‘The Cat Himself Knows, and will never confess…’

I can’t honestly bring myself to believe that anyone really thought The Name of the Doctor would actually reveal the, er, name of the Doctor: Steven Moffat may enjoy stretching the format of Doctor Who until it groans under the strain, but even he wouldn’t destroy it completely. Finding out the Doctor’s ‘real name’ (I suspect we are now obliged to put that in inverted commas) would, in a strange way, be absolutely fatal to the appeal of the character, although the exact reason why is difficult to explain: it would be the equivalent of Sherlock Holmes settling down and getting married or, perhaps, Superman starting to wear a mask.

Thus has it ever been: a lot of the original paperwork for the series has been put back into circulation, as the golden anniversary draws closer, and there never seems to have been a serious attempt at issuing our hero with a conventional name other than ‘the Doctor’ (or, in production documents, Doctor Who). Nevertheless the series has played with the notion of exactly what it is that the Doctor writes down when signing his library card, and needless to say, a lot of this is wildly inconsistent.

For the first ten or twelve years of the series, the question of the Doctor’s name is rarely addressed on-screen in the series. He acquires (or, rather, is given) the pseudonym John Smith in The Wheel in Space, which he’s used on and off ever since, but this is clearly just an alias. However, in a couple of the early stories there appears to be on-screen evidence that his ‘name’ really is Who, as unlikely as that sounds: he signs notes ‘Doctor W’ rather than ‘the Doctor’, and adopts the alias ‘Doktor von Wer’ when pretending to be German. More interesting (not to say notorious) is the cliffhanger to part one of The War Machines, in which the computer WOTAN declares that for its plan to succeed ‘Doctor Who is required’.

The Who family. Or not.

Well, I suppose you could say all this constitutes ‘case closed’ as far as the name issue is concerned, and there is, obviously, a lack of direct contradictory evidence. That said, as we’ve already seen, the Doctor is wont to use aliases sometimes, and one has to wonder where WOTAN is getting its information from: there is plenty of wriggle-room here for the various ‘Doctor Who’ references in the text of the series not to constitute a smoking gun.

And, let us not forget, here we are dealing with black-and-white Doctor Who, the earliest days of the series where its continuity and mythology are still in the process of being established. There does appear to be evidence that our hero is called Doctor Who. There is also evidence that he only has one heart and an unlimited number of regenerations, and that the TARDIS shell can have holes cut in it by very ordinary alien tech, none of which even the most dedicated old-school fan would suggest is ‘really’ the case. Digging one’s heels in over the ‘Doctor Who’ thing in particular is an odd position to take.

While there is hardly any direct evidence to contradict the ‘Doctor Who’ references, there is plenty of indirect material to work with. Once the Time Lords appear on the scene, the Doctor’s name becomes a bit more of an issue, as one would expect them to know what it is and use it. The show gets round this rather neatly, by hardly naming any of its Time Lord characters prior to 1976! (This chimes rather nicely with the presentation of the Monk on his appearances in the 60s.) The only ‘named’ Time Lords prior to The Deadly Assassin are Omega (a marginal case) and Susan (definitely a retcon – and probably not her real name either).

Terrance Dicks touches on the name issue in a couple of novelisations, not that these strictly count: the Doctor at one point is reluctant to tell his name to the Brigadier, partly because names have a special significance for Time Lords and are not lightly divulged, but mainly because the Brigadier will never be able to pronounce it (a gag Terrance may have lifted, consciously or not, from the Star Trek episode This Side of Paradise, where Spock gets a similar line). On another occasion a visiting Time Lord refers to the Master by his real name, which Terrance finds himself unable to represent using the English language and instead describes as ‘a mellifluous string of syllables’, or words to that effect.

However, The Deadly Assassin and its heirs are filled with Time Lords, many of whom are named, and none of said names are particularly challenging to the tongue: even leaving the possibility that some of these people are not full Time Lords, Borusa definitely is, as was former President Pandak. Just another example of The Deadly Assassin‘s rampant iconoclasm, I’m afraid. Tellingly, everyone addresses the Doctor on-screen by his title, even those of his superiors who know him relatively well.

There’s an attempt to redress the balance when Romana is introduced, as she does have a long and relatively difficult-to-pronounce name, Romanadvoratrelundar, which is then chopped down for convenience. However, she objects to this, which suggests it hasn’t happened before – so it doesn’t seem to be the case that Time Lords routinely have a full, complex formal name, and an abbreviated everyday name.

In The Armageddon Factor, we learn the Doctor’s school nickname was Theta Sigma (hey, there are worse possibilities), which is another neat way of dodging the issue, but from this point on the series settles down a bit – the issue of the Doctor’s name is barely ever addressed, even when the question of his actual identity becomes an element of the plot (as in Silver Nemesis). Pretty much the only exception to this is a gag in the opening episode of The Trial of a Time Lord where the Doctor appears to be about to casually reveal his full name unprompted, only to be interrupted at the crucial point (from memory, the dialogue goes something like ‘I may write a paper – Ancient Life on Ravalox, by Doctor -’ ‘Doctor, look!’) – I wish the very best of luck to anyone trying to reconcile this with the current ‘the Doctor’s true name is a dreaded secret which must never be revealed and which he will go to tremendous lengths not to say out loud’ position.

Nevertheless, that seems to be where we’re at. It seems to be a trope of the 21st century series, and Moffat in particular, to take things that were the unarticulated subtext or conventions of the old show and write them into the text of the new incarnation – this runs from elements like the Doctor’s character, to changes in the appearance of recurring monsters. And the same has happened with the mystery of the Doctor’s name, which has gone from being just one of those things to a universe-shaking secret. To be fair, Moffat has been setting this up for six or seven years – the ‘terrible secret’ idea makes an appearance in The Girl in the Fireplace, after all – but one still gets the sense of him writing himself into a corner: he can’t actually reveal what the secret is, can he?

‘I’ve just got to seed a long-running plotline, then we can go and “dance”.’

Perhaps this explains why The Name of the Doctor feels like it fails to deliver, almost as if Moffat’s grand plan is something he’s making up as he goes along. Certainly, the situation on Trenzalore which is shown on-screen does not appear to match the one described by Dorian a series earlier (again, from memory: ‘…no creature may speak falsely or fail to answer…’, which certainly doesn’t seem to be the case!), although if the universe is going to collapse as a result of the Intelligence corrupting the Doctor’s timeline this would definitely count as ‘silence falling’.

One thing The Name of the Doctor does do, by the way, is flatly and directly contradict the ‘his name is Doctor Who’ position. The episode makes two things clear: the Doctor’s tomb will only open if his name is uttered, and it’s River who eventually does so, off-screen (so it doesn’t matter who says it). Crucially, when the Great Intelligence goes into its ‘Doctor who? Doctor who? Doctor who?’ routine, the tomb stays shut: so ‘Doctor Who’ can’t be the name on the dotted line. River makes it clear that she says the real name, and only because no-one else was going to.

So maybe The Name of the Doctor did tell us something new after all. It’s a small thing, but at least that’s one possibility eliminated. Whether the whole mystery-of-the-name issue is now resolved (or as close to resolved as a Steven Moffat script gets), basically being just a lead-in to the mystery of John Hurt’s missing incarnation, remains to be seen. I rather suspect it is, because there’s a limit to the number of interesting stories you can tell about a mystery you can never, ever resolve.

A Swiss Miss Gets Haggard

You know, I’ve started to wish I’d planned ahead with this special series of Peter Cushing-related posts – here we are with number three and our hero still hasn’t had a proper leading role yet. Still, at least it’s finally a film, and a Hammer production to boot: from the studio’s heyday, it’s 1965′s She, directed by Robert Day.

Based on the (according to the credits) ‘Famous Novel’ by H. Rider Haggard, our story opens in a Palestinian nightclub in the aftermath of the First World War, where we meet three English survivors who are looking for a purpose in life. Holly, a former academic, is played by Cushing, his manservant job is played by Bernard Cribbins, and Leo, the one with juvenile lead written all over him, is played by perennial Hammer hunk John Richardson. While Holly and Job cavort with some belly dancers (the actors appear to be enjoying this, as you would I suppose), Leo is led astray by a mysterious girl named Ustane (Rosenda Monteros).

I feel obliged to point out that not least of the mysteries surrounding Ustane are her accent and ethnic origin. I think she’s supposed to be of vaguely Arabic descent, or possibly Egyptian, but Monteros is of course Mexican (she famously played Horst Bucholz’s love interest in The Magnificent Seven), and her accent basically defies description. That said, if you’re going to worry about roles being given to people of the wrong national ancestry, then She will almost certainly give you an ulcer, as we shall see.

Anyway, Ustane lures Leo off to an encounter with another mysterious woman, Ayesha, who is played by top-billed Ursula Andress (ancestry and accent: Swiss-German). She seems eerily familiar to Leo, and not because he’s seen Dr No. Ayesha gives Leo directions to a fabled lost city where she is in charge and invites him to come on a visit. This is not particularly to the liking of her high priest, Billali, played by Christopher Lee (ancestry: all over the place, accent: unmistakably English). Such is the scramble for prominence at the top of this film – even Richardson, the male lead, only gets fourth billing after Andress, Cushing, and Cribbins – that Lee has to settle for a dignified ‘and’, though he does have rather more than a cameo. (I still think naming a character ‘Billali’ only ten years after the release of Rock Around the Clock was probably a mistake.)

The fact that this is rather a lavish production by Hammer standards is made clear as the movie goes on location in the desert of southern Israel to show Leo, Holly, and Job’s journey to the lost city. It all looks rather impressive, and suggestively reminiscent of another famous 60s movie, but apparently it was not a comfortable shoot for the cast: in his autobiography, Peter Cushing recalls that Richardson contracted dysentery from drinking contaminated water and Cribbins was shot up the fundament by a misplaced pyro during one of the action sequences.

Anyway, la chica Ustane rescues our hero from the perils of the desert (and the special effects) and takes them home to meet her dad, the slave-master of the lost city, played by Andre Morell (ancestry: ooh, I’m not sure, Dutch from the sound of things, accent: sort of vaguely neutral). Unfortunately the slaves try to eat Leo, but before they can tuck in our heroes are whisked off to the city to meet Ayesha formally and have the plot explained to them.

It transpires that Andress is a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian noblewoman. (I know that sounds far-fetched, but I promise you: she really is supposed to be Egyptian.) She and her followers were banished here in ancient times after she jealously murdered her lover. Luckily, a passing desert hermit showed her the secret of immortality and she has been waiting for the reincarnation of her ex to show up ever since. And Leo is he! But will he surrender himself to the power of a woman who, despite her obvious charms, is clearly a bunny-boiler on an epic scale? How will Ayesha react to the thing that Leo and Ustane clearly have going on? And does anyone seriously expect Christopher Lee to appear in this kind of movie without having a go at being the main villain?

She is really a film of two halves – the first half, which really contains all the location stuff, really does a good job of showing the budget off, and one has to wonder if all this yomping about in the desert is actually Hammer’s attempt at knocking off Lawrence of Arabia: Richardson appears to have been styled to resemble Peter O’Toole, there are various long shots of folk on camels, Montero gets an entrance not entirely unlike Omar Sharif’s, and so on. If so, one can’t fault the ambition of the studio, but an epic panorama and a sweeping soundtrack do not a classic make.

The problem is that the rest of the movie is stringently studio-bound – the sets are mostly pretty good, but nevertheless it’s on soundstages – and really not very much happens beyond a lot of slightly abstract discussion. Despite the Hammer name, this isn’t really a horror movie, there’s a slave revolt at the end but you still couldn’t honestly call it an action film, it’s obviously not a serious drama, and yet the central relationship between Andress and Richardson is so underpowered that it doesn’t work as a torrid romance, either. The whole thing is much too well-behaved to work as an exploitation movie of any kind, if we’re honest – in the end it’s just an odd sort of fantasy adventure, more by default than anything else.

It doesn’t really help that the three most obvious charismatic cast members – by which I mean Cushing, Lee, and Cribbins – all get stuck in what are basically supporting roles, with the main plot concerning Richardson and Andress. Neither of them are brilliant actors, if we’re honest – I suppose we must cut Andress some slack because she is being dubbed, after all (insanely, the person dubbing her lines is also doing a Swiss-German accent) – but the script is much to blame as well. It is rather insipid stuff that never really gets going, and in the end one is left wondering exactly what the idea behind this film is – the danger of obsessive passion? The corrupting effects of beauty, immortality, and absolute power? The cyclical nature of history?

In the end I rather suspect She is more about some well-cinematographed bits of desert and Andress in a series of nice frocks than anything else, with the character actors cunningly deployed around the edges to give it some gravitas and charm, which they obviously do. It’s not a great film, or even a particularly fun one, but it’s pretty to look at and hard to actively dislike, despite some very dated racial politics. There aren’t a huge number of non-horror films that you could honestly say were essential Hammer, but She probably qualifies, despite all its weaknesses.

Avenging down the Decades

Let us continue our consideration of the career of Peter Cushing with a look at two more guest appearances the great man made on British TV in the 1960s and 1970s. Both of these are in The Avengers, mainly because these are the DVDs I happen to have knocking about the garret (well, one of them is technically in The New Avengers, but let’s not quibble).

Modern audiences may just associate The Avengers with Joss Whedon, a load of Marvel characters, and ten-digit box office returns, but for those of us of a certain age and disposition, that title goes first and foremost to a very peculiar TV thriller series, which started in 1960 as a straightforward detective show before transforming into one of the most stylish and off-the-wall fantasy series ever made – not entirely unlike the Batman TV show of the same period, but with much better performances and a massively higher level of sophistication. Patrick Macnee plays Steed, an adventurer and agent of an unspecified government agency, whose remit is conveniently vague; in the show’s mid-60s heyday his partner is an amateur investigator named Mrs Emma Peel (played, of course, by Diana Rigg). One of the subtle brilliancies of this show is the inversion of the way you’d expect the leads to be characterised: Mrs Peel usually takes things very seriously, while the professional agent Steed appears to be doing this for fun.

Anyway, the episode under consideration is Return of the Cybernauts from 1967, written by Philip Levene and directed by Robert Day. As it opens, the case that Steed and Mrs Peel are supposedly working on is the disappearance of a number of top scientists, but, characteristically, they are not letting this get in the way of a properly refined social life and are in fact enjoying drinks at the house of their friend Paul Beresford (Cushing). Beresford, not to put too fine a point on it, is coming on to Mrs Peel like nobody’s business, which she seems to find quite flattering, even though he is close to being twice her age. Steed appears a bit nonplussed by it all.

The disappearance of another scientist drags the duo away, at which point it is revealed that Beresford is behind the kidnappings, using a hulking robotic proxy (one of the Cybernauts referred to in the title). Soon enough he sits all his abductees down and shows them a tape of the previous season’s episode The Cybernauts, particularly the bit where Steed and Mrs Peel are responsible for the villain’s death – a villain who was secretly, in fact, Beresford’s brother! Now he has assembled this collection of boffins to cook up a suitably diabolical revenge – ‘a rhapsody of suffering’ is what he’s in the market for. However, Steed and Emma are no fools and have already figured out that someone has reactivated the Cybernauts, and they’re closing in on the culprit – taking frequent breaks to enjoy whiskey, claret, and other fine things in life, naturally…

Well, what follows is a well-directed collection of decent set-pieces strung together by some slightly dubious pretexts - The Avengers regularly makes big asks of its audience, and this episode is no exception. In addition to the idea that a seven foot steel robot in a fedora and sunglasses could wander around the Home Counties karate-chopping everything in its path without being noticed, the episode makes use of a wide variety of fantastical gadgets, from weapons that home in on a person’s ‘unique heartbeat’ to wristwatches that ‘paralyse the will’.

We are well across the border into science fantasy here, but despite what you may be thinking, the Cybernauts do not seem to me to be overtly ripping off the Cybermen of Doctor Who. For one thing, they look and behave quite differently, with the Cybernauts clearly being presented as totally mute robots. Most importantly, the Cybernauts beat the Cybermen to the screen by nearly a year. If anything, I’d say the influence was flowing the other way – not only did The Avengers and other filmed adventure series heavily influence the format of Doctor Who‘s seventh season, but the Autons, on their debut appearance in 1970, strikingly resemble the Cybernauts in a number of ways.

But I digress. This is a fairly atypical Avengers episode in all sorts of ways – this is a series which never really did recurring adversaries, and only rarely had stories specifically about the two leads being threatened. And, on the whole, it’s a fairly ‘straight’ story, with little of the quirkiness or humour you really expect from this show. Perhaps its this which makes some of the more dubious permutations of the plot a little difficult to swallow – and here I’m not even talking about the scene where Beresford has Mrs Peel in his clutches, her free will neutralised, and he proceeds to… help her off with her coat. Is the man not human? Hmm, I’m digressing again.

Nevertheless, it works as a piece of entertainment, not least because it’s Peter Cushing playing the bad guy. He gets some fairly choice dialogue to deliver – the ‘rhapsody of suffering’ line being just one example – but this never really impinges on the air of suave menace he effortlessly projects. This episode is about the villain more than most (he’s a nutcase, but an intelligent nutcase with a very specific agenda) and it’s easy to see why they recruited an actor of Cushing’s calibre for the part.

One gets the sense he was cast in The New Avengers simply because he was a famous film star, however: his episode, The Eagle’s Nest, was the series premiere and they presumably thought Cushing’s presence would help with the publicity. He gets the main guest role, but this story is mainly about establishing the characters, format, and tone.

Made in 1976, Patrick Macnee reprises his role as a slightly more avuncular Steed, while assisting him now are Joanna Lumley as ex-ballerina Purdey and Gareth Hunt as ex-mercenary Mike Gambit. Purdey isn’t really in Mrs Peel’s league, but Lumley makes the best of what she’s given, while Steed still appears to be an eccentric fop but is really a very hard man. Gambit, on the other hand, appears to be a very hard man but is really a bit of a gimp. Hey ho.

Many episodes of The New Avengers open with one of our heroes’ colleagues stumbling upon the evil plan of the villains, getting themselves mortally wounded, and then staggering off (usually to Steed’s house) to conk out after whispering a few cryptic words that will kick off the plot. The Eagle’s Nest doesn’t quite go down this route, but it’s a near thing.

We open with an Englishman being chased across a desolate Scottish landscape by a bunch of the locals: this is not Nigel Farage making another ill-advised trip to canvass north of the border, but an agent whose fishing trip has led to his discovering… aha, that would be telling. In a typical New Avengers gimmick, the bad guys’ weapons are fishing rods whose hooks are coated with jellyfish extract. It is quickly established that the local monks are baddies and the angling spy is soon toast.

However, an impostor passing himself off as the dead man turns up in London at a scientific meeting attended by the eminent scientist Doctor von Claus (Cushing, finally), who’s an expert on cryogenic suspension (not that they used terms like that in mainstream entertainment in 1976). Having resuscitated a frog to wild applause (those wacky scientists), von Claus is kidnapped by the impostor and dragged off to the remote Scottish island where the monks hold sway.

Sure enough, a succession of clues point Steed and his friends in that direction, so off they go – but why have the monks nabbed the doctor in the first place? Well, it transpires that in 1945 one of the last planes out of Berlin before the Russians took the city crashed upon the island, and it has been controlled by these fanatical Nazis and their offspring ever since (not that anyone looks particularly Aryan, if we’re honest). Also on the plane was – yes, you’ve guessed it! – Hitler, who’s been in a coma ever since, and the Nazis would quite like Peter Cushing to revive him just in time for his birthday party. What the plan after that is remains unclear: presumably the hope is that Hitler will lead an all-conquering army carrying fishing rods and jellyfish extract from this remote north Atlantic rock.

We are well into the dubious realm of Nazi kitsch here – there’s a very funny scene where all the monks whip off their habits to reveal SS uniforms underneath – but, some obvious padding aside, the story hangs together pretty well. It’s clear from the start, though, that having three regulars in an Avengers episode is probably a mistake, as it’s quite difficult to split the story three ways. Gambit doesn’t really get much to do. Purdey, on the other hand, frogmans her way onto the island, reveals a very nice chiffon number under her wetsuit (complete with high-heeled boots), and then gets a couple of mildly kinky scenes where the fishhooks of the villains shred her top layer, forcing her to spend the rest of the episode in a low-cut green wool catsuit (and, to judge from some of the camera angles, not much else).

As I said, Peter Cushing does not perhaps get the material he deserves, as many of his scenes are simply just padding. However, as you might expect, he gives it everything he’s got – it’s so interesting to see how many of the same tics and mannerisms Cushing employs when playing a villain can be subtly tweaked to transform him into a very sympathetic character. Nevertheless, he’s not playing the hero or the villain, and so this episode is always fundamentally about other people. It is silly, it is in questionable taste, and it never quite gets the balance right between comic relief and drama: but then again, it is The New Avengers, so you’d be unwise to expect anything else.

Full Sail War

When it comes to the fifth Doctor and his era, I always find myself at a slight remove – moreso, really, than with any other. You would have thought, as someone who found himself turning into a Doctor Who fan at the beginning of the 1980s, that the fifth Doctor would have been the one with whom I truly bonded and had a special regard for. However, you would have reckoned without two things: the BBC’s desire, in the early 80s, to test out the potential of twice-weekly early evening drama, and my parents’ desire, rather optimistically in hindsight, to get me out of the house and doing something vaguely normal socially.

And so it was that the BBC and local church youth organisations managed to unfailing schedule half the episodes of Doctor Who between 1982 and 1984 so they exactly coincided with the nights I was out of the house. Protestations went unheeded; I could still see half the episodes, I was told, so what was I complaining about? Every time the night I was obliged to be out moved for whatever reason, the BBC would unerringly shift Doctor Who so half the episodes of any given serial were aired on that day. The Five Doctors was an incredible, magical moment for me, not because it featured so many classic characters together, but because for once I actually got to see a complete story on its first run.

I was, as I recall, the only really big Doctor Who fan at my school. I was also the only person there who wasn’t able to watch the programme, and had to sit in fervid silence as everyone else casually discussed what had happened in the episodes I’d missed. Now, possibly I am overestimating the importance of childhood trauma, but these days I can’t help wondering if this experience didn’t in some way contribute to the general aura of ineffectual absurdity that follows me round like a bad smell and colours most aspects of my life.

Either way, one definite consequence was that it wasn’t for well over ten years – and possibly closer to twenty – that I finally got to see all the Peter Davison stories from start to finish. As the object of this current series of Doctor Who reviews is to focus on stories I have liked ever since I first saw them, this obviously has a bearing. Once more, I was going to choose an obvious candidate and review Earthshock – but how does one find something new and pertinent to say about such a much-considered, landmark story? Besides which, I’ve been writing a lot about the Cybermen recently and I’m sure we could all use a break from that. My own rules of engagement disbar me from writing about the astonishing Caves of Androzani as it took me many, many years to appreciate what a truly extraordinary story this is.

And so I have decided to write about Enlightenment, a not-very-much-regarded story from 1983, written by Barbara Clegg. This is one of those serials I didn’t properly get to see until the early 90s, but it immediately impressed me as being a cut above most of the stories around it. The fact that, after a mostly strong first season, the fifth Doctor got clobbered with a string of some of the dodgiest stories in the show’s history obviously makes it a bit easier for Enlightenment to shine, but this is still an unusual, highly competent production.

As the story opens the TARDIS is afflicted with a power failure, which the Doctor eventually realises is being caused by his old acquaintance the White Guardian, who’s trying to send a message which will lead to another mission (the two of them have form in this department). This is somewhat alarming news to the Doctor’s (fairly) new companion Turlough, mainly because a couple of stories ago he signed on with the Black Guardian: in return for killing the Doctor, the Black Guardian will help get him back to his (as yet unspecified) home planet. Turlough, obviously, has not yet killed the Doctor, and is having second thoughts about the whole deal, but the Black Guardian is one of those bosses who is a stickler for contractual details.

Arriving at the destination stipulated by the White Guardian, the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough find themselves on an Edwardian yacht, which is apparently competing in a highly prestigious and important race. The men below decks are oddly vague about when, where, and how they signed on for the trip, while the officers are simply odd. The penny eventually drops for the Doctor and his friends when they realise that the race itself is being run at the behest of the Guardians, and the participants are very far from being what they seem…

My default position is that Doctor Who is not really science fiction, but rather science fantasy (quite probably an even more vague and difficult-to-define term). Even so, there are few stories in the history of the programme as close to being pure, full-on fantasy as Enlightenment. The key image of the story – sailing vessels from throughout Earth’s history racing each other through outer space – really makes this clear. The guest characters of the story, the Guardians and Eternals, are essentially supernatural beings, with tremendous powers over space, time, and the minds of lesser creatures, and there’s no real in-story explanation for who and what they are, beyond a few lines about them coming from a Void outside Time itself (conventional wisdom has it that this is the Void into which millions of Daleks and Cybermen were sucked at the conclusion of Doomsday, which if nothing else explains why the Eternals don’t like it there: the property prices must have taken a nosedive). Those few moments where the story makes a vague stab in the direction of being traditional SF, mainly by giving the Eternals conventional technology (scanner screens, spacesuits, ‘vacuum shields’) are generally the ones which don’t ring true.

This is a fairly languid story, even by the standards of the 80s: the first episode sets up a mystery very reminiscent of a Sapphire and Steel plot, dragging its feet so the revelation that all of this is happening in space coincides with the cliffhanger. Episode two is mainly about exploring the idea of the race, and the nature of the Eternals who are participating. We don’t even meet the real bad guy until episode 3, a bold move in terms of story structure.

However, the story still hangs together (on first viewing, at least), simply because the images it creates are so strong, the ideas behind it are so interesting and thought-provoking, and the performances of the cast have such conviction behind them. If this is Doctor Who operating on the absolute edge of the SF genre, then it’s doing so with confidence and no small measure of skill.

That said, Enlightenment is really just a story about striking visuals and big ideas, because as soon as you start digging into the substance of the story’s premise it starts falling to bits in quite a bad way.

Leaving aside the question of exactly who and what the Black and White Guardians are (and, trust me, I’m so tempted to launch into another essay on the cosmology and theology of the Doctor’s world right now), they are clearly the prime movers in the story. The race is being held at their behest, and they are handing out the prize at the end: the Enlightenment of the title, which will give the winning Eternals the power of… self-determination? Imagination? Moral agency? Something like all of those put together, anyway.

The Black Guardian obviously wants to see this power go to someone appropriately chaotic and destructive, which is why he’s rigging the race. Presumably it’s in response to this that the White Guardian summons the Doctor, to ensure things are resolved fairly and squarely.

(Which leads one to wonder: is the Black Guardian’s decision to try and kill the Doctor at this exact moment in his life purely random? Could it be that, right from the start of Mawdryn Undead, he is aware that the Doctor will soon be called upon to confront one of his agents directly, and uses Turlough in an attempt to take the Doctor out of the game before the White Guardian can even contact him? If he isn’t, then it’s a tremendous coincidence that the White Guardian just happens to recruit the Doctor while he has one of the Black Guardian’s agents on board the TARDIS.

Not that Turlough is in the same league as Captain Wrack or even the Shadow, as Black Guardian agents go. As an assassin, Turlough is hardly what you’d call proactive – throughout the three stories where he’s supposedly working for the Guardian, Turlough only has two proper goes at killing the Doctor, and spends the rest of the time being useless or bickering with his employer.)

At the end of the story, the Doctor wins the race, and politely refuses the prize, declaring that it’s too much power for any individual to possess. The White Guardian agrees with him absolutely – which really demands the question, if the prize at the end of the race is so dangerous, why agree to hand it out in the first place? Obviously the Black Guardian can’t go around Enlightening people without the White Guardian’s agreement, or he’d already have done so, so why did the White Guardian agree to sponsor the race?

We are forced to the somewhat awkward conclusion that, rather than the near-omnipotent cosmic forces we might suppose them to be, the Guardians are in fact answerable to some even-greater power, which can, not to put too fine a point on it, tell them what to do. This actually fits quite well with some of the dialogue in these stories – the Black Guardian ‘cannot be seen’ to act directly against the Doctor, suggesting he is answerable to a higher authority, while the White Guardian indicates the two of them will endure ‘as long as [they] are needed’. Needed by whom, to do what?

Oh well. Whenever Doctor Who launches itself off into lofty realms dealing with concepts like metaphysics, eternity, the nature of being, and the substance of good and evil, you know you’re probably going to be in for a fairly bumpy ride, simply because it’s very difficult to seamlessly integrate these sorts of ideas into an action-adventure SF series. Enlightenment manages this job better than most stories do, and becomes very memorable as a result. Not surprisingly, given how much the plot concerns diamonds, rubies, and crystals, it’s a bit of a gem.

Pet Sounds

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, whatever undertaking you are engaged in, it can only be improved by the judicious addition of some Peter Cushing. I don’t really feel I’ve written about this magnificent, iconic actor nearly enough here on the blog, and with the centenary of his birth only a few days away this feels like the ideal moment to rectify that.

While Peter Cushing did much of his most memorable work away from Hammer (and I’m thinking here of 1984, the Doctor Who movies, Star Wars, and so on), it’s impossible to argue with the notion that he’s one of the performers most closely linked with the studio. So we will be looking at some Hammer over the course of the next few posts. I don’t currently have to hand a copy of The Curse of Frankenstein, Cushing’s first work with Hammer Films, and so instead I thought we would take a look at his final role in association with the company.

This is in The Silent Scream, an episode of Hammer House of Horror from 1980. By this point Hammer had basically packed up as a maker of theatrical movies and were trying to break into TV, in association with ITC. House of Horror is an anthology show, made entirely on film, and with some surprisingly big names appearing (usually either very early or late in their careers). As is fairly standard with anthology series, the quality of the episodes varies wildly, but The Silent Scream (directed by Alan Gibson, written by Francis Essex) is towards the top of the pile.

By this time in the final, post-Tarkin phase of his career, Peter Cushing is top-billed, but the main character is Chuck, played by a considerably pre-stardom Brian Cox (actor not physicist). As the story opens, Chuck has just got out of prison, much to the delight of his lovely wife (Elaine Donnelly). The first scene when he gets home is a masterclass in how to bombard the audience with exposition without them noticing: they live in a remote house miles from anyone else (they have no phone). They are very short of cash. Chuck is a kleptomaniac safecracker with a pathological fear of confinement. He has struck up a friendship with a prison visitor who runs the local pet shop. His wife is clearly much too good for him. All of these things except the last one turn out to be crucial plot points, yet you never quite get the sense of the script hitting you over the head with them: this stuff is hardly Shakespeare, but professionally done nevertheless.

Anyway, Chuck trots off to the pet shop to say thank you to the prison visitor, Mr Blucek (Cushing). Cushing opts to play the part with a faint German accent, which suits the character, and a trilby, which is a more questionable choice. Nevertheless he goes into Polite and Genial with an Undeniable Hint of Obscure Menace mode, which indicates to the audience that things may be about to go badly for Chuck.

It’s not really surprising that Chuck spends a lot of time in prison, as he is clearly a dim bulb, not putting two and two together when Blucek reveals his hobby, which is conditioning animals so they can be safely contained without conventional cages. Even the fact that there is a menagerie out the back of the shop containing lions, leopards, kangaroos and bears does not prompt Chuck to realise there is something very odd going on here.

Well, needless to say, Mr Blucek is intent upon the final phase of his experiments in conditioning, which involves training a human to accept confinement. This involves the use of lots of sound cues – buzzers and bells and so on – and high-voltage electrical force fields. Presumably Blucek has all this stuff lying around from his former life as a Nazi war criminal, as I don’t think it’s standard pet shop issue. Soon enough Chuck finds himself back in a cell and at Blucek’s mercy, while his missus runs around producing a little mild padding for the episode.

Actually, I’m being too harsh: for an episode of a horror anthology series, The Silent Scream works really hard to stay borderline-plausible, despite the daftness of the central premise. When Chuck first goes missing, his wife goes round to the pet shop to see what’s happened to him. Blucek denies all knowledge, but Chuck’s coat is hanging up where she can see it. At this point I was getting ready to shout ‘Go to the police, you stupid woman!’ only for the next scene to open with her… well, going to the police. (Who still don’t do anything.)

This is the kind of show they just don’t make any more – the pre-credits sequence concludes with an electrocuted tiger, and later on there’s a scene with an exploding puppy, which scores points for sheer ballsiness – it probably loses them straight away for unintentional humour, but you can’t have everything. If we’re perfectly honest, Brian Cox only really gives a workmanlike performance as Chuck, but Elaine Donnelly is very good, and Peter Cushing, as usual, commits completely to his role, investing Blucek with a slightly detached icy malevolence that commands the screen whenever he appears.

Despite all this, I have to say that The Silent Scream is never really more than okay, although the reasons for this are initially hard to pin down. I think it’s partly because none of the characters is really very likeable – Donnelly is the one who comes closest, but you have to wonder what she sees in Cox. Also, as a horror story it’s just not that frightening – it’s hard to make a man stuck in a room seem properly scary. If most of the episode was a two-hander between Cox and Cushing, set in the cell, it might have worked better, but we keep cutting away to the wife running about. There’s a half-decent blackly ironic twist ending, but even this is implicitly nasty rather than genuinely scary. Still, as I say, this is one of the better episodes of the series and a good showcase for Cushing’s talents: this man could make the magic work on TV as easily as in a movie.

Vroom at the Top

So, I was in the pub the other afternoon, catching up with a friend: a woman of impressive wit and intelligence, no small measure of physical beauty, and impeccable taste when it comes to romantic entanglements.

‘Have you seen any really crap films recently?’ she asked, fully aware, like most who know me well, that when not working or actually asleep I spend most of my time in front of a screen of some description.

I had to think about that for a bit, and realised I had actually been enjoying a pretty decent run so far this year: a few disappointments, but nothing actually traumatically bad. ‘But,’ I added, ‘I am going to see Fast & Furious 6 tomorrow.’ I filled her in on what I gathered to be the general tone, plot, and content of the film.

‘Good God that sounds awful,’ she said, and then added (knowing me rather too well, come to think of it), ‘it sounds like the kind of film Jason Statham would be in.’

I think I’ve mentioned already that Cocktail is her favourite film. Hey ho. Well, for the purposes of answering her question, I have to say that I can’t honestly describe Fast & Furious 6 (directed, like number 5, by Justin Lin) as a really crap film. I am aware that in doing so I may be using a different qualitative scale to the one traditionally employed on the planet Earth, but so be it.

Gravelly-voiced boy racer/criminal mastermind Dominic Toretto (the great Vin Diesel), together with his extended family of morally-flexible motorheads, has relocated to the Canary Islands to live off his ill-gotten gains. The film opens with a classic Dumb Movie Bit where Diesel and his rather drab sidekick (Paul Hunter) have some dialogue stressing that they have Moved On With Their Lives and the days of constant hazard and adventure are Well And Truly Over. You know this scene has only been included because they are going to go back to their lives of constant hazard and adventure about four minutes later.

And so it proves, as slightly ridiculous colossus of justice Hobbs (The Rock (Dwayne Johnson)), acting on information battered out of a suspect in Moscow, recruits Diesel to help him catch criminal mastermind Owen Shaw (Luke Evans), who used to be in the boy racer division of the SAS. The carrot to get Diesel on board is the presence on Shaw’s team of his old flame Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), who everyone thought was dead and is, in any case, suffering from Movie Amnesia.

(Oh, the divine and fragrant Michelle Rodriguez, back on the big screen! How long has it been, ‘Chelle? Do you remember the days when you first came into my life? Films like Resident Evil, Blue Crush and S.W.A.T.? I guess a lot of water has gone under the bridge since then for us both, and there are other special people who I have to think about now – Rose Byrne, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Steph who does the business news on breakfast TV, to name but three. Anyway…)

Diesel bites (obviously) and convenes the Fast & Furious All-Stars in London to commence operations against Shaw and his gang. Jordana Brewster has a considerably reduced role this time round, as her character is technically on maternity leave, but stepping in to replace her is the statuesquely lovely Gina Carano of Haywire fame. I’ve been dying to see Carano in another movie, and while this one obviously wouldn’t have the intelligence or restraint of one from the Soderbergh collective, it was still shaping up to be something a bit different…

And so it proves. Very elderly readers may recall the original The Fast & The Furious starring Diesel, which came out in 2001 and was a fairly gritty (if slightly glitzy) thriller about the illegal street racing scene and the subversive glamour of a life of crime. Fast & Furious 6, on the other hand, is… well, look, it’s got to the point where they sit around thinking up stunt sequences and then write the script around them (apparently the climax of this film is a stunt they’ve been trying to think of a way to include since number 4).

It basically goes a little something like this: Vroom vroom. Discussion about FAMILY. Exposition. Exposition. Comic relief. Fistfight. Comic relief. Vroom vroom. Exposition. Discussion of differential tranmissions. FAMILY. Comic relief. Comic relief. FAMILY. Vroom vroom. Explosion. Fist fight. Comic relief. Exposition. FAMILY. Vroom vroom.

And so on. As you may have noticed, the big theme that is impressed upon the small section of the audience’s brains not pummelled into submission by the sound and fury on the screen concerns FAMILY, which is what Diesel and his gang of criminals have apparently decided that they are. This sort of vein of cheesy sentiment inserted into an otherwise relentless cavalcade of violence, misogyny, off-colour humour and general amorality put me rather in mind of the later Lethal Weapon movies, but this is a much bigger and brasher movie than any of those.

It is, on most levels, completely ridiculous, of course: it’s very hard to describe this film, with its dubious premise, ludicrous stunts, arbitrary plot reversals, and general lack of any sense of reality, without using the words ‘utterly stupid’ – there is, for example, a sequence concerned with the apparently-thriving street-racing scene in central London, a city noted for being extremely welcoming to those wishing to drive around it at speed. (I just hope Vin and the rest remembered to pay the Congestion Charge.) And yet, and yet… it is still somehow rather winningly contrived. It looks gorgeous, bits of it are genuinely funny (though I could have done without the scenes where the Rock metaphorically smacks down various uppity Brits), everyone gets something interesting and occasionally involving to do, and the big stunt sequences have a sort of carefree abandonment about them which is rather beguiling – there’s an operatically destructive set-piece involving a couple of landrovers, half a dozen cars, two motorbikes, a truck and a tank, and this isn’t even the climax. Plus, we get not one but two knock-down-drag-out bouts of fisticuffs between Michelle Rodriguez and Gina Carano, which were surely the most, er, thrilling thing I’ve seen on the big screen in ages. (There’s a bit where Michelle starts biting Gina’s thigh, and… and… I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me a moment.)

 

 

 

What else can I say about Fast & Furious 6? It is a highly polished, precision-built, beautiful-to-look-at machine of such vaulting absurdity it almost beggars the imagination. I really shouldn’t have enjoyed it, even ironically, and yet the fact remains that I did. In terms of big, dumb, silly, fun action movies, Fast & Furious 6 sets the standard: this is the film The Expendables wishes it could be.

And … spoiler ahoy! … this is before we even come to the post-credits sequence, in which the brother of the villain sets out upon a rollicking rampage of revenge against Vin and the others. Suffice to say that when he appears, he has a baldy head, a variable accent, and a notable history of vehicular mayhem of his own: my alluring friend would not have been in the least surprised to see him. This and the previous Fast & Furious both turned out to be unreasonably good entertainment: but the next one promises to be something truly epochal. I cannot imagine any power on Earth keeping me from seeing it.

The Last of Babylon

There’s a distinct sense of ‘Not with a bang…’ about the very last two bits of Babylon 5. Here we are entering the realm of the niche, if not outright obscure product. Normally I keep track of series that I like as much as B5, but as recently as eight months ago I was totally unaware of the existence of The Lost Tales.

I did vaguely know about Legend of the Rangers, though: a movie produced for the Sci Fi Channel (or whatever it calls itself these days), which is clearly a very thinly-disguised pilot for a new series. As spin-offs go, it seems rather more comfortable with its identity as a piece of B5 than Crusade ever did: not only does it retain the title of the parent show, but there are Narn and Drazi main characters (I nearly said regulars). Present to give the whole series the right sort of imprimatur is Andreas Katsulas as G’Kar.

There’s nothing especially innovative about the plot, which concerns the doings of the crew of a Ranger ship. The captain is in a spot of disgrace after refusing to die pointlessly in futile combat (this is apparently written into the Ranger Code, which leads one to wonder exactly how this organisation has lasted a thousand years) and so he and his associates have been assigned a starship which is a) falling to bits and b) haunted. Seriously.

The piece of cake mission they are assigned turns nasty when Near-Omnipotent Aliens From The Dawn Of Time turn up and start trying to kill the dignitaries they are escorting. This seems to have been a favoured trope of JMS’s, when you consider the Shadows, the Thirdspace aliens, and so on – there’s dialogue here suggesting these particular aliens are much worse and more powerful even than the Shadows themselves, which begs the question of why we’ve never heard from them before. Maybe they’ve just been bigging themselves up in their publicity.

The convolutions of the plot are not especially surprising, but Legend of the Rangers scores over Crusade in nearly every department – it looks good, the characters are interesting, and in places it is genuinely funny. Even the main character, who starts off looking like another bullish JMS space-jock, turns out to be rather engaging, and his relationship with his Minbari first officer has a definite Kirk-Spock vibe to it. Parts of it try to be innovative and just end up being weird – the fire control systems of the ship work by the weapons officer jumping down a well into a holodeck and doing aerobics in free fall. This, frankly, is silly, and only really works here because the actress involved (Myriam Sirois) is as agreeably lithe as she is. But on the whole this movie showed promise and I’m mildly surprised nothing else came of it.

Myriam Sirois keeps an admirably straight face as she prepares to jump down the well again.

The Lost Tales is another pilot which ended up going nowhere, but on this occasion JMS wielded the axe himself. It’s a direct-to-DVD movie consisting of two linked stories focussing on characters from the original show. The first of these is, to be honest, so bizarrely unlike anything else in Babylon 5 as to make one want to strike it from the canon. Faced with an apparent case of – and I kid you not – demonic possession, Lochley calls in a priest, thinking an exorcism may be needed. What follows is mostly three people in the same room talking to each other about extremely convoluted theological matters, pepped up only by some inventive direction (JMS again).

I was waiting for the scene where they figure out that the ‘demon’ is actually an alien entity or something to do with psi-powers being misused, but no: there’s no evidence that this isn’t something genuinely supernatural. This is at odds with nearly everything previously implied about religion in Babylon 5, and this – rather than the painfully low budget or the glacial, talky plot – is what really makes me dislike it.

The second story is better, not least because it has Galen in it (who seems even more of a slippery, ruthless customer than he did during Crusade). Galen indulges in his favourite hobby of giving Sheridan a glimpse of a looming apocalypse, in this case a devastating Centauri attack on Earth in a few decades time. Sheridan can avert this, says Galen, but the only certain method is to kill a teenage Centauri noble before he ascends the imperial throne.

We’re in ‘would you kill Hitler as a baby?’ territory here, of course, and when I say the story is ‘better’ that isn’t the same thing as saying ‘it’s great’. Once again you can sense the lack of budget acting as a drag-anchor on the whole undertaking, even though there are more characters and more effects in this segment of the movie. The resolution is not particularly surprising, but at least the performances are good.

The Lost Tales did well, but apparently JMS was fed up with having to squeak out B5 spin-offs on tiny budgets and declared he wasn’t going to do any more unless he was given more cash to work with: and the studio declined. Which leaves us where we are today, with occasional rumours of a theatrical B5 movie, but nothing concrete (as yet).

JMS said that all the spin-offs really achieved was to cheapen the legacy of the original TV show, and I tend to agree, as everything from In the Beginning on has a sort of bitty, half-baked, thrown-together air about it. If you really want to see something special, and powerful, and hugely influential, you should watch the original TV series, particularly the first three seasons or so. Going back to it has been, on the whole, a very pleasurable experience (even if discovering that late season 4 dragged quite as much as I recalled was a bit of a blow).  I’ve been intermittently quite rude about Joe Stracszynski throughout this project, but the fact remains that this is ultimately all down to him. One of the best SF TV shows of all time, and one of the most important TV shows of any kind: nice one, Joe.