The Time Monster v. The Doctor’s Wife
This week the Randomiser took me back to six weeks between 20 May and June 1972, to watch Robert Sloman’s season finale The Time Monster, and to 14 May 2011 for Neil Gaiman’s The Doctor’s Wife.
The Time Monster
I took a pause of a week or so after watching the first couple of episodes of The Time Monster. It wasn’t really hooking me – in fact it was irritating me. It’s been a busy time at home and at work, and the prospect of continuing with the story at that point in time wasn’t sparking joy so I considered Marie Kondoing the mofo, at least until the time felt right to pick it up again. Then I received the latest edition of Doctor Who Magazine which informed me that its readers had just voted TTM the least favourite of all Third Doctor stories (and had done in the previous three surveys at various points over the last 25 years). Somehow, I summoned the will to watch episodes three, four, five and six. As is often the case with this sort of situation, I ended up enjoying them far more than I expected to.
What had been the problem with parts one and two? They were slow, sluggish; they gave me the feel of sitting in the back seat of a car on a long journey as a child, or a boring Sunday afternoon with that nagging worry that I hadn’t yet done my school homework. A lot of men in uniforms and suits walked in and out of rooms; green-fatigued soldiers and fusty-suited government ministers were standard fare in Third Doctor stories, but there seemed to be more of them than ever in this one. In many ways TTM is a quintessential story of its era – absolutely typical of these early seventies stories in which the Doctor was trapped on Earth and, with the help of Jo, UNIT and Bessie, fought off the bizarre extraterrestrial schemes of the Master. But, coming as it does right at the end of the Doctor’s exile years, the format is tired and overfamiliar.
This isn’t really part of my criticism, but it occurred to me that TTM seems very close in tone to the TV Action and Countdown Doctor Who comic strip of the day. I can picture pretty much the whole thing drawn by Gerry Haylock (with a lot more dynamism on paper than on the telly screen): the Doctor and Jo speeding along country roads in Bessie, the Master summoning Kronos from his crystal, jousting knights and German bombers, and of course the sumptuous sets and costumes of Atlantis. The mix-up of characters from various time zones was a scenario common to other British comic strips of the early seventies too. It was the sort of thing one might expect to find in Lion, Jet or Thunder: no holds-barred fantasy action that didn’t stand up to much rational scrutiny. The tone of comics became a bit more serious and grounded in a more adult realism about halfway through the decade, at around the same sort of time that Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes would start trying to bring a less childish sensibility to Doctor Who.
I have just been reading Obverse Books’ The Black Archive volume on Rose, by Jon Arnold. He notes that one of the significant differences in narrative approach between Classic and New Series Doctor Who is that from 2005 the show features central characters and situations that progress and develop over the course of a season or seasons, while very little changes – at least within each sub-era of the programme – in twentieth-century Doctor Who. The recurring characters in TTM – the Doctor and Jo, the Brigadier, Yates, Benton and the Master, along with UNIT, Bessie and the grounded TARDIS – are just as they have been for the entire past two seasons; deliberately so, so the audience always knows who’s who, and the rules of the game, even if they have missed an episode or two. Those moments in the story where characters become frozen in space-time, flies suspended in cosmic goo, seem to parody the stagnated state of the show’s format. ‘You, Brigadier, you were caught in a hiatus in time. Being without becoming.’
The two main non-regular characters in the first couple of episodes of TTM are Dr Ruth Ingram and her laboratory colleague Stuart Hyde, who together create a rather tiresome ongoing skit on ‘women’s lib’. Ruth is the feminist and Stuart is the unreconstructed (but ‘well meaning’, for fear of offending any real-life misogynists) cynic who constantly teases her uppity progressivism. She’d have a good case for getting him sacked today. Whatever the script might be trying to say about sexism in the academic workplace, the repartee between these two unbelievable characters reduces its significance to a level of whimsical student politics – something to be chuckled about, not taken seriously.
There’s a change of pace and several changes of scenery from episode three onwards, and I found a lot more to like about the story. The Master, followed by the Doctor and Jo, head back in time to the lost city of Atlantis. There’s a bunch of new characters and a whole new society to discover, with its own customs, political intrigue and mythology. There’s a minotaur in a labyrinth! The Master having the hots for Ingrid Pitt’s Galleia is quite funny. More problematically, I can’t think of any good reason for Galleia having a team of black manservants to carry her around on ceremonial occasions. Why create the impression of Atlantis being a racist civilisation? Or could it just be lazy casting reflective of a racist mindset ingrained in British television production of the time?
For all the familiarity of TTM, particularly in its early episodes, I was surprised to note how many instances there were of new ideas which would have echoes in later (much later, in some cases) Doctor Who stories. I am guessing TTM is the first story to offer the idea of a ‘time ram’ – one time machine materialising at the exact same point in space-time as another, to catastrophic effect. This idea would be referenced again in the Children in Need story Time Crash, and has been used in a number of spin-off stories across various media. The time ram is avoided by the Doctor landing inside the Master’s TARDIS, causing an internal infinite recursion effect that would be used again (by the same two TARDISes) in Logopolis.
The seal of the Atlantean high priest procured by the Master is engraved with measurements from which he can calculate time travel co-ordinates based on comparative ratios. It looks remarkably similar to the Gallifreyan ‘writing’ common to the post-2005 series, which makes a sort of sense if one presumes that Time Lords communicate in some sort of mathematical time language.
In their Atlantean dungeon, the Doctor tells Jo the story of ‘the blackest day of my life … and also my best’, when a hermit living in the hills behind his childhood home opened his eyes to the beauty and wonders of creation. This is a story that has been alluded to at various subsequent points in the series’ narrative, most directly in Sloman’s Planet of the Spiders, broadcast just a couple of years after TTM. The implication seems to be that K’anpo Rimpoche from POTS was the hermit described by the Doctor in TTM. It’s interesting that King Dalios, who arrives in the dungeon at the end of this scene (and appears to die), is played by George Cormack – the same actor who plays K’anpo Rimpoche in POTS. Earlier in TTM, Dalios is revealed to be more than five hundred years old, so he is clearly no ordinary human. Could there be some link between these two characters?
I didn’t expect to have so much to say about this story. I’ll round it off with a few honourable mentions for little things that I liked. The slow-motion sequences of time slowing down around the Newton Institute building are quite cool, and I can imagine the scene in which the window cleaner falls off his ladder being quite impactful on young viewers at the time. I like the mid-century décor of Stuart Hyde’s flat (if not his Elton John posters). The Doctor admitting to Jo that he is not proud of all of his subconscious thoughts is a brief but interesting acknowledgment of the darker side of his nature (the Valeyard seam?) that we don’t often see. And Jo’s courage in joining the Doctor in his dangerous pursuit of the Master at the start of episode four leads to a lovely moment between them – ‘Glad to have you aboard, Miss Grant.’ ‘Glad to be aboard, Doctor.’ – that is emblematic of a really fantastic partnership.
The Doctor’s Wife
The premise of The Doctor’s Wife – the Matrix, effectively the consciousness, of the TARDIS is siphoned out of the machinery and into a human body, bringing it to life so it can interact person-to-person with the Doctor – is pretty bold, certainly by the standards of the televised version of Doctor Who. It’s a big idea to take on board, yet it’s pretty much explained to the viewer (by showing, with minimal technobabble explanation – take note, Chris Chibnall) within the short pre-credits sequence. If this were The Time Monster, we wouldn’t have got to the download of the TARDIS into Idris’ body until at least the end of episode two.
The story that follows is fairly straightforward – the powerful entity named House takes possession of the remaining shell of the TARDIS, but Amy and Rory are trapped inside, so the Doctor accompanied by Idris has to rescue them – but I’ve been wondering what it’s really all about. Obviously the Doctor meeting the TARDIS in human form is a big, grandstanding idea (and by the way, I hate the title of this story; surely it could have been something much more clever or lyrical, but ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ sounds a bit base and sexist, in the vein of ‘ball and chain’ jokes), but everything means something, so what is TDW trying to say? Who or what is Idris to us, the audience?
I suppose for someone with a particularly close relationship with their car, or their motorbike, or their speedboat or something, the thought of meeting the personification of their vehicle might resonate. That’s not something that I relate to, particularly. I’ve owned a number of cars and have had my current one for more than a decade, but while I don’t hold anything against any of them I’m not sure we would have too much to say to each other if one of them appeared before me in human form. ‘Remember that time I reached 100,000 miles and you forgot to look at my milometer at the crucial moment, you heartless bastard?’ ‘Yes.’
I wondered whether it might be more to do with one’s environment, or home, rather than transport. I think I can imagine bonding with a walking, talking incarnation of the room at my parents’ house which was my bedroom from the age of two until my twenties. They still live in the same house so when I go to stay I usually go back to the same room and think of it as having been ‘my’ bedroom for more than fifty years now. It saw a lot of me growing up – I was an introverted lad and spent a lot of time in that room – and I do feel the soul of the place. I feel that there is a part of me forever imprinted on those walls, and they on me too. I can imagine talking to that room, and it will be painful when I can never see it again.
But there’s something else between the Doctor and the TARDIS/Idris. ‘You didn’t always take me where I wanted to go,’ he complains. ‘No, but I always took you where you needed to go,’ Idris replies. This is only occasionally acknowledged on screen, but does seem to be an important basic function of the TARDIS – she guides the Doctor’s adventures through time and space, materialising everywhere for a reason, even if the Doctor doesn’t know what it is. In this sense the TARDIS is a representation of the beacons that guide us through life, the rules by which we operate, the principles by which we determine our choices. I’ve published many books which provide this sort of guidance, usually relating to the life lessons people glean from the Bible, but it’s not really been religion or the Church that have provided the structure and waymarkers for my life. It’s been the people I love – Shaz, my children, my parents – it’s been a sense of the living universe around me, predominantly in nature, and it’s also those things in which I have immersed myself as a fan: Arsenal and Doctor Who. If any of these things could take human form (apart from Shaz, my children, my parents, of course, who generally inhabit human form as a matter of course), then I’d want to thank them for always taking me to where I needed to go.
Bad stuff and good stuff in TDW? I wasn’t mad on Suranne Jones’ portrayal of Idris. That posh, plummy, eccentric voice really grated on me. But I did like the ideas and the execution of the story. The junkyard asteroid on which it all takes place is a cool set, and the characters of Auntie and Uncle are creepy and very watchable.
I thought the joke about the TARDIS giving Amy and Rory bunk beds was very funny, and I loved the Doctor’s ice-cold delivery of the line ‘Fear me. I’ve killed all of them.’
The sub-plot of Amy and Rory being tormented by House inside the shifting corridors of the TARDIS is dark and scary. It’s revealing that House exploits what seems to be a deep-rooted fear of Amy’s that Rory harbours bitter resentment against her for the two thousand years he spent protecting her inside the Pandorica. An aspect of Karen Gillan’s portrayal of Amy that I think is very clever is the way we can always feel degrees of insecurity and self-recrimination beneath the character’s surface bravado, and this scene seems to give vivid visual representation to some of that.
Connections
There’s more here than I expected there to be. On initial reflection The Time Monster and The Doctor’s Wife look like very different sorts of stories, but both are slightly out of synch with the seasons in which they were first broadcast. By mixing peculiarities of time travel with elements of classical mythology, fairy tales and dreams, TTM was an outlier from the more prosaic, real-universe context of the rest of Classic Season 9 – a step sideways through the looking glass that is much more the style of TDW’s writer Neil Gaiman and producer Steve Moffat.
In fact, both stories literally take the Doctor and his companions outside the known universe, to a dimensional borderland occupied by godlike beings – Kronos in TTM, and House in TDW. Coincidentally, the Doctor left the universe in the previous story I watched, Survivors of the Flux, meeting Tecteun and her Ood assistant on the Division craft between universes one and two. Could this Ood possibly be the same Ood as TDW’s Nephew, or is it just coincidence? Are Oods particularly well adapted to living in this sort of environment?
All this time meddling leads to one of the Doctor’s companions undergoing a dramatic ageing process in each of the stories. Rory accelerates to old age and death in TDW, and Hyde also becomes grandaddified in TTM. Sergeant Benton finds himself in the other lane, regressed to a bonny baby.
In both stories, the Doctor builds a time device out of old scrap: a ‘time flow analogue’ in TTM, and a basic working TARDIS in TDW.
Eleven manages to materialise his Junkyard TARDIS inside the console room (at least, an archived older console room) of his actual TARDIS, echoing Three’s materialisation inside the Master’s TARDIS.
‘You talk as if she was alive,’ Jo comments to the Doctor when he refers to the TARDIS’ mood. ‘It depends what you mean by alive, doesn't it,’ he replies, with little anticipation of adventures to come. In TDW, Idris tells the Doctor that she ‘always liked it when you call me old girl.’ Ironically, the only time he uses the nickname ‘old girl’ in TTM is in reference to Bessie. Better not let her indoors hear you, Doctor.
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