MARSHMELLOW

Full Circle v. Gridlock

Here's a pair of stories each about an isolated society in which nothing ever happens. Both are trapped in an endless cycle of futility. As it turned out, both provided a lot of things to think about, at least when the Doctor and co. arrived. It's the third story of the Fourth Doctor's final season, Full Circle by Andrew Smith, and the third story of the Tenth Doctor's second season, Gridlock by Russell T. Davies.

Full Circle

I have a clear memory of watching the first episode of Full Circle at my Granny and Grandad’s house in Charmouth, Dorset, in what must have been half-term week, 1980. It’s the end-of-episode cliffhanger of the Marsh Men rising out of the swamp that I am absolutely certain I watched in their living room. I was ten years old, and can also say with confidence that I was reading issue 46 of Doctor Who Monthly, issue 76 of Jackpot, and the first combined issue of Tiger and Speed at this point in time. Woman in Love by Barbara Streisand was number one in the charts. This Doctor Who story seemed incredibly modern and exciting to me. The new electronic theme tune, all that location filming – the greenery and the mist. This story introduced Adric; now yes, I watch it now and can see that Adric is a bit cringe and embarrassing, but for ten-year-old me he represented something amazing: a boy, not too much older than myself, stumbling into the TARDIS and being whisked off for adventures with the Doctor. He was living my dreams. Thanks to the increased understanding I had (from DWM) of what went on behind the scenes of the show, I knew that this story was written by Andrew Smith, only 17 years old; as I’d also set my sights on one day writing Doctor Who, he was also living my dreams. Happy days; back then, pretty much everything must have seemed possible.

For all that excitement, the opening scenes of Full Circle are tough to watch. Romana has been summoned by the Time Lords to return to Gallifrey, but she doesn’t want to go. The Doctor is really angry about it too, but he withdraws into himself, making it really awkward. We’re reminded of how off he was with Sarah when a Gallifrey recall meant that she had to leave him too. Four doesn’t cope well with this sort of thing, but maybe it’s still a throwback to how he hurt he was as Three when Jo left him. It’s not difficult to view this ending of the Doctor-Second Romana relationship as a mirror of the latter days of Tom Baker and Lalla Ward’s real-life relationship. While, in fact, they were still going strong when Full Circle was filmed, and announced their engagement shortly before this first episode was broadcast, the spark between them was not translating to their screen dynamic quite as blindingly as it had in stories like Destiny of the Daleks and City of Death. There’s an end of the affair feel to the whole thing.

Romana aside, I think the magic of the Fourth Doctor is fading anyway by this stage. From the very beginning of season 18, when we see him huddled into his scarf on Brighton beach in The Leisure Hive, he seems so tired of it all. In part two of Full Circle, the Marsh Child runs scared from the Doctor into the Alzarian jungle. ‘Oh. How odd. I normally get on terribly well with children,’ he reflects. This seems like Tom Baker musing sadly on his own waning powers.

The Gallifrey summons sequence in the TARDIS makes a couple of references to Doctor Who stories of the previous years – unusually for the Classic Series, made at a time when there were fewer aids to the memory of what had happened in previously broadcast adventures. The Doctor says that he is looking forward to seeing Leela, Andred and K9 Mark I again, referencing the final episode of The Invasion of Time from 1978. Romana reminds the Doctor that he fought the Time Lords once. ‘Mm. And lost,’ he replies, which makes me thing that they must be talking about events of The War Games, dating back 11 years to 1969. I suppose that by 1980, there was a growing awareness of the show’s history. Doctor Who Magazine had been around for a year (launching as Doctor Who Weekly in October 1979), and fan networks – predominantly through local groups and fanzines – were becoming more numerous and better organized, so there was some context for the show to become a little more self-referential.

Romana’s departure is delayed – for a few more stories – when the TARDIS slips through a Charged Vacuum Emboitement into the pocket-sized parallel universe known as Exo-Space, or E-Space. The Doctor does seem to exit the known universe quite a lot – just a couple of weeks ago, he did so in both the stories I was reviewing. I was surprised by how dramatic and traumatic this sequence was in Full Circle. Tom and Lalla, with the help of some exciting special effects, play it well to demonstrate the seriousness of the TARDIS crew’s new danger.

In E-Space, on the lush planet of Alzarius, we meet Adric. He has a rational mind, is prodigiously gifted at mathematics (and likes to let everyone know it), and thinks he is meant for better things. All these attributes we came to know Adric for in the stories to follow, but Full Circle shows us a little more of what he could have been. We see some problematic sides to Adric beyond his precociousness; he’s a thief (initially conceived as an Artful Dodger-type character, his association with the Outlers have made him aware of the need to steal marsh fruit to survive, but he also has a magpie eye for nice shiny things like the Starliner’s image translator), he’s selfish (not wanting to share his knowledge of the TARDIS with his brother or the other Outlers), and he was partly responsible for Decider Draith falling to his death in the marsh, but wasn’t going to admit this to anyone. I think the best way to summarise this is to say that Adric knows more than most about numbers, but places the highest value on Number One.

He also demonstrates a less rational quality in Full Circle: the gift of foresight, or at least premonition. ‘[The Starliner] will take off. But I won’t be on it. I’ll be somewhere else. I’m sorry, I just can’t explain.’ Adric’s star of mathematical excellence annoyed his brothers, but what makes us mad are the things that Adric tells us of the dreams he’s often had. He knows that his future will take him somewhere else, but can’t yet comprehend that that will be in a universe beyond. When he stumbles across the TARDIS there’s a sense that he knows that it’s part of his destiny. Foresight is a useful gift, but it’s a shame for Adric that it didn’t last. He could have done with a bit of it in Earthshock. The sense of foreboding and pre-destination is a theme of this season of Doctor Who; I feel that the Doctor knows throughout that he is approaching the end of his fourth incarnation, and his final story, Logopolis, his visions of the future are manifested in the figure of the Watcher.

Adric’s brother Varsh is part of a band of young people known as the Outlers, who have chosen to separate themselves from their families and the rest of the human community on board the Starliner. It’s a rejection of the patriarchal authoritarianism of the Deciders, who impose rules and rituals on the society they govern according to the ‘manuals’ – instructions left to them from many generations before, like a Bible. One of the Outlers, Keara, is the daughter of Decider Login, and the intransigence of both of them, in full knowledge of the fact that her refusal to board the Starliner before Mistfall will probably mean they never see each other again, is painful to watch. There was a time in my late teens that I argued constantly with my parents over religion (conversely, I was the religious fundamentalist in this instance, naively in thrall to the teaching of a cultish church) and it drove a wedge between us for a while; looking back now, I can see that it was more about frustrated teenage rebellion than theology.

Full Circle today brings an additional interpretation to the plight of the Outlers. The closing of the Starliner doors to protect those inside from what they believe to be a poisonous mist makes us think of lockdown measures during the Covid pandemic, and the Outlers’ refusal to comply, their distrust and rejection of what the Deciders are telling them, seems similar to the conviction of anti-vaxxers.

At a more conceptual level, Full Circle is about being trapped in an endless cycle of monotony, being unable to break free of stalled evolution, a pretence of progress when nobody really knows how to take the next step forward. ‘The fraud of perpetual movement,’ the Doctor accuses the Deciders. ‘The endless tasks going round and round. The same old components being removed and replaced. The wilful procrastination of endless procedure.’ This is why the Outlers are so frustrated. Why Adric wants to leave Alzarius. It’s why Romana doesn’t want to return to Gallifrey. And it’s why the Doctor left it in the first place. The humans of the Starliner are not adaptive or instinctively intelligent as the Marshmen are; they fear chaos and hasty action, prefer indecision and obfuscation. As I think we will see, this is the curse not only of Alzarius, but of all E-Space.

Gridlock

A few weeks ago I wrote about The Shakespeare Code, Martha’s second adventure with the Doctor, in which several red flags were waved in her direction – about the Doctor, his post-Rose state of mind, and what it might mean for her to become his new companion among the stars. It wasn’t entirely clear how much notice she had taken of the flags, but here in Gridlock – her third televised adventure – it looks as though she’s starting to question her choices.

The awful truth is that Martha has accepted these rides through time and space, putting her life in danger, from a man she’s taken a fancy to but who is too bound up in thoughts of his lost girlfriend to really focus on Martha or her safety. ‘I didn't really think. I just followed the Doctor, and they don't even know where I am. My mum and dad. If I died here, they'd never know.’ This moment in which Martha seems to suddenly see the magnitude of peril she is in seems similar to that scene in The End of the World when Rose challenges the Doctor on who he is and where he is from, but there I go – describing Martha with Rose-tinted terms of reference. Poor Martha.

She does challenge him at the end of Gridlock. She sits down and refuses to move until he opens up to her, tells her who he is and what his deal is. But this is only at the end of a story in which the Doctor is ascribed messianic qualities. ‘You've got your faith, you've got your songs and your hymns, and I've got the Doctor,’ she tells Cheen and Milo, with the fervour of a new convert. Gridlock doesn’t hold back on the religious content; it’s a story with two Christian hymns, The Old Rugged Cross and Abide With Me, the Doctor threatens to come back and close down all the mood-patch stalls like Jesus turning over the tables of the money-lenders in the temple, and that image of him with kittens is probably still as venerated in some households as an image of Christ (yes, we had a copy of it stuck to our fridge for a while).

The Doctor as Saviour, and Martha his faithful disciple, is a clear theme of this season (the Doctor becomes human, like Jesus, in Human Nature, and later, in The Last of the Time Lords, Martha spreads the word of his good deeds like a Gospel evangelist so the faithful of the world can pray for his resurrection). I feel uneasy about all of this. The Doctor always saves the day, yes. As Brannigan says, ‘he’s a bit magnificent.’ But he’s also deeply flawed, and not someone I would want to worship. The idea of this hero with almost supernatural powers rescuing us all from destruction again and again doesn’t seem like a fantastic message to promote. Within the overall arc of the Tenth Doctor’s journey I suppose we can see it in healthier perspective – ultimately the Doctor starts to believe in his own divinity, and that’s when it all falls apart because nobody can be that special. But without that broader context, stories like Gridlock and The Last of the Time Lords are trickier viewing.

I’m sure this has always been obvious to a lot of people, but it hasn’t occurred to me before now that Martha might be named after the biblical Martha who welcomed Jesus into her home, but who traditionally is compared negatively – or, at least, considered more prosaically – to her sister Mary, who is ascribed holier qualities. This seems similar to how Martha is positioned as the more basic, taken-for-granted, overshadowed companion next to the heavenly Rose.

As things turn out, Martha fulfils the role of an angel. Gridlock is a story of liberation, of captives released and set free, and while the Doctor opens up the heavens to free the people of New New York, it’s Martha that liberates the gridlock in his soul – the stalling of his own life by grief and guilt. By telling his true story to Martha (describing the colours of Gallifrey, as Susan did in The Sensorites, as the Third Doctor did in The Time Monster, and seeing colour just as Missy can’t hear music in The Eaters of Light), and confessing the events of the Time War, he seems to find some sort of freedom. Something similar happened to me. The angel of my life, Shaz, recognised that there were secrets in my life that needed to be told, and she helped me to release them, to acknowledge them, to tell them and to face them. It was one of the most liberating things I have ever known and I’ll be for ever grateful to her. Not all saviours live in a blue box.

A few other thoughts about Gridlock:

The mood patches being sold by the side of the motorway in New New York are named as: Happy, Mellow, Anger, Forget, Sleep, Honesty and Bliss. We feel directed (by Martha and the Doctor’s outrage) to consider these mood-altering drugs as a bad thing, but they’re not the cause of the misery that has the inhabitants of the city in its grip. In a sense, they’re not a bad thing in and of themselves. I remember someone on the Verity! podcast pointing out that many people rely on psychotropic drugs to get them through the present day. They are less likely than proper person-to person therapy to lead to deep-rooted change to one’s mental state, but for an entire society that sort of therapy would needed to be provided by the State … and in New New York there is no State. The State is just dusty skeletons lying on the floor of the Senate. The patches are surely better than nothing at all.

That, and the media-broadcast pretence of continued public service and protection where it no longer exists, seems like comment on the world we live in today as much as a dystopian vision of the future.

‘Just what every city needs. Cats in charge.’ Also a reasonable assessment of the world we live in today. In this household, anyway.

I know this has been commented on before, but with my comics blogger cap on I can’t not mention how very 2000AD Gridlock is. I think Russell T. Davies himself may have acknowledged the influence of ‘Future Shock’-style stories on Doctor Who Confidential or something like that. There are direct visual references to the Pat Mills/Kevin O’Neill story Terror Tube, and the Judge Dredd character Max Normal, and I can picture much of the story being drawn by O’Neill, Ian Gibson or Brendan McCarthy.

Connections

While Full Circle opens with Romana imploring the Doctor not to take her to Gallifrey, Gridlock opens with Martha imploring the Doctor to take her there. He refuses in both instances – formerly because he fills duty bound to obey their summons, latterly because he knowns the planet no longer exists.

There’s a slightly Channel 4 vibe to these two stories, with both exhibiting surprising and most unWhovian nakedness. The Doctor enters the rear of a naturist couple’s vehicle in Gridlock, while in Full Circle there are some soggy bottoms on display when some of the Alzarian men leap into the river to help their drowning kin.

With all this public nudity the last thing anyone wants is an infestation of crabs, but here they are: nasty spider crabs emerging from the marsh fruits, and giant Macra lurking and snapping in the lowest levels of the Undercity.

That motorway in Gridlock is clogged with smoggy exhaust fumes, while Full Circle’s Alzarius is shrouded in Mistfall as its unique evolutionary processes take place.

In both locations the humans are trapped. In Gridlock, the cars on the motorway go round and round with no hope of ever reaching their destination. In Full Circle, the humans are at an evolutionary dead end, having developed originally from the spider crabs and Marshmen, and unable to leave the planet to which they believed they were originally just visitors.

These two societies have stalled because of broken leadership. In Full Circle, the ruling class of Deciders are anything but – crippled by indecision and procrastination – while in Gridlock, the Senate no longer exists, wiped out by a virus, but maintaining an illusion of stewardship over those surviving in the Undercity.

The Doctor helps both communities, their liberation visualised in both stories with an ascension to the skies above – the Starliner achieving lift-off in Full Circle, and the vehicles of the motorway rising through the roof of the Undercity in Gridlock.