Destiny of the Daleks vs The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon
The Randomiser has had me excavating some deep-rooted memories this week, through rewatches of the season openers of 1979 - Destiny of the Daleks, by Terry Nation - and 2011 - The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon, by Steven Moffat.
Destiny of the Daleks
Destiny of the Daleks is a comfort watch for me. It triggers nostalgia for the excitement I felt when it was first broadcast. I had just turned 9, the sort of age at which the annual gaps between seasons would have seemed so much longer because my young mind still knew so few of them. The beginning of a new season of this show about which I was absolutely obsessed, plus a new companion, and the return of the Daleks, who would have held enormous mythological status in my head without every having seen much of them on screen at this point (I would have seen the Peter Cushing movies on television by 1979, and was very familiar with the vinyl soundtrack recording of Genesis of the Daleks, but if I had seen the original broadcast of GOTD (or its 1975 repeat showing) by September 1979 then I think my memories of it would have been dim), made the whole thing a Category A event.
At a subconscious level, I think I probably picked up on other ‘new’ aspects of the production of DOTD that would have added to my enjoyment. Incoming script editor Douglas Adams brought a certain sophistication to what was said and seen, the blossoming relationship of Tom Baker and Lalla Ward infused almost every scene with a sense of fun, potential and excitement, and apparently (according to Wikipedia) this was one of the first British television productions to use a Steadicam, which I’m sure would have influenced that feeling of watching something through new eyes.
At this point in my life I would have been returning to school for a new term – nobody likes school, but this was the one at which I was happiest – and aside from Doctor Who I was very into my comics (Doctor Who Weekly hadn’t yet launched but I was a regular reader at this point of Jackpot and Cheeky). I sang every week in the village church choir – practice on Saturday mornings, service on Sundays, was a member of a local cub pack, and wrote/drew a weekly ‘newspaper’ for the group. My best friends were Mark, Charles, Bran and Jeremy. These are the things I remember most clearly, and I’ve packaged it all up in my mind as a happy time. I know there was some sort of psychological difficulty going on inside me at this point. I was a bit of an introvert, and also suffered encopresis (I’ve never been told this, but having looked it up just now, that is exactly what I had, no question); looking back, I think the combination of these two contributed to me feeling a deep shame about myself, and of not doing life ‘correctly’. So there must have been some sadness and anxiety in me, but my memories seem to have buried those feelings and I default to thinking of those days as happy times of endless summers and cosy winters. So DOTD is a positive resonance.
The other clear memory I have related to this story is that I attended a cub camp over the weekend of 8-9 September, which meant missing the broadcast of episode 2. The Daleks had just appeared, incredibly dramatically, at the end of the previous week’s episode, so this was an incredible frustrating. Their impact at the time was such that I remember other boys at the camp excitedly recreating the moment of their crashing through the tunnel wall, screaming ‘Exterminate’ (a weak time echo of 60s Dalekmania), but this was so annoying. Amazingly, some local friends of the family (young, modern, upwardly mobile a few months ahead of the decade that changed it all) had recently acquired a video recorder. They kindly taped episode 2 for me, so I was able to catch up with it a few days later. I’ll always associate that cliffhanger moment of Davros twitching his fingers with sitting on the leather sofa in the Dean family’s living room – so exciting.
Both those cliffhangers – and, indeed, the end of episode three, in which Romana is trapped in a tube with a bomb on a countdown timer – are great examples of the noble art of cliffhangery. They are all thoroughly exciting moments, bound to generate playground chatter and a ‘must watch’ incentive for the following week. They’re important parts of the sensory imprint made by DOTD on my memory. If you could sell it in tins it would be called Ambient Skaro. The colours of the story are a part of this for me – it’s a pink and grey one (pink is Romana’s coat and the Movellans’ weapons; grey is the Doctor’s coat, the Daleks and the chalky quarry), setting it well apart from the darker, browner, greener colours of the 1970s era. And there is a particular sound mixed in with it too – above ground a ghostly combination of wind blowing through the rocks and the mysterious distant drilling, and in the tunnels below the electronic thrub of Dalek control.
I’ve seen it said that very little changes were made to Terry Nation’s delivered script for DOTD (the main exceptions being the Romana regeneration sequence, and the Doctor’s joke about the Daleks not being able to chase him up the shaft). But I’ve also seen it said that Nation delivered very little that was usable, and that Adams rewrote 95 per cent of it. It feels to me as though Nation provided the basic bullet points of the story, then Adams inked and painted around them; the storyline feels like the former’s, the words and embellishments feel very much like the latter’s.
The introduction of Lalla Ward as the new incarnation of Romana is interesting, adding a few layers of series lore to the concept of Time Lord regeneration. Her trying on of different bodies is obviously just written for laughs – a light introduction to a new series, a new actress and the new TARDIS team – but it’s a little irritating to watch now. The idea of Romana having to choose a physical form that meets the approval of the Doctor is sexist, of course, and there’s a fair bit of body shaming in there too. But it’s kind of saved (I think, but I can see that others might disagree with me here), by the punchline in which Romana goes back to the body she chose in the first place and tricks the Doctor into liking it by appealing to his vanity through her choice of outfit.
It's a confident debut by Ward as Romana. Her fear at that first encounter with the Daleks, cornered at the end of episode one, helps convince the audience of just how scary they are (and in retrospect it’s a nice homage to Jacqueline Hill’s famous moment from the first ever appearance of the Daleks in 1963), and she’s clearly a strong foil to enormous screen presence of Baker. Their Adams-penned rapport is fast and witty, although I do think that if I didn’t have such a strong emotional attachment to this story, and this era, I might find it incredibly irritating. It does seem to me to be of that Footlights genre of Oxbridgey ‘intelligent and don’t we know it’ wit – clever and funny, yes, but often arch and disinterestedly superior. So it seems to me, anyway.
The Dalek props (and Davros’ face mask) in this story are often criticised as a bit ratty and shabby, having been recycled from the four-year-old Genesis story, but actually I was thinking during this latest rewatch that they looked good. That darker grey colouring is quite sinister and formidable, and I think it’s probably in comparison to those shaky models used in Death to the Daleks, which I watched just a couple of weeks ago, that they seem fine to me.
I was irritated by the constant description of the Daleks as robots. The whole story is built around the idea that the Daleks and the Movellans are two species of logical robots, lacking the crucial element of irrationality that would give one of them an advantage in their eternal war. Surely the Daleks aren’t – have never been – robots? They’re seething, evil, organic messes in metal shells, and everything they do is informed by irrational hatred for all other life forms, not by logic.
They can’t even talk rationally about Davros, for whom they are searching in the first half of the story. Rather than call him by his name, or even by what he is in relation to them (‘creator’), they seem able only to call him ‘the objective’. His name is an embarrassment to them. The fact that they are having to dig up their progenitor – their parent, their father – so he can tell them what to do, seems to be shameful. And when he has been woken, we can see why. Davros is just the sort of dad nobody wants: scornful, critical, abusive, competitive, bitter and angry. There’s some deep familiar wounding going on here. One ends up feeling sorry for the Daleks.
It's probably been said elsewhere, but there seems to be a parallel to Thatcherism in aspects of the DOTD story. It was written a few months before she came to power in the 1979 General Election, but filmed just a few weeks after that fateful day, so maybe there was something of what was going on in real life informing the creation of the drama. Since the post-war consensus, the British economy seemed to be stalling, and there was a frustrating inability for a government from either side of the political divide to gain meaningful control of parliament. Were they too similar? Had it all gone stale? The Tories addressed this by bringing in a new leader – a ruthless fundamentalist who did what was necessary to bury the opposition and bring in a new age of coldhearted rule. The Left has never recovered, and perhaps it never will, but in recent years we’ve seen the Right fall into disarray (Brexit) and the response has been to go looking for a new Thatcher, digging up Davros. Destiny of the British. We really are ruled by stupid bastards.
What else? Well, DOTD sees the first journey of the TARDIS directed by the Randomiser, so that makes it an interesting one for me and this blog.
I liked the character of Tyssan, played by Tim Barlow, and by sad coincidence was sorry to read in the latest Doctor Who Magazine just this morning that the actor recently died. Tyssan seemed to be just a really nice guy, a useful ‘action’ figure for the Doctor to have on his side, and he had an interesting face.
And I thought the Movellans were very cool. I love the disco look, and for what on the face of it could be a rather boring race of beings, there is character, humour, intrigue and pathos in the principal performers of Peter Straker, Suzanne Danielle and Tony Osoba.
The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon
The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon, as a pair, are another favourite story of mine, so this has been one of the more enjoyable couple of watches in my Randomised journey. This one makes me think of some really great jump scares, an excellent monster concept, and ten years ago (ten years!) when my partner’s daughter joined us at the big Day of the Doctor 50th anniversary convention at the Excel in London, cosplaying Amy Pond from DOTM, with a ginger wig and tally marks on her arms. (For the record, I went as the Fourth Doctor, Shaz was SJA Sarah Jane, my son James was the Tenth Doctor and my daughter Hannah was Ace – what a great line-up, that was brilliant fun.) The episodes are from the spring of 2011 (twelve years!), and, like Destiny of the Daleks, carried the additional excitement of opening a new season of Doctor Who. Following an enjoyable first series of the Eleventh Doctor, I remember a lot of anticipation about this new set of stories and I felt Series 7 of New Who got off to a really strong start. Matt Smith appeared to be having a great time, it was good to see Amy and Rory again, River Song still carried a degree of mystery, and the story made good use of the brilliant Mad Man in a Box musical theme that had accompanied much of the Doctor’s Series 6 exploits.
It’s a story that showcases some of the very best aspects of Steven Moffat’s writing. The Silence – horrific creatures that one forgets the instance one looks away – are a terrific idea. It can’t have been easy for the person who came up with the idea for the Weeping Angels to find another winning formula, but he made it work here. TIA/DOTM sets up a number of new mysteries – the invitations to the Doctor’s death and wake, the girl in the space suit, Amy’s on/off pregnancy, the woman’s face in the wall, using the moon landing to defeat the Silence – that we expect to be resolved in trademark twisty-turny, timey-wimey fashion as the season progresses. It’s everything you ever want, It’s everything you ever need, Oh this is the greatest show. And Moffat excels at being the Showrunner. He really is an imaginative, super-smart, talented guy with a ringmaster’s flair.
But … He’s so clever, but … there are aspects of Moffat’s writing that always seem to enrage me, and it’s so frustrating because they can taint so many otherwise great stories. It’s all subjective, I know, but it would be false to write a blog of my personal responses to stories without being honest about how these ones make me feel. In part it’s a little bit of that problem that I have with the Douglas Adams style of writing – a clever-clever but unnaturalistic wit that often defaults to being too acerbic and gives the impression of the writer, or at least the character they are writing for, thinking themselves superior to the audience. Mixed in with this in Moffat’s case is a constant sexualisation of conversations and relationships. The underlying philosophy seems to be that sex is at the root of everything. And maybe it is, but could you not try being more subtle about it? When every conversation between the Doctor and River has to be top-loaded with get-a-room innuendo and thirsty lust, it’s inappropriate for the show, tiresome and really not that sexy.
I felt that gay marriage reference in the conversation between Canton and Nixon at the end of DOTM jarred too. This could be something that has aged badly even just in the last twelve years, as I seem to remember thinking first time round it was laudable. It’s bizarre to think that same-sex marriage hadn’t yet been legalised in the UK in 2011. But now, Nixon’s 'Sheesh!' look at the front of screen seems to imply sharing a joke with the viewers, reducing something progressive to the equivalent of a Frankie Howerd wink and a nudge.
The thing with the Silence makes thoughts about memory an important theme of TIA/DOTM. The fears that we keep – those arising from our own experiences, and more primal race memory fears – are part of what makes our memories so important to us. They are there to protect us, to warn us away from danger, so this ability to avoid registering on our memories makes the Silence effective predators (or parasites, as the Doctor describes them).
When the Doctor asks Rory if he can remember his two thousand years as an Auton Roman centurion, protecting Amy inside the Pandorica, he says that he can but that he has an ability to close off the memories, ‘like this door in my head. I can keep it shut.’ I suppose this is a bit like the shutting down of traumatic memories that happens involuntarily to some survivors of terrible events, but with a level of control over it. Perhaps it’s an inherited Auton ability, or maybe it’s just inevitable given the sheer overload of memories he would have had from such a long period of time.
By the way, that description of the Silence as super-parasites – using humanity, directing our development purely for their own ends – is interesting, not to mention chilling. The image that comes to mind today is those fungal parasites that take over the bodies of ants and other insects, controlling them like zombies for the fungus’ own survival and procreation. They are part of the inspiration for The Last of Us, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they influenced Moffat’s thinking for the creation of the Silence too.
A few more likes and dislikes from TIA/DOTM …
Like: That scene in the TARDIS where the Doctor gives all the reasons that he shouldn’t trust River. ‘Who are you?’ It’s an arresting switch in tone from the playful fool to the Oncoming Storm Doctor. ‘Don’t play games with me. Don’t ever, ever think you’re capable of that.’ It’s good to be reminded from time to time that the Doctor is not just about the fun times.
Dislike: This could just be me, but I don’t get why the Doctor and River needed to sync diaries when they met up again. ‘Have we done Jim the Fish yet?’, and all that. I thought their time streams were always travelling in opposite directions, so when their kiss is the Doctor’s first time River knows that it’s her last. If that’s the case then they couldn’t both have the same shared experience in their diaries when they meet. Everything in the past of one of them is in the future of the other, right?
Like: ‘There's loads of boring stuff like Sundays and Tuesdays and Thursday afternoons. But now and then there are Saturdays. Big temporal tipping points when anything's possible.’ Saturdays do have a sense of potential about them: lie-ins or comics or morning television or exciting shopping or football or Doctor Who or a fun family evening with lovely food in front of the telly. I usually resent a Saturday on which I haven’t been able to do any of these things.
Dislike: There are no gunshot wounds, when the Doctor is shot by the astronaut, nor when Amy and Rory is shot by Canton. I get that bloody gunshot wounds may not be appropriate for a family show, and appreciate that, but it is problematic. It looks odd, but in a show like this where we aware that most things are probably not as they seem it leaves us wondering what actually happened. Were they really shot or was it all a pretence. If it was a pretence, wouldn’t there still have been fake wounds, to fool the others that were there?
Like: That said, I liked the comings and goings of Canton, Amy, Rory and Nixon from the Doctor’s Nevada prison cell, with it’s breeze blocks made of zero balance dwarf star alloy (although, where did they get those?). The special effect of the blocks fusing together was very satisfying. Rory breaking the Apollo lander model, and the Doctor's clownish antics in the Oval Office also made me chuckle.
Dislike: I’m not going to name them, for fear of bringing trouble on myself, but every now and then – this being one of them – a guest actor appears who is, in real life, so utterly objectionable and offensive that it makes one question whether one ever wants to watch the show again. It seems to happen more these days, probably because social media enables us to be more aware of what everyone really thinks. There’s a cognitive dissonance to be wrestled with here. On the one hand, it’s just an actor playing a scripted role; they’re not conveying their personal opinions on screen. Why should what they say and how they act in other arenas spoil my enjoyment of the show I love? On the other hand, if the nature of what they have said and how they act is a direct attack on who I and others I care about are, then the very sight of them can be triggering. Watching them on my favourite show seems similar to having an abuser within my own house. Venting my annoyance here helps, I guess.
Connections
I’ve already mentioned that both Destiny of the Daleks and The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon were both season openers, but what else links these two. Quite a lot, this time.
Both stories feature a surprise regeneration; more than one (sort of) in each, in fact. Romana changes bodies five times at the start of DOTD. The little girl (later to be known as Melody) starts to regenerate at the end of DOTM, and the Doctor appears to begin a regeneration when he is shot by the lake, but a follow-up gunshot from the astronaut (also Melody (River) we later discover) cancels the process.
There are a lot of rocks and sand dunes in both stories.
The face of Madame Kovarian appears at a hole in a door in DOTM, and the face of the Doctor appears (‘Here’s Johnny’-like) at a hole in the makeshift door in the Skaro bunker in DOTD.
In both stories, the baddies – The Silence in TIA and Davros in DOTD – are discovered in tunnels below ground, having been entombed for thousands of years. Also, in DOTM, Rory references his own two thousand-years long vigil by the side of the Pandorica, in which Amy was entombed.
‘Silence! Silence! Silence!’ screams a Dalek guard in the cave in which Romana and other prisoners are put to work. Is it ordering them to stop working, or, like Joy in the White House bathroom in TIA, has it seen a Silent three times and instantly forgotten it each time? I mean, probably the former, but who knows?
The fragility of memory is a theme common to both stories. The Doctor has a sense of déjà vu as he steps out on to the surface of Skaro. I liked his description of it: ‘Nothing tangible. I just have a sensation. A pervading air of ...’ There’s quite a bit of this in TIA/DOTM also, although linked to immediate memory loss rather than that faded over time: Amy is aware that something just happened to her in the bathroom, and Renfrew is aware that someone has just been shot.
River and Romana both tease their respective Doctors about not being able to control the TARDIS properly.
There are a couple of references to, and spurious explanations for, Time Lords having two hearts. ‘One for casual, one for best,’ says Romana. ‘What’s the point in two hearts if you can’t be a bit forgiving now and then?’ asks the Doctor in DOTM.
On the subject of Time Lord hearts, loads of them seem to be beating more passionately in these two stories. As we all know, Tom and Lalla were deeply in love when DOTD was filmed, and it feeds through into their characters. I think there’s definitely a case to be made for there being a romantic connection between Doctor Four and Romana Two. Meanwhile, the love story between Doctor Eleven and River Song is much more overt. Confession: I find it (plus Doctor Eight and Grace, Doctor Nine and Rose, Doctor Ten and Rose/Madame Pompadour/Astrid/whoever else, and Doctor Thirteen and Yaz) all irritatingly smug, grumpy old bugger that I am.
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