The Leisure Hive v. Flatline
Following a couple of Seventh Doctor stories, it’s back to September 1980 this week to watch Fourth Doctor adventure The Leisure Hive, written by David Fisher, and 18 October 2014 (nearly ten years ago, incredibly) for Twelfth Doctor story Flatline, by Jamie Mathieson.
The Leisure Hive
The Randomiser has landed me on another of these September season-opening stories (see also last week’s Battlefield, and other recent posts on The Mysterious Planet and Destiny of the Daleks), this time The Leisure Hive, which raised the curtain on Tom Baker’s final season as the Doctor. I think of most of the Septembers of my childhood to be particularly memorable times of the year, and useful pin-markers on the mind’s eye calendars by which I chart my life. September usually marked the start of a new chapter, a new year at school, and was coloured by feelings of nervous unease – the end of summer, a change in the weather, daunting new challenges and responsibilities – coupled with the excitement of the new – the goldening of the trees, darker, more atmospheric evenings, the return of Doctor Who.
In this sense The Leisure Hive is the most Septembery September story we’ve ever had. It opens with scenes drizzled with melancholy. That slow pan across the pebbly shoreline of grey-skied Brighton sea front, deck chairs empty until the camera settles on the snoring figure of the Doctor, swamped by the longer coat and heavier scarf, looking smaller, more wiry and weary than we’ve ever seen Four before, is a fairly literal realisation of the chilly end of a long English summer holiday. It’s nice to see Brighton on Doctor Who, as I have plenty of happy associations with the city (even stronger at the moment as my daughter Hannah has just started university there, and Shaz’s daughter Katie has just graduated from the same institution), but also it’s slightly jarring to see it like this because I think of Brighton as one of the most vibrant, life-affirming communities in the country. But this is an alt-universe Brighton, chosen to launch the beginning of the end of Tom’s long and legendary run as the Doctor. When The Leisure Hive was made the 1970s were over, I had just turned ten years old, Doctor Who Weekly had regenerated over the summer into the weightier and much more serious Doctor Who Monthly, and Tom was leaving us. I had a foreboding sense of childhood’s end.
And yet it was also incredibly exciting. A new decade! A new Doctor! A new chapter of life! (Please forgive the temporary slip into RTD-timbre.) The Leisure Hive marked the start of a new era, a new producer in John Nathan-Turner, a new script editor in Christopher H. Bidmead, new looks and new sounds across the show, epitomised by that stunning new title sequence and arrangement of the theme tune. If phases of twentieth-century Doctor Who had to be reduced to their most basic stylistic characteristics, I’d classify the 1960s as monochrome and modernist and the 1970s as shadowy and gothic. The 1980s burst onto our screens, bright and electronic. Of course, I can look back now and say they also characterised much of what was so awful about the fashions, politics and attitudes of the decade, but I can’t pretend I wasn’t excited by that futuristic relaunch of the show. It ticked all the right boxes for me at that feverish stage of my life (it took another four months for that starfield-eyed optimism to be knocked out of me with a brutal, eighties-powered thumping, but that’s a day for another story).
It's the music and the design of this story that capture that feeling so well for me (and not the sciencey technobabble that Bidmead seemed so keen to bring to the show). Peter Howell’s electronic soundtrack helps to establish a sense of Argolis as a planet many, many light years from Earth, spatially and technologically, and a society advanced and triumphant while also somehow sad, on the brink of collapse. These techno-tragic notes would continue throughout season 18, both musically (Howell also composed Meglos and the evocative Warrior’s Gate) and editorially, as the Bidmead-edited scripts accompanied Baker’s swansong with unsettling themes of entropy and losing one’s way.
The designer on The Leisure Hive was Tom Yardley-Jones; it’s his only Doctor Who credit, I believe, and a positive contribution to the purpose of crafting a story to mark an ‘all new’ era. To be honest, the set designs haven’t dated very well (what from the eighties has?). The Argolin Leisure Hive has vibes of an expensive pre-fab glamping venue, but I seem to remember that it seemed very shiny, exotic and suitably alien in 1980, and – with bright lights, high ceilings and unusual angles – a cut above the low-budget alien civilisation sets that had been making the show look a bit tired in recent seasons preceding this one.
June Hudson’s stylish costumes and Dorka Nieradzik’s make-up also bring a lot to the party. The Argolins in particular have a classy, innovative appearance. There’s a memorable colour palette to the whole story. If there was a game of ‘Guess the Doctor Who story’ through just a selection of colours, and the colours were yellow, green, burgundy and silver chrome, I think most fans would be able to spot The Leisure Hive.
For balance, I should mention a few jarring aspects of dodgy design. The Foamasi costumes really don’t work – that they’re so obviously fabric rather than reptilian skins rather spoils the effect of a new alien race. Those weird plastic Argolin statues look a bit cheap and nasty. And what’s with the progressively shorter Pangol/Doctor clones processing out of the Recreational Generator in episode four? I suppose these are all testament to budget restraints on the show, and while mildly annoying I don’t think they distract from what is overall a very good-looking story for its time.
The Leisure Hive boasts some memorable end-of-episode cliffhangers. I don’t know if water-cooler moments were a thing back in 1980, but I’m sure the endings to parts 1 and 2 of this story will have been much discussed and enthused over in school playgrounds on the following Monday mornings. The first episode ends with the Doctor apparently being decapitated and delimbed by the Recreational Generator machine. Episode 2 ends with our hero rapidly aged into a white-bearded Old Father Time figure. The first instance is mildly horrifying, although it’s quickly established at the start of Part 2 that the dismemberment of the Doctor was an illusory trick. The ageing Doctor was not a trick, meaning that part 3 and most of Part 4 of The Leisure Hive leaves us effectively Doctor-less, our hero reduced to a frail, forgetful character timidly perched on the edge of events. I wrote in my review of The Daleks and The Christmas Invasion that we the audience really notice the absence of the Doctor when he is taken out of the main storyline; the second half of The Leisure Hive becomes a similarly tough watch. I mentioned earlier that Tom Baker looks noticeably older anyway in this final Fourth Doctor season, and this decision to actually age him seems like a deliberate reference to this – as if the moment of his regeneration at the end of the season has already been prepared for. Old Leisure Hive Doctor is a bit like the Watcher – a cobwebby foreshadowing of what is to come.
The cliffhanger to episode 3 (Brock is attacked by a Foamasi) isn’t as notable, although the start of 4 (in which the assault continues and Brock’s human-skin disguise is ripped off) is edited together in quite a striking way. It’s quite a long sequence comprising close-ups of Foamasi claws and swivelling eyes, and human masks being discarded to the floor, intercut with the shocked faces of the various Time Lord, Argolin and human onlookers. Shaz was in the room with me as I watched this episode and the punchy music and jarring edits caused her to look up and comment that this seemed a particularly violent scene, so credit to director Lovett Bickford for presenting the whole sequence in an innovatively arresting way.
Incidentally, this rewatch of the story was the first time I noticed Brock comment that ‘those Foamasi make my skin crawl’ in episode 1 – a little clue to his true nature and eventual downfall. I doubt it would have meant much to anyone watching the story first time around in 1980 (who would have remembered a seemingly inconsequential line like that three weeks later?), but it’s quite satisfying to see this time around.
The writer of The Leisure Hive was David Fisher, one of whose previous stories I have already reviewed for this blog. A noticeable similarity between this one and The Androids of Tara is the thoughtful construction of the alien society visited by Romana and the Doctor. Argolis is a world that appears to have reached the end of an era of civilisation, and the very survival of its dominant species is in question – not unlike Earth as we approach both environmental collapse and the self-gorging implosion of capitalism.
‘Argolis is suffering from an escalating negative cash flow,’ Brock tells Pangol. ‘Bookings last year were bad. And next year looks catastrophic. I do apologise for the unfortunate choice of words.’ There’s a chilling familiarity about this scene, echoing the sorts of finance reports my own small business has been receiving on a regular basis over the last two or three years. Bad news always seems to be delivered with a particular relish by the accountants, doesn’t it? They rarely offer positive solutions, but appear to enjoy doom-mongering and revelling in the downfall of those who have to make the difficult decisions.
The Argolins have become sterile, due to radiation generated by a twenty-minute war forty years previously; it’s an interesting post-war period of time, considering The Leisure Hive must have been written roughly forty years since the outbreak of World War Two. Twentieth-century society – in the West at least – was embarking on an escalation of right-wing, capitalist government that ultimately would bring us to the dismal point we are at today: a world of ever more closeted societies, plagued with xenophobia, past glories and militant sabre-rattling (Pangol and his Helmet of Theron), gazing sadly outward at a ravaged, barren world, wishing everyone would just get on with each other (Mina explains to the Doctor that the Experiential Grid is a legacy gift from Argolis, hoping to promote peace and understanding: ‘Each race learns to understand what it is like to be the foreigner.’).
David Fisher seemed to know what he was writing about. Neither the moderate nor the right-wing extremist have the key to Argolis’s salvation. Ultimately they’re put in the Recreation Generator together, and something new is created – the first baby to be born on Argolis in decades, and a focus of hope. Children are the future – they have to be!
One last point of interest in this story (for me, at least) is that the decision is made to remove the Randomiser that the Doctor fitted in the TARDIS a couple of seasons previously to avoid detection by the Black Guardian. I suppose it was felt that it placed a bit of a limitation on plot development, with the Doctor unable to properly navigate his way around space and time (as he would need to, later in Season 18, hopping around between Earth and Logopolis to save the universe, and trying to plot a course out of E-Space). I’m going to keep my Randomiser plugged in, however, for the purposes of writing this blog. It’s far more interesting not to know where one is going next. After all, who would have expected Brighton to Argolis and then Bristol …?
Flatline
As regular readers of this blog (ha ha – I wish!) will know, I try to end each post with an attempt to make connections – sometimes obvious, sometimes interesting, sometimes spurious – between the two featured stories. I think the fact that Flatline is set in Bristol connects it vaguely to The Leisure Hive in that the latter story was the only other televised Doctor Who story (at the time Flatline was broadcast) to show us a British town or city beginning with the three letters ‘Bri’. I’ve checked, and it’s true – there have been televised mentions, and/or appearances in spin-offs and extended media, of Bridlington, Brightlingsea, Bridport, Bridgwater, Brixton and Brigadoon (not to mention Brisbane if we want to look beyond these shores), but never an on-screen setting. (I say ‘at the time Flatline was broadcast’ because Bristol would appear on a number of further occasions in season 10, as the home of Bill Potts and the university at which the Doctor lectured and kept Missy in an underground vault.)
Is this a spurious connection? Yes. Is it in any way significant? Well, not really, other than that I think Brighton and Bristol are two of the nicer cities this blighted isle has to offer. I mentioned earlier the tenuous links that I have to Brighton; for Bristol the links are even slenderer, but I have always thought of it as a Doctor Who sort of place. I have relatives who live in the area, including an uncle who, back in the seventies, used to claim to be a fan of the show. I’m not sure how much of a fan he really was, but he was happy to talk to me about Doctor Who which, back then, was a bit of a rarity. I didn’t really have many friends who were into the programme in the same way, and most people who knew me (family included) knew well enough to try to avoid mention of it when I was around, so obsessed was I. So that was quite cool, and also he told me that some scenes from The Sun Makers had been filmed on top of a building in Bristol (I just checked and it’s true – the WD and HO Wills Tobacco Factory). Wookey Hole, where Revenge of the Cybermen had been filmed, was not far away, and this paltry handful of facts combined in my mind to signify Bristol as some sort of Who-Mecca. It still gives me a slight frisson of something exciting just thinking about the place now, and it seems absolutely right that Flatline should be set there – if a bit odd that no televised adventure had been beforehand.
Flatline opens with what must be one of the shortest pre-credits sequences of twenty-first-century Doctor Who. A man makes a phone call to the police, he sounds terrified and gabbles something about having worked out ‘who did it all’, and that ‘they are everywhere – all around’ before disappearing with a scream. The camera pans down to an angle almost at right angles to the living room wall to reveal an elongated impression of the man (named in the credits as Roscoe) on the wallpaper border. It’s a frightening image, and an original ‘horror’ idea for Doctor Who, repeated at various points throughout this unusual episode. The splayed nervous system of PC Forrest that appears on another living room wall later in the story is another memorable moment of two-dimensional body horror.
These creatures from another reality in which there is no third dimension are a strong concept. I think the way that the writer Jamie Mathieson and the production team visualised this idea, which is quite a tricky one to wrap one’s mind around, is impressive. It seems to correlate fairly closely (allowing for some artistic licence) with how I have seen mathematical theorists describe how a two-dimensional being might perceive our reality, and it does so with a suitable level of creepiness to satisfy the expectations of a Doctor Who audience.
‘The Boneless’ – the name the Doctor chooses to give these creatures – is unsatisfying. To my mind, it’s not the fact that they don’t have any bones that really defines them. There are other things, such as jellyfish, that don’t have bones. But apart from that, I think they’re a pretty cool addition to the show’s catalogue of monsters.
That epitomises the episode, in fact. A few annoying lines of dialogue in what is otherwise an intriguing, enjoyable, unusual story full of a number of visually innovative tricks and treats. Bristol and the TARDIS are subject to all sorts of dimensional distortions. I liked that the Doctor was both fascinated by all of this and indignant: ‘This is just embarrassing. I'm from the race that built the Tardis. Dimensions are kind of our thing.’
Clara describes the dinky little TARDIS – shrunken by the two-dimensional creatures ‘leeching’ its external dimensions’ – as ‘adorable’. I wouldn’t have used that word myself, but deep down that’s probably how I felt when I first saw her pick it up and put it in her bag. Like most Doctor Who fans, I love a miniature replica TARDIS and have various models dotted around the house. Who wouldn’t want to carry that miniature portal to a universe of adventures around with them? With an actual live Doctor inside it, no less!
The view from within the tiny TARDIS – the reduced-perspective corridor leading to the little doors – also confuses the mind at first sight, and reminded me of that shrunken corridor scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
And then came possibly the highlight of the episode – the ‘Addams Family’ stunt in which the Doctor sticks his fingers through the door to scuttle the TARDIS away from an oncoming train like a hermit crab. It’s clever, it’s funny, it’s tense, it’s … quite outrageous really. How do they think of some of this stuff? There is good stuff and there is bad stuff in twenty-first century Doctor Who, but something it has been consistently great at is doing the unexpected. These are the memorable moments, like those cliffhangers in The Leisure Hive, that help to make the show so different from anything else on the telly. Long may it continue.
Flatline appears to operate as an important progression in Clara’s character development. The set up of the Doctor being trapped inside the TARDIS is designed to give her the opportunity to take centre stage, to lead, to ‘be the Doctor’, assisted by live audio coaching from the Doctor himself. So, for example, as Clara, Rigsy and the gang of community service workers enter the deserted train depot, the Doctor advises her that ‘Pretty soon a leader is going to emerge. You need to make sure that leader is you.’ The intention throughout seems to be to demonstrate that it’s not easy being the Doctor – there’s the opportunity for glory, but you have to work really hard for it. I don’t know, it all seems a little superior and patriarchal to me. Perhaps one of the reasons it doesn’t quite work here is that Clara shouldn’t need to be on this ‘self-development’ path. By this point in her run on Doctor Who, the character has been isolated and has ‘stepped up’ countless times. She’s suffered, made sacrifices, she’s allowed herself to be splintered into countless pieces in order to save the Doctor throughout his historic timeline. She’s got a flat, a responsible job, a boyfriend, a motorbike. She’s a modern girl who’s been through this movie before, an independent lady takin’ care of herself (just to revisit 1980). Does she really need to prove herself here?
There are a couple of lines of self-reflection by the Doctor on his own personal season arc, the question of whether or not he is ‘a good man’. ‘I was the Doctor and I was good,’ boasts Clara. ‘You were an exceptional Doctor,’ he replies, ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it.’ Here he quotes Mae West, who titled her autobiography Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It after a line of her character Maudie in the film Night After Night (Hatcheck girl: ‘Goodness, what beautiful diamonds!’ Maudie: ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie.’), the implication being that the Doctor is still struggling to see himself as ‘good’. See also my review of Deep Breath. I’m not a huge fan of this theme, not wanting to see the Doctor so introspective and troubled for a whole season of stories. Nobody’s one hundred per cent good, life is complicated; get over yourself m8.
Connections
I’ve already tried to make a connection between each of these two stories opening in a British city beginning ‘Bri’. A stronger link might be the fact that both of them kick off with a breakdown of an important piece of the Doctor’s tech: K9 and the TARDIS both seem to go into a state of terminal decline, with billowing smoke and everything.
Flatline uses graffiti as a device for the two-dimensional creatures to infiltrate our reality undetected, and also considers the act of marking a public surface as something unlawful while also serving a valuable service to the community (in this case, offering a memorial site for shared grief over the residents of Bristol who have gone missing). The Leisure Hive offers us graffiti of a different kind: the Doctor defaces his own TARDIS with warp mechanics equations.
Both stories delight/horrify us with forms of body horror – the delimbification effect of the recreation generator in The Leisure Hive, and the Boneless’ experimentation on the bodies of Roscoe and PC Forrest in Flatline.
Roscoe removes his spectacles shortly before he's flattened by the Boneless. In The Leisure Hive, crooked scientist Stimson drops his spectacles shortly before the specs - and he - are destroyed by a Foamasi.
The two adventures also both offer scenes of bodily regeneration of species other than Time Lords. The Boneless learn to transform themselves into three-dimensional beings, and the Argolins have developed a technology to recreate their dying race in youthful, virile form.
‘Rule one: the Doctor lies,’ said River Song in Let’s Kill Hitler. In The Leisure Hive the Doctor is less than completely honest with Mina; economical with the truth might be a better way of putting it (‘Have you ever experimented with time?’ ‘Well, yes, but in a purely academic way of no interest to anyone,’ and ‘Gallifrey … it's just an obscure little planet in the constellation of Kasterborous.’). It’s a good illustration of the Twelfth Doctor’s advice to Clara in Flatline: ‘Lying is a vital survival skill.’
‘I’m the Doctor,’ Clara announces to Rigsy, near the start of a story in which she stands in for the lead while he is incapacitated. Romana has to do much the same thing in The Leisure Hive, stepping up when the Doctor is temporarily aged. In her two seasons travelling with the Doctor, the second incarnation of Romana was generally presented as a reflection of the Doctor (even dressing the same way in her debut story) rather than as an opposite, and she left him in Warrior’s Gate, with K9, to become a sort of independent Doctor to help save the Tharils in E-Space; Clara’s run in Doctor Who might be viewed in much the same way – she is an equal to the Doctor rather than an assistant, and her journey with him ends with her taking off in a TARDIS on adventures of her own.
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