Tag: Doctor Who

Doctor Who and the Davros Discourse

So not all Doctor Who fans who were looking forward to the return of Russell T. Davies as the showrunner are thrilled by his first effort:

Yeah, all-walking all-talking all-dancing all-singing Davros (OK, maybe not the singing and dancing) in the new Doctor Who Children in Need special has really got on some people’s tits. Because I’m not a complete idiot, I understand why; able-bodied Davros is quite a change for that character, who we’ve never seen like this before (except for that episode with child Davros). The episode itself is basically a comedy sketch (despite RTD’s puzzling insistence on Instagram that it isn’t) where Fourteen arrives at Skaro while Davros is still developing his Mark 3 Travel Machine, which has a notable difference in design that the Doctor fiddles with. It’s kind of adorable even as it screws with canon in a self-aware way that could’ve been irritating were it less funny.

Now, because I understand why people are worked up over the depiction of Davros before whatever turned him into Michael Wisher in “Genesis of the Daleks” happened, I also understand RTD’s rationalisation for same:

Discussing the new-look Davros, Russell T Davies tells Doctor Who Unleashed that it was a conscious decision to move away from some outdated cultural stereotypes. Discussing the Dalek creator’s problematic legacy, RTD reflected on his discomfort about continuing to play into the trope of the “wheelchair-using, disabled, disfigured monster.” Of course, the appeal of the original 1970s Davros design was the iconic image of a half-man, half-Dalek which became as instantly recognizable as his creations. Unintentional though it was, the image of a scarred and hateful scientist and his Dalek wheelchair does play into this outdated and harmful trope.

And some of the commentary has been perfectly positive:

Of course, listening to disabled voices means acknowledging that disabled people aren’t a monolith and, as brother Ian demonstrates above, not all of us agree with Davies on this one… indeed, I had a squiz at the comments of the Youtube video of him saying this stuff and yeah, lots of people not really into it, with asking the fairly pertinent question of whether this ultimately just amounts to disability erasure. Personally, I’m not sure where I myself stand on all of this; not just because the subject is complicated—rather more so than the general discourse seems to think—but so is how I in particular relate to me being disabled.

Because I acquired my disability; I wasn’t actually born with this less than fully functional carcass… and I’ve never been entirely able to shake the suspicion that it’s not a “proper” disability somehow. That I’m a second-class cripple or something. I think the fact that I’m not in a wheelchair (though I expect to end up in one eventually) adds to that. I can’t remember exactly where or when, but I think it was in the Guardian that once I read an article that was obviously well-meaning about disability, but something about it definitely made me feel… kind of lesser as someone with an acquired disability rather than having been born with one. Probably it was just me, I’m sure that whoever wrote it didn’t mean it that way, but, well, that’s how I’ve seen myself ever since.

EDIT: I later saw this post on Bluesky regarding Ian Levine losing his shit above:

And while I entirely understand the point being made, in that I also have a different experience of disability to someone born with one, it doesn’t do anything to help my sense that my different experience is also a lesser one.

Accordingly, I find myself a bit… mixed about the Davros thing. I never actually saw him as contributing to the “disabled evil man” trope… but then again when I first saw him in “Genesis of the Daleks” in 1986 I wasn’t disabled myself, and I don’t think I even knew that it was a trope. (Or what a trope was, for that matter.) At any rate, I don’t think I ever saw Davros being in his Mark 3 Travel Machine as the thing that made him evil as such. I still don’t. That may just be me. I don’t really know. I would be curious to know what if any advice from disabled people Davies took before doing this.

I do want to note one thing I’m not seeing many if any people bring up in relation to all of this, which is that the show has kind of done this before. Back in the dim dark past of 1989, in “The Curse of Fenric”, one of the main secondary characters was Dr. Judson, the man running the Ultima machine from his wheelchair… until he gets taken over by the spirit of Fenric and can suddenly walk again. I don’t recall seeing any comparable reaction to this at the time, though admittedly I wasn’t really paying attention either; in 1989/90 there was no social media and people had to spew their venom forth in actual print in Doctor Who Bulletin or something, which I think I’d finally got sick of and stopped reading around then.

And probably no one cared, cos Judson wasn’t exactly an iconic Who villain on the order of Davros. But I do wonder what the people going off now think about that older episode. Especially with what we also know now about how Ian Briggs modelled Judson on Alan Turing and wanted him and the military commander in the story to both be gay and have had a past with each other, but the BBC weren’t having that in their on-its-last-legs SF series in 1989. How do we all feel about that, I wonder…

But the ultimate problem with the episode is that Davros should never have been brought back in the first place in the original series, as he was in 1979. With all due respect to messrs Gooderson Molloy & Bleach, I’ve always thought he should’ve been a one-and-done in “Genesis”. And for all that I enjoyed the episode; I thought having Julian Bleach play Davros out of the chair rather than in it was a really interesting idea (and he still looks like Davros somehow even without the mask and makeup), and the general comedic angle of it all was well done (Nicholas Briggs was spot on as the voice of Nyder, too). Maybe this makes me a Bad Disabled Person. Then again, I’ve never been much of a good one. CRIPPLE PUNK WHOO!

Anyway, as a closing thought, suffice to say I find this a bit over the top:

I know this is from Ian Levine’s FB group and I don’t think he started this, but I’m sure he’s all in favour of it. If it stops him making “Davros in Distress”, I’ll take it too…

The Colour of the Daleks?

So, apart from the actual new episodes with David Tennant, the BBC’s special event for the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who is… a colourised version of the original Dalek serial. Which I already thought was a bit “oh”, but they’ve also revealed it’s been edited down to 75 minutes—which is rather less than half the original length of the story, which was a seven-episode serial—and, well, now samples of the colour work have been released…

…And I’m now even less certain of what to think about it. I suppose at least the colour is kind of “60s”-ish, in that I’ve seen quite a lot of 60s films where the colour has that sort of visual character (I have absolutely no idea what else to call it), though I do wonder how accurate it is to whatever the actual colouring of the set would’ve been… cos even in monochrome film & TV things have to be a certain colour for it to register as a particular shade of grey on the screen. Cf. the castle in Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc which was apparently some nasty pink colour in reality, or indeed the TARDIS console, which was actually a kind of green…

…which it noticeably isn’t in this picture, they apparently went for the colour it was supposed to be instead… and I find myself oddly alarmed by the TARDIS control room floor… Also, isn’t this just a rehearsal picture or some such? This shot never appears in the episode, so why did they colourise it? Indeed, they’ve done rather more than that:

See a couple of details missing from the colour photo?

…Although at least the blue floor is kind of historically “correct”, as this rather rare actual colour photo (taken during rehearsals for episode eight of “The Daleks’ Masterplan” a couple of years later) shows. Still not sure about the shade, nor indeed Barbara’s cardigan…

But the thing I’m most unsure of is that it also has a new score by Mark Ayres, and that’s something that really bothers me somehow. I’ve no doubt it’ll be perfectly fine, Ayres won’t do a poor job or anything like that… I don’t know, it just feels like it’s going rather beyond the original remit of the restoration team which was to not add anything to the episodes (unless as optional extras on the DVD releases), and I’m curious as to where this will leave the original Tristram Cary score, which I think is kind of important to the serial. (EDIT: later on Thursday I found David Graham—who I had no idea was still alive—is also redoing his Dalek voices. Somehow this doesn’t bother me at all.)

So yeah, I have reservations, and I will be buying it as soon as the blu-ray comes out. OBVIOUSLY.

Found footage?

As ever, there’s talk of lost Doctor Who episodes having been found, and there’s equal talk on social media of them not being found; someone claims to have spoken to the collector in the article and apparently the latter said the episodes in question are one that have been “known” about for years and not new discoveries. However, in recent times there has been another list of supposedly actual new finds, which I quote from the comments of a YT video about it:

Myth Makers 2 & 4
Smugglers 2 & 4
Highlanders 2
Space pirates 4-6
Galaxy Four 4

Now I suspect this is about as bullshit as most Doctor Who missing episode rumours, but I find it oddly believable, cos while I’m sure most Whovians would welcome the return of any of the missing 97, I don’t think any of these are really on anyone’s list of priorities for rediscovery, especially not “The Space Pirates”. We’d take those episodes, sure, but we’d rather get “Tenth Planet” episode four or “The Power of the Daleks” or “Marco Polo”. I think the fact this rumour involves such lower priority episodes actually makes it more likely… though obviously I wouldn’t actually believe it until the footage actually appeared.

New Who, 1970

One of the numerous photos announcing the advent of third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, and one that, in hindsight, drips with a certain irony. There’s a Silurian and one of the alien ambassador costumes from his first series, sure enough, but there’s also, notably, a Cyberman—and not even the most recent Cyberman design at that, for some reason, that’s one of the “Wheel in Space” models—and a Yeti. Ironic because, although Pertwee apparently claimed the Cybermen were his favourite Doctor Who monster, they wouldn’t appear in another story until the next Doctor took over and their sole appearance in a Pertwee story was a cameo in “Carnival of Monsters” where neither they nor the Doctor crossed paths… and the Yeti would never appear again other than another cameo in “The Five Doctors”, in which Pertwee’s Doctor conspicuously did not encounter them either…

The Doctors dress up

Ah, so forthcoming 15th Doctor Ncuti Gatwa is bringing out the homophobes before he’s even started:

You’ll be missed, I’m sure

I say “homophobes” specifically because it appears that Ncuti has acknowledged being queer in a new interview (it’s been suspected for a while, apparently, but he’s never said anything one way or the other himself until this thing in Elle). In this case he brought out a misogynist as a bonus:

Fairly sure that actually is a man, bro, he just looks better in that than you probably do…

Well, the Doctor may or may not be a man, depending on how such concepts operate in such an alien culture as the Time Lords, but some of the actors in the role have had no issues dressing up like the distaff:

Colin Baker in Privates on Parade in the early 90s. That top hat was the very thing his Doctor’s costume needed…

Matt Smith also on stage in the late oughts. Indeed, this performance was apparently a big part of why he got signed up as the Doctor.

Plus his immediate predecessor and successor both played actual trans characters back in the day.

And there’s whatever the fuck Tom Baker was doing with Douglas Adams here. Also…

Did we all forget that episode where Jon Pertwee’s Doctor dressed up as a cleaning lady IN THE SHOW ITSELF? “The Green Death” episode 4. Don’t show it to your kids, it’ll warp them and make them want to dress up as unconvincing middle-aged women from the 1970s… It’s a good thing episode 3 of “The Highlanders” is one of the still missing ones, otherwise the young people might be exposed to Patrick Troughton’s 18th century Scottish washerwoman…

…Oh. Damn you John Cura and your valiant efforts to preserve a visual record of TV programming at a time when the BBC couldn’t be bothered.

Anyway, the important thing is that messrs Troughton, Pertwee, T. and C. Baker, Tennant, Smith, and Capaldi are all white men, and Ncuti Gatwa is conspicuously… not, and I feel that detail is as important to the people getting angry at his casting as his ability to rock a skirt. Pleasingly, Ncuti is already coming out swinging:

I feel this Doctor is not going to take anyone’s shit, on the screen or off it.

The original Timeless Children!

It’s BEAUTIFUL. If any single moment in Doctor Who history really changed the show forever, this first, slightly casual mention (which would be elaborated on a bit a couple of weeks later) of the Time Lords in episode six of “The War Games” (May 24th, 1969) was probably it, even more so than the famous handover of the title role at the end of “The Tenth Planet” a few years earlier. The intended joke, for those who aren’t Who fans, is that if Twitter had existed in 1969 then Doctor Who fandom would have shat its pants online just like it did with the “Timeless Child” business in the last couple of years… but it’s also funny cos there’s some truth to it.

I wouldn’t say the Time Lords ruined the show, but they obviously took away some of the mystery behind the Doctor. We kind of knew just who “Who” was. We know “The War Games” came about as it did near the end of 1968 when Derrick Sherwin had to hastily replace two other stories that weren’t working, so he drafted Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke to write this epic that would also have to set up the following season in which the Doctor would be stranded on Earth, and suggested maybe they should finally clear up the Doctor’s origins.

Said origins were apparently very casually discussed, too, Sherwin appears to have just pulled the name “Time Lords” out of his arse while the story was being plotted, and BOOM, just like that the show changed forever without apparently much forethought. Like I said, they don’t ruin the show but it would never really be the same afterwards… and we don’t know yet how the “Timeless Child” will affect the series, but at least it seems to have had more actual thought put into it than the original creation of the Time Lords.

Parenthetically, somewhere in the house I think I still have an old edition of Doctor Who Bulletin (as it then was), must have been from 1989 or ’90, in which one of the letters was from someone writing in DWB‘s patented pissy and moany style as if they were reviewing season 6 in 1969… I no longer recall the details of it (other than the brilliant ending bitching about the next Doctor being played by a comedian), but it was totally in the spirit of this picture and an excellent jab at how just shitty the show’s fandom could be even 30+ years ago…

The Unexpectedly Animated Menace

Well, I’ll be damned. “The Underwater Menace” is finally getting an animated reconstruction of its two missing episodes and is due out before the end of the year (which means we’ll probably get it three to six months later here in Australia; we’re only getting the blu-ray of season 9 here this month after it came out in the UK in March).

The original DVD release always struck me as quite unsatisfactory, although I now see that wasn’t entirely the BBC’s fault; the missing episodes were going to be animated in 2014 but the animation company went under before doing the job. That said, rather than hiring someone else to animate it and instead just slapping together a telesnap reconstruction without even the title sequence or proper credits or some sort of text commentary to illustrate the bits of action that you couldn’t discern just from the audio was lazy as hell, so nice to see it’s finally getting done properly, even if it is. Maybe I’ll even like it a bit better if I fully understand what’s actually happening on screen in episodes one and four…

Reverse the polarity of the idiot flow!

Found this while going through the archives:

…And I love this as much as I did the day I screenshotted it from Tumblr (which must’ve been nearly ten years ago). It’s such a misunderstanding of the show in general and Pertwee’s Doctor in particular. I mean, yeah, Three did render his services, but it wasn’t out of any sense of duty to the nation or UNIT… what motivates him during his exile on Earth is, in large part, self-interest (alongside his own curiosity and compassion); he says outright in the last scene of “Spearhead From Space” he wants UNIT’s help in getting himself away from Earth again. He takes as much from them as he gives to them (indeed, in “Inferno” him exploiting UNIT’s presence at Project Inferno is what causes most of his troubles in that story). It’s almost like Steve didn’t actually watch Pertwee’s episodes, or only saw something in them that he wanted to see but wasn’t really there… these days, of course, if Steve had any idea about the political and cultural subtexts did find their way into the show under Barry Letts’ aegis, he’d just be whining about the wokeness of the whole thing.

Mistakes in time and space

Another WhoCulture video. Several of these are random and usually brief intrusions by crew members, but I don’t feel like I’m spoiling much by noting that #1 is the justly legendary incident with Malcolm Terris’ splitting pants in “The Horns of Nimon”…

You little ripper!

…but I’m more intrigued by an item lower on the list, that being an episode of “The Chase”…

…in which a camera can be seen for a few seconds in the background of this shot. As the narrator says, this probably wouldn’t have been noticed back in the days when the show was shot in b/w 405-line (and being viewed on much smaller screens than we have now) compared to PAL colour… but then never mentions the time the same thing did happen in colour…

…that being “Planet of the Daleks” episode five where you can indeed just about see the camera lurking, and also one of the extras playing a Spiridon, standing at the right of the shot with his fur covering hanging slack and making bugger all effort to move out of shot. A bit odd they brought one up but not the other, and I didn’t see any of the commenters bring it up either (though I did discover a new favourite error, that being a random stagehand’s hand in “Pyramids of Mars”)…