Marco Polo

If there is one story that sits at the top of the list for most anxiously awaited for rediscovery, it would be all 7 episodes of Marco Polo.

Following immediately from their claustrophobic experience in the TARDIS, the travellers find themselves on an icy mountain slope somewhere on Earth. Barbara and Ian speculate that it could be the Andes or the Alps, but Susan correctly guesses that they are in the Himalayas, on the roof of the world. The previous adventure still haunts the travellers, though, and the Doctor reveals that one of the TARDIS power circuits had burned out and left the ship stranded without power. They are rescued by the Venetian merchant Marco Polo and his companions, who are en route to Peking to pay visit to Kublai Khan in China of 1289.

My thoughts on this adventure are going to be handled a bit differently as I did not actually see the episodes. In the mid 1970s, the BBC made a decision to systematically purge its archive of programme recordings that they felt were no longer useful for broadcast and could not be re-sold on foreign markets. Many episodes of Doctor Who were lost in this clearing of house, the 7 episodes comprising Marco Polo amongst them. Over time film copies of the lost episodes were returned to the archive by collectors and overseas television stations, and while some stories returned intact, others returned incomplete. Marco Polo did not return in any fashion, and is still (hopefully) out there awaiting rediscovery. Or some greedy so-and-so has it and is hoarding it for himself and is really annoying millions of people across the world, putting him on par with George W Bush these days. But I digress. The sound recordings for all the "missing" episodes were preserved and have been released on CD over the years, with guest narration (in this case it is by William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the series) to fill in the blanks and keep the story running, so while I can't watch the complete series I can still enjoy it either listening in my car, or on a train, or on the bike at the gym. It is on the success of these releases and a few radio plays in the 1980s and 1990s that Big Finish would build their library of audio only adventures (see my first blog for their details and website) and keep Doctor Who going.

It is only when I try and explain the missing episodes situation to people that I realize how hard it is to be a Doctor Who fan. If it's not enduring the sneering of fans of other shows about the lack of flashy special effects and low budget sets, then it's the sheer lack of availability of the entire series. Right now there are 108 episodes of the show missing, some of them respresenting pivotal moments in the show's history, and damn if it isn't frustrating to try and enjoy something that isn't all there. Star Trek fans will never know the frustration seeing as that franchise has been syndicated left right and centre and just refuses to go away, so in the end they may just get bored with their show (god knows I got bored with it a long time ago) while we Whovians sit and wait and hope for more to turn up. My friend Jamie would laugh and say "Those episodes were lost for a reason!" but that's just him refusing to allow me my fun. *sigh*

Even in audio form, though, Marco Polo is compelling. This is the first historical adventure of the series, a theme which will continue for years, where the only elements of science fiction are the travellers and the TARDIS itself. With the ship broken down our regulars are made allies of Marco Polo, but he intends to give the TARDIS to Kublai Khan as a gift in hopeful exchange for his release from the Khan's services. The Doctor must not only scheme to get his ship back and get everyone away to safety, but must also be wary of the treacherous Tegana, a warlord emissary on an anything but peaceful mission to Peking. Tegana manages to cast suspicion on the travellers, prompting Polo to confiscate the key to the ship lest the Doctor finish his repairs and escape with his friends. The journey to Peking is a long one across the Gobi desert and into China, and over 7 weeks of original broadcast the viewer would actually get the sense of the TARDIS crew being along for the ride for a long time, and not just parking for a few hours, sorting out a local alien invasion and then going again. Unlike my complaint against an episode of The Daleks, this long trek does not suffer from any dull moments; the dialogue between the characters is alive and witty, and the tension surrounding the attempts to escape with the TARDIS palpable even without a visual presence. I really really wish I could have seen this one, even if my imagination conjures up much more extravangant settings and effects than the BBC could have managed back in 1963. But mine is certainly not a unique request. I have had the opporunity to speak with a delightful Scottish lady named Jessie MacAuley, who actually remembered this episode, and she told me it was very good, so I have at least one sort-of review from someone who saw it with her own eyes. Who knows, maybe one day I will get to see it myself.

NEXT EPISODE : THE KEYS OF MARINUS

The Edge of Destruction

They say you never really get to know a person until you've gone to hell with them. Or something like that. Imagine if you will you're stuck in an elevator with strangers, or people you may only slightly know, and what kind of frictions might develop as you await rescue. Now take it a step farther and remove the possibility of rescue, that you are helpless, that there are forces working against you that are going to kill you. And then you want someone to blame. Add sharks and you've got Open Water, which followed the same formula, dumping two unfortunate divers in the middle of shark-infested waters. Replace the ocean with a suddenly stranded TARDIS, and that's The Edge of Destruction.

As series continuity goes, the evnts of the previous episodes have taken place over a very short period of time; it's doubtful that anyone actually got any sleep until being held captive by the Daleks on Skaro and coming close to dying of radiation sickness. Ian and Barbara want to go home; they are scared and have lives they must return to. As soon as it becomes apparant that there is something wrong with the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately suspects they are actually attempting to sabotage the ship to blackmail him into taking them back to Earth. The entire crew start to feel the creeping parinoia of being trapped inside the dying time machine, perhaps wondering if something from outside has broken in and is now stalking the corridors. The Doctor reacts with outright hostility and prepares to take the extreme measure of throwing Barbara and Ian off the ship into the void outside, which would certainly kill them. It is only when it becomes obvious that the TARDIS itself is trying to communicate with the crew to alert them to the danger they are facing that the Doctor relents and must make amends to the two teachers. Susan herself beings to suspect Barbara and Ian until she rationalizes that there are other factors at play, but the Doctor remains adamant until almost the last minute.

This is where the friction between the Doctor and his two newest companions starts to wane. The Doctor himself says to Barbara "As we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves," which would indicate that he realizes his own faults and begins to see the value in the others around him. After dealing with such extreme situations one after another the crew are beginning to get used to each others ways of coping with stress and realizing that as a group they do work well together in a crisis, almost like a family.

The Edge of Destruction is a 2 part adventure, with standalone titles of Edge of Destruction and The Brink of Disaster. In the final moments of the second episode, Susan and Barabara go outside onto a snowy landscape and find a giant footprint in the snow, something Susan speculates must have been made by a giant...

NEXT EPISODE : MARCO POLO

The Daleks

This is the story that really brought Doctor Who into the national spotlight, introducting some of the most famous TV monsters of all times, the title villains: the Daleks. Even my own 7 year old nephew is not immune to their allure, and can often be heard muttering "Exterminate!" at any who get in his way (although Parker's plans for universal domination may be somewhat different from those of the Daleks).

The travellers emerge from the TARDIS into a petrified jungle. The trees have turned to stone, the soil barren and dead. A mysterious city lies at the edge of the forest, and the Doctor contrives to explore it despite the protests of his companions. Susan is used to her grandfather's whims of exploring and goes along with him, her own scientific curiosity aroused. Ian and Barbara, having just escaped the barbarism of the Tribe of Gum, now have to come to terms with the fact that they are not only out of their normal time, but now on an alien world as well. When they reach the city, they separate to explore, and first Barbara, then the others, are captured by the Daleks. It is revealed that the Daleks are one of the last two surviving races on Skaro; the other being the Thal people. Both races were engaged in a horrible nuclear war which reduced the planet to ashes generations ago, and to survive the Daleks have retired into mobile casings that house what is left of their bodies. The machines are also powered by static electricity, and as such they cannot move off the metal floors of their city. Not yet. (full details of Dalek design, and lots of images at http://www.daleklinks.co.uk/ ) Our regular cast eventually meet the Thas as well, but the Thals are not the monsters that the Daleks are; indeed, they are perfect humanoids, their mutation process having come full circle. Unlike the agressive Daleks the Thals are not keen to start another war, but the Doctor convinces them that without asserting themselves and attacking the Daleks they will all be destroyed by them sooner or later.

Still the anti-hero, the Doctor can be seen manipulating events to get his own way. He even goes as far as to sabotage the TARDIS as an excuse to explore the city and look for a means to repair, which leads them right into trouble. And when the question of reigniting the conflict between the Daleks and the Thals comes up he sees no reason why the Thals should not be made into an army at his disposal, despite the objections Ian has. A dying Dalek later begs the Doctor for help, or the whole race is doomed, and he coldly stands by and lets it die, saying that even if he did want to help the Daleks, he doesn't know how.

The Daleks. Magnificent monsters. The design of the Daleks does not do much to intimidate these days, and the first thing people can say is how silly they are for not being able to go up stairs. In this day and age of CGI monsters that can melt through walls or climb across ceilings, there isn't exactly much to fear from a small tank that can't go off a flat surface. But the Daleks don't have to run around and shoot everyone; they've already destroyed their world with a neutron bomb once, and they survived, so if letting off another one to wipe out the Thals is what it takes, so be it. They are cruel. They are totally hostile, rabidly xenophobic; traits that almost make them as bad as certain humans in our own history, which is really the fear that they inspire; they're not as alien as all that when they are, in effect, us, to an extreme degree. Terry Nation, who wrote the 7 episode script, went on record once saying that he had modelled the Daleks on the Nazi SS (although in an interview in the early days of the Dalek phenomenon he simply shrugged and said that he needed a villain for his script and poof there they were) and the parallels cannot be missed, right down to the well-known battle shriek of "EXTERMINATE!".

The adventure is made up of 7 standard length episodes, their titles being: The Dead Planet, The Survivors, The Escape, The Ambush, The Expedition, The Ordeal, and The Rescue. My only beef with stories this length, especially in this era of the show, is sometime you can see where things could have been picked up a bit, some bits removed, and maybe even an entire episode's worth of material trimmed to tighten it up. I maintain that episode 6, The Ordeal has more to do with how painfully slow Barbara and Ian's Thal raiding party moves through a cave system trying to find a back way into the Dalek city to attack it; it is an ordeal for the viewer to sit there and watch Ian, then Ganatus, Kristas, Barbara and Antodus all take turns jumping over a chasm, and when inevitably someone slips, you can't help but think "It's about time..." I had a guest viewer for this one; my friend Mark was visiting for the weekend and as usual with him made a lot of heavy sighs and barely-stifled sniggers as we watched the black and white serial. I can't actually spell his reaction out (it involves a wet raspberry sound) but do take comfort in the fact that Parker was here yesterday, and actually said "Exterminate Uncle Mark!" and avenged the Daleks for his criticism.

And once all is done, and the Daleks are defeated, the TARDIS leaves Skaro. The Doctor sets the controls and the ship takes off. All is normal, until there is a thunderous explosion, everyyone is thrown to the floor, and the lights in the console room go out...

NEXT EPISODE : THE EDGE OF DESTRUCTION

An Unearthly Child

So this is where it all really started.

Susan Foreman is an interesting pupil at Coal Hill School, and as with any other school the faculty begin to notice and talk. History teacher Barbara Wright and science teacher Ian Chesterton decide to follow Susan home after school, and arrive at an old junkyard at 76 Totters Lane. Instead of finding Susan up to no good they encounter an old man and a police telephone box, and when they believe Susan is being held captive inside the box they force their way past him and into the box, which is actually the TARDIS. Bigger on the inside than the outside, this is obviously something not of this Earth.

This is the first time we see the Doctor, and he is not the stuff of which heros are made. Grumpy, irritible and selfish, he does not want anything to do with Ian and Barbara but realizes that the cover he and Susan have both been living under is now effectively blown. The only option if he is to let the teachers out of the ship is to leave Earth, a prospect Susan does not wish to face as she has grown attached to the planet during their time there. Rather than release them, the Doctor activates the ship and sends them all hurtling back into the era of the cave men, where a desperate tribe is without fire and will do anything to get it. Captured by the tribe and treated as pawns in a political game between oppsing would-be leaders, the TARDIS crew must not only make fire for them, but try and survive.

For the Doctor and Susan this is not exactly a new turn of events as they have been travelling for quite some time. Barbara and Ian, however, are contemporary people not used to having spears waved at them and dirty unkempt (and probbaly smelly) cavepeople threating them with death. Barbara cracks relatively early in a fit of hysteria when lost in the jungle; Ian dutifully gets her to pull herself together and challenges the Doctor on all his calls about escape. The Doctor just wants out; he has seen enough and wants to get away. Ian and Barbara however are more compassionate and react to the distress of a wounded caveman, and Susan with them. Also assuming the role of the alpha male in a time of crisis, Ian tells one of the cavemen in a surprising show of character that the Doctor is their leader, perhaps recognizing that the Doctor has the knowledge that will get him and Barbara back to 1963. When the time travellers do escape, though, the TARDIS does not take them to London of 1963 but to a strange mist shrouded forest somewhere else. The Doctor cannot control the ship it seems, and without precise navigational information fed into the computers at the time of departure, there is no way to direct its course. But the navigation is not the only thing on the blink; the radiation meter reads normal, but as soon as no-one is looking at it, the dial clicks back into place and the needle points to the danger reading. The world outside is poison.

The format of the series at this time was one episode per week, approximately 23 minutes in length. Adventures were spead over a few weeks, and An Unearthly Child was made of four parts in total. Each episode was also individually titled, but collectively given a working name; in this case the serial was known also as 100,000 BC and The Tribe of Gum. The individual episode titles were: An Unearthly Child, The Cave of Skulls, The Forest of Fear, and The Firemaker.

How does it stand up as a debut? To look back at it now, obviously it is not as sharp visually as other shows. The black and white picture quality immediately screams of an era so far gone that younger viewers will think there is something wrong with their television set. My own copy is a prerecorded VHS tape from CBS Fox video, and it's not the cleanest out there. Digital resoration is progressing in leaps and bounds, though, and eventually when this adventure is put onto DVD it will be improved immeasureably. Visuals aside, though, An Unearthly Child starts the series off with a bang, introducing us to the key players who will be our guides to strange new worlds in the weeks and, eventually, years to come. Episode four provides not only closure to the adventure but sets us up for the next week's serial, where the Doctor and companions will meet the creatures that will propel the show into the public eye and guarantee its success.

NEXT EPISODE : THE DALEKS

Time and Relative

The difference one immediately notices about Time and Relative is that it is told in first person narraitve, which is rare for a Doctor Who adventure. Obviously being a television series we are always going to be on the outside looking in without so much as an episode told with first person narraitve in voice-over form or anything, so to actually read one is a bit of a trip. And to make things even more interesting, it is told by the Doctor's granddaughter, the mysterious Susan Foreman.

Picture it: London, late March 1963. A 15 year old girl goes to school just like any other, but she knows things about the world that a normal 15 year old would not. And while she excels at some topics in her classes she is abominably bad at others, questioning the answers, arguing with her teachers, getting her facts wrong. And when she goes home at night, she goes to a junkyard at 76 Totters Lane in Shoreditch where there is nothing but, well, junk, and a blue London police box she refers to as "the Box". And that's where she and her mysterious grandfather live. The Ship has disguised itself to blend in with London of the era, and unbeknownst to the people of the time, two aliens are living amongst them.

This examination of the Doctor and Susan's activities in the months before the series began is a fascinating adventure. As with Frayed it is also best to be enjoyed after having seen some, if not all, of the televised series and having some questions answered. Not so much in the grand scale of the first three episodes of Star Wars but more the mystery and subtleties of Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me. Ahh prequels, gotta love em.

Susan and her school chums go about their daily lives at Coal Hill School, Susan being a bit of an outcast for her "unearthly" qualities and bonding with others who are also on the fringe of the school's culture; a girl who gets into trouble for fighting, and an awkward boy in the ROTC. Like normal kids they face a bully, spy on teachers at the pictures (an interesting cameo by Barabara Wright and Ian Chesterton, who will become very important to Susan very soon) and enjoy the lifestyle of London in the swigning sixties. It's just that it's almost April and it hasn't stopped snowing, and the whole world is feeling a distinct chill. In a world so recently threatened by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Russia is blaming the Americans, and the Americans are blaming the Russians, but the Cold is something entirely different that will soon turn snowmen into killers and hold central London in a frigid deathlock.

The Doctor is hardly in this story as a character, but his presence is everywhere. Susan feels a distance from him that every other companion in his life is bound to feel as well, and she is constantly aware of her own alien-ness that separates her from those around her. The Doctor is aloof, tending to observe the goings on around him more than take part or interfere, concerned that any action taken by him or Susan will alert their people (nameless at this point, and will remain so until The War Games in 1969) and bring down their wrath. Susan is also alert to the agents from Home finding them, but her exposure to the humans has made her much more sympathic to their plight and compels her to help them.

What's interesting to note is that for a few days as this story progresses, kiler snowmen stalk the streets, even attacking school children in a playground, and it does not alter anything in the society around it. By the time we rejoin the student of Coal Hill School in November of 1963 (or tomorrow, as the blog goes) everything will be normal, there will be no mention of it. Come on, you say, that's got to have made someone notice, someone would mention it, the school would be closed (just like Sunnydale High in Buffy the Vampire Slayer loses at least one student a week in a gory way yet is never roped off with yellow tape or closed down) but this is the way of Doctor Who. There are stranger things about to happen in the series, and it does nothing to change the world; the Doctor himself will remark in 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks that humans are very keen to ignore these sorts of things rather than try to understand them.

So. Day saved. The Doctor pulls it off (of course) and Susan goes back to school eventually. Spring is about to come at last. All in 115 pages. God bless the well written novella; I sat in my chair mesmerized by this for most of the day, and I sometimes wish there were other tales of the Doctor and Susan to enjoy before they start wandering again.

But it will soon be November. John F Kennedy will be assassinated in the street, and on the other side of the Atlantic, two school teachers will notice something strange about one of their students at last...

NEXT EPISODE : AN UNEARTHLY CHILD

...and now the fun begins

I've just finished reading Frayed and it was damn good. I'm not going to bother going into a full review of it seeing as there probably already are several hundred of them out there, but I will say what I think.

Story? Interesting. It's a planet, one gets the impression that it is desolate and far flung, way in the future. And on this planet a group of humans have set up what they call "the Refuge" where every effort is being made to cleanse children of a telepathic gene which may or may not lead them to futures of violence and crime. Outside the refuge arrives a giant rock out of nowhere, and from it emerges an old man, and his granddaughter, who are immediately separated by an attack by the planet's only native life form; the humans call them foxes. As monsters the foxes do very well; they don't speak in any language the humans can understand, they're powerful, they are hard to kill, and they're horrifying to look at. Scared xenophobic humans are always quick to isolte themselves with others like them, and so the old man is immediately accepted into their numbers, and his requests to help him locate his lost comrade are not questioned; after all, there is another human out there at the mercy (such as it is) of the evil, nasty, smelly foxes.

This is the first time the two travellers encounter humans, and over the course of the adventure they adopt human names; the old man becomes known as "the Doctor" while his granddaughter takes on the name "Susan". Thus their travels begins. And the giant rock? It's their Ship, simply named thus far. But those of us in the know are aware of what it is, and what is coming next.

Frayed is not where a new Doctor Who fan should begin, but rather where a longtime fan should go after a while. I would say they could go back at the end and read it, but as the new episodes are set to debut on 26 March of this year, the end may not be as nigh as people once thought.

Dabbling in Doctor Who history can be a challenge, but going back into prehistory can be even more risky. Tara Samms knew what she was doing when she started this, and although the writing style is far beyond what would materialize on screens in November of 1963 - a full 40 years before Frayed was published - this is undeniably Doctor Who.

NEXT EPISODE : TIME AND RELATIVE

Frayed

So this is how it starts. Sort of.

The first entry is not actually part of the televised series at all but a novella published by Telos Publishing in 2003. Telos got into the business of publishing Doctor Who novellas when the BBC was still keen to hand out licenses for such things, but after a short run of 14 books the license was not renewed and an interesting new foray into Doctor Who was cut tragically short. I and many others like me feel that this was, well, a stupid move, seeing as the BBC's own novel series has started to get a bit dry in places, with a different book being cranked out every month by pretty much the same authors all working under a guideline set down for them. Okay, Telos, like Big Finish, also have guidelines to follow like no regenerating the Doctor, no making the companions into gun toting vigilantes, not making the Daleks gay, and essential things that would really clash with the series, but in reading the Telos books you get a sense of a whole new style of storytelling that Doctor Who hasn't had before.

Novellas, as it is widely known, are short, which means that the Doctor and company would probably already be immersed in an adventure on page 1 and the readers would follow along what would hopefully be a fast-paced yet coherant story. I've got my copy of Frayed by Tara Samms sitting right here beside me, and once I finish this little preamble I'm diving in, and my thoughts will come in another day or so.

Where does Frayed fit into the Whoniverse? There are those who will scream that it doesn't, and that there is only the televised series and any effort to integrate the TV series with the stories from any other medium is crazy, insane, herecy! Screw that, especially when it comes to this story. Frayed takes place before the televised series actually begins, with the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan travelling together in the TARDIS to other worlds. Being pre-series, the TARDIS still has a functioning chameleon circuit and thus does not look like a London police box from 1960's Earth; it can change its shape and blend in with its surroundings. There was a long debate over what the series would be like without the old blue box, so here's a chance to see, in print anyways.

So. The Doctor. Susan. Another planet, sometime before they arrive on Earth in 1963 and set the events of the actual series in motion. Going into this one I am wondering how well Tara Samms is going to capture the dynamic of the Doctor and Susan, will she do it justice, am I going to enjoy this peek into their lives before that fateful day when Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright will follow Susan home and have their lives changed forever?

I'll tell you in a couple days. Frayed is 134 pages long, I have nothing else to do for a while except my school work, this shouldn't take long.

In the beginning....

So, you say, another Doctor Who blog.

Yep.

For the uninitiated, Doctor Who is the best sci fi television series to ever grace television screens. The series made its debut on 23 November 1963 and ran until 6 December 1989. In all, seven actors portrayed the Doctor over the 26 years on the original BBC series, and in 1996 a rather lame attempt at a television movie starring Paul McGann was made.

While the series was off the air, interest never really died and further adventures of the Doctor and his companions were made in novels published first by Virgin Publishing, and then by BBC Books. Three adventures were made for radio, and following their success many more have been recorded by a company called Big Finish.

So what's my angle?

Well, for starters, the show is coming back. All new episodes are being made right now in the UK with a tentative premiere on BBC 1 sometime at the end of March 2005. Soon Doctor Who and his TARDIS will be the talk of the sci fi community, spawning debate amongst longtime fans and picking up legions of new ones, much in the same vein as the recent reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. Unlike Galactica, though, Doctor Who will pick up where the series left off, and not try to define over 40 years of history. It's the history that interests me the most, and as a fan since I was about 4 years old I appreciate where the show has been, how it has evolved, and where it will ultimately lead. There is no point in me trying to create a whole new online database when there are so many others out there like the BBC's own homepage http://bbc.co.uk/doctorwho or the cutting edge Outpost Gallifrey http://www.gallifreyone.com so I am going to do something a bit different.

This is my blog, so this is going to be my own perceptions of the series. What I liked. What I didn't. What someone who watched it with me that day liked, and what I thought of their ideas.

As I described above, there have been many additions to the "Whoniverse" as it is sometimes called, with new books and audios created to fit in between existing episodes, so I am going to incorporate the newest and the most interesting of the older ones in their timelines and see how well they do indeed mesh with the existing series. I have actually already done this once, and it has taken me two years to finish the cycle, but in that time new books have been written, new audios recorded, and, most importantly, "lost" episodes have been recovered (more on that when we actually come to a lost episode, and how we will bridge that gap).

So there's my intro. Be warned, I am not starting this right away though; I have two novels to finish reading before I can begin, and I am going to start with prequel novellas before the actual series. Once I do get going there will be an entry almost every day, the exception being vacations and reading novels, which takes a bit longer than watching television.

Ready....?

That's me