Paradise Towers vs. The Vanquishers
In this latest randomised Who review I’ll be building high for happiness – in the Seventh Doctor story Paradise Towers by Stephen Wyatt, first broadcast in four episodes between 5 and 26 October 1987 – and digging deep beneath Liverpool – in the Thirteenth Doctor story The Vanquishers by Chris Chibnall, climax to the Flux season, first broadcast on 5 December 2021.
Paradise Towers
How-you-do (Hello). I think Paradise Towers is an ice hot (really good) story, poorly considered (certainly by me, in the past) because of a few ropey aspects of design and presentation. If you can forgive and look beyond those blemishes on the surface – put them down to constraints of budget, and a predominantly new production team finding its feet – it’s a strong, well-crafted, imaginative and entertaining tale with important things to say and to think about. It’s the sort of story that Doctor Who ought to do. I’ve enjoyed rewatching it so much more than I thought I would, and than I did when it was first broadcast back in the autumn of 1987.
Paradise Towers was the second story of Sylvester McCoy’s tenure as the Doctor, and the first to have been commissioned by script editor Andrew Cartmel. In a way it can be considered the beginning of the Cartmel-McCoy era, as the Seventh Doctor’s first story, Time and the Rani, has more the feel of a tale concluding the colourful and brash Colin Baker era. Time and the Rani was written by Pip and Jane Baker and featured the return of a Sixth Doctor villain (as well as tropes of that period such as garish alien skies and historical Earth figures); Paradise Towers was the first of a number of stories penned by a young, new writer to the series, and it seems darker and tricksier, a morality tale in a universe of gods, legends and dystopias. This is the start of a new direction.
Weak points of the story include that damn swimming pool, accorded wonder of the universe status by Mel while in reality looking like a sub-average and rather grotty pool at the back of someone’s house in Chalfont St Giles (which, in fact, it was). The cleaning robots are chunky, clunky and not very funky. The ‘street-talk’ of the Kangs is a little bit cringey, but once you accept who they are and what they represent I think it sort of works. And the visual representation of Pex seems a bit miscalculated.
Or does it? I’ve seen Cartmel comment that the original intention was to cast Pex as a proper muscle-bound hulk, and he was disappointed that the director cast an actor of smaller build in Howard Cooke. But I think this works okay – Pex doesn’t need to be a strongman, just someone who thinks he needs to act up the macho image in a world of older people and young women, rather than just be himself. That he has a fairly unimposing stature adds to the pathos of the character.
In other sequences the design and direction of Paradise Towers is good. The corridors and stairwells of this dilapidated tower-block of the future are suitably dark and scary, moodily lit in places. There are a few scenes in Episode Two in which Mel and the Doctor search hopelessly for each other in these corridors, which work pretty well. An impression of the enormous scale of the building – it’s 304 stories high, from forbidden basement to luxury penthouse on the roof, lonely souls and communities lurking in various apartments and hideaways within – is realised well through the use of just a few sets, an elevator display and the Chief Caretaker’s map.
I could absolutely imagine the events of Paradise Towers taking place inside the walls of Enclave, the dystopian tower of rental-only ‘micro-flats’ that has risen into the clouds over the last couple of years just a couple of streets away from our back garden in Croydon. Shiny and new on the outside, dark and inhumane on the inside. In fact, the society of Paradise Towers reminds me of Croydon as a whole: communities made up largely of intelligent, creative, good people living in an architectural disaster-area in poverty, hunger, fear and suspicion of each other under the mismanagement of corrupt and egotistical local bureaucracy which would probably be quite happy to see all the eradication of all undesirables on its once-desirable estate.
Perhaps Kroagnon’s Paradise Towers are in Croydon. The story doesn’t make clear whether or not they are on a future version of Earth. It might help explain why Mel was so keen to visit them, as she’s from Pease Pottage in Sussex – just a short trip down the road, or railway line, from Croydon. It makes sense to me; Croydon is one of those places where the future seems to be happening today – and not in a good way. I was thinking while walking around town just the other day how much of the place seems to be a fulfilment of the sort of futuristic nightmares imagined by 2000AD – so many people have a slightly paranoid, crazy edge to them, common to the much put-upon citizens of Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One.
And where’s the wonder? Our world is much like that of the Towers: a society divided by bands of class, age and colour; everyone hungry, and scared; people intellectually reduced, forming their own dialects and sub-cultures; toxic myths of masculinity; glorification of militarism; authoritarian policing bordering on fascist law; divide and conquer; bureaucratic dysfunction; the threat of being taken over by machines; some powerful bastard* at the top (or bottom) deciding who lives and who dies. Perhaps this is why the story resonates for me now, so much more than it did when I watched it as a teenager in the environment of the cosy middle-class English village in which I grew up. All of a sudden I can see what Cartmel and Wyatt were writing about.
*In fact, Kroagnon is not just any powerful bastard. He is a god – the Creator, the Great Architect – and just like the God of the Bible (who sent a flood to flush humanity off the face of the Earth), or perhaps Gaia, the divine Earth herself (who seems to have had enough of us today), he wants to cleanse Paradise Towers of the people who call it home. He considers his desirable residence would be much more des without the res.
Paradise Towers offers a broad, interesting cast of characters. It’s a strong story for Bonnie Langford’s Mel, who has a lot to do on her own – discovering the truth about the Rezzies, and befriending Pex – despite the distraction of her unlikely quest to find and dive into the great swimming pool in the sky.
It’s also a great showcase for Sylvester McCoy to demonstrate who his Seventh Doctor really is. Following his madcap debut story, in Paradise Towers we see a much more recognisable Seven – brooding and cunning, but also the trickster and the showman. I love all the little McCoy-ish quirks and flourishes on display: wiggling his fingers at Mel as he describes the flesh-eating octopi of the planet Griophos; the little pat-a-cake clap of his hands, and rolling of his hat down his arm, as he greets Fire Escape and the other Red Kangs; and the showily delicate stealing of the Deputy Chief Caretaker’s security card from his back pocket. He is a very endearing Doctor.
There is a notable line in which he says that he would hate to have to live his life by some boring old rule book. This is pan-incarnationally Doctor-ish. He’s a libertarian – a law only unto himself, and even then a lawbreaker. And yet, for someone who doesn’t like rules, he almost always finds himself bringing order and conformity to societies and communities in chaos. It’s a paradoxical aspect of his character.
The various component groups of Paradise Towers are all interesting creations. The cannibalistic Rezzies, Tilda and Tabby, are great fun and suitably creepy – the end of Episode Two in which they threaten to impale Mel on a crumpet-toasting fork is pretty scary stuff. The Chief and Deputy Chief Caretakers are a superb pair of characters, perfectly over-played by Richard Briers and Clive Merrison. The Kangs represent irrepressible hope and spirit of youth – the antithesis of ‘young people with no spirit of adventure’ bemoaned by the Doctor in the story’s opening scenes. Their tribes are differentiated by codes of colour, as gangs and communities today are so often gathered by ethnicity.
‘How are we going to unite the people of Paradise Towers to defeat the Great Architect?’ ponders the Doctor. Ultimately it’s fear and need that bring the people together – a stirring example of people power as Kangs, Rezzies and Caretakers decide to put aside their differences and pool their talents and resources to bring down Kroagnon.
That’s the central message of the story, and a worthy one at that. But a point is also made that another unifying factor (among Kangs and Rezzies) is their ‘othering’ of Pex. Pex is an outsider in Paradise Towers – a young man who should have gone off to war with the other young men, but he got scared and avoided conscription. His face doesn’t fit in the Towers, so he is rejected by everyone, teased and disenfranchised, leading him to over-compensate and ultimately to sacrifice his life to prove his worth. This is another smart observation by writer Wyatt: people can do great things together, but they can also be pretty ugly.
The Vanquishers
While Paradise Towers could be described as a strong Doctor Who story that looks a bit shonky, The Vanquishers – the final instalment of 2022’s Flux season – is another beautiful-looking episode that really struggles as a story. Not quite ‘style over substance’ (as there’s probably a lot of intended meaning in there struggling to be understood), more ‘cool over comprehension’. Which is probably true for the entirety of Series 13, much as I have tried to find the positives in previous episodes featured in this blog.
‘Can you not say things like we're supposed to know what they are?’, Yaz asks the Doctor as the latter waves her sonic screwdriver at some ‘retro-temporal manifestations’ in Williamson’s Tunnels beneath Liverpool. It seems an odd line of self-own dialogue by Chris Chibnall. I can’t imagine that many viewers really had much of a clue what was going on in The Vanquishers, despite a huge amount of breathless exposition. Even before the opening titles there is a huge amount of action and mad description, as the Doctor escapes Azure and Swarm on Tecteun’s spacestation, Yaz, Dan, Jericho and Williamson escape Sontarans in the tunnels, Kate Stewart turns up, and the Doctor splits into three identical selves operating in the tunnels, on Karvanista’s ship (fighting more Sontarans), and back on the spaceship with the Ravagers. There are loads of energy beams, mysterious lights and explosions, and it’s all hard to get a handle on. Phew. Then the titles finish rolling and we’re off again – viewers utterly vanquished. It does look good though.
I’ve watched the episode three or four times now, and read around it a little bit. I think I’ve just about got a grip on what it was all about. But I still don’t feel that satisfied by The Vanquishers, nor by the Flux season as a whole. Its ending seemed downbeat, unresolved on a number of fronts … unfulfilling. Dan is rejected by Diane (her choice entirely, of course, but for an anticlimactic end to a central narrative thread her reasons could have been better explained). Karvanista is left angry and grieving by the destruction of his entire species. Jericho dies. Nobody really knows what will become of the Mad Mole of Edge Hill, or the Grand Serpent, nor what either of them really had to do with the story anyway. The apocalyptic universal event known as the Flux is fairly quickly hoovered up by the Passenger creature. The personification of Time lets the Doctor off the hook fairly easily (paraphrase: ‘I’ll leave killing you to the Master in your next big adventure – he always manages to defeat you!’). The Doctor apologises to Yaz for not trusting her, but it feels rushed and hollow. And ultimately the Doctor chooses not to open the fob watch that contains all the secrets of her lost past lives. How frustrating. I think the only fulfilling resolution offered by The Vanquishers was the reuniting of Bel and Vinder. But how many of us really cared that much about those guys?
‘It sometimes feels in this episode as if seriality itself is choppily glitching rather than causally and convincingly flowing onward … it ultimately feels self-divided – like a thesis and antithesis struggling with one another, or like space somehow nonsensically battling time.’ I like this appraisal of the story by Matt Hills, in his chapter on The Vanquishers in Obverse Books’ Black Archive volume on the Flux series. In his conclusion to the same book, Alasdair Stuart links the content of all six episodes to the context in which Flux was made. This was a time of pandemic, lockdowns, death and disease, uncertainty and anxiety, financial restraint and social distancing; it was confusing, the future was unclear, it was a time of moments rather than a comprehensible whole. In that sense, Flux and The Vanquishers in particular represent a form of contemporary social commentary, but I imagine that was not Chibnall’s intention.
This story marks the final appearance of Swarm and Azure – aka the Ravagers – a pair of villains who looked absolutely fantastic (terrific make-up and costume design), played with enjoyably camp swagger by Sam Spruell and Rochenda Sandall. It’s a slight shame that they will only ever be associated with the Flux season, because as a pair they were a great act.
Before their demise at the end of the episode, Swarm and Flux spend most of The Vanquishers torturing and tormenting the Doctor (one aspect of her thrice-divided self, anyway). Harnessing the powers of Time, Swarm seems to enter the Doctor’s mind and pulls apart the floating house representing the secrets of her past lives, before putting it back together and pulling it apart again. This seems to cause particularly agonising pain for the Doctor, both physical and mental.
What is Swarm’s beef? It’s physical things, spatial objects – he really can’t stand them, and wants to see them gone. ‘It's so interesting, Doctor. I look in your mind, and I see what you're most afraid of. Your biggest fear isn't yourself. It's the destruction of other things. It's an obsession. You want to keep things alive. You want creatures to breathe and live. You want species and races to build. I look into your mind and your hearts, and I don't know why you want it so much. And I don't know why you're so afraid of the opposite.’ He wants Time to survive, Space to disappear. It’s a strange kind of psychosis, quite difficult to wrap one’s head around – which is perhaps another reason why the Flux season fails to land its punch: the stakes don’t mean a huge amount to us, the audience.
The Doctor’s storyline is the most interesting, emotionally engaging aspect of Flux. This is the culmination of the divisive Timeless Child arc – Division, Tecteun, the origin of the Time Lords, and the suggestion that the Doctor had countless previous incarnations before the William Hartnell version. Love it or hate it (I loved the idea), this was a tease which needed payoff – we were led to believe that we were going to get answers, but we never really did. The Doctor deposited the fob watch containing the truth about her life deep inside the TARDIS, and asked her ship to keep it ‘Somewhere I can never find it … Unless I really ask for it.’ Knowing that he was leaving the show, and that his successor was unlikely to revive the Timeless Child storyline, Chibnall was effectively deciding this payoff would never be settled.
Is this reasonable? Offering a possible reading of why the Doctor chose not to open the fob watch, Hills suggests that it was a demonstration of her mindfulness. This aligns with her character as we have seen it elsewhere: the Thirteenth Doctor has always seemed to make a point of trying to focus on the present moment, to find sustaining pleasure in what she sees, feels, hears and tastes around her even in times of crisis, although it’s sometimes suggested that this is a form of self-disciple, an attempt to rein in an overactive mind. ‘Oh, come on, Doctor, just concentrate on the here and now,’ she chides herself at the start of the episode, as one of her divided selves materialises on Karvanista’s ship.
Throughout The Vanquishers, the Doctor has been tempted to open the watch, to explore the mysterious house in her dreams, to learn everything about her previous life, to have her understandings of self and universe completely changed. By deciding not to do so, I suppose she could be asking herself what good it would do her. How would it help her in her present moment? This is a moment in which she probably needs peace and recuperation above all else. She has a universe to continue to explore (what’s left of it after the Flux, at least), and a relationship with Yaz growing ever more intimate. If there is a lesson in here for us, perhaps it’s that our endless search for advancement, for greater knowledge, for self-enhancement, and dominion over all, is not what we really need at this fragile point in the history of humanity. Perhaps we would be better all to spend more time looking inward, to concentrate on what we have, what we feel, who we are, and what we need to do to look after ourselves right now, and to allow that to be enough.
Connections
Residential buildings play an important role in both Paradise Towers and The Vanquishers. The titular Towers of the Seventh Doctor story are hailed as a visionary, architectural triumph, the housing project of the future. The spooky floating mansion in the Thirteenth Doctor’s mind represents her past. Both are dilapidated relics.
Appropriately for a pair of stories about houses, there are lots of doors. Williamson’s tunnels beneath Liverpool contain myriad doors, each one leading to a fantastic vista through a rip in the fabric of Time and Space. In Paradise Towers there are many doors separating the many different pockets of drama: doors into lift shafts, basements, and the countless resident apartments – most notably Tilda and Tabby’s door, which keeps getting broken through by Pex.
Mel is hungry. The Kangs are hungry. The Rezzies are cannibalistically hungry. Kroagnon in the basement is ‘Hungry! Hungry! Hungry! Hungry!’. In The Vanquishers, Sontaran Commander Shallo is hungry enough for chocolate to compromise his army’s entire war effort.
Shallo also makes a grab for bottles of Fanta and what looks like some sort of cherryade, so he’s partial to a bit of fizzy pop. As are the Seventh Doctor and the Red Kangs, who all enjoy a few cans of ‘Fizzade’ from an ancient vending machine. Surely that stuff’s got to be past it’s Use By date?
On rare occasions across the history of Doctor Who, the Doctor has new adventures with a companion who has previously travelled with a much earlier incarnation of themselves. In The Vanquishers it is revealed that Karvanista was one such companion, from the Doctor’s pre-Hartnell days. ‘There was a time I'd do anything for you. But you left me,’ he growls resentfully. Paradise Towers is one of Mel’s last adventures with the Seventh Doctor (before she left him), but like Karvanista she will meet the Time Lord again, in a very different life.
The Doctor clearly inspires great loyalty and courage, but siding with them also puts one at great risk. In Paradise Towers, the Doctor asks for someone to lure Kroagnon into his trap and warns that it will be a dangerous mission. Pex bravely volunteers. In The Vanquishers, the Doctor is once again rallying a diverse group of allies for the final plan, and warns that it will be risky. Jericho is placed on board the Sontaran spaceship. Both Pex and Jericho become sacrificed pawns.
Finally, not quite a connection but an observation about the stories’ respective baddies and their mad – almost nihilistic – motives. As mentioned above, the Ravagers want to see the destruction of all spatial objects, for the ultimate victory of Time over Space, while Kroagnon wants to purge his Paradise Towers of all life, which he deems unworthy of his creation. Time without Space, an apartment block without residents – what’s the point of all that?
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