toymaker, they’ve been adversaries at least once, and possibly several times before. This is a major levelling up.

On the other hand, if you want to go for the Doctor as a regular renegade Timelord, there’s the fact that he does seem to have a series of ‘peer’ renegades on his level – the War Leader, the Monk, the Rani and the Master. But even past them, there’s other refugees from Gallifrey – Doctor Chronotis in Shada, that monk from the Pertwee era, Drax the vagabond mechanic from Key to Time and even that teacher from the Twin Dilemna. Beyond them, we have Morbius as the original (or at least an earlier) renegade, and we have all those self-exiles to the countryside in Invasion of Time. All of which seem to suggest that the Doctor is not a demigod, but one of a series or movement of rebels or rebellions against Time Lord establishment.

So really, take your pick.

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@purofilion Well, the ultimate backstory of the Cartmel Master Plan was that there were three, not two, towering figures that had shaped Timelord Civilisation: Rassilon, Omega and… the Other, or the Founder, the Doomed and the Renegade. The Doctor was actually the Other, either in disguise or reincarnated, depending.

That’s why in both Remembrance and Nemesis, there are pretty blunt hints or allusions by the Doctor that he was actually physically personally involved in the creation of these super-artifacts.

In Marc Platt’s novel, Lungbarrow, the Timelords are sterile as a result of upsetting some sorcerous cult. They reproduce through genetic looms, with each ‘House’ having its own loom and lineage. According to Platt’s backstory, Rassilon betrayed and toasted Omega, the Other, knowing his days were numbered, threw himself into one of the genetic looms, dying and being safely consigned to legend status. Aeons later, the Other was genetically reconstituted from the looms as the Doctor – basically a clone of the Other. He travelled back to Gallifrey’s beginning, Susan from that era recognized him as her grandfather and off they went

The canonicity of Lungbarrow is open to question. Obviously, Doctor Who is such a sprawling cultural space that canon gets pretty dicy. Lungbarrow was submitted as a script, but rejected because it gave us way too much Gallifrey, instead it was reworked into a completely different story called Ghostlight, with the backstory jettisoned.

There are at least two other explanations for the Doctor/Other connection. One is that the Doctor actually is the Other, hiding down through the Ages through the magic of time and space travel and a colossally extended life … which are seen in all those mysterious regeneration images in Brain of Morbius, and Morbius’ terrified ‘Just how old are you, Doctor?’ This explanation, that the Doctor is the real ‘other’ not just his genetic recreation seems more consistent with the remarks in Remembrance and Nemesis, and hints dropped in Greatest Show, Battlefield and Curse of Fenric.

The other is that the Doctor physically travelled back in time to the era of Rassilon and Omega and actually became the Other – ie, he didn’t start out as the Other and eventually become the Doctor. He started out as the Doctor, had adventures, went back in time and helped found Timelord civilization. Some variation of this is in the Paul Cornell script/novel, Human Nature, when the ‘humanized’ Doctor, bereft of his memories, makes up a fable about a man who travels to a place called Gallifrey, gives them time travel, and then gives them two hearts so they will be twice as loving, but they screw it up. Of course, that’s Cornell, and it’s not clear how tightly tied into or informed as to Cartmel’s plans.

Actually, I’m not sure how much of Cartmel’s Masterplan actually existed, in terms of a fixed backstory. Cartmel wanted to make the Doctor more mysterious and uncertain, so he wanted to drop all these hints and allusions. Actually coming out with ‘This is who the Doctor really is’ would have destroyed the mystery he was trying to build, so left to his own devices, he may never have come out with it, or he might have just kept on piling up references and allusions until, like the X-Files or Lost, his mythology became incomprehensible and senseless. Or even if he had a definite pathway, he could have changed his mind, or had it changed by JNT for him. There’s many a slip between cup and lip.

The bottom line for the Cartmel Masterplan seems to have been ultimately that the Doctor was somehow actually the Other, a founder of the Timelords, and that while he pretended to be a humble space vagabond and regular ordinary Timelord, he was actually a primordial being, a demigod or game player above and beyond normal civilian Timelords and on the level of cosmic beings like the Black and White Guardian, the Osirans, Daemons, Celestial Toymaker, etc. etc.

I think that when the new series launched, they mostly rejected the Cartmel Masterplan, and decided to make the Doctor bigger by removing his backstory – he was just a regular, renegade Timelord, but now he was special because there were no regular Timelords – Gallifrey was destroyed, the Time War had shattered the Universe, and he was the last of his kind. In fact, he was the last because he’d destroyed his kind.

Personally, I’m not too enamored of Demigod Doctors. I like the idea of a simple renegade.

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@purofilion Actually, I hadn’t noticed the similarity between the Nemesis and the Moment until Jphamlore pointed it out. Good catch on his part and worth examining.

Superficially, at least, I would say the two are probably separate. For them to be the same, the Time Lords would have had to have found and retrieved the Moment/Nemesis and put it back in their forbidden weapons locker.

As for the Hand of Omega, possession and use of it would give the Daleks the ability to move and reshape stars, they could physically rearrange the universe on a cosmic scale. So not just the power of the time lords, but a level of power that the time lords arguably never used. Scary stuff. Of course, during the Time War, there’s indication that the Daleks had reached that level of technology if they were building void ships and steadily overwhelming Gallifrey.

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For the record, I don’t believe for a second that the Doctor left Gallifrey just because he was bored. But I don’t buy into Davros theory that he ran away because of the development of a Timelord/Dalek killer hybrid.

But I do believe that something bad happened on Gallifrey way back then to send him running. You look at the Hartnell stuff, particularly the early stuff, and he was clearly running and hiding. His first meeting with Barbara and Susan is out and out paranoia, and in that serial, he exhibits a clear need to ‘escape’ – from the immediate situation he’s in, but you get a clear impression that he’s in the habit of fleeing from Danger.

Oddly, he got more relaxed the more he hung out with humans, but even by Troughton’s War Games, he’s still afraid of the Time lords. Then there’s his remarks in Tomb of the Cybermen in which he says pretty nakedly that his wife and children are dead and live on only in his memory. There’s something about the way he talks about it, and his apparent reluctance to revisit those memories that suggest that whatever happened to them, it was sudden, violent and nasty.

My own headcanon is that he was part of a Renegade/Dissident movement on Gallifrey, that initially was tolerated… leading to a handful of Time Lords leaving and taking up retirement on Earth or other worlds, and some others deciding to strike out and build empires of their own, but which on Gallifrey reached a point where the establishment just decided to purge them, sending the survivors fleeing. The Doctor was a survivor, possibly the last, together with his granddaughter. His wife and children… not so lucky.

Anyway, not much evidence for or against, it’s just my own headcanon, and I prefer it to the lungbarrow/other nonsense of the Cartmel Masterplan. I prefer the thought of the Doctor as a renegade rather than a demigod.

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@jphamlore Hmmm. The ‘Moment’ actually being the Silver Nemesis wearing a hat, and the ‘Hand of Omega’ waiting in the wings to appear in the new series in a different hat is a pretty interesting idea.

For the record:

The Hand of Omega is the florid Time Lord name for a stellar manipulating device, about the size and shape of a coffin, which was used by the Time Lord engineer, Omega, at the beginning of Time Lord history, to shape and manipulate cosmic black holes in order to provide the power to move through and master time and space. It appears in the McCoy serial ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’.

The backstory is that the Hartnell Doctor stole the Hand of Omega when he went renegade way way back, he brought it to Earth and buried it in a cemetery in 1963. He was returning from that errand when he came back to the Junkyard, walked into the Tardis and found Barbara and Ian there, harassing his granddaughter. The events of Unearthly Child run from there.

The Hand of Omega is then forgotten, ignored, unremembered and overlooked until a couple of years later (our time) or 25 seasons later, or seven Doctors later, when both McCoy and Davros (and some renegade Daleks) all show up in the 60’s, all searching for the Hand of Omega. There’s Nazi’s in there too for some reason.

Davros gets the Hand, but unknown to him, the Doctor has programmed the Hand. So Davros in his effort to use it, sends it hurtling down the Time Corridor and ends up blowing up Skarro.

Rememberance of the Daleks is one of the Classic series serials, along with the Chase and Genesis of the Daleks, that has since been retconned as part of the Time War. Early echoes, as it were.

Omega, by the way, is the Stellar Engineer who created or engineered the Time Lord’s mastery of time. Unfortunately, while he was doing that, there was an accident, and he was blowed up, or thought to be killed. Turns out, he wasn’t killed, just hurtled into an Anti-Matter Dimension, where his sheer will power kept him alive as it merged with the Anti-Matter Dimension’s psychoactive properties. He appeared in the Three Doctors, Pertwee era, with Pertwee, Troughton and Hartnell, trying to break back into our universe. No mention of the ‘Hand of Omega’ there, but he was clearly engineering big.

Omega showed up again years later, in the Peter Davison serial, Arc of Infinity, where he once again tried to escape the anti-matter universe, even if the price was the destruction of ours. Davison sent him back. But for a while, he walked around in a copy of Davison’s body. Again, no mention of the hand.

Anyway, in the show’s lore, those two appearances were sufficient to establish Omega as one of the two great Time Lords who had founded Time Lord society. The runner up who tried harder and possibly did more, but got screwed over.

I’m not sure that the Hand of Omega had the properties the Jphamlore ascribes to it. He may be referencing novels or big finish audio. In Remembrance it was simply the biggest hammer in the universe, a tool for knocking stars and black holes around as if they were leggo, and by definition, could be used as a superweapon.

As for Silver Nemesis – that was kind of weird. Silver Nemesis was almost exactly the same story as Remembrance of the Daleks, taking place in the same season, only with Cybermen instead of Daleks. It even had Nazi’s running around, to no clear purpose.

Again, the story is that the Silver Nemesis was an ultimate weapon, this time created by Rassilon. It was a three part thingy – A statue of a woman, a bow, and an arrow. You activated it by bringing all three parts together.

The Hartnell Doctor had stolen it when he fled Gallifrey, way back in the beginning. This time, he separated its parts and tucked the major part, the statue of the woman, in a long 25 year orbit around earth, about 350 years ago.

He did this because the Silver Nemesis couldn’t be hidden on Earth. Essentially, taking a page from Alex Cox’s ‘Repo Man’ it was a weapon system so insanely horrific that even being around the thing caused chaos and madness. Every 25 years, when Silver nemesis came close, there’d be an outbreak of violent horrible shit on Earth, the subliminal effects of the weapons nearness.

Anyway, fast forward to the 80’s, the Cybermen come to earth looking for it. The Nazi’s are looking for it I suppose. And some Renaissance sorceress named Madame Peinforte who claims to know a little too much about the Doctor are looking for it.

The Doctor eventually gives it up to the Cybermen, but once again, he kind of programmed it first, so the Cybermen, trying to use it, end up blowing up their fleet.

Silver Nemesis and Remembrance of the Daleks actually have quite different origins and production histories, but ended up looking and feeling and presenting so much like each other, that Nemesis actually felt like a tired and second rate rip off of Remembrance. It didn’t help that they appeared in the same season, separated by one serial. (and people ask me why I’m unimpressed with Andrew Cartmel – short answer: He just wasn’t good at his job).

The Silver Nemesis weapon seems to have been about a living metal, Validium. It had been shaped into its current form by Madame Peinforte, in ways and for reasons never explained. So the form wasn’t especially crucial. It did seem to need to be in three parts, and have those three parts united to activate.

Like the Moment, it did seem capable of conversation and sentience, so I can see the parallel between the two. The Nemesis was less morally bossy.

Prior to Silver Nemesis, there doesn’t seem to be any precedent in the classic series. Except possibly Raston Warrior Robots who showed up in the Five Doctors, and also slaughtered Cybermen like crazy. But any link there was speculative.

And there’s Rassilon of course, never seen in the classic stories, but often referred to. He was the Donald Trump of Gallifrey, fond of naming things after himself. Thus the Sash of Rassilon, the Crown of Rassilon, the Eye of Rassilon, the Bathrobe of Rassilon. Which makes you wonder, if he did create it, why didn’t he name this one after himself ‘The Hot Chick Fiery Death Statue of Rassilon’.

Anyway, the two serials were probably among the most overt references to the Cartmel Master Plan – the notion that the Doctor wasn’t just a regular Time Lord, but secretly a third heavy hitter of the same stature and from the same era as Rassilon and Omega.

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@iamnotafishiamafreeman It appears that you feel quite passionately about the subject. I respect your right to an opinion and encourage you in this regard. Good luck and be well.

@purofilion Thank you for your comments. Even if we disagree, I respect your thoughts and views.

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@ichabod If I was a Dalek, that’s probably where I’d stash my porn.

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Did anyone notice that Davros didn’t have any legs? He was pretty much missing from the bottom half down.

So what about the chair?

Where did the Doctor put his legs in Davros chair? I mean, what, was Davros just keeping empty space down there, for the benefit of anyone who might want to try it out? Did he keep storage down there? Davros lives in a chair designed for him and him alone, and he’s got no legs or lower torso? So what exactly is the Doctor squeezing into?

Just something to think about?

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@ichabod Same here. Also, the Underwater Menace is finally being released in October, so it’ll be a twofer all the way around. All true Who fans are undoubtedly dancing with Joy. Or possibly trembling with fear. I think that the only comparable emotion would be if it turned out that Dimensions in Time had been lost for fifty years, then finally, a copy was found in some Lovecraftian pit of abomination, and gets released to the public without even radiation shielding.

All I can say is that I’ve already bought my lead lined apron.

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@ichabod Hmmm. I do seem to be pissing you off, and that’s definitely not my intent. Allow me to offer my apologies for any tension or unpleasantness. I do believe that disagreement is entirely legitimate, that people are entitled to disagree, and that a mutual exchange of views will often simply refine rather than resolve that disagreement. But that’s not something to go to war over, or breed resentment.

Rather than go through every aspect of our disagreement, I’m just going to focus as narrowly as possible on the narrative.

You feel that there’s something honest in Davros opening up. I don’t feel that there’s anything honest in it at all.

I base this on the finale when the Doctor hooks himself up to Davros machine. Immediately, Davros manner changes. He’s no longer wistful, reflective, mellow. Rather, he becomes immediately animated, the mellow vanishes, the infirmity vanishes, he practically dances a jig. That’s the point where he says something along the lines of “You have fallen into my trap!” He also says “I didn’t even have to rip it out of you.”

Okay, so this nakedly tells us that Davros intended all along that the Doctor pour his regeneration energy into Davros machine.

That was the point of the machine. It may have had other purposes, but you don’t get an effect like that without specifically designing it into it. So the machine was designed, constructed and sits there with that intent in mind. It was a trap from the beginning.

That’s not controversial, because Davros says bluntly ‘Ha! It was a trap all along!’ And then he’s quite honest in that he was prepared to be much more brutal, to commit rape if seduction didn’t work.

So with the reality of a ‘regeneration sucking’ machine and with the naked statements at the end, can we look backwards and say that there was ever anything genuinely honest in Davros through that whole encounter?

I’m pretty dubious. Davros through the conversation is entirely manipulative. He repeatedly points the Doctor towards his machine. He deliberately protects himself and his Daleks by raising the prospect of genocide ‘How does it feel to be a god!’ Left to his own devices, his own thought process, the Doctor might have made the threat, tried to seize events this way. Davros is deliberately heading him off at the pass. He takes him all the way to ‘Here, hold this, you could commit genocide.’ Knowing that once he’s framed it so brutally, the Doctor could never do it.

That ‘am I a good man’ shtick, falls very close to last season’s moral conundrum of the Doctor. Coincidence? Or should we assume that the level of research that identifies the Doctor’s haunts and the Doctor’s friends, also has a good track on where he is psychologically, and where he’s been. What are the odds that Davros research doesn’t include this recent moral conundrum and that exact phrase? Maybe it’s a coincidence. Or maybe Davros knew that phrase, and used it with deliberate effect. The Doctor is very knowledgable about Skarran Sewers, after all. Should we assume that Davros is less knowledgable about his Archenemy? He probably subscribes to all the listservers and fanzines.

But if we assume the possibility that Davros actually knew that the Doctor had asked ‘Am I a good man’, then its likely that he knew precisely where the Doctor was in his life and how to manipulate that moment. Basically, Davros doesn’t really need to be dying, what he needs is the Doctor to be particularly vulnerable. If he knows that moment of vulnerability, actual dying is irrelevant.

Davros says he remembers, that’s clearly a call back to that moment among the hand mines. But in a sense, he’s probably remembered all along. What he’s had to wait for is a moment when the Doctor would remember it. When the Doctor would finally have that experience, have that event, and then react to it. Davros would remember it’s not Baker, and not Davison, or Baker, or McCoy, or Ecclestone, or Tennant or Smith. If he’d tried that shtick with any of these younger guys, the effect wouldn’t be reliable, he’d go ‘Davros remembers’ and they’d go ‘Huhn, you remember my boot up your wheelchair.’

No, he has to wait until Capaldi remembers, in order to start the game. He assesses Capaldi’s response to the event, and sets things in motion. Actually dying is an unnecessary coincidence at that moment. Seriously, Davros entering his death spiral immediately and coincidentally after the Doctor encounters him as a child? For Davros, it’s all about manipulating the Doctor.

I’m skeptical for instance, of the Davros is dying meme. For no other reason that Davros here looks healthier and more robust than he has in years. That’s all relative, since at the best of times, Davros is mostly an emaciated, paralysed, palsied corpse-zombie in a wheelchair. But I can look back to appearances, even in the new series, where he was a shell of what we see.

Now this may be a factor of the production team getting it wrong and the actor overdoing it. Can’t fault that, it happens. But on the other hand, they had access to a half century worth of production images and clips. So it’s entirely likely that we’re being visually tipped off that there’s something wrong from the beginning – that Davros isn’t truly dying, but pretty tough.

Certainly ‘Davros is dying’ plays on the Doctor’s compassion. But that’s almost certainly a deliberate strategy. Whether he is dying or not, Davros identifies the Doctor’s compassion as his greatest weakness. There’s no ambiguity here, during the conversation, he says “Compassion is your greatest weakness.” and then “It’s going to get you killed.”

That’s not idle chit chat, that’s been the philosophy of Davros since his first appearance, and on through every appearance. Compassion is not in his nature, he understands compassion as a tool to manipulate, and in Genesis, he even fakes it and dissembles to get his own way. But he doesn’t respect or admire it, he’s always considered it a weakness and a failure. He bred it out of his Daleks.

In the context of the conversation, in hindsight, Davros is pretty clearly saying ‘Right now, it’s going to get you killed right now.’ But the Doctor treats it as chit chat. This is Sopranos conversation.

In any event, from Davros point of view, the claim that he is dying is necessary. But that doesn’t speak to whether he is actually dying or not. It would be a pretty whopping coincidence if he is, but stories live on coincidence.

So is there actually any real evidence that Davros is dying, apart from his say so? No. I suppose the frailty at the end game, but that’s just more ‘say so.’ Is there any evidence that Davros is not dying ? Apart from his sprightly triumph and his overall buffness? Well, the Doctor apparently manhandles him out of his wheelchair and leaves him on the floor while he goes cruising. I dunno, I’d think that sort of manhandling of someone on death’s door would be pretty traumatic. Davros comes through the encounter just fine.

And by the way, apart from the fact that the Doctor acted like a gigantic prick in kicking the old fossil out of his wheelchair, think about how Davros coped with the experience. Assume you’re incredibly old, dying, vulnerable and afraid, trying to sort out your affairs. Rather than a civil conversation, your enemy dumps you out of the chair, onto the floor and goes for a joyride, leaving you squalling like a baby. The humiliation! The trauma! You don’t get over that, not if you are functioning with any emotional honesty. People, even Davros, do not undergo traumatic humiliation without emotional repercussion. It’s not even referred to afterwards. No “That was a crap thing you did to me.” “No, I’m sorry I kicked you out of your wheelchair and went for a spin.”

Except…. Davros doesn’t. Once he’s got the Doctor back in the box, all he does is make a joke about getting the Doctor a chair of his own, and then he’s back on the track. How honest is that? The only way that works is that Davros isn’t acting or reacting honestly. He’s following a plan. He doesn’t vent or respond, because that’s not part of the plan. His actions are as fixed as a train on railway tracks. Davros is about the con, the long game. Once he’s back in control, he’s back on the con. There’s no honesty there.

Apart from the trauma of squalling like a terrified baby when dumped on the floor, the only moment when Davros expresses anything that resembles an authentic emotion is his surprise and apparent pleasure when he learns Gallifrey is back. But even there, I think he is lying. He may be surprised and happy that Gallifrey is back, but what he tells the Doctor is a lie. Davros is not big on empathy. The Daleks were winning the Time War, Gallifrey escaped to hide, Gallifrey back means they can be finished off.

So no, I don’t see Davros having any emotional honesty, there’s no real opening up for him, there’s no genuineness in their interaction. Or at least, not an honesty that would be meaningful to normal people.

I suppose I should caveat normal people. I knew a pimp once upon a time. The circumstances of getting to know him, of watching him, neither here nor there. I actually made his acquaintance before he became a pimp, and because he was a fascinating character, we occasionally chatted. Now, the interesting thing about this guy, is that he was ‘honest.’ He was ‘honest’ in that in the moment he was saying something to you, he honestly, truly, sincerely believed it. Total conviction in those words, in those moments. I suppose it was what made him a good pimp.

But here’s the thing – thirty seconds after he’d grabbed your hand and eyes brimming with tears, voice choked with genuine and sincere heartfelt emotion after he’d just told you that you were his best friend, that you and he were soul brothers… he could, with equal sincerity and conviction, stab you in the back or steal your wallet. He could with passionate honesty state his love for you, even while on some level, he plotted to steal your car the minute your attention wavered.

Since then, I’ve come to know other people like that. People of Orwellian honesty and sincerity, who are able to maintain pure emotional truth on the surface, and yet abandon it and change course in a heartbeat, or maintain entirely duplicitous agendas underneath.

On some level, these people are genuine. On another level, they’re lying. The genuineness, the fact that in the heat of the moment, they may be sincere about their lie, that’s simply armor over the lie. It’s like the skin on a bowel of soup.

The Hallmark of such people, apart from their overt sincerity, the frantic energy they put into the emotional truth of the lie of the moment is their ability to change or not change. When on a script, they stick to the script relentlessly, they don’t respond normally to changes. And when not on a script, they’ll turn on a dime. Normal people whose emotions and honesty go deeper, are subject to a kind of psychic inertia, we can’t help reacting and we can’t turn on a dime.

That’s Davros in the Witches Familiar – manipulative from start to finish, he turns on a dime when it suits him, and he doesn’t react at all when pulled off the script, his absolute sincerity is contrived, manipulative, and to the extent that there’s any honesty to it, it’s the sincerity of the sociopath, oozing conviction on the surface. There’s nothing genuine to him.

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Hmmm. I made an intemperate and uncalled for remark. To anyone offended, please accept my apologies. I have written privately to the subject of my ire.

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@serahni I don’t think that Moffat writes solely for me. 😉 In any case, there have been brilliant episodes to make up for the bad ones, so I figure that I’m ahead. Even these episodes, while flawed, are not worthless. There’s much to like in them. I wish I could turn off my analytical faculties and just enjoy. But they click away, no matter what. Good or bad, I love the show. And while I won’t hesitate to call out what I see as bad, that doesn’t keep me from loving the show. I had a cat once with bladder control issues, I still loved that cat. Even the worst of Moffat doesn’t compare with having your lap wee’d on while you were reading. And there’s a lot to love, not just in the best of Doctor Who, but even in its worst. It works out.

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@arbutus It’s a big world and there’s a lot of room in it for diversity. Human behaviour has wide parameters, and writers often struggle with that. It’s not easy. There’s a story, how do you get the characters to follow through the story. There’s a story about Captain Janeway of Voyager, and the actress who plays her. According to legend – she once went to the writers and asked them quite seriously if her character was insane… because she was written so arbitrarily. We’re not there with Clara, so that’s good.

As to the Master, I’m quite enthused. It’s almost an epiphany. There have been so many times in the classic series that the Master seemed almost like a pantomime villain, a ridiculous, motiveless, comic opera bad guy. One of the pleasures of Mark of the Rani, is that the new time lord villain, the Rani, calls the Master out on it, literally telling him repeatedly ‘you’re a boob!’ His perpetual schemes, and the way they blew up in his face, didn’t make a lot of sense in the overarching scheme of things, does a lot to pull the character together, to make the Master coherent, even epic.

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Ha ha. Bravo. I offer you my hand. Well, that’s a bit much. An extended finger is sufficient.

How about we all play nice.

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@arbutus Looking backwards, I’m not sure if the Master/Missy ever really had any interest in ruling the universe. I think perhaps that we should reappraise the title ‘Master.’ We tend to default to reading it as ‘Master = Ruler = King = Tyrant = Dictator = Alpha = Big Dog = Owner = Controller = Dominator’ That may not be it at all.

Perhaps the Master’s title refers to something else. Perhaps it simply means ‘Better.’ Or ‘Best.’ The smartest, the fastest, the winner, etc. Perhaps the Master has truly gone blazing through the universe, not in a quest to rule it, but to test himself/herself against it. To beat it, to demonstrate that he’s better, that he’s the first place finisher. He’s continually seeking out challenges to demonstrate his superiority.

Honestly, in the King’s Demons, what the hell is the point of screwing with the Magna Carta? It doesn’t advance ‘rule’ in any meaningful way. Why the continuing one upsmanship with the Doctor through incarnation after incarnation. It’s not about conquest. It’s about proving himself.

In Logopolis, when the Baker Doctor falls, the Master is crowing victory, he’s proven himself better and smarter. He’s an ego on a collision course with the rest of the universe. He doesn’t want to rule it. He would get bored pretty fast. He just wants the universe to acknowledge he’s better.

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@arbutus I’m not saying it has to predate the episode. I’m only saying that Moffat has to play fair with his audience. In this case, Moffat comes just shy of deus ex machine. He’s not arbitrarily whipping up a god from the machine who just solves the problem out of nowhere. No, he set it up two or three script pages before.

The analogy I used is a mystery novel. Typically, in a mystery, we have a cast of characters set up in the first act, and then the unravelling of the mystery which leads to a murderer. Here, however, instead of setting up his premises at the start, Moffat waits until the second last chapter to introduce a character who will turn out to be the murderer. No fair!

As to Clara –

* She could use her words. That’s the point. She could make the Dalek casing talk. It just wouldn’t say certain things. She needed a workaround. How about “Doctor, Identify me.” “You’re a Dalek?” “Incorrect!” “You’re Clara?” “Correct!” All she needed to do was workarounds. But instead, she went all Mel on us.

* I recognize the theory being circulated that Clara’s rather anomalous idiocy was the result of remembered trauma from a future self who ended up as a Dalek. Hmmm. Well, okay, that’s a theory and it may explain the result in a satisfactory way. The thing we do with theories is we test them. We test a theory by extrapolating its consequences, and going to look to see whether those consequences, those predicted results pan out. How do we test this? Well, if we assume that this was deliberate on the part of Moffat, and that he was calling back to that earlier episode, then it seems likely that he would reference it. After all, he can’t guarantee that the people watching this episode watched the Oswin episode three years before, or that they remembered it. So if that was his intent, he’d probably signal it. There’d be a deja vu reference. There isn’t one. There’s no statement or reference which calls back to that earlier episode. Ergo, the theory is unsupported. Not necessarily invalid, but lacking validation.

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@ichabod

[quote]As a writer, I’m a gardener, not a designer of highways or bridges. My one experiment in outlining a book froze the whole project for ten years, before I could find my way back to the creative impulse I’d begun with. Well, you and I are (from what I see) very different in our outlooks, so it’s not surprising that we diverge so much in the ways that we read this episode.[/quote]

We are very different in our outlooks, but neither one of us were invited to write this episode. So it doesn’t really involve our processes as writers. We come to it as watchers, as an audience, and Moffat’s choices are open to analysis and critical assessment. I’m not worried about the process by which he develops something. I’m concerned with whether the choices that are the outcome of that process are effective.

[quote]And I don’t see all of the episode as lying and pretending; far from it.[/quote]

So…. that part at the end where Davros goes “F… you Doctor, I was lying all along, and you fell into my frap, you dumb M….F…. I was going to rape the s…. out of you, but it’s so much more satisfying that I got you to volunteer into it you sentimental shmuck!”

Davros was lying about all that? He was just making it up as he went along? Davros was having a ‘Fool’s Progress’? And just accidentally had the whole regeneration energy transfer mechanism all set up in advance?

Or was it just the Doctor having a ‘Fool’s Progress’ … In which case, that part at the end where he goes ‘Aha Davros, jokes on you! I knew it was all a trap, what kind of M…. do you take me for? You’re Davros, for P…’s sake! I figured out your plan, turned it into my own trap and walked right in on you. I had a jolly one listening to your song and dance!’ That’s all the Doctor lying through his teeth? For what purpose? Egotism? One upsmanship? Is it the Doctor running a head game on Davros? The Doctor just stumbled in blindly? He didn’t anticipate that Davros had a trap? Or that a device which connects Davros to every Dalek everywhere might not be the best thing to pump regeneration energy into? He didn’t anticipate the revolt of the sewers, he just got lucky?

[quote] It’s characters under stress making plans as they go along, while losing control of everything they thought they controlled.[/quote]

Sure. I recognize those sorts of stories. I enjoy those sorts of stories a great deal. The Lazenby Bond is a wonderful example of ‘desperately making things up as you go.’ The first Tremors movie is a terrific example of characters reacting and making things up as they go. Some of the seventh doctor serials, where he’s touted as a master manipulator, actually appear on examination as brilliant improvisation. Several of the Baker serials were like this.

In a lot of stories, we have situations where the protagonist is essentially reactive – ie, they’re innocent, they’re sitting there, they don’t do anything, they don’t have any motivation. Then the villain intrudes, and they become reactive actors. I’ve always found that curious. I’m not sure that passivity is actually that great a social virtue.

In the case of the B story, Clara and Missy… yes, this is them making things up as they go. The Mistress from start to finish is improvising. She’s just making stuff up as she goes, taking leaps into the dark. Perfectly realized by her actually taking a leap, or a step, into abyssal space after she opens the airlock. She observes, then acts, and each step is invented as she goes.

But that’s not the Doctor.

[quote] To me, this is The Fool’s Progress, not a chess game. But that’s because I much prefer the story of `a Fool to any number of masterminds conning and out-conning each other.[/quote]

Not a big fan of the Sting movies? Actually, this season’s Community had a wonderful takedown of those.

I think that for a Fool’s Progress to work, the fool actually has to learn something as they go. If they begin as a fool and end as a fool… is there progress? Or, as my ex-wife used to ask me: “If a man speaks in a forest where there’s no one to hear… Is he still wrong?”

But then, if the Fool actually develops, is this a Hero’s Journey?

Regardless, this is definitely not a Fool’s Journey for the Doctor.

[quote] It’s in the many slips between cup and lip that true connection can occur, and those moments of intimacy are what I value most in art at any level.[/quote]

Granted. I respect your point of view. That’s just not what’s happening here. It’s very explicitly stated, this is a duel of Machiavellian chess masters.

[quote] What you see as a “failure in writing” I see as the potential for life-like depth and flexibility in a character; but then I see characters as fallible creatures, not plot-pawns that malfunction if they don’t fit exactly into a prescribed story-function. [/quote]

But that’s exactly the charge I level at Moffat. He’s taken a character with the potential for life-like depth and flexibility, for fallibility and humanity, and he’s reduced her to a plot pawn to perform a prescribed story function. It’s lazy writing, it’s not the first time he’s pulled it, and it’s not going to be the last.

[DenValdron @replies]

@purofilion /sorry about the misspelling.

[DenValdron @replies]

@purofillion I’m not really concerned about the ‘mercy’ issue. The Dalek that River Song encounters clearly knows the word. Daleks have historically been manipulative and can be quite convivial doing it.

I’m not even worried about Davros. In his first appearance in Genesis of the Daleks, he shows himself to be capable of cordiality when it suits him and advances his interest. He’s only a hysterical monster when he’s free to be himself.

What annoys me is the revolting sewers. That’s not established anywhere in Dalek history, there’s no background or provenance for it. The notion that Daleks simply do not die, and instead get relegated to the sewers to decompose slowly is nicely horrific. But it’s introduced halfway through a second episode and then becomes the key to the Doctor’s triumph fifteen minutes later. That’s crap (no pun intended) writing. You introduce the key plot point that allows the hero to triumph barely fifteen minutes before it comes into play? Come on.

Now, it’s possible that we could turn around and say ‘Ah, but like pull the moon, plot and rationality come second, because we want a genuine emotional payoff, that’s what the episode really is about.’ Well, okay. But… if we take that tactic, we come face to face with the fact that there is no genuine emotional payoff.

Instead, the entire episode is about dishonest emotions – the Doctor’s crisis of conscience and fatal depression, Davros need for final words, the Doctor’s sympathy for the dying Davros, the moment of empathy and connection…. No, none of that is genuine. It’s all shuck and jive. The Doctor is playing the mopery because he knows Davros is after him, Davros plays the dying invalid because he knows the Doctor is a sucker for that, the Doctor knows that Davros is playing him, so he plays Davros right back, enfolding his lies with bigger lies… all so that the Doctor can bring the sewers into revolt.

The only ones who are fooled are the audience. We’re expecting that what we see is honest, but really, it’s just two hustlers hustling each other.

So then is it about the hustle? Well, by process of elimination, that’s all that’s left to the A story. And if that’s all that’s left, then we’re entitled to dissect the plot mechanics, including the fact that the key McGuffin is only put in place minutes before it’s pulled out. Well, oopsy.

Now, B story? Sure, I can assess some genuineness there.

Not from Missy, who is a trickster-villain, in the same manner that the Doctor is a trickster-hero. The Doctor perpetually lies for good. Missy perpetually tells the truth because it makes her mayhem more fun. I can even acknowledge that in taking Missy in this direction, it may actually make sense of the rather confused motives and motivations of the Master in previous adventures. I’m thinking things like Time-Flight or King’s Demons, but hell, stuff that goes all the way back to Delgado. The Master/Mistress is not really a conquerer, so much as a trickster, an enthusiast, a hobbyist. Missy’s role here is a chaotician.

Clara on the other hand is really the only one who is taking proceedings seriously. Something which amuses Missy to no end. She’s the only one who has an actual genuine emotional payload, who isn’t either faking it as they go, or outright mocking. But she’s got nothing to do but be a foil.

But sorry, I don’t really buy the ‘Clara got scared and froze up’ when she’s been in far worse situations and behaved with the cool of OO7. Yes, yes, of course she got scared and froze up, that’s obvious, and it’s irrelevant. The series has spent three years showing us she is *not* the sort of person who gets scared and freezes up. But no matter, all that went out the window, because Moffat wanted to play a scene a certain way.

A character’s actions should be driven by their revealed personality and attributes, when the personality and attributes are altered arbitrarily because the plot or a scene requires them to act in certain ways, it’s a failure of writing.

[DenValdron @replies]

@arbutus I’d like to buy that. But this is a woman who time and again has been proven to think very fast on her feet. Consider the moment where, all alone, she’s confronted by a Cyberman, something she has never met, but which is quite intent on killing her instantly, and she talks her way out of it. Then there’s scenes in Flatline and Mummy on the Orient Express where she’s entirely improvising as she goes, but improvising well. We’re supposed to just go with this fast thinking, fast talker, who understands the limitations that the Dalek casing is putting on, isn’t instantly thinking of ways to work around them. Sorry, not buying it.

When it initially bothered me, I thought perhaps Clara couldn’t hear her ‘dalek voice’ talk, and so she didn’t realize she was saying ‘I am Dalek’ over and over again. But in fact, that doesn’t seem to be the case. When she’s with Missy, and learning to operate the Dalek, she is hearing the Dalek voice, she finds it weird, and she finds it increasingly disturbing when it dalektranslates what she says, to the point of freaking out.

If Clara couldn’t hear the Dalek voice, I’d buy it. She doesn’t know and doesn’t understand what’s going on. That would make the scene work.

But, actually, she does know, and she does understand what’s going on. It’s simply that in a pivotal moment, she dumbs down, in order for the scene to work in a certain way. This is simply writing the character to the demands of the script, no more, no less. The script requires Clara to be stupid at this point, so she is stupid. I would call that a moment of lazy writing on the part of Moffat.

[DenValdron @replies]

Hmmm. Okay, so roughly half way through the second part of a two part episode, we are introduced to the bit of information necessary to have the plot hang together. Information which is neither particularly consistent with what has gone before, nor especially rational based on what we knew of the Daleks. But this piece of information is absolutely vital to the resolution of the plot. It’s like a murder mystery where the character who turns out to be the murderer is introduced two chapters before he’s identified as the murderer. I must necessarily cry foul and ill use. Technically, this is bad storytelling.

Oh, and it seems that Clara’s intelligence varies directly in respect of the requirements of the script. We’re shown an early scene where she hears the Dalek casing directly mistranslate her words, causing astonishment and frustration. But then, in a critical meeting with the Doctor later on, the girl famed for being quick witted and fast on her feet forgets all that and stumbles about incoherently.

Oh, and the entire episode is about Davros lying to the Doctor to get him to fall into his trap, and the Doctor actually enfolding Davros with an even bigger lie, and turning the trap around on him and the Daleks. Which is definitely a clever concept.

I dunno.

Highlight of the episode is Michelle Gomez, whose ‘Missy’ in this is pugnacious, ferocious, and ever so clever and witty without letting up on the evil one bit.

[DenValdron @replies]

Wowsers. I was cleaning out old files and boxes and came across some of my ex-wife’s stuff. She had a couple of program guides from Visions, a sci fi convention in Chicago, 93 and 94. I looked through, she had autographs from Jon Pertwee, Colin Baker, Carole Ann Ford, John Nathan Turner, Gary Downie, Anthony Ainley, Chris Barrie, Paul Darrow and Bill Baggs. It’s impressive. I’ll have to get it back to her.

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@lisa Possible. But what was the viewing audience of PBS back in those days?

I tuned into Doctor Who through PBS. I donated money. I still have the mug. But it was hardly a mass market phenomenon back then.

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Just for the record, the fact that it didn’t work for me, doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the attempt.

Look at it like watching a virtuouso figure skater trying to do a triple pirouette, maybe the skater doesn’t quite carry it off. But you can still see what they were going for.

Writing isn’t just ‘art.’ Writing is strategy and tactics, it’s setting goals, identifying targets, taking different approaches to different things. You get a set of tools, a format, a structure, a style, certain amounts of information, an audience and then you play it out for whatever you can.

[DenValdron @replies]

@purofilion In terms of the American ratings. Very positive, but not really surprising.

As I’ve pointed out, I think that there’s been a concerted effort on the part of Moffat to push the show to an American and an international audience. The American breakthrough happened with Smith, and last year, there was a lot of effort to make sure that Capaldi hung on to that audience. This year, there was the international tour to places like South Korea, Japan, Latin America. There’s a concerted effort to internationalize the thing.

That Renfaire scene, for instance, there were some really obvious call outs to Bill and Ted (Dude!) (Axes!) (Anachronisms!), and Back to the Future (Rock star cool riff).

The interesting thing here is that assuming a genuine ratings blowout in America, you’ve got a lot of people for whom the Davros/Daleks backstory means nothing. They just don’t have the history with the show that many of us do. So they’re coming in blind. Davros says his name, the Doctor freaks out…. I think a lot of Americans may not instantly know what’s going on there, or how deeply anchored this is in the show’s mythology.

So if you’re Moffat, what do you do? You’re starting your series with a really hot story, but it’s inaccessible to the casual American audience. So maybe the thing to do is hit some classic American time travel touchstones – the B&T and BtF, and go really really big and unconventional, just go three ring circus. Not a bad strategic choice.

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Yeah, the absence of ‘New Paradigm’ sticks out like a sore thumb.  But then, the New Paradigm are ‘post Davros’ stolen earth stuff.   I think you are correct.

[DenValdron @replies]

Assuming that the final scene in the episode takes place after the Doctor’s confrontation with Davros….   And I think that’s a good assumption, since the Doctor makes reference to ‘saving his friends’, there’s an observation, and a question.

First, the observation appears to be that the Doctor walked away in the opening scene without either rescuing or killing Davros.  He just goes back in his Tardis, and disappears, leaving  the kid with his sonic screwdriver and ‘where did you go?’

Second, when the Doctor shows up behind Davros, well…  obviously, he’s travelled in time.  How?  The Tardis has been blown up.  He can’t be borrowing Missy or Clara’s time vortex manipulators, because they’be both been blown up.  He’s short a time machine.

So what are the options?

1)  Stole a Dalek time machine, shortly after arguing with Davros.  Might explain the Dalek gun.  Is that a Dalek gun by the way?  Looks like something cybermen used in the old series.  Must re-watch.

2) Davros gives him a time machine, or a time ride back.  Might explain the Dalek gun.

3) He gets all motivated and finds a reason to live.  He finds or obtains a spare vortex manipulator somewhere further along the timeline.  Might explain the Dalek gun.

4)  The Tardis isn’t destroyed/Missy and Clara aren’t dead, there’s a vortex manipulator.  But then, what’s his motivation?

I’m under the impression that the Doctor is going to change Davros lifeline so that the Tardis isn’t blown up and Missy and Clara aren’t killed,  which is going to create a paradox.  I guess its all timey wimey.

On the subject of Timey Wimey, anyone notice that despite being on Death’s Door, Davros actually seems healthier, more robust and a lot more active than a lot of his appearances.  Repeatedly, in Davros appearances, he’s one step from a palsied corpse, who can barely move his single arm (he can’t really move it – he’s got just enough functionality to push a few buttons).  In this episode, from the little we see of Davros, he’s actually kind of buff, and his good arm has a lot more movement.  Is this a continuity glitch, or does Davros end up a lot worse off from the Doctor’s intervention.

Also, on the Timey Wimey thing – Skarro got blowed up in Remembrance of the Daleks.   Not shimmy shammied, not catapulted into another dimension.  It actually got blowed up, by Davros himself, falling into the Doctor’s trap with a stellar manipulator.  Very kablam.   It got better?

Of course, it was 1963 that Skarro got blowed up in.  And of course, Davros was coming down from some kind of Time Corridor, so we don’t know when Skarro blowed up.

And speaking of which – is Snake Guy’s ship equipped with Time Travel?  Because he seems to be hunting the Doctor all over past and future.  And when he finds the Doctor, he’s in the Renaissance, 500 years ago?

 

 

[DenValdron @replies]

In terms of ratings, it’s a one off, so we’d have to see if it amounts to a trend.  Even Tom Baker and Jon Pertwee had a few terrible ratings figures from time to time.

And frankly, a lot depends on what the competition is doing.

Do you know what killed Trial of a Time Lord in the ratings?  Left it struggling along at almost half the audience of the previous season?   Scheduling.   Trial of a Time Lord was scheduled to air half way through the A-Team on ITV.  Basically, millions of viewers had already committed to watching the A-Team, and had watched half an hour, half of the episode of the A-Team, before Doctor Who came on.  What a handicap.  The show might have had a chance a half hour earlier, when viewers could decide whether to choose A-Team or Doctor Who both starting at the same time.  But half an hour later?  Zap.

Here, Capaldi was competing with X-Factor.  Reality television can be a tough nut to compete with.  But it can also be quite volatile.  Lots of ups and downs.    We’ll see.

[DenValdron @replies]

I’ve had a day to think about it now, and to sort out my thoughts.  I’ve also had the benefit of reading various reviews, which didn’t really alter my feelings, but at least allowed me to clarify why I felt this way.

On the good side – the emotional through line was powerful.  The opening and closing scenes with the Doctor and the boy Davros, jaw droppingly powerful.  The notion of the Doctor coming to an uncontainable moral crisis that would destroy him is fascinating.

That said, much of that through line was undermined by ‘manic derailment’ – too far over the top and pointlessly over the top.   The Mistress freezes every plane on earth in the sky and then requests….   a chat?   That’s all?  Hell, just making a phone call would have had UNIT freaking out.  All the rest was unnecessary, even pointless, even for as extravagant a character as the Mistress.  Then the whole ‘Ren Faire’ scene?  Bullish, noisy and pointless.  The whole  ‘I’m telling jokes, that you’ll find hilarious in 500 years’ thing…  awful.  More than anything, it seemed to be a riff on both Bill and Ted, and on Back to the Future.  Much as I love those movies, it dates the scenes badly.  It’s like your grandparents bringing out their Disco albums.

Frankly, the Ren Fair scenes remind me of Rick and Morty, and the scenes where Rick literally jumps up and down and yells at the camera, ‘look at me, I’m Rick, I’m the Rickest Rick that ever Ricked.’  Except there it’s done satirically, a parody and showcase of Rick’s fundamental dysfunction.  Here, there’s a sense we’re all supposed to go ‘Yay Doctor’ isn’t he the coolest!

I suppose that the point is that the ‘eat, drink and be merry’ shtick  is supposed to represent or highlight the Doctor’s inner ‘crying on the inside’ turmoil that brings him to the edge of destruction.  But I don’t get that sense.  I get the sense that Moffat just wanted to go cool and big, that he had spectacular images in his mind ‘the Doctor rocking out,’ ‘the Doctor riding a tank’, ‘Missy freezing every plane in the air’, and just went with them, whether it made sense or was actually all that organic for the story.

I’m not knocking that approach necessarily.  I had a friend who constructed a play entirely out of set pieces that she wanted to do, lines that she wanted to say, scenes she wanted to have.  It turned out very well.  Impressive and passionate drivers will put a lot of emotional or visual energy into a production.

Here though, I feel that there’s a mismatch between Moffat’s ‘need to impress’ and with the logic and heart of the story he’s trying to tell.  They’re not merging, it doesn’t gel, and so we get two disconnected drives.  It’s like watching two unrelated episodes simultaneously.  It gives proceedings a choppy feel.

This is worst with the Doctor, that sense of choppiness.  Capaldi seems to have a different performance going on in every scene he has, and they don’t connect.  It’s just, every time he shows up, he’s going to do something different.  You have to work to read any continuity into the performance, because the script doesn’t give it to us.

Then there’s the illogicality of events.  The Doctor abandoning his Tardis to travel off on a comparatively slow alien spaceship.  Even given the Doctor’s emotional crisis…  abandoning the Tardis?   And then there’s Missy and Clara opting to ride along for what they know is a trap.  Characters move, not because their actions grow from the interactions of their personalities with events, but simply because the script requires them to move in those ways.

But of the characters, I think Missy comes off by far the best.  Indeed, it’s literally her episode.   If Capaldi’s performance is chopped, like an earthworm, into wriggling disconnected segments,  Michelle Gomez’ performance is literally seamless.   Literally.  With Capaldi, he’s there, he’s gone, he’s there, he’s gone, he’s back.  When Michelle Gomez steps onto the stage, she basically stays there.  She doesn’t step offstage for plot points to happen, she sticks around, and she proceeds to advance the plot by herself.   She’s vicious, playful, insightful, helpful, indifferent, mercurial, all of these things, but it all clearly emanates from  a central core of personality, an identity which is the same, whether bantering over tea, incinerating an innocent, or protesting someone else as arch enemy.  Her performance has a unity and therefore a force that Capaldi’s lacks.

Capaldi is too fragmented by the plot.  He has to keep stepping off the stage for other things to happen and other people to have conversations or move the plot along.  Although his personal narrative and his crisis is huge, the story structure fragments him so badly, it’s hard to conceive.

As for Clara, there’s a game attempt early on to flesh her out as a mature schoolteacher, who also happens to be a James Bondian power player – the one that UNIT reaches for when they can’t find the Doctor, it never quite rings true.   The trouble is that when she’s in UNIT barking out ideas and orders, she’s only saying obvious things that you figure professionals would have already thought of.   Then when she gets to the Mistress, she’s completely swept up and reduced to a yappy little toy dog, following along.  Think about it – from the moment she speaks to the Mistress, she’s not making a decision or having an insight, she’s fundamentally reactive and following.  I suppose that reinforces my point that this episode, in fundamental ways, has been stolen by the Mistress, whether that was Moffat’s intent or not.

Still, it’s not entirely fair to judge the episode at all, at this point.  It’s a two parter after all, and so we should make some effort to consider it as an organic whole, once the second part is out.  Will the manic distraction abate?  Will the Doctor’s emotional through line come to the fore?   What’s going to happen to the young Davros, the old Davros, etc.?  Are Missy and Clara really dead?  The Tardis really destroyed?  Or is it a trick, if not the Doctor’s, then Missy’s?  And if not them, then Davros?   The one thing we know is that Missy and Clara will be back.  Will the Doctor unmake reality to undo their deaths?

There’s all sorts of ways that Moffet could push for a resolution – emotional, plot, etc.  In the best of all worlds, he unifies his story resolution, tying up the plot in a satisfying way, bringing us to an emotional catharsis/epiphany, and advancing the lives of his characters.  That would be perfect, but he’s often had difficulty bringing in a hat trick like that.  I think we could settle for any one or two.

Anyway, nothing to do now, but wait and see what comes next.

[DenValdron @replies]

Looks like the ratings dropped by a third.  4.6 million tuned in to see it, compared to 6.8 for Capaldi’s debut.  The ratings seem to be in Trial of a Time Lord/7th Doctor Era levels now.

Seems it was beaten silly in its time slot by X-Factor by ITV which had 7.2 million.

To give you a not very historical comparison, consolidated television ratings show Christopher Eccleston’s average audience was 7.95 million. This rose to 8.33 million viewers per episode for David Tennant, while Matt Smith is watched by 7.66 million. ”  Capaldi’s first season averaged 7.4 million.

Historically, Doctor Who in the classic era has generally averaged between 7 and 9 million, with occasional spikes or runs of spikes, particularly during the Tom Baker era.  Despite the mythology, Colin Baker’s ill fated first season was quite within that range.

I guess the big wild cards are international sales.  You’ll notice that Capaldi and Coleman went on an international tour to promote Doctor Who in Latin American and Asia.  They’re pushing the international markets like crazy.

And then there’s the alternative TV viewing options, which may not show up in ratings per se.

The reviews have been very good.  Let’s hope that the numbers climb back up.

 

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