Doctor Who reviews: The Sara Kingdom Trilogy

“There are many sorts of ghosts, Jo. Ghosts from the past, and ghosts from the future.” – the Third Doctor, “Day of the Daleks”

On the Big Finish Audio group on Facebook it was mentioned that actress Jean Marsh turned 87 years old today. Marsh, who was born on 1 July 1934, has had a very lengthy and storied career. Among her many, many roles, she appeared a few times on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who.

Way back in 1965 Marsh appeared in episodes four through twelve of the Doctor Who magnum opus “The Daleks’ Master Plan” written by Terry Nation & Dennis Spooner, script edited by Donald Tosh, and directed by Douglas Camfield.  Marsh portrayed Sara Kingdom, an agent of the Space Security Service in the year 4000 AD.  Sara was initially depicted as an icy, ruthless operative who followed orders zealously. When the Guardian of the Solar System, Mavic Chen, informed Sara that fellow SSS agent Bret Vyon was a traitor, she believed it.  As far as she was concerned, Chen was her superior, and totally above reproach.  Sara confronted Bret and shot him dead.

Unfortunately, what Sara did not know was that Chen was collaborating with the Daleks and a number of other aliens civilizations in a diabolical scheme to conquer the entire galaxy.  Bret learned of Chen’s treason, and so he had to be eliminated.

Soon after gunning down Bret, Sara tracked down the Doctor and Steven Taylor, ready to dispatch them in a similarly ruthless manner.  Fortunately, the Doctor was able to convince Sara of the truth about Chen and his alliance with the Daleks.  Sara was utterly devastated.  Bret, it turned out, was her brother, and her unquestioning adherence to orders led her to kill him in cold blood.

Determined to thwart Chen, the man who manipulated her and betrayed her trust, Sara joined the Doctor and Steven on the TARDIS as they sought to stop the Daleks’ scheme.

At the conclusion of “The Daleks ’ Master Plan” the Doctor managed to turn the Daleks’ doomsday weapon, the Time Destructor, against them, destroying their invasion force.  Tragically, Sara was caught in the Time Destructor’s field, and rapidly aged to death.

In 2008, over four decades after she had portrayed Sara Kingdom on television, Marsh was given the opportunity to reprise the character in Doctor Who audio stories produced by Big Finish. The spin-off range The Companion Chronicles were adventures narrated by various individuals who had traveled with the Doctor throughout the years. The trilogy of Home Truths, The Drowned World and The Guardian of the Solar System featured Sara Kingdom. The three audio stories were released in November 2008, July 2009 and July 2010.

When author John Peel had novelized “The Daleks’ Master Plan” in 1989  he inserted a six month gap between the events of episodes seven and eight.  Peel liked the character of Sara Kingdom, and he stated that this gap could provide other writers with an opportunity to tell stories of Sara’s travels with the Doctor and Steven.

The events recounted in of Home Truths, The Drowned World and The Guardian of the Solar System are set during that six month period.  But, if Sara is dead, how can she be narrating the stories?  Well, it turns out we are listening to Sara’s ghost… sort of.  Author Simon Guerrier comes up with a very unusual and inventive way to bring Sara back in these this trio of audio adventures.

Marsh is an amazing actress.  It cannot have been easy for her to reprise a role she had played 42 years before.  Especially since of the nine episodes of “The Daleks’ Master Plan” Marsh appeared in only two (episodes five and ten) are still known to exist.  So she definitely did not have much material to reference.  Nevertheless, despite this obstacle, Marsh is positively brilliant in these three audio stories.  She does an amazing job slipping back into the character’s shoes.

As William Hartnell, the actor who portrayed the First Doctor, passed away in 1975, there was obviously no way he could have contributed to these productions.  But Guerrier’s dialogue sounds exactly like what the Doctor would have said.  And Jean Marsh, when speaking the Doctor’s lines, manages to capture the cadence and personality of Hartnell’s speech patterns.

The framing sequences of the trilogy are set on Earth in the far, far distant future, after some unnamed cataclysm has sent humanity back to a primitive technological level.  Robert, who is sort of a cross between a detective and a priest, is sent to investigate Sara’s “ghost.”  It is to Robert that Sara recounts her adventures.  Robert is played by Niall MacGregor.

Home Truths, the first installment of the trilogy, is a very introspective story.  Guerrier really gets into Sara’s head, and we learn a great deal about her.  The grief she feels at having killed her own brother is palpable.  Marsh narration imbues Guerrier’s script with deep, moving emotion.

The setting for Home Truths is a super-advanced computerized house, one that appears to be haunted.  Guerrier effectively uses Clarke’s Law, i.e. any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  He also broaches upon the theme of how our technology advances far faster than our ability to control it or use it wisely.  And he focuses upon how each and every one of us has dark thoughts & urges buried in our unconscious.  Home Truths reminded me a bit of the classic 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet, with its “monsters from the id.”

The Drowned World, in contrast, is a more action based story.  The Doctor, Sara, and Steven arrive on an endangered asteroid mining colony.  Sara is really thrust to the forefront, as we see her steely determination that no one else dies on her watch.  Confronted with almost certain death, she refuses to give in, standing her ground and holding off the alien menace until everyone else gets to safety.

The story has a very 1960s feel, reminiscent of the “base under siege” formula utilized a number of times on the show.  Admittedly, the aliens in The Drowned World would probably have been impossible to achieve with Sixties special effects.  But they are good creatures to use in the audio format, where all that’s required is the listener’s imagination.

At the end of The Drowned World, Robert brings his gravely ill daughter to the house, asking Sara’s to use the house’s incredible abilities to cure her.  As The Guardian of the Solar System opens, we learn that Sara has healed the young girl, in return for Robert agreeing to remain in the house for the rest of his life, to keep Sara company.  Now, many years later, after his daughter has grown to adulthood and left the island the house is built upon, Robert requests that Sara finally allow him his freedom.  She agrees, but first wishes to tell him one last story…

While Sara was traveling with the Doctor and Steven, the TARDIS materialized within the bowels of a titanic clock that was warping the fabric of time & space.  Exploring amongst the maze of giant gears and chains, watching a towering pendulum swinging back & forth, they observed a group of tired, stooped old men shuffling amidst the gantries and walkways of the cyclopean clockwork mechanism.  The trio soon discovered that they are back in Earth’s solar system.  Even more pertinent to Sara, she learns that they have arrived approximately one year before the Daleks’ massive plot went into action.  And, on a more personal note, one year before Sara killed her brother.

The TARDIS travelers are arrested by the Space Security Service.  Recognizing Sara as a fellow SSS agent, their captors bring her to a separate interrogation room.  And there Sara comes face to face with her brother, Bret Vyon.  Nearly hysterical at seeing him alive, Sara begins to wonder if it is somehow possible to change history, to alter the events that will occur in the next year, events that will culminate in her shooting her brother down in cold blood.

Sara’s attempts to explain that she has traveled back in time are met by disbelief by Bret.  Between her emotional outburst at seeing him alive again, and Bret knowing that prolonged exposure to the forces within the humongous clock can cause mental disorientation, Bret finds her tale of time travel unbelievable.  Then Sara learns that she has another opportunity to alter history, for an important figure happens to be visiting the clock facility: Mavic Chen himself.  And Sara manages to gain an audience with him.

Coming face to face with Chen, the man she hates most in the world, Sara is forced to keep her calm.  She attempts to steer the conversation in a way that it might influence Chen might act differently in a year’s time.  All the while, she has to carefully sidestep mentioning any information that would indicate to Chen that she is aware of his alliance with the Daleks.  In the process, she learns the terrible secret of the clock, and a possible explanation for what led Chen to collaborate with the Daleks in the first place.

Guerrier once again does a superb job writing Sara.  He puts her through an emotional wringer, having her forced to see Bret alive once more, and then attempting to reason with Chen, a man she knows will very shortly betray Earth.

Likewise, Guerrier captures the character of Mavic Chen perfectly.  Chen is a master politician with a magnetic personality.  He is also incredibly good at reading people and knowing what to say to get them to act as he wishes them to, without them ever realizing they have been manipulated.  He hides his arrogance and ravenous hunger for power beneath a benign concern for the well-being of the solar system.  Even Sara, knowing what Chen’s future actions will bring, finds herself being convinced and won over by his carefully-phrased arguments.

Chen is an interesting, albeit terrifying, figure.  Judging by his role in the The Guardian of the Solar System audio play, what I’ve seen of him in the three episodes of “The Daleks’ Master Plan” that are known to have survived, as well as John Peel’s two volume novelization, Chen is undoubtedly a sociopath.  He is a charismatic and persuasive individual who casually uses and then discards people.  Chen is ready to betray the Earth, and then in turn double-cross the Daleks, so that he can assume total control of the entire galaxy, without a thought given to the countless lives that will be lost due to his machinations.

The original episodes of “The Daleks’ Master Plan” do not delve too deeply into the political climate or structure of Earth’s government in the year 4000.  However, there is a certain quasi-fascist atmosphere present.  We are not told if Mavic Chen was elected Guardian of the Solar System, appointed to the position, or seized power in a coup.  But it is quite clear that he holds tremendous authority, and there are not any apparent political checks & balances against him.  The agents of the Space Security Service possess a “license to kill,” and throughout “The Daleks’ Master Plan” we see them typically shooting first and asking questions later, if at all.  The members of the SSS appear to possess an unquestioning obedience to orders, which is what led Sara to so easily kill her own brother.

When Terry Nation created the Daleks, he used them as a blatant allegory for the Nazis.  It has been suggested over the years by various reviewers that the Earth government Nation presented in “The Daleks’ Master Plan” was also a metaphor for the Third Reich, albeit a much more subtle one, a form of fascism that had successfully hidden itself under the cloak of democracy.  Is it mere coincidence that the SSS is just one letter longer than the common abbreviation of the Nazis’ Schutzstaffel?   More than one commentator has noted that Nation recycled and fleshed out the political atmosphere of this story in his dystopian space opera Blake’s 7, which presented a tyrannical, fascistic “Terran Federation” brutally stamping out liberty and free will.

In The Guardian of the Solar System, Guerrier extrapolates on the seeds planted in “The Daleks’ Master Plan.”  The old men kept tending to the clock are apparently political prisoners or dissidents.  Sara unequivocally states that the SSS have been trained to follow orders to the letter, to not ask any questions.  SSS operations are routinely classified for reasons of security, so that each agent is left in the dark about what missions their fellow operatives have been assigned to.  The organization is run like a well-oiled machine.

In the gargantuan clock, Sara sees a metaphor for herself.  She was just a mere cog in a vastly complicated mechanism, completely unable to alter her destiny.  And when her attempts to alter history fail, that merely reinforces that helpless self-appraisal of her role in the scheme of things. In an anguished cry, Sara hollers “There isn’t any choice!  There’s never any choice!”

Guerrier plays with the possibility of a predestination paradox in The Guardian of the Solar System.  At the end of the audio play, Sara Kingdom is convinced that her attempts to alter history may very well have instead caused those events to take place.  This reinforces Sara’s feelings of being a cog in a machine, bereft of free will, this time not just in Mavic Chen’s government, but in the vast scope of history itself.

However, Guerrier deliberately leaves it ambiguous as to whether events were preordained.  Both Sara and the listener are kept in the dark as to whether Mavic Chen was already a part of the Dalek conspiracy prior to the events of the story, or if it was Sara’s actions throughout that led him to collaborate with Earth’s enemies.

Once again, as in the previous two parts of this trilogy, Jean Marsh is absolutely incredible as Sara Kingdom.  A thousand years after her mind had been copied into the computer of the mysterious house, Sara is still tortured by her actions, by the massive guilt she feels for unquestioningly following orders and killing her brother.  Unaware that Chen was exterminated by Daleks once his usefulness had run out, and that her original self died thwarting the Dalek invasion, the “ghost” of Sara has been left for a millennium with no closure.  In a way, the original, “real” Sara met with a more merciful fate.  Yes, she died a horrible death when the Time Destructor was activated, but at least now she is at peace.  The copy of her, however, the “spirit” possessing the house has been left for a thousand years with unresolved guild and unanswered questions.  Marsh brings across all of this torment and anguish with palpable emotion in a riveting performance.

Niall MacGregor also does a fine job as Robert.  It is no accident that Robert is a sort of priest, because Sara is quite clearly confessing her sins to him, in search of absolution.  Robert can only try to point out the good that Sara has done during her travels with the Doctor, the lives she has saved.  He regards her as a heroine who has repeatedly been ready to sacrifice herself to save the innocent.

Guerrier ends The Guardian of the Solar System on a striking note.  Sara, who has argued to Robert that she has never had any choice, is finally presented with a clear-cut opportunity to change, to decide her fate.  Restored to corporeal, mortal form by Robert, who has taken her place as “the ghost in the machine” of the house, Sara is now free to choose what she wants to do next.  And, granted this freedom for the first time, she is left undecided.  What happens when someone whose whole life has been mapped out for them is given the gift of choice?

The trilogy was directed by Lisa Bowerman, best known for playing Bernice Summerfield in the Big Finish audio plays.  Bowerman did a superb job, getting riveting performances from Jean Marsh in all three stories.

Each disk included brief behind the scene interviews.  I enjoyed these, as they provided Marsh’s thoughts on reprising the role of Sara.  Interestingly, Marsh indicated she would be open to playing Morgaine from “Battlefield” in an audio story.  Considering the end of that story left her fate up in the air (how exactly does one “lock up” a powerful extra-dimensional sorceress?) there could be potential in having her return in a Big Finish sequel.

In any case, these were very good productions.  I’ve always liked the character of Sara Kingdom, based upon viewing those two episodes from “The Daleks’ Master Plan” and reading the novelization.  It was great to have her appear in new stories.  Sara was so unlike the majority of female companions from the 1960s, who would usually scream their lungs out when confronted by the monster of the week.  She was sort of a futuristic Cathy Gale or Emma Peel, tough as nails and no nonsense, but with a caring, sensitive side buried under her hard exterior.  Sara was very much ahead of her time.

I was glad that Simon Guerrier brought back Sara Kingdom in these three audio plays.  Marsh subsequently portrayed Sara in several other Big Finish releases. I had hoped we might get a story in which the revived Sara would travel the Doctor in one of his later regenerations, as there’s the potential for some poignant drama out of a reunion of the two.  How would the Doctor react to Sara’s return, and how would Sara cope with the knowledge that her original self had died long ago on Kembel?  Would the Doctor be able to grant the absolution that Sara had sought for so long?  The storytelling possibilities are tremendous.

Of course, it’s quite possible that Marsh, now 87 years old, has retired from acting, in which case the likelihood of her returning to the role of Sara Kingdom once again is very remote. But at least we did have the opportunity to hear her perform in several memorable Big Finish productions within the past decade and a half.

Remembering Elisabeth Sladen

It’s a bit difficult to believe that it’s been a decade since English actress Elisabeth Sladen passed away on April 19, 2011 at the age of 65. Sladen was well-known for playing the beloved character of Sarah Jane Smith on the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who.

Sladen was cast as Sarah Jane Smith in 1973 by Doctor Who producer Barry Letts and made her debut in the four-episode serial “The Time Warrior” which opened Season 11 of the series. At the time the Doctor was being played by Jon Pertwee, in his fifth and final season in the role.

Initially written as an investigative journalist & feminist, Sarah was intended to be a bit of contrast to Pertwee’s take on the Doctor, who could definitely come across as arrogant, headstrong and chauvinistic. For better or worse, the rough edges in the relationship between the Doctor and Sarah were quickly smoothed down. Sladen and Pertwee did seem to have a good rapport, although Pertwee choose to depart at the end of the season in order to avoid being typecast and to work on other projects.

Tom Baker was cast as the next incarnation of Doctor in 1974. As effective as the bond between Pertwee and Sladen had been, the chemistry between Baker and Sladen was absolutely amazing.  The two actors played off each other incredibly well. The Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith are regarded as one of the all-time greatest Doctor-companion teams in the entire history of the series. And, yeah, I am definitely one of those fans who agrees with that assssment.

Sladen remained on Doctor Who for three and a half years. She left the show in the middle of Season 14, and Sarah’s departure from the TARDIS was seen in the final episode of the four-part serial “The Hand of Fear” broadcast 23 October 1976. It was a very effective, moving scene. Sladen and Baker apparently worked out most of the dialogue between themselves.

Sarah Jane Smith was well-loved by fandom, and Sladen found herself returning to the world of Doctor Who on several occasions over the next three decades, beginning with K-9 and Company, a pilot for a proposed spin-off that would have paired Sarah with the Doctor’s beloved robot dog that aired in 1981. K-9 and Company was not picked up, but Sarah would soon return again along with a number of other past actors from Doctor Who, in the 1983 anniversary special “The Five Doctors.” Sladen then reprised the role of Sarah in the 1993 charity special “Dimensions in Time” and the 1995 direct-to-video story Downtime.

Sladen was reunited with Jon Pertwee for a pair of radio plays featuring the Third Doctor and Sarah, “The Paradise of Death” in 1993 and “The Ghosts of N-Space” in 1996, both of which were written by Barry Letts.  In 1999 Big Finish Productions obtained the license to produce Doctor Who audio dramas, and they released several stories featuring Sarah Jane Smith, with Sladen once again playing the role.

After a decade and a half long cancellation, Doctor Who finally returned to television in 2005. Series Two episode “School Reunion” by Toby Whithouse, broadcast 29 April 2006, saw the Doctor, now in his Tenth incarnation and played by David Tennant, reunited with Sarah Jane Smith. One aspect of the story examined the difficulty Sarah had experienced in adjusting back to a normal existence after her fantastic adventures with the Doctor across time & space, and her ambivalence about him once again entering her life. Sladen really did a great job with the material, and clearly enjoyed the opportunity to play Sarah as a more complex, rounded character.

“School Reunion” was very well received and quickly led to the spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures which was broadcast from 2007 to 2011 on BBC, as well as further guest appearances on Doctor Who itself.

In addition to her work on Doctor Who, Sladen acted in a wide variety of British television productions, among them the soap opera Coronation Street (1970), police procedurals Z-Cars (1972) and The Bill (1989), sitcom Take My Wife… (1979), medical drama Peak Practice (1996), and the BBC Classics production of Gulliver in Lilliput (1982), the last of which she was cast in by former Doctor Who producer Barry Letts. Sladen also did extensive stage work, appearing on several occasions alongside her husband Brian Miller.

I was fortunate to have met Sladen once. I visited in London for several months in 1999. Sladen was doing a signing at The Who Shop in East Ham, London. At the time she was promoting the Big Finish audio play Walking To Babylon which was adapted from the Bernice Summerfield novel written by Kate Orman. (Bernice Summerfield is a time traveling archeologist who made her debut in the Doctor Who novels published in the early 1990s.) Sladen played Ninan-ashtammu, a priestess in ancient Babylon.

Even though Doctor Who had been canceled for a decade by this point, there was quite a crowd at The Who Shop for the signing, which really demonstrated how beloved Elisabeth Sladen was to fans of the show. I think Sladen was more than a bit surprised that this American fan in his early 20s (i.e. myself) was there to meet her, since at the time Doctor Who had basically just a fringe cult following in the States (it would not become really well-known here in America until several years after the BBC revived it).

I was really struck by how little Sladen appeared to have changed in the two decades since she had left the show. I said something to her along the lines of “You must have been very young when you appeared on Doctor Who.” She smiled and replied “I know what you’re trying to say. Thank you.”

I grew up watching reruns of Doctor Who on the local PBS station in the early 1980s, so it was definitely a huge thrill meeting Elizabeth Sladen. I’m glad I had the opportunity.

Doctor Who meets Batman

Happy new year! To kick off 2021 properly, I had a strangely specific dream last night.

To be precise, I dreamed that the TARDIS from Doctor Who, with the Season Two line-up of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicky, broke down near Gotham City in the 1950s. The Doctor being a time traveler knew that Bruce Wayne was Batman, so everyone headed over to Wayne Manor to enlist Batman’s help in repairing the TARDIS. When they arrived they encountered the Batman Family, the version drawn by artists Sheldon Moldoff and Dick Sprang, appropriately enough. And then a bunch of other stuff happened.

Come on, BBC and DC Comics, you know this team-up would be amazing!

(Yeah, I do have other sorts of dreams, too, but I’m not going to discuss them here. Gotta keep this blog family-friendly, y’know?)

Now I really want to see this happen. And, I mean, it actually COULD happen. After all, the Twelfth Doctor, voiced by Peter Capaldi, met Batman in the LEGO Dimensions video game. Additionally, Batman fought the Daleks, voiced by Nicholas Briggs, in The LEGO Batman Movie.

Batman, Doctor Who and Gandalf walk into a LEGO bar…

And of course I have to offer a tip of the hat to the Doctor Who serial “Inferno” broadcast in 1970.  At the time the Doctor was exiled to present-day Earth and, trying to get the TARDIS working again, somehow removed the console and started tinkering with it. When someone expressed disappointment upon seeing this supposedly-miraculous device, the Doctor fired off a memorably sarcastic response:

“What were you expecting, some kind of space rocket with Batman at the controls?”

I wish I was actually an artist, because if I was I would so totally be drawing a team-up between the First Doctor and the Batman of the 1950s right now.

Doctor Who reviews: The Lovecraft Invasion

The audio play Doctor Who: The Lovecraft Invasion was released by Big Finish in late July. However, given some of the subject matter, with Halloween right around the corner, now is certainly an appropriate time to discuss it.

Written by Robert Valentine and starring Colin Baker as the Doctor, The Lovecraft Invasion begins in medias res, with the Doctor and companions Flip Jackson and Constance Clarke, accompanied by bounty hunter Calypso Jonze, fleeing through the corridors of Titan Base in the 51st Century. As always, the Doctor and friends reach the TARDIS just in the nick of time, but they have a formidable task ahead of them. The Somnifax, a mind-parasite capable of turning its host’s nightmares into physical reality, has escaped Titan and is fleeing simultaneously into the solar system and back in time.

The Doctor tracks the Somnifax to Earth, specifically Providence, Rhode Island in January 1937. The parasite has entered the mind of weird fiction writer Howard Philips Lovecraft, drawn to him by both his fantastically bizarre imagination and his virulent xenophobia. The combination of these two elements will enable the Somnifax to manifest unspeakably destructive nightmares with which to wipe out humanity.

Jones, who has been tracking the Somnifax, has technology that temporarily inhibits the Somnifax’s ability to manifest Lovecraft’s fantasies, but unless the parasite voluntarily leaves there is no way to trap it. The Doctor and Flip utilize Jonze’ technology to enter Lovecraft’s mind and fight the Somnifax in the mental landscape.

H.P. Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 to March 15, 1937) met with very limited success during his own lifetime, but posthumously became one of the most hugely influential figures of 20th Century horror and science fiction. Lovecraft’s so-called “Cthulhu Mythos,” with its eldritch abominations, ancient forbidden texts and themes of existential cosmic horror, has served to inspire innumerable writers and artists over the past 70 years.

That being said, Lovecraft is also a very problematic figure. Throughout his correspondence he regularly espoused extremely racist views.  Within his fiction the repeated threats of humanity being physically and ideologically corrupted, of being replaced by “the Other,” is heavily influenced by his own personal fears of miscegenation and immigration destroying the Anglo-Saxon race and culture in Europe and North America.

As this story itself points out, Lovecraft is one of those writers who people often discover in their teenage years, enthusiastically devouring his works, only to subsequently learn of his reprehensible real-world ideologies.  Such was my experience. Reading Lovecraft’s stories in middle school, I found them both brilliant and terrifying. My enthusiasm for him was later dampened when I learned more about the man himself.

I read the hell out of this book when I was 14 years old

The Lovecraft Invasion feels like a very timely work, and not just in addressing the reprehensibility of racism.  It delves headlong into the question over whether or not it is possible to separate the writer from his or her writings.  The Lovecraft Invasion was recorded by Big Finish on 29-30 January 2020, at which point the debate over Cancel Culture was already raging, but in subsequent months it greatly intensified due to such occurrences as Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling making remarks that many regarded as transphobic.

Within the audio play itself, the Doctor offers his own (fictional) example of disenchantment, relating how in later life he learned that one of his favorite childhood authors went around blowing up entire planets for a hobby, and afterwards the Doctor found he was unable to revisit the books he had once enjoyed.  Awareness of the author’s real-world activities had forever poisoned those books for the Doctor.

I do not know if there is a definitive answer to be had to this debate.  I think probably it needs to be left up to the individual to decide for himself or herself whether, having learned unpleasant facts about a creative individual, they can still enjoy the works of art that person created.

While I do appreciate how vehement and well-articulated the Doctor’s rebuttal of Lovecraft’s bigotry is, I wonder if perhaps the story is a bit hard on the man. It could have been observed within the story that even though Lovecraft’s views were reprehensible, he was hardly an outlier. The unfortunate fact is that he was actually very typical of his time, and a great many Americans in the 1930s possessed strongly racist and anti-Semitic beliefs.

Nevertheless, Valentine’s script does not make Lovecraft a wholly unsympathetic figure. He is shown to be a man haunted by the fact that both of his parents died in an insane asylum, and terrified that he is destined to follow that horrifying path himself.  And in the end Calypso realizes Lovecraft is a figure not to be hated, but rather pitied.

Like it says in the Necronomicon, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” … nope, sorry, Google Translate hasn’t got a clue!

One aspect setup of The Lovecraft Invasion feels that Robert Valentine drawing a deliberate contrast against both the real-world figure of Lovecraft and his fiction. There were practically no female characters in Lovecraft’s fiction, the majority of his protagonists being middle-aged conservative, celibate scholars.  In this audio play the Doctor is traveling with two women, Flip and Constance. A third woman, Calypso Jonze, joins them.

Coming from the far-distant future of circa 5000 AD, Calypso identifies as a mixed race, pansexual, trans, non-binary individual with extraterrestrial ancestors. Valentine acknowledged that he created Jonze to embody literally everything which terrified Lovecraft.

So, while the Doctor and Flip are exploring Lovecraft’s subconscious mind, in the real world Constance and Calypso, two assertive, independent women are left to look after him, and to challenge his attitudes towards both race and gender.

Miranda Raison, Colin Baker and Lisa Greenwood

The cast of The Lovecraft Invasion all do good work. In the past I have often commented on how much I liked Colin Baker’s underrated portrayal of the Sixth Doctor on television, and how I have really enjoyed him in the Big Finish stories, where he has been given high-quality scripts with which to work.  Once again Baker turns in a powerful, passionate and entertaining performance as the Doctor. It is absolutely a joy listening to him.

Miranda Raison and Lisa Greenwood are good as Constance and Flip.  This is the first time I’ve listened to a Big Finish story with this particular TARDIS team, but I enjoyed it, and I think I will download some more adventures with this cast. The contrast between Flip, a teenager from 2010, and Constance, a war widow and member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service from Britain in 1944, is interesting, and it allows for some dramatic interactions to occur between the two women, as well as in their interactions with the Doctor.

The Sixth Doctor has a brash, forceful personality, and so the idea of pairing him with two female companions is a novel idea.  I think it allows for a slightly more equal power dynamic than you see when this Doctor is traveling with just one companion.

Robyn Holdaway as Calypso Jonze is more difficult to judge, since this is the character’s first appearance, and introduced mid-story it’s difficult to get too much of a feel for background or motivation. I do think Calypso has potential, and I would not be surprised if she, um, I mean they appear again. (Sorry, those non-binary pronouns take some getting used to. No offense is intended.)  I bet Calypso Jonze and Jack Harness would get on like a house on fire.

Alan Marriott voices the dual roles of Lovecraft and his fictional creation Randolph Carter within the mindscape. It is generally agreed that Carter was Lovecraft’s fictional stand-in for himself, a more heroic, handsomer, athletic version of the man. Marriott does a good job performing Lovecraft and Carter as very similar but nevertheless distinctively different.

British musical theater actor Jonathan Andrew Hume voices the Somnifax within Lovecraft’s mental dreamscape, giving a rich and sinister vocal performance.  The Somnifax assumes the guises of the malevolent elder gods Nyarlathotep and Cthulhu, allowing Hume to really chew up scenery of the audio landscape.

The cast of The Lovecraft Invasion… and their good friend Cthulhu!

Although not perfect, The Lovecraft Invasion is definitely a well-written, atmospheric, thought-provoking and enjoyable audio play with several strong performances. Valentine’s script certainly offers a distinctive and unconventional way of having the worlds of Doctor Who and the Cthulhu Mythos cross over.  Rather than simply importing the Elder Gods et all, the mechanism devised by Valentine allows for the story to effectively utilize Lovecraft’s creations while offering commentary on both the man and his writings.

Remembering Doctor Who writer Terrance Dicks

British writer Terrance Dicks passed away on August 29th.  He was 84 years old.  Dicks worked on such varied projects as the spy-fi series The Avengers, the soap opera Crossroads, and the BBC’s Sunday Classics series of literary adaptations.

However it is for his lengthy association with the science fiction series Doctor Who that Dicks is best remembered.  He first became involved with Doctor Who in 1968 and worked on various incarnations of the show right up until the time of his death.

As Dicks himself readily admitted in his humorously self-effacing style, becoming the assistant script editor on Doctor Who in 1968 was as much a case of him being in the right place at the right time as it was his abilities as a writer.  He came onboard during the show’s fifth season, Patrick Troughton’s second year as the Doctor, during the production of the serial “The Web of Fear.”  Dicks’ enduring memory of that story was the production team’s futile efforts to make the robot Yetis’ roars sound less like a flushing toilet.

The first story Dicks was actively involved in commissioning was “The Krotons” by Robert Holmes.  The sixth season of Doctor Who was beset by various commissioned stories falling apart late in the day, leaving co-producers Derrick Sherwin and Peter Bryant scrambling to find usable scripts.  “The Krotons” was one such last-minute replacement.  For years afterwards Dicks would refer to the Krotons as one of Doctor Who’s silliest monsters.  At the same time, though, the scripts by Holmes were solid, and as Dicks himself was always quick to point out, Holmes would very quickly go on to become arguably the best writer to ever work on Doctor Who.

As script editor Dicks was also the uncredited co-writer of the six-part Brian Hayles serial “The Seeds of Death.”  Due to the ongoing production problems the serial was only in a draft state, needing a significant amount of work before it could go in front of the cameras.

But it was the final serial of the 1969 season that truly saw Dicks’ baptism of fire.  Those aforementioned production problems led to the simultaneous collapse of the four-part and six-part serials that were to end the season.  In desperation Sherwin instructed Dicks to write a single 10-part serial to close out the year, with the provisos that series regulars Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines & Wendy Padbury all be written out at the end, that the Doctor’s previously-unrevealed people the Time Lords be introduced, and that the Doctor be exiled to present-day Earth.  Oh, yes, and Sherwin needed Dicks to write those 10 scripts ASAP.

An understandably frantic Dicks corralled Malcolm Hulke, the writer who several years earlier had helped him get his foot in the television door, and with whom he had co-written several episodes of The Avengers. Working at a furious pace, the two of them somehow managed to crank out the scripts for all 10 episodes in less than a month.  Despite the absolutely insane circumstances under which “The War Games” came to be written, it went on to become a well-regarded serial.

The seventh season of Doctor Who saw even more changes and challenges for Dicks.  Sherwin and Bryant both departed, but not before making the aforementioned decision to exile the Doctor to Earth to become the scientific advisor to Brigadier Lethbridge-Stuart and the UNIT organization.  This was Sherwin’s desperate cost-saving measure for a show with declining ratings that the BBC was seriously considering canceling.

Fortunately several things took place that would guarantee Doctor Who’s future.  Jon Pertwee was cast as the new Doctor, the show switched from black & white to color, Barry Letts came onboard as the new producer, and Dicks became the full-time script editor.  Pertwee was a perfect fit for the Doctor, the color production also brought new attention to the series, and Dicks & Letts instantly clicked, becoming not just close collaborators but lifelong friends.

It was Dicks & Letts who devised the Doctor’s arch-nemesis the Master.  Dicks observed to Letts that the Doctor was very much like Sherlock Holmes, and the Brigadier was like Watson.  So why not introduce a Moriarty for the Doctor?  Letts immediately took to the suggestion, and right away suggested actor Roger Delgado, who he had worked with in the past, for the role.  Delgado was indeed a brilliant casting decision.  Pertwee and Delgado had immediate chemistry as the rival Time Lords, which further energized the show.

Dicks was the script editor for Pertwee’s entire five year stint on Doctor Who.  In that capacity Dicks was basically the uncredited co-writer for the entire Third Doctor era of the series.  In 1974 when Pertwee decided to depart, Dicks and Letts also made the decision to move on, but not before casting Tom Baker as the new Doctor, a decision that would eventually result in the show becoming even more popular.

Dicks also finagled the job of writing Baker’s debut story “Robot,” crafting a four part serial that was simultaneously thought-provoking and humorous.  It contains one of my all-time favorite lines of dialogue from the series, with the Doctor attempting to stop a computer from triggering the simultaneous launch of the world’s nuclear weapons while breezily observing:

“The trouble with computers, of course, is that they’re very sophisticated idiots. They do exactly what you tell them at amazing speed, even if you order them to kill you. So if you do happen to change your mind, it’s very difficult to stop them obeying the original order, but… not impossible.”

Dicks would write several more television stories for Doctor Who.  Robert Holmes became the new script editor, and commissioned Dicks to write “The Brain of Morbius.” Regrettably, due to technical issues Holmes had to do significant rewrites.  As Dicks later recounted:

 “I was furious when I read the rewritten scripts for ‘The Brain of Morbius’. I rang up Bob Holmes and shouted at him down the telephone. Eventually, I said ‘Alright. You can do it, but I’m going to take my name off it’ – the ultimate sanction! Not because it was a bad show, but because it was now more him than me. He asked ‘Well what name do you want to put on it?’ I said ‘I don’t care. You can put it out under some bland pseudonym’ and slammed the phone down. Weeks later, when I saw the Radio Times, I noticed it was ‘The Brain of Morbius’ by Robin Bland. By then, I’d cooled down and the joke disarmed me completely.”

Dicks also wrote ”The Horror of Fang Rock” for Holmes in 1977, and “State of Decay,” which was broadcast in 1980 during Tom Baker’s final season.  “State of Decay” was somewhat revised by the then-current script editor Christopher H. Bidmead.  In that case I personally feel the blending of Dicks’ and Bidmead’s very disparate approaches to the show actually resulted in a much stronger story, one where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.  Dicks’ final contribution to the television series was in 1983, writing the 20th anniversary special “The Five Doctors.”

Although he was no longer working of the TV show itself, Dicks remained a key part of the world of Doctor Who via his prose writing.  Back during his time as script editor he had been commissioned by Target Books to write novelizations of the show’s various serials.  The first one Dicks wrote was Doctor Who and the Auton Invasion, adapted from Robert Holmes’ scripts for Pertwee’s debut story “Spearhead in Space” and published in January 1974.

Dicks was the unofficial editor of the Doctor Who book line.  He would attempt to get the original writers to adapt their own scripts.  Malcolm Hulke and former script editor Gerry Davis each wrote several of the novelizations, as did actor-turned-writer Ian Marter.  However, due to the low pay, most of the time Dicks ended up to writing them himself, and eventually he would pen over 60 of them.

To truly appreciate the impact of these novelizations on Doctor Who fandom, you need to understand the time period in which they were published.  In the 1960s and 70s the BBC would typically air Doctor Who episodes once, with perhaps an occasional repeat of a serial at the end of the season or during the holidays.  If you missed seeing an episode when it first aired, chances were good that you were never going to see it.  There was no home video or DVDs or DVRs or streaming or anything like that.

On top of that, due to videotape being expensive, and film taking up a great deal of space, the BBC routinely wiped videos of older shows, and junked the film copies they made to sell their programs to foreign countries.  Doctor Who was one of many series to be affected by this policy.  By the end of the 1970s nearly all of the Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s were missing from the BBC archives.  A decent-sized chunk of Pertwee’s five year tenure was also absent.

So, if you were a fan in the early 1980s, between the paucity of reruns, the non-existence of home media, and the seeming destruction of many of the episodes from the first 12 years of the show, the novelizations by Terrance Dicks & Co were literally the only way you could experience older stories.  If you wanted to discover the show’s past, the novelizations were absolutely invaluable.

Fortunately a lot of those missing stories have since been recovered, and a handful of the still-missing episodes have been recreated via animation.  Nevertheless, there are still certain serials that are partly or completely missing where the novelization is a way in which you can experience the story.

I well remember exactly how much the novelizations affected me as a Doctor Who fan.  I started watching reruns on the PBS station WLIW in 1984, when I was eight years old.  I came in at the tail end of Tom Baker’s run, and then saw the Peter Davidson stories.  The stories sometimes referenced the show’s past, and these were tantalizing hints of an exciting history that I had no way of experiencing.

Then one evening at the Galleria shopping mall in White Plains NY, at the Waldenbooks, I came across an entire display of Doctor Who novels.  To my young, excited eyes there were dozens of them, with colorful, exciting covers, featuring aliens and giant monsters and dinosaurs and spaceships and other weird, exciting sights.  (The covers to The Auton Invasion and The Carnival of Monsters by artist Chris Achilleos seen above are good examples of the sort of covers that appeared on the Target novelizations.)  I immediately wanted to buy one… but my father wouldn’t let me.  I don’t know why, but he seemed convinced that I wasn’t going to actually read it.  But over the next week or so, I begged & pleaded.  My father finally gave in, and the next time we went to Waldenbooks he let me buy one.  I finished that book in just a few days, and was soon asking my parents to let me buy another.

Now here’s the humorous part of the story.  That first novelization I got was Doctor Who and the Power of Kroll, written by Terrance Dicks, based on Robert Holmes’ script.  I had never seen the TV story, and I bought it because it had Tom Baker’s Doctor with a really weird gigantic monster on the cover.  Reading the book by Dicks, I became convinced that “The Power of Kroll” had to be an absolutely amazing TV story. A few years later I was certainly in for a rude awakening!

This was the first, but certainly not the last, time this would happen to me with the novelizations.  The benefits of the prose format was that it allowed Dicks and others to work with an unlimited budget, to not worry about dodgy special effects and cheap sets and rubbish costumes.  Within the imagination of readers such as myself everything was real.

The prose format also allowed Dicks and the other adapters to get into characters’ thoughts, to expand certain scenes, to restore moments that had been left on the cutting room floor, and to fill in plot holes that came about during the series’ always-rushed production schedule.  There were several times when I read novelizations by Dicks before I got to see the actual episodes, and almost inevitably the book versions were better than the original television episodes.

As I discussed in my review of the 1972 serial “Day of the Daleks,” in his novelization Dicks did a superb job of expanding, and improving upon, the television episodes.  Another example that comes to mind is his adaptation of the debut story of the Master, “Terror of the Autons.”  The book improves upon the broadcast version in several ways.   Certainly the cyclopean octopus-lobster hybrid form of the Nestine Consciousness described in the book is a much more formidable menace than the blob of energy we saw on TV screens.

In the early 1990s Doctor Who had been cancelled and the majority of the serials had been novelized.  The decision was made to begin publishing original novels.  Several of the writers who have worked on the revival of Doctor Who launched in 2005 got their start on these novels.  And also present was Terrence Dicks, who wrote several novels over the next two decades.

It’s interesting to contrast the approaches of the younger writers with Dicks.  Most of the younger writers were very experimental, writing books that were part of larger arcs, and having catastrophic stuff happen to the TARDIS, and making the companions the main characters who drive the plot forward, and showing the Doctor acting as this Machiavellian cosmic chess master.  Obviously this laid the groundwork for a lot of what was subsequently done in the television revival.

Having said that, sometimes it got a bit tiresome, and you wanted to read a novel where the TARDIS just landed somewhere randomly, depositing the Doctor and his friends in the middle of an exciting adventure.  That was the approach favored by Dicks, and he tried to utilize that more traditional story structure in his novels.  Occasionally his books could become too heavily referential to past continuity.  But on the whole they were fun reads.  Certainly I enjoyed his 1995 novel Blood Harvest, which was a sequel to his serial “State of Decay.” I think it contained a nice balance between the new direction of the novels and a more traditional story.

Another book by Dicks that really stood out in my mind was Players, which was published in April 1999.  Dicks did a great job writing the Sixth Doctor and Peri.  I’ve made no secret of the fact that I feel Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant were given some underwhelming material to perform when they were on the show.  Reading the novel Players led me to wish Dicks could have worked on the show during the Sixth Doctor’s all too short tenure.  As I said, Dicks loved to reference continuity in his novels, but at the same time he was usually cognizant that you absolutely needed a strong story on which to anchor all of those tie-ins to past adventures.

Dicks continued to write Doctor Who prose fiction after the 2005 revival.  He penned Made of Steel and Revenge of the Judoon, a pair of “Quick Read” novellas starring the Tenth Doctor & Martha Jones, and he did a novelization of “Invasion of the Bane,” the debut episode of Who spin-off show The Sarah Jane Adventures.  A final short story, “Save Yourself,” is scheduled to be published posthumously later this year in the anthology Doctor Who: The Target Storybook.

A gifted raconteur, Dicks was an enthusiastic participant in the Doctor Who DVD audio commentaries & behind the scenes documentaries.  He was a popular guest at conventions.  I had always wanted to meet him.  Unfortunately when he was at the Doctor Who convention on Long Island in 2014 I was unemployed & short on funds, so I was unable to go.

Everyone who knew Dicks spoke warmly of him, and the tributes that have been written over the past week have all been heartfelt.  He certainly was an important and influential figure in helping to make Doctor Who the ongoing success that it is.

Remembering Victor Pemberton

British writer and television producer Victor Pemberton passed away on August 13th. He was 85 years old. I was a fan of Pemberton’s work, and over the past several years I had corresponded with him via e-mail.  Based on his e-mails, and on interviews he gave, he appeared to be a warm, intelligent man.

Victor Pemberton and Sprocket

Pemberton was born on October 10, 1931 in Islington, London. His experiences a decade later, living through the terrible events of the Blitz during World War II, were a formative influence.  Decades later Pemberton wrote a series of 15 historical novels set in mid-20th Century London.  He described these books as, at least in part, “an attempt by me to exorcise those terrible times from my mind.”

One of Pemberton’s earliest successes as a writer was in 1966, when he penned The Slide, a seven part science fiction radio drama broadcast weekly by the BBC from February 1 to March 27, 1966. This eerie, atmospheric drama starred Roger Delgado and Maurice Denham.

In the newly developed English town of Redlow, several earthquakes have occurred. This in itself is odd, as the area is considered geographically stable.  Things become considerably more unusual when a mysterious greenish-brown mud begins to ooze out of the fissures in the ground.  Not only is this mud highly acidic, it seems to have a life of its own, spreading out across flat ground, and even creeping uphill.

Called in to investigate these mysterious phenomena is Professor Josef Gomez, a South American seismologist portrayed by Delgado. Gomez previously encountered similar earth tremors in the nearby English Channel.  Assisted by local scientific authorities, the Professor makes a startling discovery.  The mud, it turns out, is not only a living entity, but it is also sentient.  And it  has the ability to telepathically influence certain individuals, driving many of the residents of Redlow to madness and suicide.  Gomez and his colleagues find themselves in a race against time, struggling to halt the lethal mudslide before it destroys the entire town.

Like so much other television and radio material from the 1960s, the master copy of the radio play was purged from the BBC archives. Fortunately, Pemberton himself recorded all the episodes of The Slide during their original broadcast.  Decades later, he discovered the tapes in his garage.  This stroke of luck allowed the BBC to restore the recordings and release them on CD in 2010.

In 1967 Pemberton became involved with the Doctor Who television series. He acted in a small part in “The Moonbase” and served as Assistant Script Editor on “The Evil of the Daleks.”  Pemberton was then promoted to Script Editor on the next serial, “Tomb of the Cybermen,” which was written by Kit Pedler & Gerry Davis.

Among his contributions to “Tomb of the Cybermen,” Pemberton scripted a scene in the third episode which showed the character of Victoria Waterfield, who had joined the TARDIS crew at the end of the previous story, adjusting to her new life.

THE DOCTOR: Are you happy with us, Victoria?

VICTORIA: Yes, I am. At least, I would be if my father were here.

THE DOCTOR: Yes, I know, I know.

VICTORIA: I wonder what he would have thought if he could see me now.

THE DOCTOR: You miss him very much, don’t you?

VICTORIA: It’s only when I close my eyes. I can still see him standing there, before those horrible Dalek creatures came to the house. He was a very kind man, I shall never forget him. Never.

THE DOCTOR: No, of course you won’t. But, you know, the memory of him won’t always be a sad one.

VICTORIA: I think it will. You can’t understand, being so ancient.

THE DOCTOR: Eh?

VICTORIA: I mean old.

THE DOCTOR: Oh.

VICTORIA: You probably can’t remember your family.

THE DOCTOR: Oh yes, I can when I want to. And that’s the point, really. I have to really want to, to bring them back in front of my eyes. The rest of the time they sleep in my mind, and I forget. And so will you. Oh yes, you will. You’ll find there’s so much else to think about. So remember, our lives are different to anybody else’s. That’s the exciting thing. There’s nobody in the universe can do what we’re doing.

It is a beautifully written scene which is wonderfully performed by Patrick Troughton and Deborah Watling.

Pemberton decided to leave the Script Editor position after only one story in order to concentrate on his writing. He quickly produced the scripts for the six part Doctor Who serial “Fury from the Deep,” which was broadcast in 1968.  Regrettably only a few short clips from the story are known to still survive, along with the complete audio soundtrack and some behind-the-scenes footage taken during the filming of the final episode.  Nevertheless older fans of the series who saw “Fury from the Deep” when it was first broadcast have very fond memories of it.  Eighteen years later Pemberton had the opportunity to novelize the serial for the range of Doctor Who books published by Target.  When I read that book at the tender age of eleven, I found it to be incredibly scary.

“Fury from the Deep” is also noteworthy in that it contained the debut of the Doctor’s now-iconic sonic screwdriver, which was devised by Pemberton. The serial also saw the tearful farewell of Victoria from the show.

Pemberton would write for Doctor Who on one other occasion. In 1976 he scripted “The Pescatons,” the very first Doctor Who audio adventure.  It starred Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen.  Pemberton had the opportunity to novelize “The Pescatons” for Target in 1991.

After he left Doctor Who, Pemberton went onto a long & prolific career working in British television and radio.

In 1983 Pemberton became involved in the British version of the Jim Henson show Fraggle Rock. The series was about a group of funny and bizarre creatures, the Fraggles, who lived in a vast, wondrous subterranean civilization.  The Fraggles and their neighbors, the diminutive builders known as the Doozers and the giant bad-tempered Gorgs, were all brought to life by Henson’s amazing Muppet creations.

Fraggle Rock was broadcast in a number of foreign countries, and different framing segments involving a human character and his dog Sprocket (a Muppet) were recorded for each market. In the original American version, the human was the eccentric inventor Doc.  As a writer on the first season of the British version, Pemberton devised the human character of “The Captain,” a lighthouse keeper in Cornwall.  Pemberton became the producer of the British version from the second season onward.

When I e-mailed Pemberton in 2010 asking him about his time on Fraggle Rock, he had fond memories of his time working with the Muppets:

“It was a great fun series to do, with a lot of talent involved, something one always got from the late, lamented Jim Henson and his team. Needless to say, Sprocket, as in every version, was my hero of the show, mischievous and lovable to the last!”

One of Pemberton’s most acclaimed works was a trilogy of radio plays for the BBC based on the lives of his parents. The Trains Don’t Stop Here Anymore was broadcast in 1978, with the next two installments, Don’t Talk To Me About Kids and Down by the Sea, airing in 1987.  These three radio plays would form the basis for the first of his historical novels, Our Family, published in 1990.

Our Family was a wonderful book, and I made sure to let Pemberton know how much I enjoyed it. He appreciated my kind words.  In his response he noted:

“A few years ago, an historian referred to my novels as ‘archives of true family life during the London blitz of the Second World War’. I hope that’s true, and that, through the simplicity of the stories, current and future generations will have the opportunity to understand what it meant to live through those times.  After all, without knowing about the past, there can be no genuine future.”

In the later years of his life Pemberton retired to Murla, Spain. He was kind enough to autograph copies of his two Doctor Who novels which I mailed to him in 2010.  I consider myself very fortunate that I was able to correspond with Pemberton over the last several years.  He was a wonderful writer, and will definitely be missed.

Doctor Who reviews: Face The Raven, Heaven Sent and Hell Bent

Here’s my write-up on the Doctor Who Series Nine three episode conclusion. “Face the Raven” was written by Sarah Dollard and directed by Justin Molotnikov.  “Heaven Sent” and “Hell Bent” were written by Steven Moffat and directed by Rachel Talalay.

Yeah, it took me a while to get around to this… although fortunately not nearly as long as it took the Doctor to escape from the Confession Dial!

1) Familiar faces

It was really nice to see the return of Rigsy (Joivan Wade), who was introduced last year in “Flatline.”  Our intrepid artist has gotten married and is now a father.  Unfortunately his past association with the Doctor and Clara has put a target on his back.

I expect that by the end of “Face the Raven” the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) had come to regret saving the life of Ashildr (Maisie Williams). Especially as Ashildr’s manipulations had once again gone awry, this time resulting in the death of Clara (Jenna Coleman).

2) Death becomes her

I admit that the whole concept of the death mark tattoo being transferable from one person to another was awfully convenient.  The raven and the tattoos controlled by Ashildr were much too supernatural-type elements for my liking, as well.

Nevertheless, Clara did get a good, well-written death scene in “Face the Raven.” Coleman certainly played it very well.  The only thing that kept me from total shock & mourning was the fact that there were two more episodes left to Series Nine, and I was really left questioning if we had truly seen the last of Clara.

3) Solo act

Aside from the Veil, the figure of death that incessantly stalks him throughout the “Heaven Sent,” the Doctor is the sole character in this episode. Peter Capaldi completely blew me away with his performance in this.  Casting him as the Doctor was such a masterstroke, and that is amply on display here.

I loved the insights into the Doctor’s character and his thought processes. It was interesting to see how his so-called miraculous escapes are really the result of him retreating into a mental space in his head (represented by the TARDIS console room) and working though all of the variables and possibilities.

The direction on “Heaven Sent” by Talalay was amazing. She previously did superb work last year on “Dark Water” and “Death in Heaven.”  It was great to have her back again to close out Series Nine.

Interesting fact: early in her career Talalay was a production assistant on the John Waters movie Polyester, and the producer of his next two films, Hairspray and Cry-Baby. So, yes, Talalay has worked with John Waters and directed Doctor Who, which officially makes her one of the coolest people ever.

4) Repetition is good for the soul

There was that moment towards the end of “Heaven Sent” when it’s finally revealed that the Doctor had been repeating the same sequence of actions over and over and over again, hundreds of thousands of times, as he attempted to break through that twenty foot thick wall, wearing it down ever so slightly, before dying each and every time. There’s that awful instant when you realize that every single one of those skulls at the bottom of the lake belongs to the Doctor, each one of them the result of another cycle, another death.  It’s a genuinely chilling moment.

How many times did the Doctor have to die and be reborn within the Confession Dial before he finally broke through that wall? It seems that it couldn’t have been more than a week for each sequence.  There are 52 weeks in a year.  The Doctor was imprisoned for approximately 4.5 billion years.  Very roughly speaking, that comes to 234 billion times.  And now my head hurts.

5) Drawing a conclusion

Mike Collins is the artist who storyboarded “Heaven Sent” and several other recent episodes. When trying to figure out how many times events had repeated for the Doctor, I e-mailed Collins to ask if he knew how long each go-round was.  He responded that he didn’t recall a specific length being mentioned in Moffat’s script.

In any case, Collins is a very talented artist who has been involved with the Doctor Who comic books for a number of years now. Given his obvious fondness for the series, it’s wonderful that he now has the opportunity to work on the actual television program.

6) A masterful plan

While inside the Confession Dial, the Doctor refused to divulge what he knew of the Hybrid, the entity that “will unravel the web of time, and destroy a billion billion hearts to heal its own.” We discover in “Hell Bent” that the reason why the Doctor kept this knowledge was because he needed a bargaining chip, something with which to manipulate the Time Lords into providing  him an opportunity to rescue Clara.

And, yes, she’s back… sort of. Takes from an instant in time from right before her death, Clara is neither alive nor dead.  The Time Lords are afraid that an attempt to undo Clara’s demise, a fixed moment in time, has the potential to cause massive, horrific damage to reality.  But the Doctor, having spent literally billions of years pounding against a wall, is in no mood to listen.

In the end, the mystery of the Hybrid is more a McGuffin to propel the story along than it is a question to be answered. The Hybrid could be the Doctor, who might just be half-human after all.  Or perhaps it could be Ashildr, an immortal half-human, half Mire.  Ashildr herself, still alive at the very end of time, suggests another possibility, one did not even occur to the Doctor…

Ashildr: What if the Hybrid wasn’t one person, but two.

The Doctor: Two?

Ashildr: A dangerous combination of a passionate and powerful Time Lord and a young woman, so very similar to him. Companions who are willing to push each other to extremes.

The Doctor: She’s my friend. She’s just my friend.

Ashildr: How did you meet her?

The Doctor: Missy.

Ashildr: Missy. The Master. The lover of chaos. Who wants you to love it too. She’s quite the matchmaker.

The Doctor: Clara’s my friend.

Ashildr: I know. And you’re willing to risk all of time and space because you miss her. One wonders what the pair of you will get up to next.

7) Time Lord Victorious

I’ve previously hypothesized that the Doctor and the Master were once very much alike, but over the centuries they developed in extremely different directions. Certainly it has been suggested on more than one occasion that the Doctor, if he is not careful, if he disregards morality and ethics, has the potential to become someone quite like the Master.

The Doctor Who novel The Dark Path by David A. McIntee was published in 1997. It revolves around an encounter between the Second Doctor and a fellow Time Lord, an old friend known as Koschei, the Master before he became the Master.  Koschei is at this point not evil, but he is arrogant, as well as quite ready to utilize violence as a first resort, rationalizing that the ends justify the means.  He is in certain respects much like the Doctor was when we first met him in “An Unearthly Child.”

Koschei’s carelessness accidentally causes the death of Ailla, a young woman who is traveling with him. Consumed by guilt, Koschei attempts to utilize an ancient artifact known as the Darkheart to rewrite history and undo Ailla’s death.  In order to do so, he uses the Darkheart to destroy the home planet of the Tereleptils, killing millions of sentient beings.  This horrifying act sets in motion further tragedies, all of which place Koschei on the path to becoming the Master.

I do not know if The Dark Path is considered canonical, but it certainly offers an interesting possible explanation for how the Master came to be. And there are undoubtedly parallels between McIntee’s novel and Moffat’s script for “Hell Bent.”

The Doctor, the man who never carries a gun, uses one to shoot the General (who was actually more or less on his side up until that moment) in cold blood so that he can escape with the retrieved Clara. The Doctor argues that he didn’t really commit murder because the General is a Time Lord and that he will regenerate.  But that sounds like a very self-serving justification indeed.  Certainly the fact that the Doctor is willing to resort to violence, that he is ready to gamble on the stability of reality itself, and that he wants to wipe Clara’s memories in order to keep her “safe” all leaves her aghast.

Finally, seeing Clara’s reaction to everything that he has done, the Doctor is at last forced to step back and look at acknowledge just what he is doing, what he is becoming…

“Look how far I went for fear of losing you. This has to stop… I went too far. I broke all my own rules. I became the Hybrid.”

8) The restaurant at the end of the universe

I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of Clara and Ashildr traveling through time & space in a TARDIS stuck in the shape of a 1950s American diner. Obviously at some point Clara needs to return to Gallifrey so that she can be sent back to her proper time to die, allowing history to continue uninterrupted.  But that might be in five minutes, or five years, or five centuries.  That’s really open-ended.  Besides, the whole crisis caused by the Doctor’s actions was supposedly predicated on the notion that the longer Clara is removed from her timeline the more danger reality is supposed to be in.  And I’d hate to think that down the line someone uses all this as an opportunity to somehow undo Clara’s seemingly-inevitable death.

Still, it was pretty cool to see a TARDIS console room with the “default” setting, just as the Doctor’s own TARDIS originally appeared back in the early 1960s.

Anyway, however they turn out, Clara is now off on her own journeys. The Doctor has had his memory wiped of all the specifics of who Clara was.  So this appears to be the end of their time together, which is a good thing.  Coleman did a very good job portraying Clara, but the character was sometimes inconsistently written, which was frustrating.  And after three years I think many viewers are ready for a change.  Hopefully the Doctor’s next companion will prove to be very different.

Doctor Who reviews: Sleep No More

I’m finally caught up on my Doctor Who viewing.  Here are a few thoughts on the episode “Sleep No More” written by Mark Gatiss and directed by Justin Molotnikov.

1) Found footage

I am generally not a fan of so-called “found footage” movies.  I found The Blair Witch Project to be one of the most overrated pieces of $#!+ that I have ever seen.  On the other hand, I did enjoy Paranormal Activity, although part of that may have been due to not having very high expectations in the first place.

You can imagine how I felt when I started watching “Sleep No More” and realized that it was that type of story.  Fortunately this was actually a good episode.  Gatiss wrote a scary, unnerving script that made very good use of the format.

Molotnikov did very solid work directing.  Rather than the confusion and motion sickness that Blair Witch left me with, “Sleep No More” with its cutting back-and-forth between security cameras and character POVs resulted in, for the most part, genuine suspense.  While there were chaotic moments of storytelling, for the most part those contributed to the atmosphere of the story, since the audience was left just as uncertain about what was going on as the characters.

2) In space no one can hear you sleep

Humanity once again manages to make a mess of things.  Yeah, leave it to capitalists and scientists to get together for the oh-so-brilliant idea of cramming people’s need for eight hours of sleep into a mere five minutes, leaving us able to work non-stop for almost an entire day.  I’m sure that in the real world there are people actually attempting to find a way to do just this, all in the name of greater profits.

Of course, since this is Doctor Who, things inevitably go pear-shaped.  The Doctor falls into his standard role of calling out humanity on its arrogance and short-sightedness.  Due to the format of this episode Peter Capaldi only has a couple of short monologues regarding the foolishness of the Morpheus program.  Nevertheless, in these few brief moments he invests them with both a genuine sense of outrage at humanity’s audacity and a philosophical contemplation of the value of sleep.

3) Enter Sandmen

The Sandmen are, when you come down to it, a ridiculous concept.  Fortunately the episode moves at such a fast clip that you aren’t left considering for too long that a bunch of people-eating monsters have been formed from “dream dust.”

The low lighting and herky-jerky camerawork also, for the most part, results in the Sandmen not being seen too clearly.  Good decision, since from the few good glimpses we get of them they look very much like humanoid lumps of oatmeal.  I expect that it a well-lit room they would appear quite silly.  Molotnikov did a pretty good job filming the Sandmen in an effective, menacing manner.

4) Universe building

If you ever watched any of Doctor Who stories made in the 1960s and 70s that were set in the future, for the most part everything was very white and very British.  That began to change a bit in the 1980s, and since the show returned in 2005 we really have seen a number of future eras occupied by different ethnic groups.

Gatiss had an interesting concept in “Sleep No More” for how in the 38th Century India and Japan combine into a massive superpower with colonies throughout the solar system.  It gave “Sleep No More” a distinct flavor and backdrop.  As with the best universe building, Gatiss mostly leaves these as background elements and hints of a larger culture.

5) To be continued?

“Sleep No More” appears to end on a cliffhanger, which left me believing that this was another example of the two episode structure that has occurred throughout Series Nine.  So I was a bit surprised when I then watched “Face the Raven” and it was completely unrelated, the first installment of a three episode season finale.

I wonder if at some point the dangling plotlines of “Sleep No More” will be picked up in a future episode.  After all, the character of Nagata, played by Elaine Tan, survives.  She heads off with the Doctor and Clara in the TARDIS to Neptune, where they hope to shut down the Morpheus program.  Or perhaps we really are going to be left with the episode’s final unsettling minutes, kept in the dark as to exactly how things worked out in the 38th Century.

Doctor Who reviews: The Zygon Invasion and The Zygon Inversion

Yesterday I watched the recent two episode Doctor Who story “The Zygon Invasion” and “The Zygon Inversion” written by Peter Harness and Steven Moffat.  It was a pretty good pair of episodes.  They were not perfect, but certainly entertaining and well-made.  This was another one of those stories that I needed to think over for a bit before writing about.

1) You say you want a revolution?

The dangling subplot of the Zygons from “The Day of the Doctor” was picked up here.  We learn that humanity and the Zygons did manage to reach an agreement that enabled 20 million Zygons to secretly settle on Earth in human form.  Unfortunately a splinter group of militants has formed made up of Zygons who do not want to live as humans, who wish to embrace their alien heritage.  They regard humans as the enemy and assimilated Zygons as traitors.

I realize that these episodes were written & filmed months ago, and even aired prior to the terrorist attacks in Paris earlier this month.  But the parallels here are interesting.

Those attacks, and numerous other atrocities around the globe in the last several years, are the work of the Islamic State, a fanatical doomsday cult of Muslim extremists.  They wish to create a “caliphate” based upon their idea of a “pure” interpretation of Islam in preparation for the arrival of the End Times.

The actions of ISIL have led to anti-Muslim paranoia in the Western world.  Many in the United States want to ban Syrian refugees from entering the country out of fear that militants could be hidden among them.  This actually plays right into the hands of ISIL, who want to stop the refugees to find a safe haven, and who perceive the Islamophobia as the perfect recruiting tool.

Harness and Moffat pointedly avoid any mention of religious motivation among the Zygons.  However, the revolutionaries, led by a Zygon known as “Bonnie,” are motivated by the dream of a society that is totally free from both the presence and ideology of anything that is not Zygon.  They are willing to commit horrible acts of violence to achieve this “perfect” world.

Bonnie intends to cause the Zygons who have assimilated to return to their original forms, realizing this will create massive panic among humanity.  This will force the assimilated Zygons to join her group solely to survive the inevitable human violence.  Bonnie even recognizes that realistically 20 million Zygons do not stand a chance against six billion humans, but she would rather die on her feet in pursuit of her goals, taking as many humans with her as possible, than live on her knees.

UNIT, in turn, faced with millions of shape-shifting aliens who have the ability to infiltrate all levels of government, to assume the identities of friends and loved ones before they strike, are ready to wipe out all of the Zygons, guilty and innocent, in order to prevent more violence.

2) Working class Zygon

Bonnie forces one of the assimilated Zygons, a man named Etoine played by Nicholas Asbury, to transform back to his actual form, recording it on her cell phone and posting it on the internet as a start to sowing xenophobia among humanity.

Etoine is horrified; he was perfectly happy with his new existence as a human, and now that has been destroyed.  Harness and Moffat make in very clear that this Zygon is apolitical, just someone trying to get on with their life…

Etoine: I’m not part of your fight. I never wanted to fight anyone. I just wanted to live here. Why can’t I just live?

The Doctor: We are on your side.

Etoine: I’m not on anyone’s side! This is my home!

Seeing no way out, Etoine commits suicide in front of the Doctor.  It’s a heartbreaking scene, with a sad, moving performance by Asbury.  It really demonstrates the suffering that ordinary people endure because self-important revolutionaries prize ideals more than they do actual lives, when fanatics believe that the ends justify any means.

3) Capaldi and Coleman

Both Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman are amazing in this pair of episodes.

Capaldi is well on his way to becoming my favorite Doctor ever.  He is such an amazing actor.  In the second episode, the Doctor gives a powerful speech to Bonnie…

I don’t understand? Are you kidding me? Of course I understand. I mean, do you call this a war? This funny little thing. This is not a war. I fought in a bigger war than you will ever know. I did worse things than you can ever imagine. And when I close my eyes… I hear more screams than anyone would ever be able to count!

Capaldi totally owns the episode at this moment.  I could not take my eyes off of him.  He was amazing.

Even when it comes to silly stuff like the Doctor claiming that he has question mark underpants, referring to himself as ‘Doctor Disco” and “Doctor  Funkenstein,” or alleging that his real name is “Basil,” Capaldi delivers those lines with such a wonderful irreverence.  Things that might sound daft coming from a lesser actor are quite witty and almost self-deprecating when Capaldi delivers them.

I know that at this point a number of viewers, myself included, are experiencing a bit of Clara fatigue.  The character has been around for a while now and, as with other companions, the quality of writing given to her has been somewhat inconsistent.  Given that, I think it can become easy to overlook Coleman.  But she actually is a great actor.

This is ably demonstrated when Bonnie takes on Clara’s form for the majority of these two episodes.  Bonnie is a completely different character from Clara, and Coleman plays the part perfectly.  It definitely demonstrates her versatility.

4) Osgood lives

Despite having been murdered by Missy in “Death in Heaven,” Osgood (Ingrid Oliver) returns.  It transpires that since the events of “The Day of the Doctor,” there have been two Osgoods, one human and one Zygon, the living embodiment of the peace treaty.  We don’t find out until the end of “Inversion” which one this is, human or Zygon.  But since they both have the same memories and personality, in a way both of them were real.

When I first heard Osgood was returning, I did feel it cheapened her death.  However it’s made clear that the death of one Osgood very much affected the other, that they had become as close as twin sisters.  Osgood certainly seems a more serious, somber individual here than in the past, no longer a goofy teenage but an adult dealing with great responsibilities.

5) Pod people

There is a tone to these episodes very reminiscent of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” a menacing undercurrent of paranoia.  Is this person a human, or are they actually a Zygon?  Who can you trust?  At times it is quite unnerving.

The difference here, of course, is that the Doctor is hopeful that he can cut through the fear & distrust to find a peaceful solution.  He desperately wants to find a way for the two races to co-exist.

6) Five rounds rapid

Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) comes across much better than she did in her previous appearance in the Series Nine opener.  Yes, it’s obvious that Kate is still very much in over her head.  This time, however, we see that she nevertheless remains as rational and level-headed as one can under extremely difficult circumstances.

Kate is obviously much less idealistic than the Doctor.  Like her father, she is willing to use violence as a first resort.  But these episodes do demonstrate that her approach is not all that unreasonable…

Kate: You left us with an impossible situation, Doctor.

The Doctor: Yes I know, it’s called peace.

As much as I appreciate the Doctor’s noble intentions, it’s easy for him to negotiate a peace treaty and then fly off in the TARDIS.  Kate was left with the difficult job of actually making it work, of ensuring that humans and Zygons peacefully co-existed.  Just as Ashildr pointed out in the previous episode, the Doctor is always interfering and then running away, leaving others to deal with the consequences of his action.  All things considered, Kate appears to be doing the best she can.

While it is unfortunate that Kate had to kill several Zygons, if she had not done so then she herself would have died, just as many other members of UNIT did in this story.

7) Let’s let Zygons be Zygons

The Doctor eventually convinces Bonnie to give up her crusade.  He also forgives her for her crimes.

I was left wondering if Bonnie got off easy.  After all, she and her followers killed a great many people, both human and Zygon.  Many would argue that she was deserving of some form of punishment.

Perhaps this can be seen as the lesser of evils.  If Bonnie had been killed, it likely would have turned her into a martyr, inspiring her followers to continue her fanatical path.  If she had been locked up, she could have remained an unrepentant enemy waiting for an opportunity to escape and resume her terrorist activities.

By convincing Bonnie to reconsider her views, the Doctor has diffused the threat she and her organization presented.  At the end we see her devoting herself to maintaining the peace treaty by permanently taking on the form of Osgood.  It can be argued that she is making amends for her crimes by working to heal the rift she created and prevent others from following in her footsteps.

This is an issue that continually plagues humanity.  What is more important, enacting retribution or ending the circle of violence?  Do you let crimes go unpunished if it will prevent future violence from occurring?  There definitely is no easy answer.

As I’ve observed before, a quality of science fiction which I appreciate is that thru its lens it enables us to gain different perspectives on contentious real world issues. Obviously these two episodes of Doctor Who gave me a great deal to consider.

Doctor Who reviews: The Girl Who Died and The Woman Who Lived

I’m behind on my Doctor Who viewing!  Hopefully I’ll catch up soon.  In the meantime, here at last are my thoughts on “The Girl Who Died” written by Jamie Matheison & Steven Moffat and “The Woman Who Lived” written by Catherine Tregenna.

1) Period pieces

It has often been observed that one of the BBC’s greatest strengths is in filming historical dramas.  This has definitely served as asset to Doctor Who, enabling the show’s creators to craft stories set in Earth’s past that have a feel of authenticity to them.  Certainly that is on display in these two episodes, which take place, respectively, in a Ninth Century Viking Village and in the English countryside of 1651.

Along those lines, the juxtaposition of a familiar historical period with fantastic sci-fi elements can work wonderfully.  I do not necessarily think that either the Mire or Leandro necessarily rank up there with the all time great Doctor Who villains.  But both are quite effective within these period setting, perhaps more so than in a story set in the present day.

2) Who wants to live forever?

A theme that has recurred throughout Doctor Who is that immortality, or even a really really REALLY long life, can be as much a curse as a blessing.  For all the benefits of living for millennia, there is the fact that everyone around you grows old and dies, that over and over you will lose those you care for.  And with all those long years ahead, you are also left wondering exactly how you are supposed to occupy your time.

This is very evident in the character of Ashildr.  The long centuries have embittered her, left her aloof and indifferent to the rest of humanity.  The majority of her memories have faded, and she needs to keep detailed journals to remember her own past.  For all of the wonderful adventures she has experienced, she has also experienced monumental loss, and now feels utterly alone.  It really is left up in the air if the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) was right to save her if it condemned her to this existence.

3) Maisie is amazing

I was extremely impressed by the performance of actress Maisie Williams, who portrayed Ashildr in these two episodes.  Williams showed such an incredible range and depth for such a young actress (she is only 18 years old).  Ashildr as written by Matheison & Moffat in the first part is very different from the figure seen in Treganna’s second installment.  Williams played Ashildr as a sweet, thoughtful, imaginative girl in part one.  In the next, she effortlessly transitions to the haughty, cynical, haunted, mournful woman that the Doctor now encounters.  Williams and Capaldi had a wonderful chemistry and interaction in these two episodes.

4) Am I a good man?

Previously examining the relationship between the Doctor and the Master, I pondered the idea that the two of them began as similar people but then developed in very different directions.  That leads to a question, one akin to the Twelfth Doctor’s consideration.  If they were once so very alike, then is the Doctor actually a good person?

“The Woman Who Lived” offers some insight into this.  We learn that the Doctor is, from experience, well aware of the pitfalls of immortality.  It can engender a dangerous sense of superiority and disdain for others, and create disconnect from the mortal world.  That is why the Doctor will not allow Ashildr to travel with him; he feels that he needs to be around ordinary human beings to be able to continue to appreciate their importance, the precious qualities of mortal lives.

I believe that the quality of “good,” of decency and morality, is not simply something that it exists.  It is not natural to anyone.  Instead it is something that we need to vigilantly maintain each and every day of our lives, in spite of all the offenses and injustices that life throws at us, in opposition to our own defects of character.

This is the difference between the Doctor and the Master.  They possess similar personalities and flaws, but the Doctor endeavors to continually remain aware of his failings and his weaknesses, and to work to overcome them, to be selfless.  That is what makes the Doctor a good man.

5) Hopefully not a Swift end

When the highwayman Sam Swift (Rufus Hound) shows up halfway through “The Woman Who Lived,” he seems like just an arrogant douche.  Later we learn that Swift has been arrested and sentenced to die.  Standing on the gallows with the hangman waiting, Swift proceeds to tell a number of cornball jokes, hoping to keep the spectators amused for as long as possible, to delay his execution for just a little bit.  It’s a surprisingly touching and subtle performance by Hound, showing the frightened, vulnerable side of the character.

This is a great scene that underlines the Doctor’s point that the inevitability of death is what gives life worth meaning.  Ashildr, barring catastrophic injury, will live forever.  Without the fear of dying, she is no longer able to appreciate her life.  In contrast, Swift is desperate to hold back death, to stay alive, if only for a few precious moments.

6) Another third path?

I’m returning here to something that I brought up in my review of “The Witch’s Familiar” where both Moffat and the characters failed to think outside the box.  In that case, it was the Doctor not finding a third alternative to either killing Davros as a child or letting him live his life uninterrupted.  In the comments section, Jim O’Brien described that as such: “in many of the stuff [Moffat] pens, I find that he (or his characters) often have a very clean-cut X, Y, and Z perspective on things.”

There was another occurrence of that here in “The Woman Who Lived.”  Ashildr desperately wants to travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS because she is bored with immortality, with being stranded on a primitive planet with nowhere to go, nothing new to experience.  The Doctor refuses to let Ashildr join her because he perceives the danger to his own behavior that could occur from being around another immortal. He wants to leave her in 1651.

Well, why isn’t there a third choice?  Why can’t the Doctor offer to give Ashildr a one-time lift in the TARDIS to another time or planet where interplanetary space travel exists, so that she can then go off and explore the universe on her own?

7) Weird science

I wonder if electric eels actually work in the manner seen in “The Girl Who Died.”  Could the Doctor really have been able to defeat the Mire that way?

Well, wacky science aside, what I appreciated about the Doctor’s plan is that it once again shows that, rather than shooting or blowing up his adversaries, he really tries to find an intelligent and clever method of outthinking his foes in order to defeat them.  That’s one of my favorite qualities of the Doctor.

8) But you can’t go around wearing copies of bodies!

I don’t think we needed it explained that the Twelfth Doctor subconsciously chose the face of Caecilius from “The Fires of Pompeii” as a reminder to himself that he saves people.  After all, Capaldi is hardly the first actor to guest star and then return to play an ongoing character during the show’s long history.

Along these lines, I’m wondering what we’re going to find out next.  Will it turn out that Lieutenant Andrews from “Carnival of Monsters” was Harry Sullivan’s grandfather?   Or that Bret Vyon from “The Daleks’ Master Plan” was a clone of Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart?  Maybe it will be revealed that immediately after the events of “Inferno” Sir Keith Gold bumped into the malfunctioning TARDIS console and was transported back to the Victorian Era where, stricken with amnesia, he assumed the identity of amazingly alliterative London theater manager Henry Gordon Jago.

Now I’m half-expecting there to be an upcoming Big Finish audio story revealing that the Sixth Doctor took on the likeness of Commander Maxil from “Arc of Infinity” to remind himself to, um, dress to stand out and to shoot first & ask questions later?  Well, that would explain Old Sixie’s odd fashion sense and tendency to be trigger-happy!

Okay, all kidding aside, I did enjoy these two episodes.  “The Girl Who Died” was perhaps the weaker of the two, coming out a bit uneven.  “The Woman Who Lived,” on the other hand, was absolutely fantastic, featuring an amazing performance by Maisie Williams and superb writing by Catherine Tregenna.  Of course, Peter Capaldi continues to impress and amaze as the Twelfth Doctor.